Sabine Wojcieszak: Let´s Boost Our Happiness as the Real Game Changer!

In this talk, Sabine Woesik discusses the profound connection between happiness and success within organizations, emphasizing that happiness is not merely a result of success but a necessity for achieving it. She argues that many people remain overburdened and overly busy, often neglecting their happiness amidst the pressures of work. The speaker highlights that fostering an environment conducive to happiness is essential, as it enhances creativity, productivity, and overall well-being. Woesik provides actionable strategies for individuals and companies to improve happiness, such as adopting positive communication, celebrating successes, and unlearning outdated beliefs. She reinforces that each person has the responsibility to cultivate their happiness and contribute to a positive workplace culture.

[Music] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome our next speaker Sabine woesik presenting the topic let's boost our happiness as the real game changer tools today in the companies but I really believe in the magic of happiness for me happiness is Magic because it can do amazing things with us and if hini is true and I believe in the magic of Happiness the future belongs to me I'm pretty

sure about this so for me happiness is really a serious thing sounds a little bit weird but it's a serious thing it's a serious thing when we talk about being successful and especially when it's not there then we have a problem so we are on a developer conference so we need to have a cat on the slide so here's the cat it's the only cat but it's

connected with my promise I promise you we will dive a little bit into the magical world of Happiness why it's so important and how you can make use of happiness and the future is yours so this is my promise but there's always a butt you know so when we talk about happiness and it's all about you it is not enough to know that happiness is important for

us many people would say common knowledge we need to be happy everyone knows that but the truth is just to know it isn't enough you have to do it you have to use this knowledge every single day and it's really easy to be happy when everything is going in the right direction the work really starts when the time gets tough yeah when things are not going right

when you have mistakes when failures appear and then being happy is really hard work but it helps so the best thing is to start when things going good so that you're are prepared for those times where it's not going that good easier to apply so that's me just to make sure this person is me yeah the other one is my husband and together we run the company

get next it we come from ke so we came we are ferry to cipa and drove by car to vus and that's will exactly be our way back and we we are consultancy we are helping companies teams and individuals to be more successful so if you look at this I'm not a fan of Sci Sci-Fi movies but I'm a fan of AI tools and so Jane way

is not exactly Jane way it's me it's the new screen saber of my husband's uh iPhone because he is a fan of um Enterprise and me and he said that's the best combination so fine if you want to connect with me this is my QR code to LinkedIn feel free and also post about the presentation if you to so one thing which often pops up also on

social media is that we need to be first successful and then happiness will afterwards that's not true because where is the end of being successful when we start to be successful we sometimes want to be more successful and more successful and more successful when do we have to reach the point to say now it's time for being happy no definition for that and the other thing is

to be successful we often have to go a very rocky road with a lot of challenges on it and we need to find ways to overcome this challenges and this leads a lot lot of power physical power but also mental power and we can get this power especially the mental power out of Happiness this helps us to survive with all these challenges to master them and to

come to success so happiness is a prerequisite for being successful not way yeah and this is important to remember but now reality we are all over busy right what do I mean with over busy we have so much to do that we do not even have time to improve stuff when I talk to companies and teams oh come on let's improve this and yeah we really won't

like to do but we don't have time so we are staying in the mud because we don't have time to get out of it and this is some kind of being over busy and the results in my workshops and coaching coaching sessions are people who are really stressed we heard this yesterday in the keynote as well people who are overstrained people who are insecure about what they

are doing people who helpless dissatisfied and then unhappy at the end yeah so this is the result of being over busy and not having time to improve things which are not going right so the work harder approach does not seem to be a good idea anymore because we are already stressed we are exhausted and then working harder to be more successful work in my coachings I had

a young lady she told me for four years I did not go on holidays for four maybe a long weekend but on this weekend I was working on my emails so this is not holiday right another one told me I have so many meetings during the week all the Strategic and creative work I have to do in the evening at the weekend or during my holiday what

the result was that someone told me I don't know how much longer my body can it who of you know such or similar situation in your company Maybe by yourself or you see it with other people yeah there are some and the question we have to ask ourself is am I happy and this is a question I always ask in my coaching sessions in my workshops are

you happy and the reaction is that people look at me and say what what are you asking is am I happy I I have never thought about this yeah but it's the prerequisite for being successful we should think about it might be better so we always have good intention with whatever we do no one wants to do a bad job we always want to do a good

job so we have good intentions but sometimes we believe in outdated stuff some of these outdated beliefs are ah don't be like that don't be a wimpy or something like you have to get through it or that's just the way it is yeah don't complain about it that's just the way it is and we do this all success and when I talk to people about this and

