Wednesday 19 March 2014

My Happiness Project - My Happy App

My Happy Project: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

My three gratitudes for today:
1. The health care system that I have access to that I freely use for me and my family
2. Friends / co-workers who break into my office to ensure proper decoration for a variety of occasions
3. Trust and respect from co-workers and managers

Today I would like to share a small project of my own.  Being inspired by Plasticity and Shawn Achor I developed a simple messaging application for my fellow co-workers.  The application plugs into a pre-existing intranet that we already use.  The reason I would like to share this project is because it is a direct result of looking for the positive in every day life.  It is realizing that The Golden Gate Bridge Didn't Collapse and looking for more positivity in the videos you watch, the books you read, or the people you are with.  The constant pursuit of this does change the way you think, it makes you more positive.  During a recent employee review meeting with my supervisor I was struck by how much I wanted to try and implement these ideas in my own work place.  I don't mean to say that my work place is a negative environment, but every place could use a bit more positive.

I woke up one morning with Achor's 5th point in rewiring your brain, "Random Acts of Kindness - write one positive email praising or thanking someone daily". I thought to myself why don't I just do that.  I realized that the social norms don't really allow you to compliment someone sincerely out of the blue it just feels awkward.  In addition, compliments from your supervisor or a friend while welcomed sometimes feel like a compliment from your Mom.  You enjoy it but you evaluate the source.  My idea was a method  of sending messages to fellow co-workers anonymously.  This would avoid the awkwardness of the initial note and well as the inevitable return compliment from the recipient.  The recipient would not automatically message you back with the best thing they could think of at the time but would send another individual a more genuine message because they would be unaware of the original sender.  I am hoping that this will cascade and spread positivity throughout the workplace versus a single closed loop of I message you and you message me and we are now even.

All of these thoughts were happening in that quiet time between me getting up and preparing lunches for the day and the children crashing down the stairs looking for breakfast.  My last thought before this inevitable moment was, "How can I make this safe?"  With any anonymous messaging service you always have to be concerned about the very tiny chance that someone takes the opportunity to take that anonymous jab at someone which would complete defeate the concept of the application.  My solution to this was to record both senders and receivers on any message and store the message in the database but to not display the senders anytime the message is viewed.  This would allow me to investigate any rare situation where a message raises a problem.  In order for this to be accepted there would need to be some trust in me as a gatekeeper to this information.  I have never been as excited to get to work as I was that day to code out this application.

I just "launched" this messenger application today with a presentation at a staff meeting.  My beta tests of the application were received very well and management was very happy with the potential.  I look forward to how the rest of the staff receive and buy into this compliment system.

I would also like to share this Google Talk by Shawn Achor (~60min).  This talk is an informal discussion where Shawn discusses more of his understanding of happiness and gratitude.  It is worth watching if you have the time.

Thanks for reading.


My Happy Project: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

4 comments:

  1. The best compliment of all time. Thank you for encouraging others to look at life with a more positive gaze. You are amazing!

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    1. Wow, thanks Jen. I appreciate you taking the time to read. This happiness thing you have going on is a bit infectious. Thank you for all your work with Plasticity and sharing so much of your story.

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  2. Well funny meeting you two here!

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    1. Well we have to hang out somewhere, welcome to the party.

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