Scale Up Happiness: 7 Proven Steps to Measurably Increase Your Passion, Performance, Joy, and Success

By Dillon Turnbow

What if you could be at least 20% happier?

The sad reality is that most people are not as happy as they could be. In fact, over 75% of people are not truly happy. If that includes you or someone you love, know that it doesn't have to be that way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scale Up Happiness
• Release date: May 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988155218

Book preview

Preface

I’ve been leading happiness trainings for a major healthcare company since 2014. It was never my job to do that, but something I thoroughly enjoyed. At the end of every training, someone would inevitably tell me that I should teach happiness for a living. I shrugged it off for many years. Then I stumbled across a program to become a certified Happy for No Reason Trainer. It felt like the universe was telling me something, so I did it. I learned a ton and the program was great, but not really what I wanted to teach. So, I decided to create my own happiness program from scratch.

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. every day for months and diligently worked on this program. The funny thing is I never set an alarm clock. I just found myself wide awake, fully energized, and with new ideas that I wanted to put on paper.

I realized that I have a unique skillset, with tools that haven’t been used for happiness before (as far as I know). In my corporate job, I did process improvement using methodology known as Lean Six Sigma. This is a statistically based method for process improvement, which has been proven to ensure processes are as efficient as possible and produce the best possible outcomes. Lean Six Sigma is the gold standard of process improvement that is used by major companies all over the world.

I have a Black Belt, which is the highest level (they also have yellow belts, green belts, etc., as in martial arts levels).

Improving happiness is not that different from improving a business process. We all have habits (or processes) that we follow daily to produce consistent results. I’m guessing you have a morning routine that you follow. That’s a process. By utilizing the tools of process improvement to adjust our habits, routines, and thinking, we can improve the outcome and increase our happiness.

I wrote this book for a few reasons. First of all, I truly want to spread happiness in the world. I’ve been very unhappy at times in my life. I see now that the unhappiness was in my head and entirely unnecessary. I don’t want anyone else to go through unnecessarily tough times.

Second, I know that process improvement can be applied to improving happiness and I’m uniquely positioned to make that connection. Most people who write about happiness have studied psychology (it was my major in college, too), but I don’t know of any other happiness authors who are also Lean Six Sigma Black Belts.

The final reason I wrote this book is the most important to me. I’ve learned that to reach the highest levels of happiness, you must have a connection to a Higher Power. It doesn’t matter if you call it God, Universe, Source, Allah, Spirit, or something else. And, this book is not going to promote any specific religion. My hope is that happiness training serves as a bridge that helps people connect to their Higher Power. There are seven things everyone needs to be happy. The first six have nothing to do with divine connection. Anyone and everyone can be happier by improving those six things. My hope is that people will stick around for the seventh piece and establish or strengthen their connection to their Higher Power.

Increasing Happiness

Is Possible

Do not set aside your happiness. Do not wait to be happy in the future. The best time to be happy is always now.

Roy T. Bennett

Almost every time I tell people that I’m a Certified Happiness Trainer, they respond the same way. Is that a real thing? When I explain how much time, money, and effort I put into building a happiness program, they think I’m crazy. But here’s what most people don’t know: every person has seven, high-level needs that must be met in order for them to be as happy as possible. These are the same for everyone. And, there are scientifically proven ways to meet each of these needs in a healthy way to easily increase our happiness. These are fundamental steps that anyone can take to become happier in a short time. These are some of the most exciting discoveries in human history.

You’re probably reading this book because you would like to be happier. Who wouldn’t? Besides survival, it’s been the primary goal of life for thousands of years.

Aristotle said, Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

The Dalai Lama said, Our business is to be happy.

Perhaps most telling is when you ask parents what they want for their children. Almost always, they say they want them to be healthy and happy. All the other things that weigh us down fade away. Parents just want their kids to be happy.

There is good news, and there is bad news about that. The bad news is that most people are not very happy. In fact, less than one in four people say that they are truly happy. Covid increased depression rates by over 200%. Only one in five people would say they are engaged and passionate about their jobs.

But the good news is that we have discovered how to be happier! To me, this should be on the front page of every newspaper across the world—happiness is that important—and we know how to attain it. There are actual step-by-step things we can do that are proven to make us happier.

I’ve been leading happiness programs for the past eight years and have seen the incredible results. According to the before and after surveys, happiness of those participants improved by an average of 20.7%. Furthermore, effectiveness at work increased by 32.5%!

However, the impact was much more than just a change in numbers. I’ve seen teams start thinking and behaving differently. I’ve seen them communicate better, have stronger relationships, and have more fun. I’ve seen them produce higher-quality work and complete it much faster. The biggest thing I’ve seen is the massive impact on hundreds of people’s lives. The scores are great, but hearing them all tell me about the change they experienced has proven that anyone can increase their happiness and improve their lives.

My Story

Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.

Shawn Achor

I’m a happiness trainer, so many people assume that I’ve always been happy, but that isn’t the case. Happiness is something that I struggled with for most of my life. Genetically speaking, it started at birth. My family has a long history of depression. My mom, my dad, my grandpa, and many other of my relatives battled depression throughout their lives. That’s just to say that genetics were not on my side and I have a predisposition to be unhappy.

I didn’t really experience depression until high school though. That’s when something happened that changed my life forever. I broke my neck.