say oh Sabina we are professionals that's the way it is that's how business goes that's the way how you will be successful and I say yes exactly because you are a professional you should rethink the way you you behave because you are a professional and your task of a professional is being successful so do the right things yeah and when we know that those things don't work

we should think about other ways to be successful without being always stressed and overstrained and exhausted so the problem is we are all workers and our most important tool is here inside of our head our brain yeah knowledge workers need their brains it's the most important tool and it does not if it does not work you can't replace it you need your own but if we are

overloaded if we feel insecure if we have the feeling of being helpless or if we are unhappy our brain properly no way there are a lot of research done for this so everything our feeling about this is backed by science so if we have this bad situation we are not creative we need longer with every task do we are not resilient so if things go wrong this

will really throw us down and we cannot change that fast because when our brain is not in the right mood every change needs so long maybe this is a problem why changes and transformations in companies take so long because people are too stressed the brains are not in the right mood yeah so we think about strategies for improving change management and all those stuff maybe it's a

very simple solution having a better environment for people learning is also difficult we are in days where things are changing ever faster learning is part of our daily job but if we are stressed learning get really gets hard and at the end it leads to less productivity that's the result of it no talking about uh productivity tools one thing what we should do to overcome these old

beliefs of you have to get through it that's the way it is it's maybe something like a spring cleaning for our beliefs yeah just to check out which beliefs are still valid and which should be thrown away so like Maria condo is doing this for your flat you can do it for your brain and your beliefs as well so this means we have to unlearn Old beliefs

and replace them with new beliefs and new patterns we can apply to our daily life so what can we do to unlearn oh no it's not the right one so this is the one I want to show psychiatrists have shown that things like burning beliefs physically burning beliefs helps our brain to get rid of them so you're writing those things down on a sheet of paper and

then you burn it this connection between the brain and seeing what's happening really helps our brain to learn old beliefs you can believe it or not but maybe you try it so and then has always the thing yeah I know that I have to change but so many butts I think you all have some butts in your head yeah what can be the butt why we don't

start to change anything and then people also meet companies so we have to work we usually do this in a company in our own or in another one's company and in a lot of companies we have huge elephants in the room problems no one wants to address problems like yeah you see this no use of strengths no fun at work poor leadership poor culture no room for

personal development you know them all maybe not in person but you have heard of them and there are still companies who are doing this and this is an environment where people do not have the space to be happy yeah because there's so much working against your own happiness so the company each company should give the environment the room for being happy but that's not all then you

have to do the rest you can offer people an environment where they have the chance to be happy if they are not willing to take it and to develop it for our own happiness it will not work so it's a task which has to be done from two sides we need to have the environment and we need to do it by our own that's the way yeah

so just to let you know that I'm not talking about something stupid I have some numbers with and these numbers are from the latest Gallop study about the global Works workplace and they say for Europe This these are the numbers for Europe we have 15% of employees who are actively disengaged 15% of employees are actively disengaged this means when you want to start a change campaign P

they work actively against yeah we have on the other hand only 133% 2% less of people who are engaged those people who really want to do something great who want to do the change 133% against 15% and then we have 72% in the middle who are not engaged they are called The Quiet quitters so they are not working actively against anything but they are not supporting any

initiative they are just so this is not a good thing and to be honest 133% of active of engaged people is the lowest number in the world for Europe so we obviously seem not to be the people who are really engaged or we have not the culture in the companies that people like to engage that's the but I have here the numbers for Germany in Germany we

have 19% of actively disengaged people and you see what costs come up when you have so many people actively disengaged in companies so this is a good reason to work against it yeah so it's really costly so let's get back to the number of Europe 15 when we have 15 people and you are one of these 15 out of 100 who is disengaged just let me know

tell you it's not about you as a person having the same person in another team in another company could be a completely different result yeah it's just this person in this environment in this situation but but if you belong to these 15 people or 15% please take responsibility for yourself because when you are actively disengaged believe me you will not be happy and this is not healthy

for you and you will not be productive and you successful but please also take others because you will really be hard to Bear for the others yeah you will throw them down and leave make a decision and leave that's the best decision you can do on the other hand if you are a leader and you have one of these 15% in your team responsibility for yourself because

you will get crazy with saw someone like this in your team but also for your other for the others for the rest of team and also let this person go as I said it's okay it's not about this person it's about this person in this situation and I have two examples in one of my one of the companies I worked for there was an agile transformation the

