Happiness at Work

Dr Srikumar Rao: Personal journey. I spent a very large chunk of my life laboring under the illusion that the world consists of two sets of people; those who passionately hate what they do and those who dislike what they do and the notion that you could not only enjoy work but thrive in it and feel energized and rejuvenated and radiantly alive, that was totally alien. I've now discovered that not only is that not an alien concept but that's the way it should be, and if it isn't you're wasting your life.

Rachel Salaman: How much is it about doing the right job for you versus making the most of the job you're in?

Dr Srikumar Rao: The two are actually very highly co-related, because you can only begin where you are, but the funny thing, and this is really paradoxical, is once you start making changes between your ears, those changes reflect themselves outside and the situation outside changes. So in other words, if you are in the "wrong," quote-unquote, job, perhaps the best thing for you to do would be to start working on your attitude, and that will, believe it or not, actually result in changes happening outside, because this is the really important point, Rachel, most of us go through life under the impression "Here I am, a nice person trying to do his or her best and the universe does things to us," and we feel that things happen to us. That's not the way it is. You and the universe are intricately connected, it's as if you were dancing, and if you start leading differently the universe has no choice but to follow differently.

Rachel Salaman: What are the most common reasons for unhappiness in the workplace?

Dr Srikumar Rao: I guess the most common reason is we have a very rigid view of "this is the way the world should be," and we strive with might and mane to make the world over in the image that we have, and it doesn't co-operate, and when it doesn't co-operate we react by getting angry, frustrated, anxious, and I would say that's probably the number one reason for the unhappiness we experience.

Rachel Salaman: Is it ever appropriate to try to change something in your workplace versus just changing your attitude towards it?

Dr Srikumar Rao: It is always appropriate to change things in the workplace, as long as you have a vision of "this is the way things should be" then it's not only appropriate, I think it's incumbent upon you to try to work towards your vision. The problem isn't that we try to work to change the workplace, the problem is that we do it thinking "If this happens then I will be happy," that is a fallacy. If it happens, wonderful, if it doesn't happen, still wonderful, you strive with might and mane, but you do not allow the achievement of any particular outcome to determine your well-being. If you can cultivate that, then you find every day is a plus, and win or lose simply doesn't matter.

Rachel Salaman: Are you actually talking about just having low expectations?

Dr Srikumar Rao: No, I'm talking about you have high expectations, but if you, for whatever reason, don't meet those expectations, you simply look upon it as data and say "Where do I go from here?" as opposed to getting all upset and depressed. It's a little bit like the poem, "If" by Rudyard Kipling, where he says "If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors the same," he really had it right.

Rachel Salaman: How much does a sense of purpose make a difference to happiness at work?

Dr Srikumar Rao: I think it makes a tremendous difference. One of the things that I talk about is the fact that most of us tend to live in what I call the "me-centered universe," and in a me-centered universe we believe that Galileo got it wrong, the earth doesn't revolve around the sun, it revolves around us personally, and we have a habit of, no matter what happens, to immediately break it down to "How is it going to impact me?" You know, like our spouse gets a great job offer and we start thinking "How is this going to affect our relationship?" If you live in a me-centered universe you are going to experience more than your share of frustration, angst, depression, all the things that make life terrible comes with the territory. So part of what I share is, if you want to reach a life where you're radiantly alive, then you have to be part of a cause which is considerably bigger than you are, a cause which brings a greater good to a great community, and you have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community, but if you're not in a situation where you can subsume yourself into something much bigger than you are you're by and large going to live a pretty mediocre existence. So a sense of purpose is a huge part of what I share and what I encourage persons to come up with in my programs.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned that you encourage people not to be me-centered.

Dr Srikumar Rao: Correct.

Rachel Salaman: Your subtitle of your book urges people to be resilient, motivated and successful. That sounds quite hard to achieve without being a little bit me-centered, where should you draw the line?

