There is a right way and a wrong way to finding happiness.
Unfortunately, most of us are only familiar with the wrong way: pursuing happiness.
Paradoxically, our greatest pain comes from trying to pursue happiness. “I’ll be happy when”.
Declan Edwards is a world-renowned Happiness Expert, a leader in positive psychology (the non-toxic kind), who has transformed the lives of high performers all across the world.
Declan walks through the art of finding happiness and meaning that aren’t reliant on external factors like getting that promotion, a nice car, or a house.
If you are someone who feels like your cup is always half full, then this episode is for you
In this episode Declan shares:
- Why happiness is a skill that can be learned and practised
- The relationship between happiness and success
- Why high performers often fall victim to the moving goalposts phenomenon
- The science behind the hedonic treadmill and hedonic adaptation
- Why happiness needs a PR makeover
- The difference between joy, connection, meaning and purpose
- Why emotions are not inconveniences to be avoided
- Practical ways to build emotional intelligence and self-awareness
- How to reconnect with your body and understand what emotions are telling you
- The parenting paradox and what it teaches us about happiness
- Why connection is one of the strongest predictors of long-term wellbeing
- The five foundational skills for cultivating happiness
- How journaling can help you identify life’s early warning signs
- Declan’s top habits for staying at the top
Key Quotes
“Success at the cost of happiness is one of the most common forms of failure.”
“Our brains have this funny tendency to always be moving the goalposts for happiness.”
“We get too caught up being human doings and forget to be human beings.”
Episode Resources
PRE-ORDER For the Long Run by Jess Spendlove 👉 https://booktopia.kh4ffx.net/n423Ea
Declan Edwards
More about Declan Edwards: https://www.rorywarnock.com/
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Declan
Declan Edwards is a globally recognised happiness researcher, author, TEDx speaker, and founder of BU Happiness College – an award-winning social enterprise dedicated to making the science of happiness both accessible and actionable.
With a Bachelor of Health from the University of Newcastle and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from Central Queensland University, Declan blends academic expertise with real-world application. His work has supported government departments, universities, not-for-profits, and leading businesses to strengthen workplace culture, reduce burnout, and become employers of choice.
Known for his engaging and relatable style, Declan has spoken for audiences ranging from the United Nations and The Red Cross to major corporations and community groups. His presentations combine evidence-based insights with personal stories, humour, and practical tools – leaving people not just inspired, but empowered to thrive.
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
speaker-0 (00:00.194)
Success at the cost of happiness is one of the most common forms of failure. So as life is sped up, people are increasingly treating emotions as inconveniences and distractions.
speaker-1 (00:09.67)
I’ve definitely fallen victim to the goalposts moving. And the more they move, the more they need to move to get that same response.
speaker-0 (00:17.686)
Yeah. Our brains have this funny tendency to always be moving the goalpost for happiness and at the same time kind of undervaluing it. Now thankfully, we can train the brain out of those patterns. And so learning how to look inwards and reconnect with ourselves and go, hang on, maybe my answer isn’t out here, it’s inside of me, I think is a an art form and a skill that people are losing. A happy life does not mean feeling happy all the time. I mean to be frank, becoming a parent is the worst thing my wife and I have done for our happiness in the last two years.
There are going to be chapters of your life where joy is not present or accessible. So maybe in those chapters I lean on connection or meaning or purpose. These are slower, steadier forms of happiness. They take longer to build, but they also stick around a little bit longer. This is one of the biggest realizations I’ve had of studying happiness over ten years. If we learn to cultivate happiness as a skill, we make better decisions, we think more clearly, we show up better in our relationships, and lo and behold, success kind of comes as a byproduct. Not
The main goal.
speaker-1 (01:21.272)
Declan Edwards, welcome to Stay at the Top. Privileged that you had the drive down on this wet Monday morning.
speaker-0 (01:23.896)
Thanks for having me.
speaker-0 (01:28.63)
I can’t say it’s if you turn the weather on for me.
speaker-1 (01:31.118)
Not what you imagine when you think of Sydney. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. I love that you have dedicated your work to helping people be happier. You’re a happiness researcher, you’re a coach, founder of the BU Happiness College. I believe you’ve also just started a PhD.
speaker-0 (01:51.33)
it’s up in the air. I’ve sent off my application, my research application. Like this is what I want to study. Yeah. It’s gonna be an eight year process. I’m a sucker for punishment. and I’m just waiting to hear back on intake and funding. So potentially by the time this episode’s out and people are listening to this, yeah, I’ll have started the eight year process.
speaker-1 (02:07.234)
Well safe to say you’re well already on a mission, like a good decade in. Yes. Potentially another eight years. What’s another What’s another thirty years? I did listen to an episode where you were talking about your work and you’re really in the first quarter. And it’s such a great way to think about it. I guess to start and to set the scene, like, is happiness what we should be aiming for in life?
speaker-0 (02:12.61)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (02:31.352)
I mean, I would argue so. Obviously I’m a little biased because I’ve dedicated a decade of my life and career to studying happiness as a skill set and a science. I would say it’s better than a lot of the alternatives. And what o the most common alternative is is, you know, in a capitalistic society, we tend to lean towards prioritizing and pursuing success as the goal. Sometimes at the expense and cost of happiness. You know, we’ve all met people who’ve been remarkably successful in a certain part of their life, be it
you know, financially successful, career-wise successful, successful in their health and longevity. But if that comes at the detriment and expense of all these other areas that matter, I would argue that success at the cost of happiness and well-being is one of the most common forms of failure. So yeah, I would argue that happiness is a better pursuit. It’s a better goal to have. And we know from the research that ironically, that relationship between success and happiness tends to be
A little bit opposite than most people think. We often think if I achieve enough success, then I will be happy. That’s the outcome and the reward. But what a lot of the research in positive psychology and wellbeing science says is, well, actually it’s the opposite way around. If we learn to cultivate happiness as a skill, if we learn to be really happy and well now, we make better decisions, we think more clearly, we show up better in our relationships, and lo and behold, success kinda comes as a byproduct, not the main goal. So yeah, I would argue that happiness is is definitely worth pursuing.
speaker-1 (03:51.574)
And is it safe to say that really success is attached to an external metric and then happiness is really this internal work and a shift? Hope I haven’t oversimplified it, but
speaker-0 (04:02.734)
I think that’s a fair way to say it. There are external elements that impact happiness. You know, for example, geez, early on in my career of studying happiness, I I admit now, I’m ashamed to admit, but I admit I was one of those guys that said, no, money doesn’t buy happiness. And then a few years in, someone said to me, you know, the only people who say that are people who aren’t worrying about putting a roof over their head and food on the table. It’s a remarkably privileged position to be in to say that money doesn’t impact happiness. Of course it does. And we now know from the research that, you know, your your financial security.
