Understanding The New Happy with Ashish Kothari and Stephanie Harrison

Ashish Kothari: Hi, dear Stephanie. It is so lovely to have you with us on the Happiness Squad podcast.

Stephanie Harrison: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here with you. It's such an honor.

Ashish Kothari: You know, I have been following you. And friends, if you're listening, Stephanie is the most creative expressionist of happiness and has an ability to take some of the most complex topics and bring them to life through just magical visualization.

Her graphics are unbelievable. I'm a huge fan. And so it is a real pleasure to have her with us. Her book is coming out in May. It's called The New Happy. I had an early copy that she kindly shared with me. And I know you will love it.

There'll be so much resonance with Hardwired for Happiness that you have read and the practical nature of the tips she offers, the illustrations she has. I mean, they are going to bring a smile and there is so much here that we'll talk about.

But I'll start with the first question we always ask our guest, Stephanie, because your book is called The New Happy, it is the question. It was written for you. We've practiced it 60 times already with other guests, but this is the real one.

What does happiness mean to you? And how has that definition changed from the old to the new happy?

Stephanie Harrison: It's so funny, isn't it? It's absolutely perfect. I feel so honored. I currently define happiness as being a part of a community that gives and receives, so giving and receiving.

I believe that true happiness comes from being yourself in service of others, and that's certainly not what I used to believe. As you've read in my book, which all was centered around a quest for achievement, for perfection, for superiority, and for a sense of being the best that you can be.

Going through this shift has been a really interesting journey. And as you said, I hope that anyone who might resonate with that previous version of happiness and is hoping for something different might find some tools or support in the work that I do.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. I love it. It's such a common feeling and I run into this all the time. It was the same story for me. We hustle for worthiness through our achievements, fame, and money. If we get all that, then we feel worthy and hence happy. Then there is something missing.

And I love your framing, which is know who you are and from that serve others. And if we serve others, the research is so clear; when we give, we are happier. So I love it.

Now, I know you've had an amazing career. You've been a consultant, worked at LinkedIn, at Thrive, and all through, you also traversed life’s challenges and obstacles. So share a bit, Stephanie, of your personal story of how you came to 'The New Happy'.

Stephanie Harrison: Yes. As I said, I had always believed that certain achievements would make me happy. It wasn't something I was consciously aware of; it was deeply ingrained within me. That's what you do to be happy. And I lived my life according to those principles and objectives.

Then, one day in my early 20s, I had this big fancy job and a really nice little apartment in New York City. I had everything I had always dreamed of achieving or experiencing, and yet I found myself struggling very much, experiencing health problems, struggling with my mental health, feeling as though nothing I did really mattered.

There’s this whole range of signals that was indicating that things weren’t working out for me. Finally, they got loud enough where I was willing to listen to them and started to think, maybe I've gotten something wrong here. Maybe I've made some mistakes that if I learn a little bit more, I could try to correct them in the future.

That led me to start studying happiness and ultimately to get a grad degree in positive psychology and eventually start my company, which is based upon the work I did when I was in graduate school.

I was really interested to unravel these stories we've told ourselves about happiness in our culture—where they come from, why they exist, and who benefits from them. What are the things that we're taking for granted that might not actually be serving us?

What I discovered became very clear. We have all the wonderful information about what we need to do to be happy. All of those answers that I was looking for when I was having my own breakdown, they're out there, in academic journals. They weren't as popularized as they are today, but there were certainly something that I could find.

At first, I was amazed and so grateful that all these amazing scientists had figured out the answers to my questions. Then I got really mad because I realized everything we learned from our culture was so different from what the scientists had discovered about the sources and pathways to true happiness.

I wanted to understand how we got to that place and what we could do differently, how we can unwind the old happy in our lives and experience true happiness. So I spent my time at grad school researching this and then once I left, I also continued to study it in my own time and starting to build this philosophy of happiness.

At a certain point along that journey, my partner became really sick out of nowhere. He just woke up one day and was not feeling well. We were left pursuing a cure for an illness no doctor could diagnose. We had no idea what was going on and what the problems were.

He slowly declined and became completely dependent on me to be his caregiver, and I eventually left my job to help support him. It was at that time that I decided to work full-time on sharing this message with the world and started making the artwork you talked about so generously, and sharing these ideas with people.