I've been asked this all the time. A common thing is "Professor Rao, let me get this straight, you say that if I want to live a happy life I shouldn't be me-centered?" Right. "So I should be other-centered?" Yes. "So I should be other-centered so I can live a happy life?" Yes. "So that means I'm being me-centered all the time am I not?" They're very bright people who take my program, and I've run into that numerous times, and the answer is, it's a little bit like the training wheels on a bicycle; you have the training wheels because you're learning to ride a bicycle, and once you have you take the training wheels off. So you begin in that manner, you want to be other-centered because you want to feel good about yourself, but after you've been doing it for any length of time you're no longer doing it because you want to achieve something, you're doing it because that's who you have become. So you start off in that manner, but eventually you change, you become that person and you're no longer being other-centered because you want to feel good, you're doing it because that's who you've become.

Rachel Salaman: Some of the examples you use early on in the book to illustrate a sense of happiness are rather child-like. For example, the wonder people feel when they see snow, or you mentioned that some people prefer nickels to dimes because they're bigger. How much does your vision of happiness have to do with shaking off adult concerns and returning to a state of innocence?

Dr Srikumar Rao: A big part of that. You can never be a child again, but you can have the same child-like wonder, but first you've got to recognize that you had it, you lost it, and you can go back to it.

Rachel Salaman: How relevant is that in a workplace?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Tremendously relevant.

Rachel Salaman: Can you give some examples?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Of having child-like wonder? Oh absolutely. I remember there was someone who went through my program and he happened to be in a particularly tough environment with a lot of very toxic people around, and there was one person, I forget now whether it was a colleague or a boss, who he found particularly irritating, until he started wondering. You know, when he was a child he had an uncle who was prone to temper outbursts, and he remembered that uncle and he remembered thinking "When I was a child I would always look at him with a great feeling of expectation, a combination of awe, fear, excitement, and I was always wondering when will he fly off the handle, and it was such fun, and I'd make bets with myself as to is he going to fly off the handle in the next five minutes or isn't he" and he remembered that, and he kind of started approaching his interactions with this person in the same way, and it became a matter of playing a game, you know; how long will it be before he blows up, and all of a sudden that changed in his head the entire nature of the interaction with that person. There are such things that you can do for yourself, and they really are very effective.

Rachel Salaman: It sounds like it's a little bit like shifting perspectives.

Dr Srikumar Rao: It has everything to do with shifting perspectives. All of life is a game. Shakespeare had it right, we're all on stage, we're all playing a role, play your role with gusto, and sometimes you're an emperor and sometimes you're a beggar, and it really doesn't matter that much, what matters is what will you do with the role that you're playing.

Rachel Salaman: Along those lines one of the tips in your book is that people should try to be the actor not the character. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Certainly. The only thing we ever do in life, Rachel, is we work on ourselves, and the universe gives us a vast panoply of tools to work on ourselves, and we habitually say "This is trivial, like where do I have lunch and what movie to do I see," and then we say "This is important, this is my career, this is my spouse, these are my children," but in reality it's all grist for the mill, and the only thing you ever do in life is you work on yourself. So if you recognize that you're working on yourself and all of the things, important, unimportant, are the tools that you are being given to work on yourself, and you do the very best that you are capable of with the understanding you have at that given point and with the intention of "I'm going to live a life of service and help everybody reach his or her highest potential," then you will find that whatever you're doing blesses you. Tasks are not chores, they are vehicles by which you achieve growth, and that is an attitude that can be cultivated.

Rachel Salaman: Could you tie that back to this idea of actors and characters?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Certainly. So what you're doing is you're playing a role, and you're always playing a role; sometimes you're parents, sometimes you're a child, you're a teacher, you're a boss, you're a subordinate. So whatever you are in, do the best that you are capable of in that particular role, but recognize that you are much more than a role. A role is something you assume, always be conscious of the fact that you are not the role, you are playing the role. It's a little bit like if you're an actor and you're playing a really wretched character, let's assume you're playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesperson, and nasty things happen to him; he tries to commit suicide, he's depressed because his earnings are going down, but even when you're doing that, you know that you're playing Willy Loman, you aren't Willy Loman. If you identify with Willy Loman, you're screwed. Identify with the actor, not with the character.

Rachel Salaman: A lot is said these days about the importance of authenticity. It sounds like what you're advocating would work against being authentic.