Or lack thereof has a huge impact on how happy and well you feel. So there are external elements, but to your point, yeah, happiness is largely an intrinsic job. It’s doing the internal work of getting to know yourself, of understanding your values, of defining happiness on your terms and your definition. That’s probably something to be really clear on for everyone listening to this conversation. I’m honored and proud to be seen as a happiness expert, but I am not an expert on your happiness. Because I’ve not lived your life. I’m not you.
I I think if people do the internal work and the intrinsic work of getting to know themselves and defining what a happy life is by their standards, they’re far more likely to achieve a sense of happiness and t and to live a happy and fulfilled life than if they just look for the next, I don’t know, guru saying, Here’s all the answers, go follow this blindly.
speaker-1 (05:17.142)
And how did you land here? Because sitting here talking to you, you embody the work that you do. Is that just who you are at your core? Or how did you get to the point that you went, happiness is my life’s work and that’s what I’m off to do?
speaker-0 (05:30.75)
I yeah, I’m proud to say that a lot of this is who I am now. But that didn’t come accidentally. It wasn’t born in or baked in. I don’t think happiness is something that you just have or don’t have at birth. For me, I actually spent a lot of my teenage years wrestling with happiness and wrestling with unhappiness. I look back now and I describe a lot of my life and a lot of my formative years as a bit of a human chameleon.
I think that came down to a couple of things. You know, I by the time I was in high school, I’d been to four or five different schools. My father was lifelong in the military. So I moved around a lot and I became really good at going, who do I need to be to quickly get approval from others? Who do I need to be to kind of play to what their expectations of me are? And I got really good at it. So from the outside looking in, people would be like, you know, he’s pretty charismatic, he can crack a joke, he can talk. He seems pretty happy. But at home, at the end of the day.
when I was on my own. It’s remarkably unhappy. And that came down to I didn’t know who I was. I was so busy chasing everyone else’s idea for me. I remember one of my f earliest mentors, he said, Declan, what do you want out of life? And I said, you know, I’d it’d be nice to be kinder to myself, to have more confidence in myself, to trust myself, to have more self worth. And he goes, Okay. All these things start with the same words, you know. And I was like, they do. Now at the time I was like eighteen, nineteen years old.
And he goes, they all start with self. So tell me about yourself. What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What do you value? What matters to you? Keeping in mind I’m 18 or 19. And I was like, I have no bloody clue. These are big questions. And so I kind of turned around team and I was like, well, h how do you know these answers? Like I I don’t know them. I didn’t learn anything about self-knowledge or self-awareness or introspection or emotional intelligence or any of this in school.
I said, how do you know all this? And he goes, you know, I’ve been studying wellbeing science and positive psychology. I went, hold on. You mean to tell me there’s a field of research that studies what it means to live a good life, to be happy and fulfilled. And I don’t get exposed to that? Like that’s this seems like a cheat code. How do I get access to it? And so I became quite obsessed, to be honest. I studied, I went to university. First I actually was studying journalism, changed very quickly to study health sciences, and from that was fortunate enough to get into a postgraduate study in positive psychology.
speaker-0 (07:52.79)
just fell in love with going, hey, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You know, as human beings, we’ve been trying to understand happiness for three or four thousand years going back to the ancient Greeks. And only recently in the last three or four decades have we started studying it scientifically. Why am I not learning from them? And the more I dove into that field, the more I just fell in love with it. And I went, I think this is what I want to do with my life. A, for myself, I was feeling the benefits myself. And B, I went, what would happen if we started sharing this more?
You know, if if people learnt these as early as possible, I I just think it would make a the world a better and happier place. And so that’s what I’ve been doing now for the last ten years.
speaker-1 (08:30.502)
I think it’s so common to witness speaking for myself and I think the people in my life, the clients I serve. I guess I typically work with what I would call a a high performer, someone who’s quite motivated and driven. And, you know, I have been this person before. And it feels like it’s constant work shifting that because it’s hard to shift what you’ve learnt your whole life.
But I’ve definitely fallen victim to the goalposts moving constantly. And the more they move, the more they need to move to nearly get that same response. Why is this like an inbuilt, like all humans nearly from what I’m hearing, but definitely those really motivated, driven, you know, high kind of performing types of people?
speaker-0 (09:19.544)
So you’re talking about two things there that we see in the happiness research, and I’m glad you brought them up because they’re arguably the two most common. Like I I think across humanity we wrestle with these. the first is the we call it the hedonic treadmill. And the easiest way to know if you’re on the hedonic treadmill, and by the way, just because I study and research happiness and teach it doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. I’ve been on the hedonic treadmill this week, right? But the quicker you can recognize you’re on it and then get off it, the better for your well-being. And the quickest way to know if you’re on the hedonic treadmill is how you complete the sentence.
I’ll be happy when. Right? When we set happiness as this future goal that we’re moving towards, and to your point, a lot of high achievers, what we’ll tend to do is we’ll set the mark. We’re like, hey, I’ll be happy when I’m making X in revenue or you know, a salary is this, or when I get the promotion, or whatever it may be, right? And as we get closer to it, we do a really cheeky thing. We either move the benchmark, so we’re always chasing, because we like that hunger, or we get there and we celebrate for all of what? A minute or two?
And then we’re on to the next thing. Right? And so this hedonic train meal keeps us running. The other thing that’s coming up in what you just mentioned there is something called hedonic adaptation, which is the things that brought us happiness, unfortunately, have a r a lower return on investment over time. The best way to think about this is do you have a favorite ice cream flavor, for example? Not chocolate. Anything but Okay, we’ve ruled out chocolate.
speaker-1 (10:38.794)
Not chocolate.
speaker-1 (10:43.168)
Let’s go I like a caramel swirl with a bit of a chunk in there somewhere. my god.
speaker-0 (10:47.668)
Gorgeous, you’re painting a picture for me, my taste buds can already experience it. So you haven’t had ice cream for a and you’re like, you what, I really feel like a nice ice cream. It’s a hot day, like it’s sunny, let’s get an ice cream. If you go and you get a scoop of that caramel swirl, that first little mouthful, you’re like, yes. This is the life. This feels so good. If you have a second scoop of it, and then a third scoop, and then a fourth scoop.
