Awaken Your Genius » Ali Binazir

‘The How of Happiness’: Interview with Prof Sonja Lyubomirsky

Ali Binazir — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:15:23 +0000

There have been a number a number of excellent books on happiness published in the past few years, and I have been consuming them avidly. Not only do I use their principles to help my students and hypnotherapy clients lead happier lives, but I also enjoy applying the principles to my own life. The books are also fun to read, with accounts of quirky psych experiments and fun, touching anecdotes.

One of the best of the happiness batch is The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by UC Riverside Professor of Psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky. Amongst all the happiness texts I’ve read (and there have been about 8), this one I found to be the most practical in its ability to increase real happiness in your life.

This is because of Prof Lyubomirsky’s judicious use of questionnaires and the Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic, which figures out which activities end up creating the most happiness for you. The results for me were somewhat surprising and allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on the activities that, unbeknownst to myself, meant the most to me.

Prof Lyubomirsky, a Santa Monica neighbor and fellow Harvard grad, was kind enough to let me into her home for a very informative interview which you can watch below. I recommend everyone, young and old, to get a copy of The How of Happiness for yourself and someone you love. There is no greater gift than enabling “the experience of joy, contentment or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful and worthwhile.” So go forth and be a happiness enabler.

In Part 1, we talk about how the book can help you custom-design your own happiness program. We also discuss savoring, flow, and 2 of the 3 happiness myths.

In Part 2, we finish up the happiness myths, get into hedonic adaptation and the infamous story of Markus and Roland.

Get your copy of The How of Happiness on Amazon

Dave Barry ad-libs on his new book “I’ll Mature When I’m Dead”

Ali Binazir — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:05:25 +0000

Dave Barry, the author of such immortal classics as Dave Barry Does Japan, Big Trouble, Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys and Boogers Are My Beat, demonstrates novel and exciting uses for his new book I’ll Mature When I’m Dead: Dave Barry’s Amazing Tales of Adulthood, rendering his interviewer pretty helpless with laughter in the process.

Dave ad-libs everything in this interview — watch that split second he takes to come up with ‘Defacebook’ to witness the gears turning in the mind of a comic genius. The already notorious bits in I’ll Mature When I’m Dead on vasectomies and colonoscopies are worth the admission price all by themselves, so go get yourself three copies: one for yourself, one for a mopey friend who could use a laugh, and one to replace the first copy your friends will steal from you.

Video: Dan Siegel on Mindfulness and Feeling Good

Ali Binazir — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:59:40 +0000

Daniel Siegel, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Co-Director of the UCLA Mindfulness Research Center, author of Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation and all-around stud does a striking demonstration of how you can go from a negative state of mind to a positive one in a matter of seconds — using only one word.

Even though I’ve experienced and performed many such demonstrations myself, this one’s pretty dramatic in its impact and simplicity, so be sure to watch the first two minutes at the very least. Towards the end, he gives a practical mindfulness technique you can use at any time.

Five Expert Persuasion Tips to Nail the Job Interview

Ali Binazir — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:49:02 +0000

A friend of mine just landed a job interview with a company he’s really eager to join. He’s one of two finalists for the position, and he wants to maximize his chances of success, so he asked me for some interview tips.

Especially in a contracting job market, even getting the job interview counts as a triumph. But now that you’ve arrived at the human-human interface of you and your potential future employer, what are you going to do, champ? How can you optimize your chances of nailing down the job?

This article is not about what to wear or updating your resume. It’s about five ninja tactics that compel your interviewer to see you in a completely different light than other interviewees. Derived from a powerful course in persuasion, these techniques create structures in your interviewer’s mind that bias them at an unconscious level towards hiring you versus anyone else.

1) Paint a picture of you already working at the company.
If you create a picture in your interviewer’s head of you already in the job, doing the things you’d be doing as an employee of the company, then you’re in very good shape indeed. This is because the unconscious mind can’t tell the difference between real and imagined pictures.

So ask a question like this: “I’d like to have a better idea of my work if I were to be hired so I know it’s a right fit. What would you envision me doing here in a typical week?”

If this does not come up during the interview, make sure it’s the very first one you ask when it’s time for your questions. To answer this question, the interviewer has to make a picture of you working for him. Elicit additional detail so the interviewer can make the picture more vivid — with whom, where, what dress code. At the same time, you’re getting key information about your potential future job, which is also useful. This brings us to the next point.

2) Let the employer do some of the selling.
In the early stages of courtship, if you’re fully taken with the object of your affection and he or she knows it, you have no leverage. Same with this courtship. So part of your power comes from not being 100% taken with the job. Sure, you’re interested in the position, but you still need to be persuaded a little bit.

So think that you have some leverage. How would you act if you had at least two other offers in the wings? You’re a hot commodity — present yourself as one. Ask discerning questions about the job and the company that show that you’re evaluating them, too.

