HappyHour Season 1

Posted on August 7, 2020 in Announcements

Happy Smarts Happy Hour

The very first HappySmarts HappyHour – HSH^2 – happened on a whim. Because my good friend Pete McGraw emailed me out of the blue to ask if I had a podcast and would consider interviewing him. I enjoyed the session with Pete so much that I decided to continue to interview guests with my wonderful moderators, Melanie, Elena and Gayathri

And so 3 months and more guests later, we had the final 17th HSH^2 on 31st July 2020. Two of our guests – Prof Srikumar Rao and Prof Vic Strecher – came back a second time on popular demand.

I would have loved to have continued with the HSH^2s and surely will at some point in the future. Right now though, I am taking a break from it for one and only one reason – to focus on the re-launch of my employee happiness course: Happier Employees and Return on Investment Course (HEROIC for short).

Here is a complete list of the awesome guests on HSH^2 Season 1. Please watch the replay on The Happysmarts YouTube Channel.

1. Pete McGraw is an awesome researcher and author of two great books (The Humor Code and more recently, Shtick to Business).
2. Kelly Goldsmith, one of the rising stars in the field of marketing academics. She is the daughter of Marshall Goldsmith, world’s leading c-suite coach and co-instructor of my course on Employee Happiness on edX.
3. Szu-chi Huang, award-winning Marketing professor from Stanford University, spoke on goal-setting, pursuit, and achievement.
4. Prof. Srikumar Rao is a Mind-valley instructor and author of several awesome books including Are You Ready to Succeed? and Happiness at Work. Many of you may be more familiar with Prof. Rao as the purveyor of the GTBTWK (‘Good Thing, Bad Thing, Who Knows’) story in Week 5 of ALOHAF!
5. Viral Acharya, C. V. Starr Professor of Economics at New York University and ex-Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (India’s “FED”)
6. Coach Daron K. Roberts, Harvard Law Grad, football coach, and lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin.
   He’s an awesome motivational speaker–and makes his insightful observations in the most original, creative ways I’ve seen. (So, unsurprisingly, he almost always often gets over 500 “likes” on his LinkedIn posts!). He spoke on the topic  how best to to “transition”–or reinvent–yourself, a very relevant topic for the current times.
7. Prof. Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .
   Broaden & build theory, Losada ratio, Micromoments of love are definitely in the Top 10 theories to emerge from all of Positive Psychology, and Prof. Fredrickson is the proponent of each of these theories.
8. Nic Marks, is a TED speaker (his talk has close to 2.5 million views), statistician and therapist rolled into one, and founder and CEO of Friday Pulse (an organization that monitors and helps promote work-place happiness)
9. Prof. Sonja Lyubomirsky is world-famous as a happiness researcher.
   Her books, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness are already classics, and her ideas on the happiness pie-chart and the happiness activity-person fit have shaped the habits of millions of people around the world.
10. Tasha Eurich, author of Insight, a book on the importance of self-awareness for well-being and success.
    It’s an excellent book which is why it has over 200 5-star reviews on Amazon! In this HappyHour Tasha summarized the book for us! She also led us through a mini workshop to help us assess our current levels of self-awareness (hint: most of us think we are more self-aware than we actually are!), and provide tips on how to improve further on this dimension.
11. Michael Norton
12. Suresh Ramanathan & Anirban Mukhopadhyay
    are Jokans (that’s the term for graduates of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta–because the campus is located in an area called Joka in erstwhile Calcutta, now Kolkata). Anirban Mukhopadhyay (who will soon take over as Associate Provost of the prestigious Hong Kong University of Science & Technology), and Suresh Ramanathan, Dean of the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. They enlightened us on a variety of topics, from how to deal with temptations, and how to best fight weight-gain and obesity, to dealing with the pressure of success.
13. Luis Gallardo, founder of ‘Happytalism,’ the World Happiness Foundation
    The foundation organizes, among other things, the World Happiness Festival. I got to meet Luis in the the ‘Kingdom of Happiness’ (Bhutan) a few years back. He shared his life’s journey with us–including what it took to give up a cushy consulting job to pursue his life’s mission (of promoting happiness initiatives in organizations). If you are interested in any way, shape or form in organizational happiness (e.g., you want to be a wellness consultant or are in HR), do watch this session.
14. Prof. Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University.
    Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss (a really enjoyable caper across countries that vary on happiness), called Prof. Veenhoven ‘the Godfather of Happiness’ and you’ll know why, the very first minute you tune into HSH^2 #16.
15. Prof. Vic Strecher of UMich.