Nataly Kogan: Happier Now

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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Nataly Kogan. Nataly is an author, speaker, and the founder of Happier, a training organization. Her work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TEDx Boston, and [The Dr. Oz Show]. At Sounds True, Nataly Kogan has written a new book called Happier Now: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Embrace Everyday Moments (Even a Difficult Ones). In her debut book, Happier Now, she teaches readers how to stop searching for some elusive big happy in the future and start finding more joy in everyday moments.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Nataly and I spoke about how she redefined happiness not as a state of ultimate positivity devoid of difficult emotions, but as a skill we can all develop. We talked about the health benefits of practicing gratitude and how we can even practice gratitude when we feel terrible and it doesn’t seem genuine. We talked about the myth of “I’ll be happy when . . . ” and how knowing how our brains work can actually help us deconstruct this myth. Together we also did a five-minute happiness workout. Then we explored how rest and creative activities can actually end up making us more productive, and we talked about the great gift we give each other by being honest about our true emotional state. Here’s my conversation on being happier now with Nataly Kogan:

Nataly, one of the things that really struck me about your new book Happier Now is how much you reveal about yourself and your background, coming to the United States with your mom and dad as a family of immigrating Russian Jews. In the very beginning of the book, you write, “This book in its entirety is my letter of gratitude and love for you, my parents.” It touched me so much to feel how much gratitude and love you feel for your parents. I wanted to start on that note and for you to tell me a little bit about how that love and gratitude for your parents actually became the source of the book Happier Now.

Nataly Kogan: What a wonderful question. Thank you for starting there.

I’m an only child, obviously. We’ve always had a very close family, but immigrating as refugees the way we did at 13 to this day remains the most formative experience of my life. To go through something so difficult and traumatic together, I think there’s only two outcomes afterwards. I think it’s either fear or love. I chose love and so did my parents. We left Russia with nothing. We had six suitcases and a few hundred dollars, and we lived in refugee camps. When we came here, we lived in the projects and on welfare. We had a really rough start.

Throughout all of it, my parents—I can only imagine how much they worried and how much fear they had. I have a daughter right now—Mia—who was the same age I was then. I’m the age my parents were then. I cannot imagine undertaking that journey and bringing us to a new place, [and] we didn’t know if we would get here.

So, to me, it’s not just my gratitude for them to bring me here, but it’s for their beings. In all that struggle, they had a pretty difficult life in Russia. Jews face a lot of persecution. Immigration—coming here, starting their careers over at 40. My parents have always, always, always had hope. They always tried to find some moment for all of us to be OK even when we were in a dire situation.

The story I tell in the book is when we were in Vienna in a refugee settlement with no money, no idea when we would get to the United States, my father—who is a PhD physicist, who is this brilliant man, my hero in life—at night he got this gig making a few dollars unloading crates at a local market just to make a little bit of money. He would do that all night.

One morning he came back, my mom and I were just waking up, we shared this tiny little room. He came in, and he was all dirty and smelly, but he said, “Girls, come. Get up. We’re going to see the Vienna opera house. They have free tours today.” My reaction to this was to say, “You’re absolutely crazy. We have no money in this horrible place. We have no idea when we’ll get to America, and you want to go sightseeing?” I’ll never forget it. My dad looks at me and my mom was already getting up to get dressed because she was like, “Yes, let’s go.” They looked at me and my dad said, “You’re absolutely right. Life is really, really bad right now. It’s awful, but we have a choice. We can either sit here and just wallow in the struggle, or we can take this opportunity to go do something together as a family, see something beautiful, enjoy the city. It doesn’t cost any money. Let’s go.” At the time, I still thought it was crazy and I went along and I made sure he knew and my mom knew I disagreed with this decision, because my idea was always that if there’s something wrong in your life, you own the struggle. You don’t for a moment enjoy any little moment.

I tell that story because, to me, that is something that my parents both embodied so much. That’s the source of my gratitude for them. Yes, the journey to bring me here and the risks and the hardship absolutely, but it’s that they’ve always had hope and they shared that with me and that there was always this sparkle. When I was younger I didn’t appreciate it, but as I’ve gone on my journey in writing this book and thinking about it, I realized just what a gift they’ve given me.

TS: Tell our listeners a little bit about how you went from being this negative teenager, if you will, questioning why you were going sightseeing, to now being the queen of happy and taking on a gratitude experiment at a certain point in your life.