Dr Srikumar Rao: No, because it means being authentic to who you really are. If you recognize that you are a spiritual being playing a human experience and you really identify with that, then you are being authentic.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you talk about the harm done by using unhelpful labels. Can you give some examples of this?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Oh certainly. We go through life, and the moment something happens, instantaneously, even without recognizing it, we stick a label on it, we decide "This is good or this is bad." There are very few things that we think of as neutral, we immediately classify it as slightly good, slightly bad, but we label it good or bad, and the funny thing is, the moment we decide something is bad we experience it as bad, and my observation has been most of us tend to use the bad label, bad thing label, anywhere from three to ten times as often as we use the good thing label. So when we do that we almost by definition suffer, because lots of bad things are happening, you know, everywhere from "I went to the tube and my train pulled out just as I was going to the platform" to major illness, death, whatever. Now can you, Rachel, go back, go back five or ten years in your life, and can you recall something that happened that, at the time it happened, you thought "This is terrible," but now, with the perspective of time and perhaps wisdom, you can say "That wasn't so bad," or maybe even it was good? Can you?

Rachel Salaman: Definitely.

Dr Srikumar Rao: Virtually everybody can. So if something happened in the past and you thought it was bad and you now say "Hey, that wasn't bad, that was actually good," is it just possible that what you're today saying is bad could, in X years, turn out to be good? Absolutely. So if there is even the slightest possibility of that, why do you label it bad right now? And if you don't do that, then a lot of the suffering in your life goes away. Give you a classic instance. There was someone who took my program who got fired, and he thought "This is absolutely terrible," but he got a good package and, you know, eventually he found another position which was much more to his liking, so it was okay but approximately ten months after he was fired there were significant business reverses and the entire division he was in closed down, and everybody was laid off and they did not get a severance package. So by getting out when he did he actually was ahead of the curve.

Rachel Salaman: How can you break the habit of using the unhelpful labels?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Be conscious of the fact that this is what you do. When someone takes my full program I actually have an exercise where I get them to think "What happened to you today, what did you think about it, did you classify it as good or bad?" And especially if it was something major, I invite them to think "Is there any possible way in which this could actually be a good thing as opposed to a bad thing?" And when they think about it in that term then they come up with all kinds of ways in which it actually could have been a good thing and it doesn't really matter whether they believe it or not, the fact that they are thinking along those lines automatically makes it a less ominous presence in their life, and if you do it consistently you'll come to a point where you no longer have to think about it, you'll automatically accept things as they are without sticking a label "bad thing" on it.

Rachel Salaman: One surprise in the book is that you caution against positive thinking, saying it's like firing on four cylinders rather than eight. Could you explain that?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Certainly. The very name "positive thinking" sets up a duality, because it implies there is negative thinking and you've got to steer clear about that and stick to the positive side of it. Look at the language we use when we talk about positive thinking, things like "If life gives you a lemon make lemonade," which implies that life gave you a lemon and having a lemon is a bad thing and therefore you're going to put a positive spin on it and think about the lemonade. It's a little bit like you're on a teeter-totter and you're trying to put all the weight on one side, it's very strenuous, its tiring, and you frequently don't succeed. There is a much better way of dealing with that, which is don't stick a "bad thing" label on it at all. So if something happens to you and you don't stick a "bad thing" label on it, then it isn't negative, and if it isn't negative you don't need positive thinking to get you out of it. It's a far superior strategy.

Like you're going some place and you slip on a patch of ice and you break your leg. Now think about what happens in your head immediately, "Oh my God, I'm in such pain, why did this happen to me, bad things are always happening to me, who's going to do the project I'm responsible for?" etc. etc. Now if you break your leg there's stuff you have to do, got to go to a doctor, maybe have it set in a cast, when the cast comes off you go to physical therapy, all of that, all of that is stuff that you have to do because you broke your leg. But the rest of it, "Why do bad things always happen to me, who's going to take care of this?" etc, etc, all of that is baggage that we pick up. We don't have to pick up that baggage, nobody told us we don't have to pick up that baggage, it's culturally accepted, everybody around it is doing it. In fact, people might even feel offended if you don't pick up the baggage.