Not only was it something I wanted to offer to others, but also how I knew from my research that helping others was the best way to help myself in that really difficult moment.

As difficult and painful as that time was, it also led me to be able to do this work that I do now. It also gave me a chance to take those ideas about happiness and this philosophy that I developed and then actually test it in my own life and see if it worked.

And I was thrilled to find out that it did, which spurred me on even further to want to share it with people in case they might find it useful too.

Ashish Kothari: It's such a beautiful yet painful story. Life. I mean, your life has shown that those who are happy don't necessarily avoid suffering. You are a lived life experiment of how, in suffering, if I hadn't learned what I did, both from your experiences and those of your partner, life would have been very different.

It's not about the absence of suffering, but about building that resilience and those skills that allow us to navigate it.

Stephanie Harrison: So true. And building on what you're saying, another belief that I had about happiness, which really ties into this old happy idea, is that a happy life is one where there is no suffering, where there are no challenges, and everything is moving along perfectly.

When I say that out loud, it sounds obviously impossible. But deep down, a lot of us actually believe that we just have to arrange our lives in the perfect configuration and then we will be permanently happy.

Letting go of that need to strive to control all of the events of your life or to shape them into something that it's not could have led me to work really hard to try and make my life something that it wasn't, and that really wouldn't have helped me because it would have disconnected me from so many things that are personally important to me and my values.

Instead, accepting what was going on and striving to navigate through this is what led me to discover my love of creating art, and I never would have found that otherwise. So, as you're saying, it's about finding happiness alongside life's inevitable sufferings.

Ashish Kothari: Victor Frankl said it beautifully: it is when we give meaning to suffering that makes the suffering meaningful, and we grow from it. We know from all the post-traumatic growth research that more people grow from trauma than get depressed. It requires real work, and the field of happiness and the science behind it offer a powerful way to do this.

You know, Stephanie, I'm going to share something with you. In my 25 years before I launched Happiness Squad with consulting, I was at five different firms, including 17 years at McKinsey. I have friends across all different consulting firms, and what you describe is something we put up with. We feel not enough and we just live it.

I've heard this more from my female friends than from male friends, although I don't think it's any different. Men sometimes are even more closed. Many young women friends have shared struggles, like one who, despite being physically healthy, couldn't conceive and when she did get pregnant, she lost the baby.

Others have told me about crying every flight home on Thursday or having to get off a plane because they felt so anxious.

Personally, in: 2014

We don't want to share it, then we keep living. I want to acknowledge it takes a lot of courage to break out and choose to go a different path and then stay with it when the opportunity arises. Friends, there is possibility in choosing to break the norm of what our lives have become. That normal is not normal.

Stephanie Harrison: It's so funny, isn't it? I was joking around with one of my old friends a couple of months ago. We were talking about if our younger selves could see what we're doing now, what would they think? I was joking that my younger self would be horrified that I make pictures for the internet.

Like, how did you go from being a management consultant to doing that? If my younger self saw that I had stepped off of that path I had worked so hard to get onto, they would probably be horrified. But of course, that younger self didn't know that the norm wasn't working and certainly wasn't working for me. I was lucky enough to be able to take a different path.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. And you know, reflecting back on your younger self, I often do this exercise with many of my clients. We do this 80th birthday exercise. I'm sure you've done that with your clients too.

I had one client, a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company. We were having this conversation about what his next steps should be. He has achieved a lot here, but what does the next look like for him?

We did this 80th birthday meditation together, celebrating his 80th birthday party. He had tears running down his face because as he looked to his 80th and connected again to his core— who he is, his strengths, what he really cares about, and what he wants to be remembered by—he realized he had wasted 40 years of his life not doing any of this.

So there's a reflection on the younger self that can be shocking, but when we look at our future self and allow ourselves to tune deeply within to what we would want to hear, there is so much opportunity that opens up for choosing a different path.

Stephanie Harrison: That's such a beautiful exercise. I adore that.

Ashish Kothari: So my friend, let's dig into your two core things around new happy that you started with: discovering who you are and the second piece, serving others. Talk to us a bit about what are some ways our listeners can start that journey of discovering who they really are?

