‘The Happiness Project’ Author Gretchen Rubin on Wellbeing at Work

MARY MELTON: Today, I’m talking to Gretchen Rubin about cultivating happiness at work. Gretchen is one of the most influential thought leaders on the topic of happiness. She’s the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including The Happiness Project . Her latest book is Life in Five Senses , and it just came out in April. It’s estimated that we spend roughly a third of our lives working. That is a lot of time. So it’s important that we take the time to figure out how to make work as fulfilling as possible. We’ve enlisted Gretchen’s expertise on this topic. Here’s my conversation with Gretchen.

MARY MELTON: Thank you so much for being here on WorkLab .

GRETCHEN RUBIN: I’m so happy to get the chance to talk to you. 

MARY MELTON: Well, I would love to start with how you got interested in happiness. Can you tell us your origin story? Because it’s very—I feel like it’s very relevant to the moment we’re in right now.

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Well, it was a very ordinary moment in my life. I live in New York City, and I was in the pouring rain, I was stuck on a city bus that was just inching forward. And I had one of those rare opportunities for reflection that you often don’t have, and the tumult of everyday life. And I thought—I looked out the window and I thought, well, what do I want from life anyway? Well, I want to be happy. And I realized I didn’t spend any time thinking about whether I was happy, if it was possible to make yourself happy, or what they even mean by the term happiness . So the very next day, I went running to the library and got a giant stack of books about happiness, because I thought, well, I should do a happiness project. And since then, the subject of happiness is so vast and so compelling that I’ve been basically exploring different sub-themes within happiness ever since.

MARY MELTON: So why do you think business leaders in particular should be thinking about the happiness of their employees?

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Happier people are more productive. They are more focused. They make better team members and better leaders. They’re more likely to help out. They have healthier habits. They’re less likely to suffer from burnout. Somebody showing up for work who’s happier is going to be doing a better job. And so whatever we can do to help each other to be happy is worth doing.

MARY MELTON: As a leader, or as a manager, if you do see that someone may not seem like they’re happy at work, do you have a recommendation for what they could do? 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Well, it’s going to be very different for different people, of course, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and that’s actually the most important thing to keep in mind. It sounds very obvious, but it’s very different because, like, let’s say you’re working with somebody who seems very obviously stressed out. Why don’t I encourage them to start meditating? I mean, you might think, that worked great for me, let’s suggest it for someone else. But the fact is, no tool works for every hand. And you really have to think about, well, what’s true for this person? There are many, many reasons why a person might be stressed out, and so the most important thing is to be a good listener. Sometimes the very opposite of the thing that would work for you might work for somebody else.

MARY MELTON: Well, this seems to speak directly to two main keys to happiness that you write about a lot and have spoken about a lot: strong relationships and self-knowledge. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Exactly. So, strong relationships matter so much at work. So, it’s that manager, but then also, do you have a friend at work? This is another thing that they see when they talk to people who are happy at work. And having a friend at work isn’t just, like, having people that you can sort of joke around with about, you know, pop culture. This is somebody where you could confide an important secret. This is somebody who has your back. And so having a friend at work makes a big difference. So that goes right to relationships. And then the other thing is self-knowledge. Even something as simple as morning people and night people. This is largely genetics and a function of age. And let’s say you have an 8 a.m. meeting and you’re like, wow, now that I’m asking around on our team, we’re mostly night people. Maybe we can switch this meeting to 11 a.m. That’s the self-knowledge, and thinking, like, if it’s possible to make changes to suit the people who are involved with them, we should seek to do so. 

MARY MELTON: I love that. And it feels like when we’re talking about self-knowledge, it’s a good spot to discuss this framework that you developed called the Four Tendencies. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Yes. So I’ll explain this. And most people know exactly what they are just from this brief description. But if people want to take a quiz, you can go to my website . It’ll tell you what you are and give you a little report and explain the framework. But what this framework looks at is how you respond to expectations, which sounds dry, but it turns out to be really useful. So we all face two kinds of expectations: outer expectations, like a work deadline; and inner expectations, like my own desire to keep a New Year’s resolution. And depending on whether you meet or resist outer and inner expectations, you are an upholder, a questioner, an obliger, or a rebel. So, upholders readily meet outer and inner expectations. They meet the work deadline, they keep the New Year’s resolution without much fuss. They want to know what other people expect from them, but their expectations for themselves are just as important. So their motto is ‘Discipline is my freedom.’ Then there are questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They’ll do something if they think it makes sense. They resist anything arbitrary, inefficient, unjustified. They’re often told they ask too many questions. So they’re making everything an inner expectation. If something meets their inner standard, make sense, they’ll do it, no problem. If it fails their inner test, they will resist. So their motto is ‘I’ll comply if you convince me why.’ Then there are obligers, which, by the way, is the biggest tendency for both men and women. This is that you either are an obliger, you have many obligers in your life—second largest is questioner. Obligers readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. So these are people who say, I keep my promises to everybody else. Why can’t I keep my promises to myself? So the secret for obligers is, if they want to meet an inner expectation, they must create a form of outer accountability. So if you want to read more, you join a book group. If you want to exercise more, you work out with a trainer. You think of your duty to be a role model for other people. You need that outer accountability, even to meet an inner expectation. They’re the rock of the world. They’re the people who are the most likely to come through to help others, but they have trouble meeting their expectations for themselves. So their motto is, ‘You can count on me, and I’m counting on you to count on me.’ And then finally, rebel. Rebel is the smallest tendency. Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do in their own way, in their own time. They can do anything they want to do, anything they choose to do. But if you ask or tell them to do something, they are very likely to resist. And typically they don’t tell themselves what to do. Like, they don’t sign up for a 10 a.m. spin class on Saturday because they think, well, I don’t know what I am going to feel like doing on Saturday. And just the idea that someone expects me to show up is going to annoy me. So their motto is ‘You can’t make me, and neither can I.’ So those are the four. 