Imagine you broke your leg and you're in hospital and you're in-laws travel 100 miles to come and see you and commiserate with you, and you say "Who, me? I'm fine, it gives me a chance to catch up on my novel, which I never had time to do," they might feel upset. So its culture, part of the culture, we're indoctrinated into it, so you have to think hard to recognize what is legitimate and what is useless baggage you're picking up, and we pick up a lot of useless baggage. So I simply encourage persons in my program to recognize that they're doing this and ask "Do I really want to do it?", because always recognize this, you need positive thinking, quote-unquote, if something bad happened to you, but if you don't classify whatever happened to you as "bad", then you don't need positive thinking. Now some people could argue that that itself is positive thinking, now we're getting into semantics, and if that's the attitude they take then that's fine, I'm with them, but most of the time you talk about positive thinking as something bad happened to you and you're going to put a good spin on that. I'm saying go deeper to the source, don't label whatever happened to you as "bad" because you honestly don't know.

Rachel Salaman: Your book emphasizes the role that resilience plays in greater happiness at work, can you explain the metaphor of the "Daruma Doll"?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Okay. The Daruma Doll is a pattern after Bodhidharma, who was an Indian sage who is credited with spreading Buddhism through China into Japan, and legend has it that he was meditating in a cave and he was meditating so furiously that his arms and legs atrophied and fell off. So the Bodhidharma Doll is a rotund doll, no arms, no legs, and it's very heavily weighted at the bottom so you can't knock it over, you knock it over ten times and it springs up ten times, and I think that's a wonderful metaphor of the way your life can be, because fate will deal you blows, it can lay you down, but you don't have to continue lying down, you can snap back up. And a very quick way to snap back up is to simply not label anything that happens to you as bad, and that is something that you can get to if you think about it and cultivate it. So if you treat whatever happens to you not as "Oh my God, this is terrible, why did it happen to me?" but simply as "This happened" and then "What do I want to do about it?"

Rachel Salaman: How might that apply in the workplace?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Okay, things always happen to you in a workplace. You're working very, very hard on a project and your boss takes all the credit for it, or a colleague manages to stymie you at the last minute. So you can go along and be frustrated and depressed and say, you know, "Why is this happening?" and your blood pressure goes up, you might have a heart attack, or you could simply say "That's life," you know, "This happens, and what is the lesson that I can learn from it, and I'm now in a new starting position, where do I go from here?" So it's a little bit like be like a computer, because a computer gets an enormous amount of data but it never, ever gets upset, it simply says "According to my programming, where do I go now?"

There's a wonderful example of this. Gary Kasparov, who was then the world chess champion, was playing Deeper Blue by IBM, and it was the first time that a computer beat a reigning world chess champion. And Kasparov used to intimidate all his human opponents, and what really unnerved him is that he was unable to intimidate the computer, and even when the computer made a mistake and he had a strong move the computer simply didn't get frazzled but dug itself out of the hole. The fact that he couldn't intimidate the computer intimidated Kasparov. It's a good way to look at life, stuff will happen to you and you will deal with it as necessary, but you do not have to lose your equilibrium, that is a cultivable skill.

Rachel Salaman: One particularly insightful chapter I thought is titled "What Do You Notice?" Can you tell us your main points here and how they might relate to the workplace?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Yes. Very simple, we look upon the world not as it is but as we are. This is very important, we never see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. So you are walking down a street and you're hungry and you notice all the restaurants and eating places. So if you're introduced to someone, what do you notice? Do you immediately try to see how much money is this person making, where did he go to school, how articulate he is, or do you look at he is a genuinely kind individual, look at the way his eyes light up when he greets you? What strikes you about the other person, that's more a reflection of who you are than who he is. So if you're in the work situation, and I've had this happen numerous times, let me illustrate with a very common problem that many of us face. You've got to realize that many persons that take my programs have MBAs from top business schools, and quite a few are in the financial services industry, and toxic bosses are not unknown there, so I have a lot of persons who grapple with "You know, my boss is a real jerk, what do I do?" And you can look at it as "Oh my God, my boss is a real jerk and I'm stuck in this totally untenable situation" and you can be down and miserable, depressed, or, as I train them to do, this is a game, your boss is a jerk, so we'll take that as a given. Given that your boss is a jerk, are you skillful enough to make him un-jerky at least some of the time? You know, that's your challenge, try and see if you can actually get the person to be a decent human being, and maybe nine times you'll fail, but one time you'll succeed, chalk that up as a victory and say "How can I do it better?"