Stephanie Harrison: Such a good question. Where to begin? I would love your thoughts too. I think that for many of us, the journey begins with the practice of self-acceptance and the recognition that there are no conditions of your self-worth.

You can do something amazing and it doesn't make you more worthy, and you can do something horrible and it doesn't make you any less worthy. Learning to adopt that perspective was so foreign to me. What do you mean that what I do doesn't define my worth as a person and the value that I have?

I think that's usually the idea I like to introduce people with to start: this recognition of there's, you've probably heard throughout the course of your life, all the ways in which you're not good enough, you're too loud, or you're too quiet, or you're too slow, or you're too fast, and the list goes on forever.

We have to sort of cast those off a little bit and recognize the truth of our inherent worthiness, which we can do by taking a step back and looking at any other person that we see and thinking about their worthiness as a human being and recognizing, like looking at you, I would never put conditions on your worth.

I would never say that just because he said this, he's no longer good enough. So can I practice extending that to myself as well? You don't have to accept yourself fully at this moment; that's probably going to be too hard for most of us who've been really conditioned by old happy. But you can start to practice.

And the more that you can start to embody that and try to see yourself through those eyes of unconditional self-acceptance, the more it starts to become a little bit ingrained within you and it influences your choices, which then makes it all easier and you start to create this positive upward spiral.

So that's usually where I advise people to start with, at least as an introduction to the concept.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah, and I would add self-acceptance and self-love. Just loving ourselves for who we are and recognizing that nothing in the world is perfect. We're not perfect, but that doesn’t make us less worthy. We are all works in progress. I love that.

We had Dr. Shauna Shapiro on our podcast about three, four months ago. We'll tag it again on this. She wrote this beautiful book, "Good Morning, I Love You." Her message was about the motion of acknowledging yourself every morning and saying, "Hey, I love you," instead of feeling like you're not enough.

It’s amazing to me there are so many people who will hear this and cringe, but if you don’t love yourself, how can you expect others to love you?

Stephanie Harrison: It’s also this recognition of when you think about the times that it’s been easy for you to grow or to take on challenges or to do something that's different or new, what made it easier for you?

It was probably having somebody who cared about you, who was cheering you on or was in your corner or supporting you or coaching you through it. So why would that be any different for yourself? Loving yourself would make those things that you want to do much easier.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah, and accepting ourselves for wherever we are and recognizing that we can still move forward. Always growing.

Stephanie Harrison: Exactly. It’s like we’ve equated this idea that if you accept yourself or if you love yourself, then that means that you don’t want to change, which is just so fundamentally silly.

Of course, if you have that sense of love for yourself, you want to grow and you want to improve, and it actually becomes a lot easier. So I totally reject the idea that loving yourself means that you're not interested in growth. You can do both at the same time.

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. And we are able to achieve so much more because we're doing it from a place of groundedness. It's a classic piece again that goes into how people tell themselves the story that they are perfectionists and what they're really trying to run away from is the feeling of not being good enough or that a job will define them.

If you look at most animals, they seem to be quite content with just being—they're in the moment, eating grass or sitting out there. But humans, although we call ourselves 'beings,' should probably be called 'human doings' because we don't like to just be.

Our whole sense of worthiness is tied to achieving and doing things. It’s amazing to me how someone would cancel a client meeting and immediately wonder, "What can I fill that time with?"

Stephanie Harrison: Yeah, totally. Got to use the time productively.

Ashish Kothari: Self-acceptance and love is one way that we can start to know ourselves. What else?

Stephanie Harrison: From there, I advise people to pursue recognizing that they have unique goals and motivations and desires for their life, and moving towards those is a good thing and something that is really important for them to continue becoming who they are.

We are all attracted to certain pursuits or ideas or hobbies that light us up or inspire us. The problem arises when we decide those things aren't good enough for us or they won’t help us to be successful or prove our worthiness.

So we ignore them and push them away in favor of doing what we're supposed to do and achieving the goals set out by our society. Tuning into those things that bring you joy or make you feel alive is so important for your well-being.

When you're deeply entrenched in old happy, you might not have any idea what those are. So how do you start small and start thinking, "I sort of want to read this book today," or "This television show is really interesting to me. I wonder what it is that I'm attracted to about it."