I don’t care how much you enjoy that ice cream. Eventually you’re gonna get to a point where you’re like, I genuinely don’t like this. Right? Not only am I not enjoying it, I’m actively against it now. Our brains have this funny way of adapting very quickly to things that once boosted our happiness. Another example I tend to give is everyone who’s bought a new car. You buy a new car and you go, my god, the new car, I love it. I’m gonna keep it so clean, I’m gonna, you know, polish it on the weekends. I can’t wait to drive it around.
speaker-1 (11:41.534)
The children aren’t snacking in the children.
speaker-0 (11:43.086)
No food in the new car. That’s a rule when we get the new car. And what, three to six months later? It’s just the car. You know what I mean? So our brains have this funny tendency to always be moving the goalpost for happiness. And at the same time, when we do get to happiness, reducing and minimizing and not kind of undervaluing it over time. Now thankfully, we can train the brain out of those patterns, and thankfully we can learn a lot of things that
allow us to cultivate and experience happiness more often and at a deeper level. But these are inbuilt wirings. You know, because and they work really well for us. If you go into, well, why does our brain do this? It’s not because your everyone’s brain is out there plotting against us, being like, right, how do I ruin happiness for all of us? It’s because and and I mean to be frank, this is one of the biggest realizations I’ve had of studying happiness over ten years. Your brain doesn’t actually really give a shit if you’re happy. That’s not its purpose.
It cares that you’re alive. And so in pursuit of survival, in pursuit of comfort, in pursuit of predictability, it’ll sacrifice happiness if we don’t train it to do otherwise.
speaker-1 (12:51.79)
And even as I was preparing for this episode, I started to think about happiness and what is happiness and and just even thinking more deeply about it because we nearly aim for it. This is my interpretation. A lot of people, you know, the pursuit of happiness. But then in listening to some of your work, it’s it’s not even necessarily like something that we just reach. It’s a series of skills and different emotions which all kind of sit under an umbrella. I feel like it needs a PR makeover.
speaker-0 (13:21.118)
It does, to be honest, it does. And that was another big realisation for me early on in in studying happiness was if you ask people what is happiness, what does happiness feel like, for example. And for those listening to this conversation, ask yourself that. What does happiness feel like? A lot of times we ask that in a westernized individualistic culture like Australia, UK, US, Canada, we tend to lean a little bit more towards the dopamine driven forms of happiness. So happiness feels like joy.
It feels like excitement. It feels like elation. It feels like accomplishment. It feels like pride. And these are all beautiful things. But they also come really quickly and go really quickly. They don’t last. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have them in our life. Of course we should. But if that’s our only definition of happiness, I promise you, there are going to be days, moments, maybe even weeks and months and chapters of your life where joy is not present or accessible. Grief comes to mind, right? The loss of a loved one. There is no way in the world.
As someone who studies and teaches the skills of happiness, I would go to someone in a chapter of grief and say, seek joy right now. How dehumanizing is that to something that people are experiencing? But what I might say is, hey, if we look at happiness through the lens of a lot of collectivist cultures, when we ask what does happiness feel like, it tends to lean more towards contentment or connection or meaning or purpose.
And these are slower, steadier state forms of happiness. They take longer to build, but they also stick around a little bit longer. It’s not to say one’s better or worse. It’s more to say how do we make a thorough and cohesive and comprehensive approach to happiness that goes, you know what, there are chapters of life where I’m not going to be able to rely on joy being my main form of happiness. So maybe in those chapters I lean on connection being a form of happiness. There are other chapters where, you know.
connection and meaning and purpose and contentment might not be as accessible. So how do I lean into pride and accomplishment in those chapters? It’s like being an artist. If I only have one colour on my palette, that’s what I’m stuck to paint with. But if I expand the palette, if I expand my definition of happiness to go, there’s all these forms of emotions that sit under it, how do I tap into those and use them? And something I should highlight for people is that’s not to say that other feelings that might not sit under the happiness umbrella term
speaker-0 (15:42.616)
Don’t have a purpose and role either. I’m I’m so against toxic positivity. A happy life does not mean feeling happy all the time. I don’t think happiness needs to be the main emotion that you’re experiencing in every moment of life, but I do think it needs to be present. So it might be the main emotion I’m feeling would sit under anger or sadness or fear and anxiety. It’s okay, that’s human. But can I find a little silver lining? Can I find a little lens of an emotion that would sit under happiness that goes alongside it?
Example before, the main feeling I might feel when losing a loved one is grief and sorrow and sadness. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a beautiful part of being human. But I also know that I’m more likely to get through that chapter and to feel better through that chapter if that sorrow and sadness and grief is presented alongside connection as a form of happiness or alongside meaning and appreciation as forms of happiness than if it’s presented on its own.
speaker-1 (16:37.006)
It’s kind of the price we pay for admission, you know, to to have the the up here, we are also going to experience the down here. Do you think people are trying to move through life in a in a tighter kind of range of emotions, or do you think that’s a byproduct of being so externally focused that we’re we’re not maybe reaching and experiencing both ends of that emotional range?
speaker-0 (17:03.374)
I think what I’m seeing quite a lot of is as life has sped up, you know, we’ve got so many more competing priorities these days, everything’s moving faster. It wasn’t that long ago that if I wanted to find the answer to something, I would have to go check out a book at the public library, probably a series of books, dig around for a while, ask a friend and and hope that maybe over a series of months I find an answer. Now if I want to know the answer to something, how accurate it is is questionable, but I could pull up my phone and ask AI immediately.
speaker-1 (17:30.754)
I was talking about this on the weekend, I said, I can remember trying to record my favorite song on a cassette in my room when it came on the radio.
speaker-0 (17:38.85)
And if you missed it, too bad, you’re gonna have to try next time. So as life is sped up, what I worry is happening is people are increasingly treating emotions as a whole, including happiness, as inconveniences and distractions. I love the saying now, if we get too caught up being a human doing, we forget to be a human being. And if we get too caught up being, even on the other end of the spectrum, a human thinking, which is overanalyzing everything, ruminating on things, thinking everything through
You know, it’s almost funny as you know, as as therapy and counseling and psychologies become more normalized, which is a good thing, there’s almost the trade-off accidentally as we can overswing into it and now everyone’s trying to break down every little thought and every feeling they’re having, and every difficult behavior is a red flag, or every person is a narcissist. And I’m like, Well, maybe we’re over analyzing things here. We need to come back into this middle ground of just being able to go, hey, part of being a human being and living a good life as a human being.