3) Sell the way your customers buy by appealing to their values and criteria.
Ask a question like this: “I’m sure you’ve hired some top-notch people in your day. I’m very curious — what’s important to you about what they do for XYZ?” “What’s important to you about” is the magic question that elicits the deep criteria and values that motivate a person. Once you’ve found out what they are, you want to make your qualifications and work history relevant to those values and criteria.

Let’s say she responds, “Well, my best employees are really on board with XYZ’s innovative and customer-centered culture. They’re really excited about the prospect of revolutionizing an industry.”

Now you want to use the words innovative, customer-centered, and revolutionize in describing what you’ve done so far and what you’d like to do for the company. Sell the way your customer buys.

4) Speak aspirationally.
Ask a question such as, “Where do you see the company going in the next 5-10 years?” Then proffer your vision of what’s possible and how you fit in it. This is your chance to shine, so do some homework on the industry.

Sure, it’s important to tell them what you’ve done so far and what you’re capable of doing. However, don’t let yourself be limited by that. What puts you over the top is your ability to provide a picture of the magnificent things you will be doing for the company that the boss hasn’t even dreamt of.

So, to expand on #1 above, create that compelling vision of the future with you the indispensable linchpin of it all. In fact, there’s a new book out by Seth Godin called Linchpin which speaks to this. Check it out and maybe read it on the plane to the interview.

5) Sell yourself like you’re the cure for cancer.
If you had the cure for cancer, how hesitant would you be to present that to patients who needed the drug? If you possess the solution to someone’s problem, you have a moral obligation to present that solution as clearly and convincingly as possible. Not in a needy way (see #2), but with appropriate grace and power. This is no time to be shy, my friend. Be your own best advocate, because no one else is volunteering for the position.

6) Rehearse.
Make a list of all the possible questions they could ask you and all the questions you’d like to ask. Then get a friend to do a practice interview with you. Record it on video and watch yourself. Rehearse the answers to the questions out loud at least five times. Even better, write out all the answers to the questions. That’s what I did for a series of 10 interviews for one particularly selective company, and there is no better way to think through the answers and burn them in your memory. Eight solid hours spent earnestly preparing for a job that could be paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years may be the best investment of time you’ve ever made.

Check out the persuasion course for greater business and social success.

Why do smart people make dumb decisions?

Ali Binazir — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:22:44 +0000

Meet my friend Bart. As a surgeon, every day at work he’s entrusted with the lives of others, and he handles the job well. He’s a genuinely gifted fellow. He’s also fit, healthy, and well-rounded.

In other words, Bart has made a lot of great decisions in his life, and continues to do so every day.

Except that some time ago, he got engaged. And none of his friends thought it was a good idea. We all predicted disaster, of the Hindenberg up-in-flames variety.

Bart did get separated a few years later, and you probably know someone who was plenty smart who made a similarly disastrous decision. Whether it was taking the wrong job, buying a Hummer, selling off Microsoft stock in 1989 or launching into a destructive affair, this kind of thing happens all the time. Perhaps it’s even happened to you.

It’s easy to see all of this in hindsight. But what if you could see the faulty decision-making while it was happening? Then, instead of an “I told you so” story which helps little and irritates much, we may actually accomplish something useful — like helping avoid the error in the first place.

Psychologists who’ve studied our decision-making processes have observed cognitive biases that tend to get us in trouble.

Remember that these biases don’t make you a bad person — they just make you human. As far as we can tell, they’re deeply-ingrained features of our brain function. The more you’re aware of them, the better chance you have of avoiding them. There’s a slew of them, so I’ll highlight some of the big ones:

1) The fundamental attribution error.
This bias makes us attribute the failure of others to character and our own failures to circumstance. “Jenkins lost his job because he was incompetent; I lost mine because of the recession.” It also attributes our own successes to our competence, discounting luck, while seeing others’ successes as products of mere luck.

This lands you in hot water when you assume that bad stuff only happens to other people: you’re not going to be part of the 50 percent of people who get divorced, and the price of your house will go up even though 90 percent of them have dropped in price. I’m going to marry Charlie Sheen and make it work because I’m different; those 4,000 other women were just stupid. They did something wrong, but I know what I’m doing. The fundamental attribution error’s a pernicious one, and it nails all of us at some point.

2) The confirmation bias.
This one has two parts. First, we tend to gather and rely upon information that confirms our existing views. Second, we avoid or downplay information that goes against our pre-existing hypothesis.

Say you suspect that your computer has been hacked. Then every time it stalls or has a little glitch, you blame it on the hackers. Or you think that your boss has it in for you. Then everything she says or does you interpret as part of her plan to undermine you. It’s a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you identify with a political party, you probably do this all the time. If you’re a scientist, you do this inadvertently as part of the scientific method. And if you’re a trial lawyer, it’s your job to do this.