Notice these little signals that the world gives you as you engage with it about how you are being pulled towards something. The part of old happy culture is this idea that you have to push yourself, and push, and push, and never stop pushing.

In fact, when we are intrinsically motivated by something, when it's something you find enjoyable or interesting for the joy of doing it, you don’t have to push yourself at all; you're pulled towards it.

If you do that, then you're able to experience profound joy of engaging with the world while also becoming more and more of yourself. That's one of the most beautiful things about us as humans and the more we can tap into that, the happier we're going to be.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. I mean, it is so beautiful. I've always said this on an earlier podcast, my original book, Stephanie, wasn't called "Hardwired for Happiness." It was actually called "From Fear to Freedom."

Stephanie Harrison: Oh, I love that too. That's a beautiful title as well.

Ashish Kothari: Right. So I'm probably going to re-release the book again under that title. But really, that's what I've been researching. The whole field of happiness wasn't what I was researching, but I fell into that.

But the notion, as I always say, is you really need the gravitational pull of purpose to pull you out of the gravitational pull of fear. Otherwise, if you don't have that, if you don't have something that is pulling you, you will go back and revert to what feels comfortable yet painful.

Because we are programmed for so many years growing up, and then we build this lifestyle where there are external entrants, things in the moment that we tie our happiness to, leaving them in pursuit of something which, in society, would be considered silly.

So silly. Like, why would you do that? You have a stable job. Why would you risk that? You don't even know if it's going to work. There is so much fear and so many of these echoes that we hear back. Unless we find something like that, it just is hard to break away from it.

Stephanie Harrison: It resonates so much with me hearing you say that. I couldn't agree more. And I feel that reflected in my own life experience. There were so many things that I wanted to do, but I was always so afraid of doing them. Afraid to even acknowledge them to myself, as though admitting them to myself was going to bring the world crashing down around me.

It all just got suppressed, and you just need to push it down so that you don't even acknowledge it because your life might explode. But the only thing that helped me overcome that fear was doing it for other people, finding that greater purpose that you're talking about because otherwise, I never would have been brave enough to do it.

That pull of your purpose, of the things that bring you joy, that are meaningful and important to you, is like the difference between swimming upstream in a river trying to fight the current and get to your destination versus flowing with the river.

So much of the advice I see online about achieving your goals is all about getting better at swimming upstream. Like, let’s arrange our lives so that we can be really strong enough to push through the forces. Instead, I would love for people to say, "How do I float downstream instead toward the things that are important and meaningful to me?"

's absolutely—my mantra for: 2024

"Stillness in motion" is a beautiful concept. And this is the image that came to me: imagine two eagles soaring in the sky on wind currents, covering miles without fluttering a single wing. It's similar to what you're saying about finding your downstream and getting into the flow.

It’s about finding the natural wind currents that will carry you, covering miles and miles without expending too much energy. And if we look at natural systems around us, that is the nature of life. Life's nature is not to push and push; it’s about flow.

Stephanie Harrison: That's beautiful. That's a gorgeous image and a beautiful mantra. I love that.

Ashish Kothari: So I always go into that. You also talk about talent, something that we don't think enough people consider. So talk a little bit about talent and how important that is.

Stephanie Harrison: In the book, I argue that we have three different types of gifts that we can discover and they're a part of us. And that's how we share ourselves with the world. One of those is talent.

Talent is something that has many misconceptions about it as a concept and it can be really helpful to break down how one gets a talent because everybody wants to be talented. It’s a beautiful goal.

We all want to feel like we have something important and perhaps unique to offer. What I lay out in the book is kind of like a roadmap for developing talents, which can be used no matter what you want to cultivate.

The way I advise people to think about talents is that these are specific skills that you have learned how to master. That means that no matter what you've been through, or no matter what, if you would like to develop a talent, there's always some way that you can do that.

Yes, of course, let's say you want to be the world's greatest swimmer but you don’t have the right body type, or you have a disability that makes something hard, there are going to be challenges associated with how you decide to move towards that goal, but it's always possible to learn how to cultivate a talent.

Think about my own life as an example. When I started making artwork, I had never used a graphic design program before, never made art before, never posted on social media before. I didn’t have a personal account, any knowledge of how to build a community or any of that stuff.