is going to be learning how to feel and experience and work through our emotions. That’s why, out of all the different skills of happiness that I could choose, it’s the first one that I focus on in a lot of my work is, hey, if we cannot manage our emotions effectively and name them well, what hope do we have to do the deeper work of introspecting and understanding ourselves? You know, it’s like we’re trying to look inwards, but our mind and our emotions are so cluttered and so busy ’cause we’ve been resisting them and avoiding them for so long.
speaker-1 (19:03.064)
I heard an interesting analogy. I went to a health retreat on on Mother’s Day, actually. I went away for the night because I thought, what do I need for Mother’s Day? I need a night of stillness, space, and sleep. And they did a workshop and I know I can definitely default into being all up in my head as a lot of us do. And there was some analogy which was basically
Our brain really should be doing kind of 10 to 20% of the the the feeling as such. And really the body is the 80 to 90%, but most of us can’t get into our body. And I imagine with some of your work there is a lot of practices a around that. Can you share maybe your own favorite practice or one that really seems to resonate with a lot of your clients or in the workplaces where you go and speak and consult?
speaker-0 (19:55.488)
Yeah, I’m quite a fan of getting people to identify where the feeling sits in their body. As a starting point. Because it encourages people be curious about an emotion. And you’re right, it’s very easy to hyper rationalise our emotions. So so often I’ll say to someone, Hey, I mean, just as a starting point, building emotional literacy is really important. So if I said to someone, How are you feeling today? if they have five to seven words to describe their emotional experience, which in Australia is often stressed, bad, not bad, good, or you know.
Half those aren’t even feelings. Now the last one, you know, how are you feeling like you know. Well I don’t actually know, that’s why I’ve asked you. Or, you know, how are you feeling? Not bad. Okay, we’ve ruled out one option. What about all the other emotions left? Which of these are you feeling? You know, if we don’t have emotional literacy and emotional awareness, everyone knows about emotional intelligence, right? It’s been spoken about for forty years. But you cannot be intelligent about something that you can’t name, that you don’t have the language for. So as a starting point, we call it a two-word check-in. If you were to describe how you’re feeling today.
With only two words, what are the two words? And the reason we go only two words is because a lot of the time our emotions are captured and our feelings are captured in individual words. Confused, proud, uncertain, confident, right? These are individual words. Thoughts, and therefore the rationalization of our feelings, tend to be in sentences. How are you feeling lately? Well, work’s really busy. You’re just talking to me about context. You’re not telling me how you’re feeling. Right? And so first and foremost,
Name how you’re feeling in two words, max. Gets to the heart of it. And then get curious and go, where does that feeling sit in my body? So for example, this morning had a bit of a rush. If you asked me this morning, I like, okay, one of my words would be rushed. How do I know it’s rushed? And if I sit there and go, where does rushed sit in my body? I kind of go, I feel it a bit around my chest. And I go, Well, how did I know to go there? My heart rate’s speeding up, I’m kinda breathing a bit more shallow.
There’s a bit of a cloudy I can feel it a little bit around my head, there’s a cloudiness there. And so once you go, well, where does this feeling sit? You then go, okay, how did you know to go there? Why did I know that it was sitting around my chest and around my head? And I start describing it. And if you can start describing your feelings almost as you would to a five-year-old. A five-year-old doesn’t know the feeling the difference between feeling rushed or overwhelmed. For example, they have two very close cousin feelings, but they are different. How would we tease apart the differences? And so if we can get into emotional nuance.
speaker-0 (22:20.876)
And not only recognize our emotions and name them, but then also be able to go, what does that actually feel like? That gets us back into the body. And we go, that’s an interesting feeling that’s in there. And you know what’s beautiful is sometimes you don’t have to do anything past that. If you just feel the feeling, if you let yourself fully experience it, it’s amazing how quickly it passes a lot of the time. A lot the time we wrestle with feelings for much longer than we need to.
Because we’re resistant to them, we’re trying to explain them or rationalise them, and that’s important sometimes. But there’s a lot of the time where it’s like, hey, if you just let yourself the example I use a these days, not that people experience this a lot because of how busy life is, if you feel boredom, right, rather than reaching for the phone or reaching for Netflix or, you know, reaching for food or something to distract yourself, just feel bored. You’ll be surprised by how quickly you get bored of feeling bored. And the feeling passes. If you feel stressed, sit if you feel sad, sit there, feel the sadness.
You know what’s beautiful? Having a cathartic cry in the shower. Right? Be there. Feel it. And it passes. Right? And and I think so often, you know, the saying is what we resist will persist. If we just fight the feeling, it fights back. It fight back so it fights back harder and we get stuck with it.
speaker-1 (23:28.95)
I’m interested to know, I know you became a father in about the last twelve months. And if it your perspective on anything that you teach has shifted in in terms of that role and and, you know, instilling some of this work. Because that’s what I’m sitting here hearing and thinking, like, I need to learn this. I’m sure a lot of people do, but also how do we then pass this on? so you know, maybe this next generation are a little bit more.
in touch with their feelings. Are you thinking about this differently or have has this just made you double down on the work that you’re doing in that context?
speaker-0 (24:08.018)
Yeah, becoming a dad has done a couple of things for me. The first is it made me remarkably grateful that I’ve spent ten years studying and practicing this because holy cow have I needed nearly every tool at my disposal. it was not how would I put this? It’s it was not a kind entrance into parenthood for my wife and I. It was not the entrance into parenthood we were hoping for. It ended up being quite a traumatic birth for my wife, quite a lot of post-nale depression anxiety for both of us, actually, on the back end of it.