If you’re interested in moving an agenda forward, then the confirmation bias works in your favor. If you’re subject to this agenda and don’t like it, recognize the confirmation bias for its fallacy. And if you’re interested in the truth, start without preconceptions. Outwitting the confirmation bias means exploring both sides of an argument with equal diligence.

3) The overconfidence bias.
I call this the ‘my guess is better than yours’ bias. People’s confidence in their own decisions tends to outstrip the accuracy of those decisions. Your friend will say he’s “100 percent positive” about something — e.g. his choice of wife – and only be right 50 percent of the time. A disastrous form of this happened in the doomed 1996 Mt Everest expedition described in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, resulting in the death of many climbers.

4) The availability bias.
We tend to estimate what’s more likely by how easily we can come up with an example from memory. The availability of our memories is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples. So we tend to make those more salient, then come up with weird decisions based on them.

As a result, you may cancel your trip to the Canary Islands because mom tells you the biggest plane crash in history happened there. Or you stop going to hockey games because you heard someone in the stands got thwacked on the head with a puck last week. Or avoid investing in stocks because those crashed last year.

To bypass the availability bias, be sure to look at all the evidence around a particular decision, not the stuff that jumps to mind first. If only 1 out of 100,000 plane landings resulted in a crash, it’s safe to fly to the Canary Islands. If one out of ten million hockey fans gets nailed by a puck, you can watch a hockey game.

5) The sunk cost fallacy.
I call this the slot-machine effect. You put a quarter in a one-armed bandit, and pull the lever. You win nothing. No big deal – you put in another quarter. And another. This goes on for a while, and you start thinking, “Well, I’m invested in this machine now. It’s going to belch an avalanche of quarters any second!”

The truth is that every pull of the lever has the same winning probability of nearly zero, regardless of how much money you’ve put in. The money is effectively gone forever – it’s a sunk cost. There’s no quantifiable expectation of future return, so it’s not an investment.

This is a big one in jobs and relationships. You can be stuck in a crappy situation for a while, and then think, “But I’ve invested three years in this! I can’t just throw that away!” The fact is that those three years are never coming back – you’ve already thrown them away, so don’t worry about it! The sooner you cut bait and go for a better situation, the better off you are.

So next time you have smart friends who are about to make an unbelievably dumb decision, follow this five-step plan:

a) Look through this list, or an even more comprehensive one
b) Empathize with them for being human, coming up with an example of a time when you made a similarly boneheaded choice – “Boy, was I a goober!”
c) Instead of saying “What the hell are you thinking,” say “I have a lot of faith in your judgment, so help me understand how you came up with this decision.”
d) If you’re still convinced they’re smoking something funny, only then offer gently some insight on cognitive biases, and see what happens.
e) If they still don’t get it, take the frying pan from behind your back and give them a compassionate but bracing thwack upside the head. It probably won’t change their mind, but it’ll feel pretty satisfying.

Ali Binazir (yours truly) is Chief Evangelist and Decision Enhancement Engineer at Elite Communications LLC. Formerly a consultant at McKinsey, I use a combination of Eastern wisdom and Western science to help people and companies make better decisions. You may contact me directly at ali(at)awakenyourgenius.com.

Interview with Gretchen Rubin at Vroman’s Bookstore

Ali Binazir — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:58:28 +0000

Here’s an interview I did last week with Gretchen Rubin, fellow HuffingtonPost.com contributor and all-around star (Yale Law grad, clerkship with Sandra Day O’Connor, supermom, etc). I caught up with her at a reading she did at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Southern California’s oldest and largest independent bookstore. My first time there — what a place! A bibliophile’s heaven indeed. To catch Gretchen when she swings through your city, check out her book tour schedule on her excellent blog.

But I digress — voila the video. It’s just over a minute, so check it out:

‘Happiness Project’ by Gretchen Rubin Video Review

Ali Binazir — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:43:15 +0000

If Aristotle was correct in calling happiness the summum bonum of life — the chief good, the ultimate thing we all strive for in all our strivings — then The Happiness Project is a sure-fire recipe for having more of it.

A fun, funny and wise book written by Gretchen Rubin, a regular HuffingtonPost.com contributor, it’s a distillation of the wisdom of the ages on happiness. It provides eminently practical ways to amplify your happiness pretty much immediately (e.g. gossip less; exercise more; launch a pet project).

In this video review, I share my impressions on The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Be sure to check out also my interview with Gretchen, her excellent blog, and the supremely useful resources of her Happiness Project Toolbox.

If you like the video, please show signs of life by rating it and leaving comments!

Visit the AwakenYourGenius.com blog, where smart people get smarter
Write to me directly