Those were all talents that I developed. And the way that I did that was by figuring out what was joyful and interesting for me, what felt true and authentic, and then practicing over and over again and cultivating flow states to be able to develop more rapidly and to be able to experience that state of transcendence.

Really testing ideas, trying things, making a ton of mistakes, and making a ton of things that I'm embarrassed by now. But it all mattered because it all added up into now being able to do something that my five years ago self would have never imagined.

So if there's a talent that you want to develop, it's something you can do. It's just about figuring out what it is that calls to you, make sure you're choosing the right thing, the one that's authentic, and then identify what you can do in order to practice and cultivate that on a regular basis. If you do that, you will absolutely see the results that you're looking for.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. And I cannot believe that you only started graphics drawing how many years ago?

Stephanie Harrison: In: 2020

The artwork that I share comes from the pictures in my head. That's how I see things. When I read research, I have these mental conceptualizations of it. It's very intuitive to me. But when I started trying to translate these concepts, I knew that I didn't have the skill to do things that were complicated.

So I decided to be the girl who does really simple stuff, embracing a weakness and trying to turn it into a strength.

Ashish Kothari: I just had a conversation this morning, Stephanie, with the most amazing 70-year-old. Her name is Bina Mirchandani. She's part of our community, in India. She was a very successful executive in the retail space.

A year ago, at 69, she decided to start painting. She just finished her first public exhibition. She sold 10 out of her 15 pieces. Her work is amazing. This notion that we're not fixed at any age, and it doesn't need to be complicated either.

We can all become something new. In fact, friends, here's another statistic for you. Did you know that the you that you think you are—every cell in your body is a new cell in three months? Your body regenerates not all at the same time but continuously. The reality is that who you are three months from now is not going to be the you that you are today.

The same is true for everything outside. Our body regenerates every 90 days. Our emotions recycle, I might say, every 90 seconds; emotions rise and fall. Our thoughts change every 90 milliseconds.

Not scientific, I know I'm making it up, just playing on 90. But the reality is our thoughts change faster than our emotions, and our emotions change faster than our body, but we are continuously changing. So is the world around us.

Seasons change, things grow, things move, some at a slower pace, some at a faster pace. But change is the reality of life, yet somehow our egos and our images of who we are and who we're meant to be have this level of fixedness about them.

Stephanie Harrison: It's so true, isn't it? Thinking about the cultural aversion we have to aging, holding on to an idea of how we used to look or what we used to be able to do, and then missing out on all of the things that we can do now that are different and available to us.

Ashish Kothari: I love your art. Every time you put something out there, Stephanie, it comes deep from here. It's simple, but life is simple; we make it complicated. Your simplicity and depth show me how deeply you understand it.

One of my most favorite scientists was Richard Feynman, and I loved him because he could explain the most complicated things in the words of a six-year-old.

Stephanie Harrison: That's so kind of you. Thank you.

Ashish Kothari: So, let's shift to service. Let's shift to the second part, which is discovering who you are, what your unique gifts are, what your talents are, and then you practice so they become a skill so you can then do great things.

Then you say the second aspect of new happy is giving it away, this notion of serving others. Talk a little bit about that.

Stephanie Harrison: Helping other people is the secret to happiness. Our failure to widely acknowledge that, despite abundant research showing how powerful it is to be of service to others, is because it's so counterculture to the way we've been socialized into looking at ourselves and our lives.

The argument I make is that the purpose of life is found in being of service to others. The joy of life, the growth of you as an individual, is found in being of service to others. We are struggling as individuals and as a society because we have sidelined that as a nice-to-have in favor of personal growth, personal achievement, and self-glorification and aggrandization.

Instead, we need to focus on taking ourselves and offering them up to the world. The more that we do that, not only the happier we become, but also we make other people happier too. That's how we can create a happier world.

Ashish Kothari: And isn't it true, Stephanie, sometimes it's even bringing awareness of in what way are you serving the world?

Stephanie Harrison: Totally. Everyone is doing something already. Everyone is already in service. That's the thing that makes me both laugh and very frustrated because if we demean this idea of helping other people, then we don't pay attention to the millions of ways that people are helping one another right now and the support they are giving to people.