company decides to go to Agile and they did it in a good way with a lot of time for Learning and there was one guy he decided that's not a good way and he was actively disengaged whenever he had the chance he was chatting with his colleagu say oh everything is bad and that's not a good way and and the whole process slowed down and then this

person it was a good decision decided to leave this company and go to another company so this company has not started with agile but they wanted to and they hired him because he had already some knowledge of this and he is happy there so it's the same person it's the same idea getting agile but in a new environment it's good for him and it was not good

in the old environment yeah he worked there for 15 years and had a good position but now everything changed and this was not what he wanted go going to another company means he is doing the change and that's fine he was happy there and I had another thing one company I'm working with is sending me a lot of people for coaching so and there's one team who

should be the beacon for the whole company how to work in the future so really shaking things up doing new stuff and I had five coaches from this and after my coaches uh my coachings four people left the company and I was oh so do they ever send me coachi again and I met the team manager and he said you have done an amazing job I said

really you are aware that four people have left the team yes said is fine it's fine for us as a team because we need need people who really want to do this but it's also fine for them because they weren't with me yeah so I had a manager who had the pretty good understanding about what's going on but for me it was like oh my God what

would they say four out of five are leaving the company not a good sign but it was so what has happiness to do with this when we look at the definition of Martin zelikman who is the one of the first positive psychologists he says happiness is the result of Joy the result of Engagement and of meaning and here we have the word engagement and we had the

engagement index before people who are actively engaged are really happy because they like what they do and that's the reason why they engage and out of this engagement they refuel their happiness so whenever we are in a situation where we not sure is this a good situation for me or not a good situation we should make up something very simple which is the pro and cons list

what's the good side what's the negative side because sometimes we just get stuck in this negative emotions and we don't look at the positive side and when we create a list not only in our brain writing it down we had a better view about this and this gives us focus and Clarity so another explanation or definition about happiness comes from barara Frederickson she's one of the world

leading researchers about and she has some more aspects of being happy cheerfulness joy fun gratitude Serenity interest hope awe inspiration love Pride we can all connect them to our daily work Pride are we pride about what we are proud about what we are doing do we love what we doing and with whom we are doing and how we are doing it so we can everything connect with

our daily work so what is the difference between fun and happiness is there even a difference and yes there is one and it is that fun is a shortterm emotion so yesterday evening we had party this was fun and after the party is over maybe we remember it but this fun will be gone somewh happiness is more a mid and long-term overall mood and and also a

mindset this is the way how we see the world the way how we look at everything and this is the difference fun is a part of Happiness so sometimes people say when we have not a lot of activities that are fun we are closer to happiness it might work for a while what is happiness not it's not a native approach or being blind about what's going on

so people who are happy also see that there are things working they don't believe that everything is Rose in the world they don't believe that water is champagne they still see the problems but they know also the other side that there is something good about it so this means that when we talk about happiness we talk about a broader perspective so usually our brain is trained to

see the bad stuff this is from our ancient times where zebus tigers are round and always a thread to our life it was important but this is not the way it is today what we are now doing is that we have to open up our perspective and also see the good things not only the bad things but also the good things and that's the balance that also

means that we do not only have to look at the don't haves but also on the things we have we don't have this car we don't have that car but maybe we have a car yeah so get the balance right that's the thing what we are doing and the engine for happiness are positive emotions positive emotions oh I can only say emotions we are in the it

sector who of you has wow great so but what I he as a beer again we are professionals we are not emotions and I say yeah exactly because you are professionals you have to talk about emotions because maybe you can hide them to the outside but inside of you you will have emotions and we need to take care of this because they are important for you so

we need to create situations to have more emotions which means sometimes we just need to be aware of the positive stuff around us or we have to create more of them that depends what can we do to create more on the individual level you can write gratitude lists what are you graceful for we can think about what was good today we can also celebrate successes you know

this from agile on Team level this means we can do we weekly checkouts and talk about what was good in the week so that everyone goes into the weekend with a good affirmation of the weekend not having the bad stuff in mind we can end each meeting with a collection of what was good or we can also celebrate successes on Team level so now it's your turn

talk with your neighbor about what good things happened last week one minute to observe the one person who is talking uh about his reactions on the face yeah so you have one minute chat about what is what was good last week I hope you you have something to okay maybe you have realized it's really hard to remember what was good last week it's for us most of

the time easier to remember what wasn't good this week but when we look at the face of someone who's reporting something good the whole fesal expression is always also changing and this is the amazing stuff about it and it's I promise you not only outside it also happens inside because a cocktail of hormones will be released when we're talking about good stuff and this gives us more

