Promotion? Don't worry, be happy
By LARRY BALLARD
Des Moines Register
My new friend Sonja Lyubomirsky says there's a good chance the bozo in the next cubicle who smiles all the time will be promoted to a better job.
Why? Because happiness begets workplace success.
Now, I know what you're thinking: How the heck can I be happy at work if I haven't had any success in the first place?
It's like the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. Or the "How can I get experience if no one will hire me?" problem.
For those, there are no answers.
That's where Lyubomirsky comes in. She got her degree at Stanford and researches something called "subjective well-being."
For those of you whose Psych 101 class was at 8 a.m., it's basically the study of how people feel about themselves and how that affects what happens in their lives.
Lyubomirsky and two other researchers pored over more than 225 scientific studies and concluded that happiness can lead to job success rather than simply follow it.
Sounds complicated, we know, but stay with us.
Lyubomirsky says there's plenty of evidence out there that success feeds off happiness, not the other way around:
Lyubomirsky's theory was recently published by the American Psychological Association. So it's safe to say there are a lot of words such as "cognitive" and "meritocratic" and "metanalysis" that make it unreadable unless you attended a few of those 8 o'clocks — and took notes.
She said the idea was born at a psychology conference to which Lyubomirsky took her 8-month-old daughter.
"She was going on 7 years old when we finished" the study, said Lyubomirsky, who teaches at the University of California-Riverside. She is quick to emphasize, of course, that happiness alone is not enough to guarantee success.
"We would never say that intelligence and hard work and family connections and things like that don't play a role," she said.
OK, so it looks like I have my work cut out for me on this subjective well-being thing.
Meanwhile, I plan to take Lyubomirsky's advice. No matter how cruddy things get at work, I'm going to throw back my shoulders, stick out my chin and greet every co-worker with a big 'ol smile.