MARY MELTON: And I would imagine that knowing your own tendency, and then also as a manager, having an inkling at least what the tendencies are of the people who are working with you might be really useful. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Oh, it’s extraordinarily useful. And I’ll give you just a couple of examples. One of the things about questioners is they can sometimes drain and overwhelm other people with their constant questioning. So let’s say you’re a manager and there’s some kind of office change that’s going to happen. So you’re in there, you’re giving a presentation to everybody and a few people’s hands just keep going up, keep going up. You can tell that everybody else is getting annoyed. You could say, if you feel like you understand why we’re making this change and you feel ready to go back to your work, please feel free. If you would like to stay and have me answer more questions about why we feel like this is the right change to make, I’m happy to stay. Because you’re like, I need to get those questioners onboard because they will just ignore it. If they don’t think it makes any sense, they will just quietly go about their own business their own way, which is often not that helpful in a group environment. But you can sort of say for some people, I’ll answer their questions, but not everybody has to sit through these questions. And then let’s say you’re managing and you see that somebody is kind of not doing what they’re supposed to do. You might think, Oh, let’s have a check in meeting every Friday. Let me give you deliverables, like, let me up the accountability. If you’re dealing with an obliger, that would work very well. They respond very well to outer accountability. If you’re dealing with a rebel that might actually accelerate their resistance, like, they might push back more and more because they don’t want to feel controlled by you, in which case you would do an appeal to their identity. Something like, You know what, I don’t need to check in with you all the time. I mean, I know I keep asking you, but I’ve worked with you before. I know you’ve got the chops to pull this off. If you run into any roadblocks, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just expect to see your excellent product. And so you can see where these are very different approaches. And it also explains a lot of conflict where one person’s just not understanding where somebody else is coming from. Sometimes people feel very defensive around questioners because they’re like, Well, you don’t trust my judgment. Why do you keep questioning my decisions? Where questioners truly just want to understand why, like, just take me through it. And so questioners often also need to learn how to ask questions that feel constructive and don’t make other people feel defensive or uncomfortable. 

MARY MELTON: With so much going on, there are just a ton of stressors coming at us. It can be really hard for people to even know where to start on the path to a happier life. What do you recommend as a first step? 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. If you’re feeling out of control, do good, feel good really works. Even something as small as making an e-introduction to two people that you know would benefit from knowing each other, or recommending an electrician to help that person get business, or whatever. Volunteering, donating money, even learning about an important issue so you feel like you’re participating in your civic duty better. And if we’re feeling very anxious, action is often an antidote to anxieties. Another thing to think about is your own body. It’s very easy to get up in our heads. Even something as simple as, Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting some exercise? Are you making sure that you’re not letting yourself get too hungry or too thirsty? Our physical experience always colors our emotional experience. It’s going to affect you. 

MARY MELTON: Let’s dig into that just a little bit, because your newest book, Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World , and about how tuning into our five senses can really brighten our lives. So, how about cutting through the noise at work for someone who may be feeling a little overstimulated in a sensory way? 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Yeah. You know, doing the research for our Life in Five Senses showed me something about the open plan that I hadn’t really realized was a factor, which is that our brains are specially tuned to information about people—people mean danger and people mean opportunity. And, you know, humans are one of the most social species on the planet, and we really depend on each other. And so it makes sense that we have special areas of the brain to help us pick out faces and identify faces. We even identify faces when they aren’t there, like on the front of a car, and the man on the moon. Our hearing is tuned particularly well to hear the human voice. And so if you’re in a place where there’s a lot of people around, you’re going to find that particularly distracting more than if it was just other kinds of visual information, auditory information—because it’s people. So what can we do with this? Because the open plan is here to stay. I’m a person who needs a lot of visual simplicity when I am trying to focus. Other people are abundance lovers. There’s simplicity lovers and abundance lovers, and abundance lovers like stuff. They like piles and they like collections. And they like a lot of photograph collage. They find that stimulates their creativity and helps them to focus. Whereas simplicity lovers want a bare counter, not much on the walls, you know, more of a simple environment. And in an open plan, you’ve got people with different preferences working very closely together. What I find is that often people want to argue that their preference is objectively true. And so it’s easier to say, You prefer it one way, I really prefer it a different way. How do we create an environment where we both feel comfortable and can thrive? That’s different from me being the boss and saying, A cluttered desk means a cluttered mind. Everybody in this office should have a clean desk because that’s what works best. It’s like, well, that’s what works best for me. So part of it is just being able to articulate preferences and sort of thinking, okay, is there a way we can come at a place where all of us can deal with it? And another thing is to think about, are there ways that you can get the environment that you need? So one is obviously headphones, which of course everybody now has headphones. So, Mary, if you need to focus, if you’re really needing to concentrate, do you want silence? Do you want a busy home like a coffee shop? Do you want music with words? Do you want music without words? These are like the big ones. What do you like? 