Yeah, for the first eight or nine months, we genuinely didn’t enjoy being parents. I I I I wrote a post about it at one point, because I didn’t know really what else to do except to journal and get my thoughts out. And I think it opened with something along the lines of, without a doubt, becoming a parent is the worst thing my wife and I have done for our happiness in the last two years. Which was not something I ever expected to say. I was looking forward to being a dad. Thankfully, over the last couple of months, things have started to change. We’re feeling more ourselves, we’re enjoying it a lot more. But
The thing that that changed within me is I started, because I’m a bit of a happiness science nerd, I like going to the research, I was like, hey, I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this. What’s going on here? Like, you know, I think particularly with something like parenting, you find out you’re gonna be a parent and everyone’s like, my god, it’s the best thing ever. And so the expectations are set really high. And you come in and you’re like, this is not the best thing ever. Like, what are we doing wrong here? And there’s something in the research called the parenting paradox, which I find really interesting, which is if you ask parents over the long term,
Has having a child made your life better? Are you happier for it? Without, like the vast majority say yes. But if you ask parents day by day, have you experienced stress today? Have you experienced anxiety? Have you experienced depression? Have you experienced overwhelm? Have you experienced frustration? All these things that you think would be anti, you know, but kind of the opposite approach to happiness, they also say yes. So it’s weird, because on a day-by-day level,
The experience of parenting seems to be remarkably bad for people’s happiness. But if you zoom out on the long term, it seems to be remarkably good for people’s happiness. And so that was something that I wrestled with a lot. And in in trying to seek out an answer, the other thing that Becoming a Parent did for me and challenged my conceptions and thoughts and about what is my role in passing this on to my son is I reached out to Dr. Justin Coulson, who’s one of Australia’s leading positive psychologists when it comes to parenting, runs a great program and a great business called Happy Families.
speaker-0 (26:34.006)
I kinda just went, You’ve done this a lot more than I have. I’m eleven months into having one child. he has, I think it was is it six or seven daughters. It’s it’s a large amount of children. Right. He’s done it a lot and dedicated his career to studying what does it mean to be a good parent. And I interviewed him for for my podcast, How to Be Happy. And my big takeaway from that episode, he said, you know, we wish that we could take all of our knowledge and experience and just jam it into our kids’ heads so that they don’t have to make the same mistakes we did.
They don’t have to go through the same pain and suffering that we did, and they get a leg up on life. And unfortunately, that’s not how it works. We can’t force our children to learn anything. And it was a nice realization point for me, something I think I’ve been aware of in the fringes, but it’s become more front and centre as I’ve become a dad. That even as a happiness expert, happiness coach, happiness researcher, it is not my job to make anyone happy. I can’t. I can’t make my wife happy. I can’t make my clients happy. I can’t make my son happy.
It is my job and responsibility to make it more likely that my wife lives a happy life, to make it more likely that my clients live a happy and fulfilling life, to make it more likely that my son lives a happy life. And that’s allowed me to go, actually, you know what? I can be a little bit hands-off on this. Right? I can’t force this, which has been so freeing and rewarding. And I don’t think as I said, it’s been on the fringes of my mind for the last decade of doing this work, but it was very front and center. I’m like, especially, you know, supporting my wife through postnatal depression anxiety.
It was so hard to see someone that I love so deeply suffer so much and also come to terms with the tension point of I can’t solve this for her. I can’t fix it for her. And it’s also not my job to my job is to be there, to support her, to do the best I can, to make it more likely, to stack the deck in our favour, and then hope. And thankfully that’s paid off.
speaker-1 (28:25.07)
Well, thank you. I mean, for sharing that as well, ’cause that’s a very personal, you know, experience and you know, if I can share my own experience there, which I have wanted to talk about before and it’s now coming up and I thought, you know, this is the the forum to do that. but I have been mindful about how it would be received ’cause I am, you know, sensitive to to people’s situations. But for me my experience was nearly the flip side of that. I never felt maternal.
And I was concerned, would that shift? And and you know, I feel very fortunate that I was able to to fall pregnant naturally and and and my pe my partner and I had been talking about it. But I had had numerous conversations with my GP and my obstetrician. What if this doesn’t shift? Because even throughout that
pregnancy journey and then, you know, one or two days into being a mum, that did completely change. And it’s just the biology of being a human and that human experience is so different person to person. And you know, I think the work you’re doing around having these these tools to be your life’s work and constantly be kind of coming back to that is just an incredible place to share that. But yeah, I just
I wanted to share that from my lens and I have not had, you know, I don’t have a miracle baby that sleeps through the night or anything like that, but it just did did change my perception of what I thought it would be to what it actually is.
speaker-0 (29:58.958)
And I think this what what this comes back to, and I’m glad you shared that, right, is life is inherently unpredictable and uncertain and we all make ideas in our head of what life’s gonna play out like. We do it on a microscale too, we’re like, okay, this is how today’s gonna go. And a lot of call it suffering, call it unhappiness, comes back to when life does that pesky thing of not playing by our plan. It’s like, how dare you life? Did you not get the script that I wrote before this? Like, this is how you’re meant to go. And so we fire and resist and suffer.
There’s an analogy of are we focusing on external stability or internal stability? And the analogy is, you know, if I’m going into uncharted waters, if I’m sailing a ship off the coast and I’m going deep into the seas where anything could happen, I want a lot of confidence in that ship, and I want a c a lot of confidence in the stability of it. What that is, is, you know, rather than trying to control everything around us and go, I hope everything goes well, I hope the sea’s calm today, I hope the winds are in my favor, building out
proven skill sets and tools and capacity. So emotional intelligence is one of them. Perspective building is one of them. Gratitude is one of them. Like through my work at BU Happiness College, we’ve identified seventy-five distinct skills that are linked to happiness. And you don’t need all of them. But the more you have, the more thorough of a toolkit you have, the more sturdy your ship is to handle whatever life throws at you ’cause
Sounds like both of us had an unexpected approach to parenting. We will continue to have unexpected approaches to parenting. I’m sure people who have kids older than us have told me, why every time you think you’ve figured it out, you’re gonna get a curveball. And I think that’s just part of life. How boring would life end up being if everything went to plan? And so rather than trying to focus on getting all our ducks in a row, or actually someone said to me once, you know, I’ll be happy when I just get all my shit together. Like when everything’s just going to plan and I went, cool. So that’s let me agree to that. That’s how you put in years of work.
