Be your best: Life, leadership and the pursuit of happiness

In the marbled lobby of a five-star hotel in London, business men and women bustle through arranging meetings, scanning digital devices and – in the case of one American man – apologising loudly to his daughter who is blowing out the candles on her birthday cake thousands of miles away.

The man wears a pinstriped suit and his wrist twinkles with an expensive watch. He is an advert for corporate success, but because I am waiting to interview Tal Ben-Shahar and Angus Ridgway I can’t help wondering how happy he is or how fulfilled in his work.

Ben-Shahar, happiness expert and best-selling author, and Ridgway, the former head of strategy at McKinsey & Co, have developed “Potentialife”, a nine-month “leadership programme” which they claim will revolutionise how organisations inspire and engage their employees. It hinges on research which shows happiness and wellbeing breed success, rather than the other way around.

Ridgway, CEO of Potentialife, and Ben-Shahar, its “chief learning officer”, arrive with their younger colleague, Dubliner Daniel Philbin-Bowman (son of broadcaster John Bowman), who joined the company at launch stage.

The two founders met in Washington DC four years ago when Ben-Shahar was speaking at a McKinsey event. “We sat beside each other for dinner and by the end . . . we had decided to work on a project together,” says Ridgway, “and the end result is Potentialife.

“Tal was in the world of flourishing and happiness, and I was in the world of leadership, but as we talked it was clear that those things were two sides of the same coin.

Leadership skills

“Workplaces are evolving, people are moving around a lot more and now everybody has to be a leader,” he says. “It’s no longer just the people at the top, so leadership just got a whole lot more important for business and there is an increased need for people who can set other people on fire.”

He quotes Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings: “If you have 1,000 really thoughtful people thinking about how to improve you’ll make a lot more progress than if you have 100.”

Ridgway and Ben-Shahar started to explore what was already out there in the market: “Coaching, but that’s expensive and you can’t scale it . . . executive programmes, but you can’t send a whole company away, and anyway when people come back they inevitably lose a lot of what they’ve learnt . . . so we wanted to create something new in the field, something revolutionary.”

The result, after a year of snatched meetings in airport lounges, was Potentialife, which combines the science of positive psychology with an online platform and app that collects individualised data, tracking how people spend their time in and out of work.

The pursuit of happiness has long been of interest to Ben-Shahar. A former professional squash player for his home country of Israel, he was in his second year of a four-year computer science programme at Harvard University when he had his first "ah ha moment".

“I was doing very well in sports, academically and socially things were going well, but I was very unhappy and that didn’t make sense to me. I was miserable and it dawned on me that the equation I had for how to lead a happy life was not a little wrong but very wrong.

Not working

“My equation had been, ‘become successful and you’ll be happy, become more successful and you’ll be happier’. But that wasn’t working for me and for a lot of people I knew.”

So one very cold Boston morning in February he went to his academic tutor to tell her he wanted to switch from computer science to philosophy and she asked him why. “I told her there were two questions I had to answer: ‘Why aren’t I happy?’ and ‘How can I be happier?’. That’s when I started studying philosophy and psychology.”

After graduating from Harvard he studied education in Cambridge, England, then returned to Harvard to complete a Phd focusing on wellbeing and happiness.

“From my research and personal experience I realised that success does not lead to happiness, it is actually the opposite. If we increase our levels of wellbeing we also enhance the likelihood of success, we become more creative, more productive, a lot more engaged, relationships improve, which means better teamwork at work but also better relationships at home with kids and partners.”

At Harvard, he became teaching assistant to Philip Stone, one of the founders, 25 years ago of positive psychology which is described by Ben-Shahar as “the scientific study of optimal human functioning”. Stone mentored Ben-Shahar, and, at the older man’s suggestion, he turned Stone’s positive psychology seminar into a lecture course. The first year he had eight students. Two dropped out leaving six. The following year there were 300 and that grew to 900.

Within a few years his positive psychology course was Harvard’s most popular class. “It was a surprise,” he says, adding that it was academically rigorous. The only studies he introduced to the course had to reach the standards of academic research. He also tried out all of the studies himself before introducing them to the class.

The success of the course meant increased success for Ben-Shahar who came to the attention of media outlets such as CNN and The Daily Show, published best-selling books including Happier and became a familiar face on the lucrative motivational speaking circuit. Potentialife, he says, is a culmination of all of this.

“I had been going to companies around the world giving lectures and it was very gratifying but something was missing. I was helping managers understand about happiness . . . they understood what I was saying about the importance of physical exercise and gratitude, for example, but the question was how do you take that understanding and make it real?”

He paraphrases Voltaire: “Common sense is not so common . . . but our programme takes the science of wellbeing and enables the participants to make the behavioural changes necessary to increase happiness and enjoy all the benefits that come from being happier.”

Isn’t it inevitable that there will always be some “dead wood” in organisations? “The thing about our programme,” says Ridgway, “is that it raises everyone up. Everyone could be a little more productive. Everyone could have more energy. It’s about having people in your organisation playing to their strengths and spending more time doing what they love doing. We have CEOS doing it and we have graduates.”

But surely not everybody can have what sounds like an almost vocational approach to their work? Ben-Shahar quotes a research study on hospital workers including janitors, admin staff and doctors. The study broke them into three groups: those who did their jobs for money, not out of choice, those who wanted to progress, get more money and gain prestige and those who were glad they got paid, but would do the job anyway because they believed in it.

“The interesting thing was that you found janitors in all three groups, admin staff in all three groups and doctors in all three groups . . . we believe that everyone can experience their job as a calling at least 5 per cent more of the time and that can make a huge difference to teamwork, to productivity and to relationships in work.”

Philbin-Bowman, director of Europe with Potentialife, was formerly the youngest winner of McKinsey’s entrepreneurial award having founded a behavioural science team within the management consultancy. Why move?

“I would read a fascinating new book about the latest model for success or watch something great on Ted . . . but my number one frustration was ‘I know this is interesting but once I put it down I am not going to change and life will resume as it was’. I knew I wasn’t alone and I wanted to help change that and build a model to help people apply these things to everyday life. That’s what Potentialife is all about”.

Big ambitions

After just a year, they have clients across the world from Australia to South America. Law firm William Fry is one of their first Irish customers. The men have big ambitions for the global impact of Potentialife and not just for the corporate world. The not-for-profit wing of their company is already running in schools with more than 20,000 children taking part. Ridgway says teachers are reporting less anxiety in the students, better relationships and – while this is not the focus – better grades.

“There is a bigger picture of what we are trying to do here and it’s to take the science of flourishing, happiness and wellbeing and scale it to the world to benefit all of humanity, and we think we’ve cracked a way of doing that,” he adds.

It seems an important final question to ask Tal Ben-Shahar, one of the world’s leading happiness gurus. Is he happy? “I am happier than I was 20 years ago, but in five years’ time I hope to be happier than I am today. It’s a lifelong process and our programme is a process. It is not ‘here is the secret to happiness’. . . but it shows people the way to achieve it for themselves.”

The Irish Times is collaborating with Potentialife and has a team of readers who are taking part in the nine-month Be Your Best in 2015 programme. Follow how they fare at irishtimes.com and in the newspaper.