It was my senior year and my football team was ranked #1 in the state. We were playing a game on a Friday night in October. I don’t really remember the play, but I’m told that someone hit me, which caused my head to dip. Then someone else hit me at just the wrong angle. I laid on the ground with excruciating pain radiating down from my neck to my fingers. The pain was different from anything I had ever felt. I was terrified, but could barely move. I panicked as the trainers helped me to the sideline because it was obvious that something was horribly wrong. My parents took me to a specialist the next day, who quickly declared that I would never play contact sports again.

At that time, football meant everything to me. It was the only thing I loved and the only thing I cared about. I put everything into it, and truly believed I would play in college and then in the NFL. It was my identity, my passion, and my future. Then, everything changed.

To make things worse, my coach called me a cancer and isolated me from the team. Despite the MRIs and doctor’s notes showing that playing football could paralyze or kill me, he wanted me to keep playing (there is more about this later in a section about forgiveness). That sent me spiraling into depression.

I tried taking prescribed antidepressants. I tried talking to a professional psychiatrist multiple times per week. I tried buying things that I thought would make me happy.

None of it worked.

In fact, while I was in college at Arizona State University, I was lucky enough to land a high paying, part-time job at a pharmaceutical company. I bought a convertible BMW, lived in a frat house with good friends, and dated beautiful women. I had a 3.85 GPA and nothing to stress about. On paper, I had a perfect life for a twenty-year-old.

Looking at my life circumstances, I should’ve been the happiest guy on the planet. But no matter what I did, I usually just felt sad.

I even got to a place where I resigned myself to believing that I would never be happy. I believed that happiness was about genetics and the chemicals in my head, and I didn’t have the right ones. That continued for years, until I took my first happiness training. That training showed me that there are things I could do to improve my happiness.

My life hasn’t been the same since.

Happiness Training

My First Happiness Training

It was 2014, and I was working in Sales Operations for the Colorado region of an $80 billion-a-year company. The region was having extreme difficulties. Membership was way down, sales were way down, and the financial picture was bleak. There were even rumors about closing the region altogether. My team had twelve people on it. We had to lay off two of them. They were extremely high performers that everyone liked; the company just couldn’t afford them. To make it worse, leadership told the ten remaining people that we would have to pick up the slack and do the work the others had been doing.

To say morale was low would be an understatement. There was incredible stress and pressure. Everyone was tense. Nothing was fun.

Then we had a team meeting with the ten people remaining on the team. One of my colleagues, Gretchen, brought in a book, The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. She suggested we all read the book together and implement the learnings on our team. To be honest, I was against it. I thought, I’m already working over fifty hours a week; I might be getting laid off anyway. I don’t want to read a book about happiness.

The director was even more against it. He banged his hands on the table and yelled, NO! I’m not going to ask these people to do one more thing. NOT ONE MORE THING!

But luckily for us, Gretchen pushed it.

She bought each person a copy of the book with her own money and convinced us to start reading it. Then she set up lunch meetings to discuss it as a group. These gatherings quickly became a regular occurrence, with different people leading them each time. We would cover a few chapters each time and discuss all the book’s great points and lessons. We also shared our interpretations and our personal stories. We learned a lot about each other by going through each of the ideas. Plus, we generated new ideas that weren’t even in the book.

As we discussed the book, we thought of different ways to integrate many lessons into our work. We would try various things and make adjustments until they became team norms. Soon, we were all doing them all the time.

For one example, we started every meeting with either a two-minute funny YouTube video or a series of comic strips that made us laugh.

The impact was remarkable! The night-and-day difference that it made was obvious to everyone.

As I said, we started working together much better and producing better work. However, the big thing was that it actually became a joy to go to work again. The stress and pressure were still there. The layoffs and rumors of closing the region were still there. All the negative environmental forces and circumstances were still there. But something had changed in us, and it had changed forever.

Since then, I’ve led happiness training for many different groups and individuals, and I’ve always received fantastic feedback from people who told me how it changed their lives. That’s why I spend so much time and effort on happiness training. I’ve seen the massive impact this training has had on my own life and the lives of hundreds of others.

In spite of tough circumstances and life’s crazy ups and downs, we know how to be happy. That is why I’m so excited about happiness training and why I’m so happy to share it with you.

Also, note that this book is for both individuals and teams. I’ve mostly rolled it out for teams that are within a large company. However, I’ve also worked with many people one on one. Some of the advice in this book is given in the context of a work environment, but it can be applied to just about anything.

What Is Happiness Training?

Happiness training is based on the study of positive psychology. It’s grounded in cutting-edge research and scientific studies from the world’s leading experts to identify the characteristics and behaviors that enable people to thrive.

For example, Marci Shimoff interviewed thousands of people from all over the world for her book, Happy for No Reason. From those interviews, she identified what she calls the Happy Hundred. These are the very happiest people out there. The top 1% of happy people. Interestingly, they are not the happiest because of their circumstances or for any reason one might expect. Many were born with disabilities, abused, or suffered horrifically traumatic events. Yet they all had habits in common that contributed to their happiness. These habits made them the happiest people out there, and they are habits that everyone can adopt.

Likewise, Shawn Achor identified the outliers in published scientific studies—people who were significantly happier than average—and he identified what made them happy. He notes that traditional psychology identifies how most people behave and averages out the scores. Positive psychology,