I am happy and I am going to go to another level!
In our culture, thousands of people have thought that happiness is one or something that we achieve, spending a lot of time looking for it. I’ve heard friends tell me, I’m going to get married to be happy with my future wife, or I’ll be happy when I buy my apartment, or I’ll be happy when I get that promotion at work.
In my opinion, happiness is an emotion that everyone chooses to live and enjoy every day. I tell my friends, I got married because I was sure that “I am happy.” I mention it because when you think that you will achieve happiness by achieving something, you will soon notice that emotion called “happiness” evaporated because it depended on that something that you wanted to achieve. Why? Because I understood that each person chooses to live and enjoy happiness every day in every moment of their life.
By Deloitte was done a survey in late 2019, surveyed 18.4K Millennials and Z Generation in 43 countries, including 304 respondents in Colombia. To this survey, a survey of 9,100 respondents in 13 countries was added, with questions during the development of the pandemic. This survey showed that 31% of Millennials in Colombia feel stressed and unhappy. 59% of them say that work and career prospect contributes a lot to their feelings of stress and unhappiness. 66% say that the well-being of their family contributes to this feeling.
If you want to know more about this study, then I share the link to the results of the survey here.
Delving into my environment, I noticed that some co-workers sent emails out of working hours, others breached their commitments or delivered their activity on time but incomplete. Speaking with them, I identified that some of them felt anxious or stressed in elements such as the well-being of their family, their work and physical health generated by the development of the pandemic.
My team is made up of 3 people who work for a company in the Financial sector, whose focus is building software.
I was thinking about how to help the team, I checked my toolbox and found that the practice 12 steps to happiness allows us to reflect and takes us to action about 12 areas that contribute to increasing the level of happiness from different points of view. And Jurgen was not wrong, his proposal with this practice was aligned with my experience.
If you want to learn more about this practice, I invite you to visit the following link here.
The objective of the practice is to reflect and act on each of the 12 steps, they have a common thread towards happiness, showing that happiness is not a destination, nor is it something to achieve, but it is something that we create, it is a path that you and I choose.
I carried out for this practice the following steps:
Step 1. Prepare. I prepared the environment for this practice on the Miro Collaboration tool with the photos of each of the co-workers and the 12 steps to happiness. The practice was done remotely using Zoom.
The “12 steps to happiness” are:
· Thank someone and be appreciative toward your co-workers, every single day.
· Give something to another person or make it possible for others to offer gifts.
· Help someone who is in need of assistance or enable co-workers to help each other.
· Eat well and make good, healthy foods easily available for everyone.
· Exercise and work out regularly and make it easy for people to take care of their bodies.
· Rest well, sleep sufficiently, and enable colleagues to refresh their minds.
· Experience new things try stuff out, and let people run all kinds of experiments.
· Hike outdoors, enjoy nature, and allow people an escape from the office and the city.
· Meditate and get people to learn and adopt practices to reflect and meditate.
· Socialize, relate to other people and make it easy for co-workers to develop connections.
· Aim for a goal and get people to understand and realize their own purpose.
· Smile whenever you can, appreciate humor, and get colleagues to engage in fun activities.
Step 2. Reflect and Act: Each co-worker reflected about:
- How have you felt at each step in the last 2 weeks? He placed a rating on the scale of 1 to 5, where one is “very low” and 5 is “very high.”
- What will I do this week? It leads each participant to choose their action individually to increase the level of happiness.
Each step took a maximum of 3 minutes to explain the concept of the step, reflect and write the personal action that each one committed to living during the week.
Now, as a facilitator, I learned that we all have a different level of happiness at each step. I also learned that each area is a ladder that everyone builds and walks every day.
On the other hand, I confirmed that everyone is responsible for their happiness, this does not depend on a nation, a company, a material object or a dream achieved.
And finally, I discovered that there are areas that we do not define as relevant in our personal life and that when acting on these new areas, indescribable happiness is felt.
Below, some lessons of the team:
o The team learned that each one was responsible for their happiness.
o The team learned that in some areas they are happy. However, they needed to act to feel completely satisfied.
o The team discovered that there are areas that they had never recognized as important in their personal life.
o The team learned that the qualification is different in each person due to their expectations are personal and different.
My next experiment with this practice will be to make a mural with the step and the action in order to the improvements in each of the steps are evaluated frequently.
Another experiment will be to carry out the practice with Area Leaders and other teams to know the actions that they will carry out and determine what actions impact the culture of the organization to implement specific actions from the organization that promote happiness at work, in family well-being, health, exercise, etc., of the co-workers.
As a different action, I made a review at 2 weeks about the actions carried out by each of the co-workers. As a next action, I would perform the quantitative analysis of each step for 3 months in order to analyze the increase in the level of happiness in an OKR for the organization.
By the team the following results were obtained:
o The team took the majority of the written actions through reality, feeling satisfied with the effort and time dedicated.
o The team understood that increasing the level of happiness is a ladder that is walked every day. They chose to ask each other the status of their actions each week.
o The team understood that walking to happiness is not based on money. There are actions boot from the attitude. They do not need money.
o The team understood that they can learn from each other in some steps because each one has an advanced developed level and others a beginner level.
Dear Reader, if this is the first time you read about this practice, I encourage you to evaluate yourself in each step and define punctual and honest actions to increase the level of happiness in your life, you will really be amazed.
If you know about this practice from Management 3.0, I encourage you to write specific actions, which you can quantify in a short period of time.
I want to invite you to use the 12 steps to happiness, to be given the space to reflect and act at each step to walk the path together with personal and collective happiness. You will notice that you are happy, you did not know it and you will go to another level!
