Center for Workplace Happiness

How far left are you?

Wait…I’m not asking about your politics, I’m asking about your handedness. Today is all about being a leftie (not leftist) and what that means to you. If you’re right-handed, like 87% of Earth’s human residents, this newsletter is for you, too, because you’re farther left than you may know!

If you have a leftie in your family, or if you are a leftie, that’s genetics at work. There is a familial link for left-handers, and researchers think that they’ve identified the gene that makes it possible for a person to produce a left-handed child. Being a leftie is so rare that even if two left-handers meet, fall in love, and produce a boatload of children, 70 to 80 percent of their kids will be right-handed.

Famous left-handers include:

Leaders: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama 

Innovators: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg

Business Heroes: David Rockefeller, Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Forbes

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There’s a 40^th anniversary today that you might not know about. Have you ever been part of one of the “first Tuesday in August” neighborhood festivals? Maybe your neighborhood or town had a cookout, or a little parade? Chances are, police officers were everywhere at the festival.

Not only were they there, they were the guests of honor. The first Tuesday in August has been the National Night Out since 1984. What began as a way for neighborhood watch volunteers to share information and best practices with each other quickly turned into a celebration of community policing and became a way for people to see the human side of our often-misunderstood law enforcement officers.

Let’s face it, we have trust issues where police officers are concerned. The police. The FBI. The Secret Service. The Gestapo. The KGB. When you read those words, you don’t think of individuals, do you? It’s more likely that you think of an amorphous, powerful entity. You might...

Do you have friends? Then today is your day! Today is the International Day of Friendship and this issue of the weekly newsletter explores the mysteries of our friendships.

There are two sides to friendship – the positives and the not-so-positives. Because every single person is human, we bring both sides of ourselves to all our friendships, and so do our friends. That means that each friendship has the potential to be a rollercoaster, with the size of the hills and valleys in the hands of both people. That’s what makes friendships so complicated!

Humans are hard-wired to form communities, and friends are the non-family community we create. Like family, friends can provide emotional support, validation, companionship, and strong pathways to happiness through shared experiences. Friends are often our sounding boards, exercise partners, and mastermind partners, helping each other create strength, growth, and resilience. Friends give us a sense of belonging, feedback and...

Every four years, we Americans forget who we are. We forget that we have power. We forget how to use that power. We forget to be civil as we use our voices and our fingertips, and sadly, sometimes fists and other weapons, in our attempts to move hearts and minds to our way of thinking.

You can make a leadership decision and make your corner of the world more peaceful – will you step into your leadership role this political season? The more people who choose to gently, quietly lead, the more civil this season will be.

It’s easy to blame social media, broadcast media, political ads, and journalists for the negativity and belligerence of the narrative, but the truth is, since the inception of our country, elections have been contentious, political advertising has been negative, and conversations have degenerated into heated arguments when politics was the topic.

Where does leadership come into play? It comes from you, not to you. In these next 105 days, will you step up and...

Did you feel like I felt Saturday night – horrified, confused, uncertain, and helpless? No matter what your politics are, you have a heart that beats in your chest, you have family members you love and would do anything to keep safe, and if circumstances had been different, those killed and injured could have been your loved ones.

For all of us who feel unsteady in the wake of the violence, this issue of the newsletter has tools you can use to create a calmer inner atmosphere for yourself.

Arguably the worst part about being a bystander to a tragedy is the feeling of helplessness. In the absence of anything concrete to do, people tune in to news outlets and take to social media, airing their feelings, their theories, and finding supporters and detractors. We want to do something, yet everything feels random and uncontrollable.

Brains are interesting things – part of how we learn so rapidly as children is that the brain recognizes and stores patterns. As we have more...

Welcome to the Dog Days of Summer. It’s the time of year when traffic is lighter, meetings are smaller, and life gets just a little bit slower for most people.

For much of my life, I thought the phrase came from the observation of how lazy and slow dogs became in the heat of summer. Maybe you thought that, too? Nope – the ancient Romans noticed that when Sirius and the sun were in close proximity, the weather became hotter and more humid. Sirius, aka the Dog Star, is the brightest star in Canis Major, or the Big Dog, constellation, hence the Dog Days of Summer.

How does your life shift in the summertime?

If you have school-aged children or grandchildren, chances are you spend a bit more time with them than you do in the rest of the year.

If you teach any kind of class, chances are your classes are smaller this time of year.

If you work in the hospitality industry or any medical field where there’s flexibility in the timing of treatments, your workload increases...

Today is Made in the USA Day, Thursday is Independence Day, and the short work week means most US workers have more freedom than normal this weekend – four days off instead of two. Today, let’s talk about freedom from a slightly different perspective – let’s talk about the freedom you either do or don’t allow yourself to feel.

• Have you ever come up against something that felt unfair to you, and you rebelled? That’s you, allowing your freedom.
• Have you ever been in a situation where you felt intimidated, maybe because of an authority figure? That’s you, disallowing your freedom.

America was formed because of those two different approaches to freedom. Ours is a country created through civil, then not-so-civil, disobedience. The words “free” and “freedom” crop up in our foundation documents eight times – four times in the Declaration of Independence, 3 in the Bill of Rights, and once in the Constitution. As a...

Are you a Jimmy Buffet fan? A full-on Parrothead? Or maybe you’re someone who never understood the appeal of a man who wore loud shirts, shorts, and performed barefoot in front of thousands of adoring fans?

It doesn’t matter where you land on the Beach Balladeer’s spectrum of fandom, you’ve probably lived through a figurative hurricane season or two in your life, and maybe even been in the path of one or two literal hurricanes. It’s Hurricane Season 2024 from now through the end of October, and again this year, there will be people who will try to reason with hurricane season. Literal hurricanes, yes – and figurative ones, too.

Let’s use this Jimmy Buffett song as a springboard to talk about the very human trait of trying to control things that are completely uncontrollable. When a particularly stubborn person realizes their attempts at control have failed, they often try their hand at bargaining or even digging in their heels, adamantly...

This week marks the summer solstice – it actually happens the day after tomorrow. This week also marks the winter solstice, which oddly enough also happens the day after tomorrow.

How can this be? It depends on your vantage point. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, Thursday at 4:50 PM eastern time is the exact time of summer solstice. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Thursday at 4:50 PM eastern time is the exact time of winter solstice. It is the astronomical beginning of both summer and winter. Your vantage point determines your upcoming weather forecast.

Have you ever thought about how things can feel very different, depending on your vantage point? Merriam-Webster defines vantage point as “a position or standpoint from which something is viewed or considered.” Point of view can be used interchangeably with vantage point – both mean the same thing. Here are some examples of how your vantage point can drastically change how you experience...

When something hurts so much we say that it breaks our heart – does it really, or does it save it?

Have you ever lost someone you love? And yes, pets count. Can you remember the physicalness of the pain – the pain in your chest, the hollowness of your being? What is that? Why is that? And can we ever “suffer” a loss without suffering?

Probably not, and you probably wouldn’t want to, either.

Professor Yoram Yovell, a researcher on the relationship between emotional and physical pain and expert on the neurobiology of love and emotions, has studied why love and loss hurts so much. Turns out, emotional pain has a strong survival benefit – it alerts us to the fact that something has changed in our lives that we need to pay attention to.

When babies – human or not – are without their mother, they cry a very specific cry. Yes, the cry alerts their mother to return to them, and for the researchers, there was a surprising finding:...