The fact that we're having this conversation is an act of service. You're providing me with an active service by inviting me to speak to your community. That is a profound gift. And yet, if we don't have that mindset of looking and recognizing our interdependence upon one another, then it just becomes a transactional thing or something you naturally do.

But it is service and it takes forms every single day for all of us, whether it's through your relationships with your family, what you do in your community, or how you show up for your team at work.

You're already serving and the more you focus on that and continue to find new ways to expand and share yourself as authentically as you can, the more happiness you can experience.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah, it is so powerful. You add, as you serve others, you also start to bring awareness to how many others are serving you.

Culture is so much about the power of the self and self-reliance and self-dependence, which is also at the heart of the mental health crisis because when you say it's all about you, you are afraid to ask for help because you feel you're weak. I love the word Ubuntu. You are because I am.

It’s this notion of serving. And by the way, you don’t have to leave your job to serve others. Other people think serving means, “Hh my God. Now I've been all focused on myself. And now I should leave it and serve others,” or people say “I'm going to serve others outside of my job, but I'm going to serve others when I retire.”

And you covered that point really beautifully too. This notion of how can we be in service? Regardless of where you are and what you're doing. Entrepreneurship is not the only way of being in service.

Stephanie Harrison: No, no. It's so interesting. I remember a while ago I noticed how many people I was speaking to were saying, "Oh, I want to help people. I want to find my new happy and be of service." So I need to quit my job and become a coach. Or I need to give up my whole life or whatever it is and go do something completely different.

And if you want to be a coach, fantastic. Be a coach if that calls to you, but that's not the only path to being of service. There are so many millions of ways to serve and you can do it right now, wherever you are.

It's about your next conversation. It's about the way that you show up for all of the people in the world around you today. And that's what I find really inspiring. You don't have to change your whole life. You can just start behaving a little bit differently and then reap the benefits of the personal joy that you get from that.

Ashish Kothari: And that's where the beautiful part of your book, "Uncover Your Gifts and Serve the World," really comes. You made it really simple.

Look, if you connect what you care about, those things that bring you joy with your talents, things that you are strong in, you combine those two and start to figure out how you can live into those right where you are.

In the place where you work, or if you want to go do something else, that's fine too. So we talk about Ikigai, and if you have a job, you have three out of the four elements of Ikigai, whether you realize it or not.

If you were not leveraging your strengths at work in some shape or form, doing something that you're good at, you wouldn't have the job. If the company wasn't doing something that actually provided value to the world, nobody would pay them money. It wouldn't exist.

I would never give my money to somebody that wasn't serving me. So the company is serving. You've got the humanity need, someone is willing to pay for it, your strengths. So better to try and integrate what you love right here at your job. And I love the title of your chapter: The Perfect Job Nobody Told You About.

Stephanie Harrison: Thank you. Yeah. So we can turn our jobs, the jobs that we have, into ones that allow us to serve. I love how you described that.

Ashish Kothari: It's beautiful. So tell us a little bit, Stephanie, obviously you have this book coming out in May. I can't wait to celebrate you and support you in this book launch.

I've read lots of different books around happiness and when I read your manuscript, I loved the simplicity of it and the authenticity of how you've shared your story. It is so easy to digest and so easy to apply. Thank you for doing that.

That means you serve the world. How can the world find you and really get more of your beautiful voice?

Stephanie Harrison: Oh, thank you so much. You can find most of my work at thenewhappy.com or on social media at newhappyco everywhere.

Ashish Kothari: Beautiful. So as a parting, my last question to you, Stephanie is, you said if your 20-year-old self looked at what you're doing now, she would be amazed. What advice would the older you now give to your younger self?

Stephanie Harrison: What a great question. Honestly, the words that come to mind are just very simple: Keep going. Just keep pursuing what you're doing, which I feel very grateful for. I feel very grateful to my older self for that word of affirmation.

Ashish Kothari: Keep doing right. Don't hustle for worthiness out there.

Stephanie Harrison: Yeah, totally.

Ashish Kothari: Well, my friend, this was a real joy. Thank you.

Stephanie Harrison: Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful to you for all that you do. Thank you.

Ashish Kothari: Take care.

Stephanie Harrison: Thanks.