Fill your Budget with Happiness
Fall. It’s Budget time.
One of the biggest process and rituals of nowadays corporations has its climax in this month. Many of my readers, I bet, are somehow involved, sweating to create positive messages, building Story Telling flows, re hearsing speeches.
How much time are they spending on Planning their Happiness?
According to ancient greek philosophers and today sociologist and thinkers, including Dale Carnagie : “Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”
So, I suggest you spend your October time planning your Happiness while working on next year Budget: in case you would miss it at least you are prepared to face it in an happier way!
Rewire yourself
Aiming to understand more about how to change my “inner conditions” and increase my Happiness , I got a certificate from a Yale online Course led by professor Laurie Santos: “The Science of Well Being” and I practised the suggestions in the book by Franco Berrino, Daniel Lumera and David Mariani: 21 days to rewire yourself (21 giorni per rinascere).
Summer break helped me taking the decision to try rewiring myself: I increased time spent on Exercise through regular swimming sessions; I revised my diet following Berrino’s suggestion and stopping taking sugar, alcohol, caffeine, meat, processed food while increasing seasonally available vegetables, nuts and raw food. Meditation played an important role as well, after a workshop with my Finance team and the suggestions coming from Lumera in stopping ruminating on the past, forgiving the evil you had to bear and focusing on today, paying attention to what you actually do. Finally, the consideration from Yale professor Laurie Santos boosted my attention to social connections, savouring and sleeping. After 3 weeks of intense work, using WOOP techniques to plan all my changes, I noticed a great change in my Happiness levels.
Being a CFO, I measured the output in a Scientific way, taking the The PERMA Profiler, a validated, 23-question survey that measures five pillars of well-being known as PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment, just before and right after my rewire, obtaining an improvement of about 1 point out of 10. Then I took The Authentic Happiness Inventory, a validated, 24-question survey that measures overall well-being. At the end of the survey I again improved versus baseline. Finally my body reacted positively, I lost 7 Kilos and cholesterol went down to 170 from 250.
After almost two years from starting my blog The Happy CFO , I feel very proud of this change: different diet makes the world a bit more sustainable, socialising my improvements I keep on building Happiness around me.
Budget your 2019 Happiness
What would happen if company Budget discussions and presentations include more time on how we are planning ours and our team Happiness? It has been demonstrated that Happy organisations generate much better and sustainable results. Then we should expand the scope of the yearly Budget discussion including concrete actions to increase our teams happiness, engage in social and community improvements and link our usual Financial Planning to the company Happiness plan. The power of such approach stays in the fact that according to Burke: “(Company associates) Men are not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies” so if every manager would discuss an ambitious Happiness goal for the team,” the pursuit of happiness” would become real and the Company outcome much better than a classic Financially focused Budget deal.
As always you can find more ideas here
