A while back, someone told me that the most popular classes at Harvard and Yale universities were about happiness.
This seemingly innocuous statistic stuck with me. Of all the things students could be focusing on or learning about, why happiness?
As I’ve previously written about, I’ve spoken with university presidents who describe epidemic levels of anxiety and depression among incoming students. An epidemic of anguish. Maybe this is a way for students to deal with these feelings. However, my hope would be that these students, these future leaders of tomorrow, would be reaching for something deeper.
These classes at Harvard and Yale are taught respectively by noted scholars Arthur Brooks and Laurie Santos. I very much respect both of these thinkers and I’ve even been a guest on Laurie’s podcast, so I’m not intending to denigrate their work in any way.
But, a quote from my friend Simon Sinek better sums up my thoughts:
“When we help ourselves, we find moments of happiness. When we help others, we find lasting fulfillment.”
In other words, wouldn’t it be better if we changed our perspective from “me” to “we?”
Here’s a quote from an interesting article I ran across online:
When you’re aiming for fulfillment over happiness, you’ll naturally get waves of joy throughout the journey. These highs will be much higher than those you experience by chasing a higher salary or eating a piece of cake because each and every single one is tied to meaning and purpose.
Ultimately, happiness is in the journey, not the destination. When you realize that happiness isn’t the end goal, but a byproduct of striving toward becoming your ideal self, you’ll be able to stop chasing happiness…and just be.
Fulfillment is a word we arrived at in Barry-Wehmiller. Truly Human Leadership means making sure our team members feel safe, cared for, and they then go home knowing that who they are and what they do matters. We didn’t want our teammates to just be “happy.” We wanted something more for them. If you’re a parent, you want the same things for your children. You want them to feel safe, well and cared for. You want them to live lives of meaning and purpose. And, you want them to feel like they matter.
According to Professor Isaac Prilleltensky, mattering consists of feeling valued and adding value. Feeling valued is about being recognized, appreciated, accepted and seen. But there’s more to it, he says:
People want to add value. People want to make a contribution. You see this in children when they learn to be autonomous human beings, when they want to feed themselves, when they want to do things by themselves, when they want to exercise choice. And later in life, when all of us want to make a contribution, not just to ourselves, but to those who (we) love, to work and the community. So, it turns out that adding value, making a difference to yourself and others is also a very fundamental quality of human beings. And to feel like you matter, you really have to experience both feeling valued and adding value.
Work that is meaningful and allows us to see the value we add makes us feel like we matter, and, in turn, makes us happy.
That is the essence of Truly Human Leadership. Through it, we strive daily to create meaningful work for our team members. We cultivate caring, empowering environments in which our people can come together to share their individual gifts—marry their passions to their skills— in the creation of value for themselves, for others, for the organization. We help them see the joy and happiness that is realized from achieving our shared vision together.
A statistic I’ve quoted from Gallup for many years told us that the number one source of happiness in the world is a good job, doing meaningful work with people you enjoy.
We began to see the creation of an environment of mattering as a result of the skills of caring we were teaching in our company: empathetic listening, recognizing and celebrating others and a culture of service. Seeing others as someone’s precious child through listening not to judge but to understand, recognizing them for their goodness and learning what it means to be in service of others breeds fulfillment.
Then, when the people within our span of care feel fulfilled in the time they’re spending away from their homes and families, they are inspired and energized instead of stressed. And when they are with their loved ones and in their communities, they share that feeling.
And happiness happens along that journey. It is not the goal or the destination.
I would propose to today’s students that a pursuit of happiness is not the answer to the epidemic of anguish. We can take medication to stave off the symptoms of a condition. But wouldn’t we rather fix the source of the condition entirely so the symptoms are gone?
Furthermore, if we tried to meet the needs of others, instead of our own, in each daily encounter, it would completely change the way we, as a society, interact.
When we treat people with respect and honor their dignity and create opportunities through which they can realize their potential and be appreciated for it, they will then go out into this world with a goal in mind of living the life of meaning and purpose and service of others. We can flip the lens and change the perspective from a me-centric world to a we-centric world.
What I would really like to see in our schools is to not focus on happiness, but focus on the skills of caring for others, which brings us fulfillment. It brings us meaning. It helps us to understand how to feel valued and add value. It helps us feel like we matter and helps us to help others feel the same.
When we create a sense of mattering, one of the byproducts is happiness. But more importantly, when we change our perspective from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, we create something much bigger than ourselves. We create a world where people genuinely care for each other!
When we shift our perspective from “me” to “we,” we can create a world where Everybody Matters.