So the moment you convert it into your head as a game that you are playing against a very skillful opponent, it changes how you experience it, and you can use techniques like that for a great many work related situations. You've got a customer who's really upset and you can look at it as "You know, now here is my challenge, I've got an upset customer, is there anything at all that I can do to turn it around?" Maybe you'll succeed, maybe you won't, but now you're playing a game against a tough opponent, and the way you experience the situation changes dramatically.

Rachel Salaman: You also say that people get distracted by what you call mental chatter, can you share a work related example of that?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Absolutely. Very often what happens is everybody now is called upon to do more with less, no matter which industry you are in, no matter what level you are at, you will find that by and large there is a tendency for people above you to say "We're going to take away this stuff that you had as a help and we expect you to do more without that." You're always being called to do more with less. So when that happens there is a tendency to start thinking, first of all, railing against fate, and then "How can I possibly get this done, what can I do, I'm in such a miserable position?" and that tends to permeate every aspect of your interaction with everyone. So what I train people to do is, when you're talking to someone, talk to someone, don't think about the million things you have to do and this person is an interruption, and by bringing that focus down, two things happen; one, the nature of the interactions dramatically improves, and two, you find that you get a lot more done than you otherwise would have. One of the biggest problems we have in the workplace is not that there is so much we have to do, but we are so concerned about how much we have to do that we don't do any of it with the care it deserves. Mindfulness is a cultivable skill.

Rachel Salaman: At the end of your book you say "Know that whatever is aggravating you is trivial," and that's something that's come up in this interview. How can you be sure you're not letting something important slip by if you assume everything annoying doesn't matter?

Dr Srikumar Rao: Okay, I'm not saying that it doesn't matter, I'm saying it does matter and you have to treat it appropriately. It doesn't matter only in the sense that you don't have to allow it to destroy your mental equilibrium. It is very important, but nothing is important enough to disturb you in that manner. Let me give you another metaphor. Imagine that you're a trauma surgeon in an inner city hospital, lots of stuff comes your way; drug overdoses, car accidents, knifings, gunshot wounds, so someone is very injured and you try with might and mane to help that person recover. You don't treat it as unimportant, it is deadly important and you do the very best that you can, but if that patient dies you move on to the next one.

Rachel Salaman: I think some people might have problems understanding what you mean by "trivial," because on the one hand you're saying certain things are important, but on the other hand you're saying "Remember that everything is trivial."

Dr Srikumar Rao: This is a paradox, because we have the habit of assigning, "This is important, this is trivial," and what is important we allow it to disturb our equanimity. So what I'm basically saying is its trivial in the sense of "Do not let it affect your equanimity," it's in that sense that I'm saying it's not important.

Rachel Salaman: So something can be important and trivial on two different levels?

Dr Srikumar Rao: That is exactly correct.

Rachel Salaman: Or would you go so far as to say that everything could be important and also trivial?

Dr Srikumar Rao: That is absolutely correct, but you have to be pretty advanced in your anchor to realize that, and most of us aren't.

Rachel Salaman: So if you were to share your three top tips for greater happiness at work, what would they be?

Dr Srikumar Rao: First of all recognize that the world you live in is not real, it's a construct, you made it, and that's actually tremendously liberating, because if the world you're living in is real and you don't like it you're stuck, there's nothing you can do, grin and bear it, but if the world you live in is a construct and you don't like it, you can deconstruct parts of it and build it up again. Second, recognize that your habit of sticking a label on something, and particularly a "bad thing" label, is responsible for much of the suffering that you undergo, and you don't have to stick a "bad thing" label on anything that happens to you because you honestly don't know. And I guess the third thing that I would like to share with people is, by all means have goals, because goals are tremendously useful because they give you direction, but don't become obsessed with goals, because when you become obsessed with goals you miss the journey, and the journey is the only thing you have. So by all means strive towards a goal, but invest in the process, not on the goal.

Dr Srikumar Rao talking to me in London. The name of his book again is "Happiness At Work: Be Resilient, Motivated and Successful – No Matter What."

Dr Rao has a website www.areyoureadytosucceed.com, where you can sign up to receive information and resources. You can also view a talk that Dr Rao did on the subject of "embracing happiness" at http://www.ted.com/talks/srikumar_rao_plug_into_your_hard_wired_happiness.html.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.