Positivity ratio

Hello everybody, in this week’s video, we’re gonna talk about happiness math. I’m not kidding, the math of happiness. If you simply add up all the positives and subtract all the negatives, you get an outcome, that’s how happy you are. And I know this sounds ridiculously stupid and simple, but there is some fundamental truth about this. You stack stuff up, happy versus the negative, and it kind of tells you how you’re doing in life. The same goal is frankly for how your relationships are going, how much happy stuff is happening in your relationships versus how much negative stuff is happening, and even how’s it going to work. How many things at work are making you feel good? How many things at work are making you feel bad? And then you get your outcome: good work, good relationships, good life, right? Get your numbers up, subscribe, and let’s get started talking about how to get your math to say what you want to say in your own life.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, we want to get our numbers up, right? We want to get our math outcomes to be through the roof, so that we’re happy, happy, happy, well, and then we have to deal with things. Okay, let’s first talk about John Gottman, who’s a leading researcher in relationships. He runs what they call the “love lab” in Seattle. And he basically gets couples together, he says, “Just sat down and have a conversation,” and then he monitors all kinds of things like their heart rate and their pulse and their the pupil dilation and stuff like that as these people have a conversation. And after a while, Gottman got so good at watching couples talk that he could get rid of all the data, all the analytics, and simply watch a video of a couple talking. Maybe he’d watch for 3 to 5 minutes, and then, with 90% accuracy, he could predict whether or not the couple would be together in 3 years or not. And all he was really doing when he was making his predictions, even though he didn’t know it at first but later he realized it was, he was counting the ratio of positive exchanges between the couple versus negative exchanges. And those couples that had a high ratio of positive to negative, at least three to one, maybe five to one was even better, those couples were gonna make it. And a five to one, they were gonna be kind of nauseatingly happy, really happy couples.

Similarly, a psychologist named Marcia Losada had very similar outcomes as he was researching success at work, the success of business teams, specifically sales teams. In fact, he spent a good portion of his career coaching sales teams, and he recognized that some were objectively more higher performing than others. They had higher profit margins, better customer service ratings, that kind of thing. What he didn’t know at first was what their positive to negative ratios were, so he studied that through thousands of hours of video tapes of which teams had high ratios of positive interactions relative to negative interactions, and those that had high ratios, three-to-one or better, were good teams. And those that were 5 to 1 or better were amazing teams. So this science keeps showing up, that where there’s a high ratio of positive stuff, simply do the math, count it, we overcome the negative. But here’s the trick, it’s not a simple weighing of one versus one. That if we can’t simply say, “Oh, here’s a positive, so life is gonna be happy. Oh, here’s another positive, so life is happier. Here’s another positive, well we must have a really happy life,” because unfortunately, the negatives are quite a bit heavier than the positives. So one really negative thing kind of counterbalances a bunch of positive things. That’s why we need a big ratio of positive things to overcome what’s called the negativity bias. And when we get lots of positivity, then we get happy in our lives, and we have better relationships, and we have more success at work.

So please, use your own ratio, count it up, positive things versus the negative things, to see where you’re headed in life. In fact, I’d encourage you to comment in the comment sections below. Maybe look to your partner, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, whatever, and say, “What do you suppose your positive to negative ratio is? How many positive interactions do you have relative to the negative ones?” And maybe, is there some tip that you got for the community that would help boost the ratio for not only for you, and for others. So, get your positive interactions up, get your ratios up, subscribe to my channel, and you will, in fact, get more tips on how to be happy every single Sunday morning in your inbox. Hey, and I’ve got an additional bonus for you in the link below. David’s gonna create a link to a section of my book, a chapter in my book is all about love, about how to get your relationships going, firing on all cylinders. So, I hope you enjoy that. Like this video if you liked it, share it with your friends, subscribe, hit the bell button, then you’ll get more of this kind of stuff, content, every Sunday morning. I’m Paul Charisma, I’m your happiness expert, and it’s my honor to be here with you this morning. Thanks for watching.