power more selfawareness and all those things okay another thing that we should do is we should not go to the next goal or rush to the next goal as soon as we have reached one of this and this is what we actually doing in companies so one go okay the next and there is no time in between to perceive that we have done something great no time

for celebrating or enjoying that we have done something great and no time for being proud of what we have done and what we have reached and being proud is so important for us is so important for our happiness so who of you has been proud to during the last week proud about what you have amazing what can you do to be more often proud so you can

write a success or pride list what have you achieved during your professional career just to be aware of this you can also talk about it and you should talk about it with your colleagues so that it's part of your culture to talk about these achievements and that you are proud and you should be able to accept your success I know a lot of people say hey great

job you have done oh that was not a problem at all yeah so instead of saying thank you amazing yeah I'm happy about this so it's important that we are able to accept the success on Team level we can also do success Retros a retro where we really talk about success and why we have been successful what was the key to our success we can also learn

out of this we can have a success bot some people have failure boards why not having a success board where we show that we are successful and why we are successful we also can create a team definition what does it mean to be successful my definition of of success might be a different one than yours definition of success so why not having a team definition of also

establish a r ritual how we can success another thing to be happy is positive communication there's U they researchers run an experiment with young children age about four and they had one group they should resolve a puzzle and they just sent this young young children into the room and they did the puzzle and they took the time how long it take and they had another group four

year old children they don't know anything about psych psychology and I talked with them about how was your ice cream yesterday did you enjoy it is it delicious just a positive chat and all of those children with the positive chat before outperformed the other group by Sol with solving this puzzle and that's the same for adults as so when we go into the meeting and someone says

Hey Sabina think about the last time this is a really hard customer don't do the same mistake again be careful I will always be in the what do I I will not be at my best but if you say I know you're a great communicator you're exactly the right one for this job rocket I will go and say yes that's it I will do it and I

will do it yeah so positive communication is important not always pointing out the negative stuff also pointing out the positive stuff so Sean AA wrote that happiness is not an overall mood it's a work ethic and it's the indispensable ingredient of success you can read this in his book Happiness Advantage so really recommend this book when you are interested in this topic of Happiness we also had

this explanation of fun as part of being happy and what does it mean having fun net work this is not about the kicker table it's not about fancy colors in the office can be but it's not the only thing we have more things which are more related to work and the first one is the stuff of being of having playfulness at work doing some experimentation using creative

uh tools to brainstorm all the stuff so really things we can use in meetings in our daily work and all those things playfulness the second one is connection being connected with what you do having idea of the vision of the big picture what is your part in this big picture and being connected to the people you are working with the teamwork yeah team building is part of

this as well and the third part is flow what do you need to get into the flow getting rid of all these tasks which are not bring you forward getting rid of all these unnecessary interruptions everything what is has to do with creating the space where you can get into the focus so and when all these three things come together we have the real fun at work

and to be honest everything of this is implemented in edile when we do Agile right when we have the right idea about edile when we are just FOC focusing on being faster we leave out these important steps we don't focus on why we are doing all the stuff we are just focusing on the delivery and not on what is this does with people yeah there's a book

about this the power of Fun by Katherine price also really book laughter is also important for happiness we need to love and this book humor seriously also very interesting but sarcasm and rudness is not humor and I have a lot of companies in the it sector and I know also these t-shirts with this sarcastic quotes on it remember the keynote yesterday he about how to dress up

when you are wearing these sarcastic quotes you might take it as a funny thing not everyone is able to understand sarcasm that's the one thing and it also gives a signal so we always should be aware of this so when we apply happiness and positive psychology as happiness happiness is a part of positive psychology we have more creativity we have a better collaboration we have more resilience

we have a better productivity and also our leadership style will improve if we incorporate happiness and this is all important for being successful so your six steps to boost your happiness are get rid of old beliefs be aware of the positive there's another side than just the negative celebrate successes create fun at work not by just installing a kicker table but having a look on the way

how you work use communication and love a lot this is really important so you can use the happiness in the way that you are your own game changer when you apply happiness for yourself and don't wait for others to make you happy they won't do that this is your task so you all have now one last task and please stand up it's early in the morning we

need to do some exercises so one arm to the side the right arm to this yeah that works okay now we try it with the other th okay now with both and faster faster faster thank you very [Applause] much okay are questions from your side oops do you have any advice how to get creativity back when it's the consequence from burnout and fastpac work yeah um that's

