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Resilience Over Happiness in the Workplace
Dr. Becky Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Good Inside, clinical psychologist, and #1 New York Times bestselling author, shares insights as to why focusing on resilience over happiness helps teams to overcome any obstacle in their path.
“I just want everyone to be happy”– I have to be honest, this sentence never sits right with me.
Here’s how I see it: the more we work toward keeping everyone happy, the more we set the stage for anxiety, frustration, and lower self-confidence. Stay with me here, I’ll explain:
Anxiety is the intolerance of distress. It’s the experience of not wanting to be in your body, the idea that you should be feeling different than how you are feeling in that moment.
So how does this connect with a focus on “keeping everyone happy”? Well, when we focus on keeping people happy, we make it our goal to get them “out” of distress and “in” to comfort. And while, at first glance, there may not seem to be a problem, the truth is that work – and life in general – always involves tough moments and sometimes tough stages. There are weeks on edge where a project isn’t going well, there are times where employees have to tolerate layoffs around them, there are sometimes year-ends where bonuses aren’t what anyone wants them to be.
When we try to keep everyone happy, what we really do is make it that much harder to get through tricky times – because everyone around us is looking for the “solution” instead of looking for how to tolerate the mess.
When people are upset, they can learn one of two lessons:
- “I should not feel upset. When I feel uncomfortable, my job is to beeline my way to comfortable as soon as possible. Distress is not to be tolerated, it is to be changed. When distress arises, figure out a way to feel happy.”
- “I am upset. That feeling is real and important to pay attention to. Sometimes life brings me disappointment and frustration – and so it makes sense I’d feel, correspondingly, disappointed and frustrated. Nothing is wrong with these feelings and I am someone who is capable of coping with them. I don’t have to run away from them. I will get through this.”
If I’ve learned anything from my own adulthood, it’s this: we cannot successfully avoid distress. We will face distress no matter what and then either we look to escape or cope. Escaping from distress in the workplace will surface as added frustration, procrastination, and entitlement; coping with distress in the workplace will surface as resilience, direct communication, and connectivity within the team.
So let’s change the narrative. Let’s be the generation that stops saying, “I just want everyone to be happy!” and starts saying, “I want – for myself and for the people around me – to be able to cope with whatever the world throws our way.” Let’s build resilience; after all, I think we all know that happiness naturally finds adults who are able to manage through life’s challenges. Resilience sets the foundation for happiness – so let’s start there.
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