Getting all your shit together. You’ve now got this giant pile of shit. Cause it’s together, it’s not scattered. It’s organized. Well done. Yeah. What do you do with the big pile of shit? And they’re like, I hadn’t thought of it that way before. And I was like, Well, what if we just, you know, focused internally instead? What if we built these skills and tools, these previously they’ll call soft skills. We now try to call them happiness skills or human skills. Right? The things that make us uniquely human. The things that allow us to distinguish ourselves from AI and robotics and all the things happening in the world.
speaker-0 (32:15.862)
And ironically, the things that tend to be correlated with living a really happy and fulfilling life. If we double down on learning and practicing those skills, I promise you we can handle what life throws at us.
speaker-1 (32:26.2)
I love the idea of the toolkit, a lot of the analogies and references. I talk about a lot controlling the controllables and different skills, habits within your toolkit. I know you have your first book coming up, which is very exciting. Congratulations. How to be happy. I know we’ve got where we’re book besties. We same month, same publisher. But I don’t well, have you shared the seventy five skills in there? Or did you have to select a handful that I don’t know
speaker-0 (32:41.346)
Thank you, and to you.
speaker-1 (32:54.968)
Are they your favourites? Can you say that? Or the most impactful or the you know, the foundation on where people need to start?
speaker-0 (33:02.72)
Yeah, I wish I could say I fit all seventy five skills into one book. I think if I did, it would be do you remember growing up, I feel like everyone’s grandparents had these. They had a bookshelf just stacked with like the Encyclopedia Britannica, like all the volumes. That’s what people would be buying if I was like, here’s all seventy-five skills correlated with happiness. no, and I started the book process, so I originally went, Okay, if there was a top ten, what would be the ten that we want to focus on? And even then started writing and went, This is gonna be bigger than the Bible, let’s cut it down to five. And I mean, okay, if there was five that
I’ve noticed over the years of doing this work tend to work really well for building a strong foundation for happiness. What are those five? And then I was cheeky because I started grouping some together. So for example, in the 75, emotional awareness and emotional literacy and emotional regulation are three different skills. But in the book, I’ve grouped them into emotional intelligence. Right? The ability to manage our emotions intelligently. So I’ve been able to squeeze a few extra ones in. You know, it says on the cover: here’s five skills that are needed for happiness, but
You’re getting more bang for your buck because you’re gonna learn more than five in there. But yeah, I kinda sat down and went, okay, what are the ones that I know is pay off most people? And the first is emotional intelligence, manage our mind and emotions effectively. The second is introspection. So being able to look inwards. We live in a world that’s very distractable, we’re seeing more advertising than ever, and the core message of nearly every ad you’re going to see is do this or buy this and you will be happy. Right? Trans this idea that happiness is something external to us, which we’ve already been speaking about today in this conversation.
And so learning how to look inwards and reconnect with ourselves and go, hang on, maybe my answer isn’t out here. It’s inside of me, I think is a an art form and a skill that people are losing. And so I give a few tools like meditation, mindfulness, journaling, different ways for people to start looking inwards more frequently and build that capacity. The third skill is to then start retraining our brain, which is when we start looking inwards and we practice introspection, we realize what I mentioned before, our brain doesn’t care that we’re happy.
It will default to worst case scenario. If ten things go well in your day and one thing goes wrong, you’re not lying in bed at night going, look at all those ten things that went great. Our mind will default to the negative. It’s meant to. But there are tools and practices that we can do to expand perspective, to train our brain out of that default, and to start honing a more optimistic lens on life. And that’s really important. And then our last two skills kinda go back to back, which is the skill of knowing oneself.
speaker-0 (35:22.626)
So echoing back to my early journey of, hey, a lot of what we want in life, self-worth, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-compassion, all starts with knowing yourself. You can’t have a good relationship with a stranger. And a lot of people are strangers to themselves. They don’t know who they are, they don’t know what their values are, they don’t know what their strengths are, because they’ve not done the work of defining that. It’s hard to do that if you haven’t done the first ones. If your mind and emotions are, you know, are unregulated and all over the place and you’re not managing them well.
If we’re not practicing introspection and looking inwards, if we’re not able to train our brain out of just looking at the worst case scenario, it’s very hard to understand ourselves. But if we then do that work of getting there, then the fifth and final skill that I cover in the book is hey, you’ve now done the work of getting to know yourself. Now define your vision, your definition of a meaningful, happy, successful life. Not mine, not anyone else’s, not your parents, not society’s. If you know yourself well, in the short time that you have in this life,
And don’t know about you, but for me, every year has been feeling faster, especially since becoming a dad, right? And COVID. Yeah, it just goes quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker. I don’t think life is ever gonna slow down. I think it’s gonna increasingly speed up. And I’m very aware that I’ve got I’m gonna blink and at one point I’ll be at the end of my life. Hopefully it’s gonna be a long time away. And I wanna be able to look back on my life and go, Did I live intentionally? Did I live with purpose? And did I live in a way that was beneficial to my happiness and beneficial to the happiness of those around me? If so, I think that’s a good life. But
Part of that is the skill of defining that for myself. Defining my vision, my purpose, my goals, learning things around, you know, goal setting and habit building and that. That all falls into that fifth bucket. So if people can do those skills in order, manage their mind and emotions, introspect, retrain the brain out of the negative default, get to know themselves really well and define their vision, the amount that they’ve stacked the deck in their favor.
I can’t guarantee it’s gonna make people live a happier life. I wish I could put on the front of a book. This is guaranteed to make you X amount happier. It’ll be the most sold book in the world. But I think I’m proud to say that what I’ve done within that book has really stacked the deck in people’s favour, made it so much more likely that if they read it, they’re more likely to live happy, successful, and fulfilling life compared to if they haven’t read it.
speaker-1 (37:31.498)
You’ve made me realize one of my favorite exercises. because two of my I talk about rhythms in my book, finding your rhythm and you know, nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress and recovery, and connection. Amazing. And it kind of sits in a few of them. I’m the same. I’ve kind of squeezed a few extra things in by bucketing it. But one of my favorite practices, I put it in the sleep category, but it is the wind down. it’s a gratitude practice. It’s also thinking about
the wins from the day, it’s what are your three wins from today and what three wins do you want to have tomorrow. Because exactly to what you said, it’s we we don’t naturally I I believe it’s like a seven to one nearly kind of ratio of our brain thinking about the negative and scanning for the threats as opposed to the positives. And it’s really about thinking, regardless of where you are in your life, personally, professionally, what’s going on, what were those three wins? And they can just be as simple, they don’t have to be big wins. And
When you start doing that, and I guess it’s any form of gratitude and journaling, they really do start to pop out and and you become a lot more aware of them. When you talk about journaling, do you have like is it just to get a page out and do a brain dump and whatever’s on your mind, or do you have a few favorite like questions or things for people to reflect on?
speaker-0 (38:48.832)
Yeah, I I think there’s so many different ways to approach journaling, right? It’s just like there’s so many different ways to approach meditation. You know, I I love the story. There’s this story from Buddhist philosophy that someone had been practicing meditation and they went to the Buddha and said, hey, you know, I’ve I’ve tried meditation for a bit now, I just think it’s not working for me. It’s not, you know, gonna be part of my toolkit for a good life.