a hard one because when people really run into burnout it's a long way back I think the most important thing is to change your environment so get out of the environment which brought you into the situation and really start with someone who can help you to reflect on the situation and then try out stuff creative stuff to find out what you really enjoy so sometimes things changes

completely up after the situations of burnout and you need to find out what now makes you happy so you really need to try out and it's um a little bit of coming out of your comfort zone not to say oh no I don't want to do this just see it as a I have to try out and then you will discover you only can discover what brings

fun back and creativity back when you try it out but therefore you need this this step to get out of your comfort zone and maybe someone a good friend or your partner can help with this and can push you a little bit so that's easier to overcome this any advice on fighting imposter syndrome so um the question is are we talking about what is imposter Syndrome from

the psychological side so which has a deep root in your childhood or are we talking about the mainstream imposter syndrome most uh mostly every person has in in the um in the professional environment so when we have this in this this mainstream one in the professional environment I would say have some against someone who helps your coach or a colleague who says come on don't complain go

I have a good friend and when he always starts to explain complain about things I I don't know if I can't do this I say come on stop complaining now it's time to move on I have listened to you I know that you can do it um and I will lead you I will help you through this situation I can't talk about the psychology psychological impostor syndrome

with the roots in childhood because this a completely different process yeah so I'm not a psychologist or a therap IST so I can't help with so if startup was bought an environment goes from happy to corate and whole team not happy should everyone needs to leave it depends it depends on how hard the situation really is and what you have tried out so this is your responsibility

it's not the company who is important or is is is making you happy it should just deliver the the environment and when you really feel that this is not the way you want to work and this is not the way um you want to have for your future then you have to make a decision and this decision can either be okay I will leave or it is

I would give it more time and try out and then make a decision just to postpone the decision can also be or you decide say okay I will try it but then stop complaining about it yeah because it's also the decision that you need to make a cut there as long as you go on complaining complaining complaining you will waste a lot of energy and this will

make you even unhappier so you have to make a decision which is either it's not good for me it's making me S I cannot do my best I cannot perform here I have to choose another way or you say that's the way it is it's okay for me because I like what I'm doing but then stop complaining because complaining will make it harder for you how can

we improve happiness for remote workers you see there's a mistake in this question how can we improve happiness for others we can't improve Pro their happiness that's what they should do but what we can do we can make offers we can give the chance to connect with each other maybe we can also have a weekly check out with the whole remote working team and talk about what

what was good what is important when we work with remote workers and we want to see how they feel is that we stay connected no matter if it's with the video chat we had yesterday the we have to to turn on the camera so that we can see how people feel we can see that things are changing in the faces but also what's happening in the chat

when we are having constantly an eye on this and we see that suddenly people start to communicate in a different way maybe it's time maybe it's also too late but we should realize this and talk with them and say hey What's Going up how do you feel my impression is that something has changed yeah so this is what we can do but we can't improve the happiness

we can just give the space for being happy and making offers happiness is your task anything else yeah um we have time for one more question from the audience great so by the way the answers are just common answers because I don't know what exactly is going on so when you want to have the right answers you need to dive deeper what is the reason for this

what is the root for this and then you can exactly do something about it you mentioned that uh fun is Incorporated in agile yes I don't see it yet maybe you have a different understanding of agile maybe uh you can elaborate more yeah so we have an agile for example the thing that we say we need to experiment we know that we don't know everything yeah and

we need to do experimentations uh experimenting is part of the playfulness trying to find out to figure out and the question is now do people have the time and the r the the space for doing this experimentation or is there a lot of pressure and this is what I said being faster is only the result of applying all these agile approaches but if we only focus on

being faster we may we maybe forget why we are doing things uh we are actually doing so when we run workshops for example and we use interactive stuff like brain writing and people just get like oh brain writing again yeah and they don't have an idea why we are doing this because it brings out better um better ideas when we do just brainstorming the first answer will

level the quality of all the other answers when we do brain writing we have a better better outcome if we understand this and say okay we want to have a better outcome that's why we are doing this then it's okay and we say ah great idea but if you say say I need to write again can someone else do that yeah we have not understood why we

are doing this and this is what I actually see in a lot of companies they are doing somehow agile they are just focusing on the faster approach and they have not really understood why they are doing agile and this is a bad situation then everything does not feel like fun if we are doing it in a good way with the right mindset it can create fun maybe

not for everyone because it's also also yeah taking all the responsibility is not always easy okay thank you very much thanks thanks saine thanks for setting up the mood for the day and it's our turn to share some happiness with you here's the gift from the confence