The best advice I’ve received about being myself came from happiness expert Arthur Brooks. While he explained the PANAS test—which measures your Positive and Negative Affect Schedule—I added that our shared Mad Scientist tendencies (an associated archetype he created) were affirming in his new book written with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
After I confessed my long-held hope to be equanimous—Mad Scientists are easily excited and disappointed—he made a wise case to stay authentic: The truth is, you can’t be that person anyway. You’d be an intense hippie.
Brooks’ advice clicked, but that wasn’t surprising. Nor was its humorous delivery or that it doubled as marriage advice. He writes the acclaimed “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic and is revered for his guidance doing so by his Harvard students and organizations alike.
In our conversation, he illustrates how the emotional self-management tools in their book invite us to step into our strengths and create cultures of shared happiness.
Fast Company: You make the distinction that while we often seek compatibility—people who are similar to us—complementarity is behind our most fulfilling relationships. If you and I are working together, how can we merge our traits into a complementary partnership?
Arthur Brooks: It starts with knowledge and understanding. Number one is information about who you are and who they are, which you can gather through the PANAS test. Number two is an agreement that we’re going to celebrate our differences. It’s like the “celebrate diversity” bumper sticker that people say and never mean. On the bumper sticker, they mean people who look different, not people who think different. Studies show that the more you say you value socio-demographic diversity, the less you value intellectual and ideological diversity. That’s what you have to embrace. This is the secret to a happy marriage too: seeing differences as strengths not conflict. Complementarity is differences that fit.
FC: Awareness allows us to play synergistic roles for each other. How can we discern those?
AB: It’s critical that they’re assigned roles. Otherwise, it’ll be a source of irritation. Let’s say you’re a worrier. Worriers are generally high in negative affect. You need people you can turn to and say: Please help populate my zombie apocalypse. I go to Candice on my team—she’s a cheerleader (high positive affect, low negative affect)—and say: I’m worrying about things that don’t matter. I need to mellow out.
FC: Your articulation of the difference between hope and optimism invites a valuable perspective shift. How does shifting from optimism to hope elevate our mindset and, ultimately, success?
AB: Optimism is nothing more than a prediction that everything is going to be great. Nothing can live up to your expectations as an optimist. If you’re a worrier, the best-case scenario is that you’re a hopeful pessimist. You’re seeing all the bad stuff out there, but you know you can make it better. You don’t want people walking around saying: We’re going to IPO in six months! We’re all going to be rich! It’s not pessimistic to say: There may be a recession coming. But, here are six things we can do today. It’s important to be realistic when you have an imperfect vision for the future. That’s the mark of success I want in my life, not just my professional life.
FC: You describe negative emotional contagion like a virus. How can teams develop a shared positive mindset?
AB: Cheerleader bosses can be terrible CEOs. The main reason they fail is that they say: Don’t be negative around me! I don’t want any negative energy! That’s a huge mistake. They get hit by a freight train because they didn’t see it coming. They also disempower their teams because they can’t give honest performance reviews. They tell you: You’re doing great! Then, walk into the adjacent office talking about the incompetent idiot next door. It’s all counterfeit currency. We need a space for negativity. You don’t want the vehicular language to be: Everything sucks! You want it to be: The reason we have negativity is because we want the truth.
FC: We learn that we can turn down our sensitivity bias to negativity by replacing negative emotional receptors with positive ones, like gratitude, which you describe as “emotional caffeine.” What are simple ways to deploy it?
AB: To begin, it has to do with understanding the principle. The goal is to turn down the amplitude of negative emotions without numbing them. You don’t want fentanyl. You want Tylenol. Caffeine doesn’t permanently fill the adenosine receptors in your brain. If it did, your heart would be going 160 BPM. You don’t want that. You want something that’s going to give you a little less adenosine. One way to do that is to have a culture in which you’re overtly grateful for the good things that are happening. I often said to my team as CEO: We have some tough stuff to talk about today, but I want to start with good news. I was putting a little caffeine into their adenosine receptors. The same thing is true when you have a culture where everybody jokes around during challenges. You’re not saying: Nothing is bad. You’re saying: This is how we’re choosing to respond to it.
FC: You articulate forgiveness as a secret weapon, sharing that: “Almost all unresolved conflict comes down to unresolved resentment, so a practice of forgiving each other explicitly and implicitly is extremely important.” What role does forgiveness play on teams, and how can we practice it to make our relationships more enduring?
AB: People quit their jobs because there’s so much implicit resentment and scar tissue built up. We don’t have enough emotional commitment or investment in each other to even try to resolve it. The way to deal with that is to be explicit. You need a culture where you’re continuously saying: I’m never going to try to offend or belittle you. So, if I do, it’s inadvertent. I promise, I’ll do the best I can. In return, I need you to promise to forgive me. I ask for my team’s forgiveness all the time. I’m not saying: Let’s go on a retreat and do trust falls. I’m a scientist. Still, if we’re going to have proper trust in each other, we can’t build up walls. This is a good policy in romance too: We have a policy of forgiveness and the biggest infraction is violating it. The two things that can mess up a team, marriage, or friendship are anxiety and attachment: You’re either too anxious or, more importantly, too avoidant to talk about what’s going on.
FC: Gratitude is central to becoming happier. What is a gratitude practice a team can participate in and how does thankfulness elevate the quality of our relationships?
AB: I’ve done this exercise with my team: Let’s think about the four things we’re most worried about for the company. What’s the worst-case scenario for each? Now, let’s list the best and most likely ones. If this were another company, what probabilities would we put on those situations? You get happier and more grateful as you go because you realize that the most likely case is pretty good, and the best case is likely. The doomsday scenario was just a fantasm in your limbic system. It’s a process of metacognition: You’re moving the experience of negativity into your prefrontal cortex and feel more grateful as a result. The truth is, gratitude is a realistic perspective for most of us. No matter how bad things are, there are always things to be grateful for.
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