And the Buddha turned around and said something along the lines of, okay, well, by our philosophies and teachings, there are 40,000 different ways to meditate. So I highly recommend you try one of the other 39,999. Now I I’m not saying in the book I’m gonna teach you 40,000 ways to journal and meditate. But I do think find a way that works for you. So like you could do passive journaling, which is no structure, no planned outcome, just curiosity, blank page, what’s in my mind, let’s go. Right? That’s that can be really helpful at certain times.
You can use active journaling, which is having a prompt question and a clear outcome. Very useful. You can do narrative journaling, which is writing about your life through the lens of if you’re writing a script for a movie about your life or the manuscript for a book of your life, because it gives you a little bit of separation from self to be more objective and write in third person. Very useful at times. You can do gratitude journaling. You can do audio journaling, which is, you know, I use an app called Otter, it’s free, it’s just a transcription app. And if I’m driving, I’ll turn it on.
And as I’m driving, I’m sort of reflecting on my day and I’ll just talk about what’s on my mind. It transcribes it all and gets it out of my head. Again, there’s so many different ways to practice it. It’s more going, hey, can I find the right approach for the right time? I think it’s a starting point, if someone’s listening to this and they’ve never journaled before, a good starting point is once a week, have a book by your bed and just ask, hey, before this week closes out, is there anything on my mind or on my heart that would be beneficial to get out?
We’re just training introspection a little bit. Is there anything that’s been weighing on me that’s just been sitting on my shoulders, sitting on my mind, sitting on my chest, that would be beneficial to get out? You don’t have to do anything with it once it’s out. Right? Like, yeah, there’s more advanced forms of journaling where you go back and you analyze it and you look for beliefs or values or common themes and you can tease it apart. That’s a big part of you know coaching and psychotherapy. But sometimes it’s just beneficial to get it out of your head and go, okay, it’s in the book, done, close that out. So just start with that.
speaker-0 (41:05.1)
Right, just start by looking inwards and going, is there anything that I just haven’t voiced or haven’t drawn attention to that’s kind of simmering away below the surface? Because what I’m a big believer in is life when it’s time to make a change or or do something differently, life gives us a poke push than a punch. And so many of us, myself included, because life is busy, ignore the pokes. It’s only retrospective that we go, you know what? There were some pokes that that wasn’t the right job for me. there were some pokes that that was a relationship that probably wasn’t worth being in.
there were some pokes that I’d let my health slide for a bit and wasn’t looking after my well being. We ignore the pokes and then life gives us a big push. If you ignore the push, you get a mean right hook. And life punches hard. For anyone who’s been punched by life, you know what this feels like. The likelihood of it ending up there is so much smaller if you’re regularly checking in with yourself via journaling, for example, and going, Hey, is there anything that my mind and body are trying to tell me lately? And I’m just ignoring? If you get it out, so much more likely to
to adapt to it and do something with it before it gets to that crisis point.
speaker-1 (42:04.838)
And I love, you know, what I’m hearing is it’s not an exact protocol. It’s these tools you can pull out, you can use, like just find what works. Just carve out the time experiment. Yep. And it’s amazing how much I don’t know, maybe this is just me. I l I love. I’m still, even though I’ve got the the note recorder joining the meetings, I’m still there taking notes. So maybe that’s just me. But it’s amazing how much you think you don’t have anything to
write about or reflect on and you just pick up the pen and put it to the page and so much comes out. Yeah. I do want to spend the very last bit of our conversation because I think it’s really important talking about connection. And I think a lot of people think about connection in terms of relationships and friends, which is of course really important. I’ve heard you on a podcast and I talk about it in my book, in my connection chapter, The Harvard Study. So focusing on that kind of personal relationships.
But a lot of us spend a lot of time at work and balancing connection at work while having boundaries, particularly if you’re a leader. I feel like this is again something maybe people struggle with, like on how they create and cultivate connection, but also retain, I don’t know, a level of seniority, particularly if they are that kind of C suite or manager. Can I get your thoughts on all of that?
speaker-0 (43:29.612)
Yeah. I’m glad you brought it up because connection is an essential ingredient for a happy and fulfilling life. We know that now from the research that Harvard Longitudinal Stay, the longest running study on human well being, particularly later in life, found that, you know, there’s all these things that contribute to it, but there’s one that slightly outperforms the rest, which is our quality of connections to those around us. Which I love because I think it’s challenging a multi billion dollar self help industry. Look at the term self help.
It’s focused on self. It’s focused on individual. And I think in the past, you know, there’s this been this narrative that happiness is an inside job. Happiness is individualistic. It’s intrinsic. Which I used to believe, and now I don’t. Now I think the seeds of happiness are planted by us as individuals, but they’re watered and nurtured collectively. They’re nurtured in the spaces between us. Right, where we overlap. Connection and relationships are essential to a good life. Now when I talk about connection, I look at it through three lenses: connection to self.
Which I mentioned before, knowing yourself, a whole chapter of the book is dedicated to that. Connection to others. So this is yes, our relationships. And then connection to a sense of something greater than us. Some people will get that through religion or spirituality. Some people just feel that by being connected to a shared humanity or to, you know, whatever it may be, right? Having this sense of purpose in our life. If there is something bigger than me that I’m serving, I’m fortunate that I get a lot of that through my work. I I think I’m just the latest in a long run of happiness researchers.
To do the work of sharing the science of happiness. And I hope that in my lifetime I get to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me and pass that on. And then someone after me will take up the mantle and continue it. And that’s where I get a big sense of contribution to something greater than myself. But all three of those, connection to self, connection to others, connection to meaning and purpose, or something greater than us, if you break down what connection actually is, it’s just what do we have in common? What do we share? Right?
