Why happiness matters?
Employee happiness is amongst main missions of SCB. Recognizing that happiness is the essential element to unlock potential and empower its team, SCB has continuously incorporated this topic into its activities. To this end, SCB Academy had the pleasure to host a talk on October 17, 2019 by Mr. Veerayut Lortongpanich, a renowned advertising producer and motivation speaker for young business audience. Entitled “Can happiness be achieved?”, the talk stressed the key elements to organization happiness. Firstly, we need a healthy relationship with family and friends. It is also crucial to have someone with whom you can share any problems and gain supports from. Moreover, it would be important to learn and absorb some positive energy from people who have passion. Last but not least, Mr Veerayut shared with his audience that it was essential to contribute to others besides accomplishing one’s life.
In other words, relationships, passions, and helping others are the key factors in happiness. This piece of advice is highly supported by several studies in science of happiness. Those elements have strong impacts on our sense of happiness and peace of mind. Therefore, this article explored the recent studies that further investigated these happiness factors as follows:
Relationships
A Harvard University 75-year-long study has revealed that good relationship keeps us happier and healthier. And it is a question of quality not quantity. One surprising finding is the level of satisfaction that a person has regarding his relationship with others is a better healthiness indicator than lab results like cholesterol levels.
Passions
Being passionate about work fills you with energy to push beyond the limits. It helps you improve skills. People with high passion have a tendency to process greater
work satisfaction and better psychological well-being. However, one should be careful that too much passion could lead to obsession including burnout.
A recent study also found that they would be more likely to face many conflicts between work and other life activities when finding hard to let go.
Helping others
Studies on volunteering experiences show that volunteering brings benefits such as less depressive symptomatology, lower utilization of health services, greater life satisfaction and longevity, as well as delay or reverse declining brain functions.
While many may assume that helping others by giving money brings happiness, Elizabeth W. Dunn, a professor in University of British Columbia, challenged this view. She hinted that it is more “how” we helped than “how much” money we spent on helping others that brought happiness. This was a conclusion she drew from her experience of sponsoring Syrian refuge in Canada.
“If we want people to give more, we need to subvert the way we think about charitable giving. We need to create opportunities to give that enable us to appreciate our shared humanity. If any of you work for a charity, don't reward your donors with pens or calendars.” Dr. Dunn said in her
TED Talk, “Reward them with the opportunity to see the specific impact that their generosity is having and to connect with the individuals and communities they're helping.
To set us on course for a happy life, we have the power to harness the “happiness skills”, which are relationship, helping others, and passion. Additionally, spending time with positive people would be another bonus to forge happiness in personal and professional life. After this emotional-yet- highly-delightful talk, many participants reaffirmed that they needed to apply this knowledge into practice. Maybe this remains a challenge for everyone, but at least a quality talk on subject alike remains essential to remind us not to forget to put it in practice.
Our motivational speaker, Mr. Veerayut Lortongpanich, is the owner of “Wink Wink Production”, a famous advertising production company. Mr Veerayut has been invited to many universities, schools, and institutes to share his professional experience. As a producer of many awarded advertisements, he is an expert in delighting his public. A personal account on he visits to many detention centers including juvenile ones also shows he practices what he preaches. “Helping others is like refilling your tank”, says Mr Veerayut. “When we are fulfilled, we become a full charged power bank, then you can even become a charging spot for others.”
