One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context.
While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new at all. There is a lot of good research that have found that the emotional state of our leaders has a direct impact on the emotional state and productivity of their teams. You can access some of these research here, here and here.
You can also hear Daniel Goleman talk about the importance of leading ourselves, managing our emotions and the impact of leaders being happy and upbeat.
Each and every one of us have the right to be happy and the pursuit of happiness. Once we become leaders, it becomes even more important to be happy, as our happiness or lack thereof has a much more significant impact on the people around us. We owe it to ourselves and everyone that we lead to go on the pursuit of happiness.
I have been on a journey to understand happiness. Explore questions like what is happiness or what makes us happy. This journey took me to understanding the ancient Indian wisdom around this topic. Wisdom that has been passed on for 1000’s of years through texts like the Bhagvad Gita, the Upanishads. Wisdom that was passed on to us by Buddha and his teaching. Wisdom passed on to us through the Sufi tradition.
The result is my latest book – Being Happy. In this book, I share my learning in the form of short stories, some of them I have adopted from the texts that I explore and some my own creation.
Each and everyone of us has the same potential to be happy. However, not all of us is able to realise this potential. We have amongst us people who are happy and content and then those who are miserable and depressed and every other state in between them.
If you think that this is an important topic, as important as I believe to be, then I would like to invite you to explore the topic of your personal happiness, either through self reflection or through engaging with the masters – current and past. I would like to invite you to join me in the pursuit and being happy.
You can also find an interesting discussion on this topic with his Highness, the Dalai Lama here.