MARY MELTON: I cannot have music with words. There’s no way. Maybe a little classical music. Just slightly in the background. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Right. And I need silence, or maybe a busy hum. I was talking to somebody where if she was doing work with words, she wanted music without words. And if she was working like in Excel, she wanted music with words. So, I mean, part of it is to know your own preferences and to really think like, well, what is true for me? Can you clear clatter? Can you turn off notification sound? Can you reduce the sounds of things around you that might be disruptive? If you’re feeling very distracted by your phone, can you turn it to grayscale? So it’s just a much more utilitarian and much less compelling device. There’s a lot of ways that we can play with our environments and try to shape them to suit ourselves, because I think sometimes we just don’t even think about it. 

MARY MELTON: Yeah, it seems like this gets so much back to that root of just self-knowledge, knowing yourself and taking the time really to identify these things that you maybe have taken for granted or never really thought about that actually could have a real effect on your productivity and happiness. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: No, absolutely. And the kind of corollary to that is just recognizing that other people may be different. And one of the things that has just astonished me in my study of the senses is we all live in our own unique sensory environment. We have to sort of show consideration for each other, and for ourselves, because maybe everybody else is fine with something. But you’re like, I really can’t work with that music playing. I know you guys all really like it, but it’s really, really affecting me and I’m finding it very hard to tune it out. 

MARY MELTON: Right, right. And it speaks to routines. We hear a lot right now about, oh, you got to do, you know, before 6 o’clock in the morning, make a 25-step matcha tea and just turn off. All these things that feel like, oh, you don’t even possibly have the time or inclination to do any of those things. What do you say to people who think that they have to follow a certain routine to achieve that, especially with all of the noise that’s coming at us, that that’s what we should be doing? 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Well, again, it’s just this idea that just because something works for someone else doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. Or just because something works for you doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for someone else. For instance, on the Happier podcast, the podcast that I have with my sister, the last couple of years we’ve had challenges based on the year. So we had Walk 20 in ’20, which is walk for 20 minutes in 2020, and then there was read 21 in ’21, rest 22 in ’22, and go outside 23 in ’23. And what happens is all these people do these things and it’s like, You could have done this at any time. You don’t need us to say you can read for 21 minutes or you could go outside for 23 minutes. But people sort of needed a reminder and a push and a little bit of encouragement along the way. That’s what would work for them. And so I think sometimes you hear about these morning routines, and it just rings true and you get that sense of like, Ooh, I want to try that. That sounds good. But then sometimes you’re like, Oh, I don’t know, getting up at 6 a.m. I have not historically had good success with that. One really good thing to ask yourself is, when have I succeeded in the past? Let’s say you want to have the habit of exercise. Is there a time in the past where you did exercise regularly, and then can you try to make it bring into now the element that allowed you to do it in the past? But this idea that there’s sort of one right way or one best way, people do want that. They want to be told it, even though it often does, it won’t work. And so now when people say to me, you know, what’s the best way, I’m always like, well, what’s the best way to cook an egg? And then people say, Well, it depends on how I want my eggs. And then some people say to me very proudly, Well, I don’t even like eggs. And I’m like, That’s my point. I can’t tell you the best way to cook an egg, because it depends on how you like your eggs. 

MARY MELTON: Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much. Gretchen. This has been such a pleasure to get to speak with you about ways in which we can bring more happiness and all five of our senses to work. 

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Well, thanks so much. I so enjoyed the conversation. 

MARY MELTON: Thank you again to Gretchen Rubin. And that’s it for this episode of WorkLab , the podcast from Microsoft. Please subscribe and check back for the next episode, where we’ll be talking with Jenny Lay-Flurrie, the chief accessibility officer at Microsoft. If you’ve got a question you’d like for us to pose to leaders, drop us an email at [email protected], and check out the WorkLab digital publication, where you’ll find transcripts of all our episodes, along with thoughtful stories that explore the ways we work today. You can find all of it at Microsoft.com/WorkLab. As for this podcast, please rate us, review us, and follow us wherever you listen. It helps us out a lot. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Mary Melton, and my co-host is Elise Hu. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produced this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thank you for listening.