And so if we look at in your example of at work, how do we have connection at work in a way that feels appropriate? You might not have well the thing that I share with my team at work is that we’re going out and getting drinks regularly and we’re talking about our lives or we all play on the same social basketball team. You might, like, depending on your team and workplace, sure, go to town. But that might not feel appropriate for your team and for your workplace. But if you can go, hey, well what we all share and have in common is we have
speaker-0 (45:43.51)
A shared set of goals right now, or we have a shared vision for what we’re doing with this team, or we have a shared purpose for this organization, right? Or we have shared priorities, we have shared challenges. If you just go, what do we share? and you can dot point down answers, that is your entry point for connection. And you can do that with anyone. I think that’s the beautiful part. If you get really curious about connection.
You start going, turns out a hell of a lot of humanity has a lot more in common than we have apart. Not that you’d see that in the media, not that you’d tell that from a lot of social media either. But we do. Right? I I I just fundamentally believe that most of humanity, the vast majority of humanity, are fundamentally good people who want to do good in their life and who want to experience good things. If that’s my one starting point for connection.
It’s amazing how you can form connection with people from different backgrounds, cultures, languages, ages, like just coming back to what do we have in common.
speaker-1 (46:39.468)
I love that. I guess as we kind of get towards the end, I do want to call out the book again. So how to be happy. We’ll have the link in the show notes. Anything you want to add around the book. I know you’ve been doing some live shows, you’ve got you’ve recorded the audio book.
speaker-0 (46:53.838)
Yes. Yeah. So yeah, this has been a wild journey. It’s been three or four years of my life doing this book. wow. In particular. So studying the skills and science of happiness for over a decade now, but the last three or four specifically dedicated to I I I say now, right, that my first ten years of my career was spent learning, practicing, and teaching the skills and science of happiness. What I’m focused on for the next ten years of my career.
Is democratizing the skills and science of happiness. Which means how do I make this way more accessible? So the book is a way to do that, right? Rather than someone needing to pay for me to come do staff training at their workplace or pay to work one-on-one with me or one of my team. Which, sure, if you want to go to town. But rather than that, I go, hey, for the sake of $30 something dollars, people can get a decade worth of study and research in this packaged into a nice little book form. It’s why we do our podcast, How to Be Happy, which
Assuming people who are listening to this are podcast people, which I think is a safe bet ’cause they’re listening to a podcast, would love for them to come join us there too. Like we’re focusing more on content and basically going, hey, how do I spend the rest of my career making this so ridiculously accessible that people have no excuse but to go, Yeah, it’s worth learning more about how to live a happy life and how to play my part in contributing to the happiness of others. And if everyone does that, or a fair portion of humanity does that, I just fundamentally believe we’re gonna create a happier world and
The purpose of my career, I’ve said, is to grow global happiness. And if I can leave the people listening to this conversation with one message, it’s that I fundamentally can’t do it alone. I need as many people as possible to learn and practice the skills and science of happiness if we’re going to create a happier world together.
speaker-1 (48:32.718)
I love that. It’s like you knew my last question, which was if you could leave everybody with one thought or message. So you’ve already done that. I’d love to shine this back on, you know, you personally, and I like to ask my guests a question because everybody have I have on here is on a mission, whether it’s from their expertise, whether they’re a leader or an elite athlete, they’re doing some pretty incredible things, which also require them to have some good habits or practices, things that help.
keep them centred and anchored. So I’d absolutely love to know what three habits or practices help you, Declan Edwards, stay at the top.
speaker-0 (49:12.19)
Mm, my top three lately, because they change a lot, right? It depends on the season I’m in. It depends on what challenges I’m facing in life. Gratitude is definitely one. So being able to take stock and notice of the good things that are around me. my brain, like anyone else’s, does default to the negative. It tends to put more value on that. So just training it consistently to go, yes, there are challenges that fa that I’m facing. Yes, there are difficulties in life, but there’s also all this good. Let’s not lose sight of it. So that would definitely be one. Second one, exercise or movement of any way, shape or form.
And that’s changed a lot over my years because I used to be very structured and rigid with it. My workouts had to go for X amount of minutes. They had to be involving X amount of weights. You know, it was very judgment focused and discipline focused. And now I try to be a little bit more intuitive movement, which is my non-negotiable, right? My my minimum standard for my own well-being is I will move my body every day for 30 minutes at least. What that movement looks like, entirely dependent on the day and the context. It might be stretching, it might be
Calisthenics, it might be weights, it might be basketball, it might be a walk. And so allowing myself to be a lot more intuitively led with my movement has been a really beautiful practice for me. Great. And then the third one I’d say is breath work, but particularly one type of breathing, which is called the psychological sigh. Which we do naturally when we’re s when we’re asleep. Don’t do this for everyone who lists listens to this, but if you have a partner who you share a bed with, if you were to stay awake and watch them sleep, again, I high don’t do that.
But if you were, you would see every so often they would do this funny little breath where they breathe in, they a g have an extra little breath in, and they do this like long exhale, like a and they sort of like sink into their sleep a little bit more. For whatever reason, that type of breath where you breathe in through your diaphragm, you have an extra little breath at top, and then you have a long exhale, is a really quick way to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system and calm the mind and body. So especially when life’s so full on and busy and I’ve got, you know, the books coming out and
On a speaking tour and all these things are happening, taking a moment to just go three to five of those breaths, breathe in, extra little breath in, long exhale. By the time I do three or five of those, I can feel it. Like my shoulders drop, my body slows down, my mind is clearer. And so that’s been a recent addition to my toolkit that’s kind of made the top three only recently.
speaker-1 (51:32.438)
I love that. Very on theme and the next guest I have coming in is a breathwork. very
speaker-0 (51:37.172)
Meant to be never.
speaker-1 (51:39.246)
Yeah, so perfect cue for that. Declan, this has been an absolute pleasure. thank you for sharing your expertise, you know, your professional insights, some really personal experiences as well. And I’m very grateful. I defin I have pre-ordered the book. everybody listening, how to be happy, get your hands on the pre-sale, go and listen to Declan’s podcast, and I think we all could cultivate the skills to.
live a healthier, happier, more fulfilled and purposeful life.
speaker-0 (52:11.37)
I believe so and thank you so much for the opportunity to share some more about the skills and science of happiness. I appreciate it.
speaker-1 (52:16.034)
That’s all I’ve got for you all this week. I will be back again next week with a solo episode helping you all not only reach the top but sustainably stay there. I’ll see you all then.