NK: Yes. I think—as most of us—it definitely was not a simple journey or one that I expected. I can tell you that if you had told me 10 years ago that I would the founding a company called Happier or that I would say my life’s mission is to help people be happier or that I would be writing a book called Happier Now, I would laugh you out of the room. It was just the last thing I expected, because there’s a saying about Russians. It says Russians are good at three things: suffering, making others suffer, and complaining about suffering. It would be funny if it wasn’t so true. Suffering is something very deeply rooted in the traditions I come from and my family. It’s something you bond over. It was something that I was very rooted to.

Then you add on top this very difficult refugee experience. We landed in America [and] I was in eighth grade. I hardly spoke English. Everyone made fun of me. I went from being a star student to being in remedial classes. I felt so much doubt and fear and unhappiness. My solution was to find happiness through achievements. That’s the thing I came up with because whenever I achieved anything like I got a good grade or I learned to speak English well enough or I got into a top college, I would feel really good. My parents would feel really good. It was like this happiness bubble.

I thought, “OK, I got it. I’ll blow a lot of these achievement happiness bubbles.” I say that I lived my life with this “I’ll be happy when . . .” mantra. I just kept setting these, “I’ll be happy when I get into a great college. I’ll be happy when I graduate at the top, get a great job, marry a lovely person, have a child, live in New York.” Every time it happened, I had this amazing moment of happiness and I would always share it with my parents because, really, we’d go through it together. Then it would just always pop. It would just always go away and I didn’t know why. I just had to chase the next achievement.

After about two decades of doing this, I hit a wall, Tami. It was burnout, but it was worse. I was hardly functioning at my job. I was not being a very good wife or mother. Everything was very dark and bleak for me. I stumbled—luckily stumbled—across research on gratitude. My father is a scientist, but in Russia to think that anyone studies emotions or happiness, that would be absurd. I read all this research about the benefits of practicing gratitude, of how it doesn’t just improve our mood but also our health and sleep and relationships.

To be honest, my first reaction was, “This is so weird. It’s too simplistic. It’s never going to work for someone as complicated as me.” I just rejected it because, as you know, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves is very firm. I had this story about myself that this wasn’t going to work.

But, I was desperate, and desperation makes you try things. So, I said, “Fine, I’m going to try this gratitude experiment for 30 days. I’m to write down three good things about my day. I’m going to have one kind, grateful interaction with another human being. I’m going to do this for 30 days. It’s definitely not going to work, and then I can feel very smug and justified in my unhappiness.”

The punchline we know, because after about two weeks—it’s not that I became some happy-go-lucky person. I’m still not a happy-go-lucky person. In fact, that’s one of the things I’ve redefined about what it truly means to be happier. I was suddenly, for the first time in my life, able to find joy in those little everyday moments that until that point I just used as stepping stones on the way to chasing these big goals. I mean really little moments, like my daughter greeting me enthusiastically when I came home or the way the sunshine was falling on the tulips that were on the couch or the fact that my husband texted me to say he missed me.

These little, little moments—they had always been there. I had never paused to truly experience the joy and the love and the kindness of them. The incident that really shifted everything of my understanding of, “Wow, this is working,” was we were at a restaurant with my daughter and my husband—a little place near our house. I saw a couple next to us. It just appeared they were new. They were puzzled looking at the menu. I leaned over and I made some suggestions to them. Then I saw the chef back there. I went to say hi to him. I can back and my husband Avi was looking at me as if I had two heads.

I said, “What?” He said, “I can’t believe this.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re here with us. You are present in every interaction. You’re enjoying these little moments.” That was—often what other people reflect on us makes it clear. That was a turning moment for me—to realize that practicing gratitude was absolutely shifting the fabric of my life, because now I could experience joy in these little moments, and doing that actually helped me deal with the difficult moments.

TS: Now, you said something interesting, Nataly. You said, “I’m not a happy-go-lucky person. In fact, I’ve had to redefine happiness in order to be the host of happier.com and write a book like Happier Now.” How have you redefined happiness?

NK: Yes, that’s a great question, because I’ll tell you what I used to think happiness was like. And I encounter—I do a lot of speaking all around the country. We have a big community in Happier. I hear this from people—that we often define happiness as something, first of all, as a state of being. “If you do XYZ, then . . . I’ll be happy when . . .” You do certain things, then you earn the right to be happy. It’s a state of being and it’s void of all negative emotions. That it’s happiness is just about positive emotions. We live in this world that’s constantly saying, “Turn that frown upside down! Cheer up! Stay focused on the positive!”

So, I think most of us used to think of happiness as this state of positivity. That’s what I used to think of it. I was never able to just feel good all the time, so I thought I was failing at happiness. I was failing at life. I was failing at my American dream of becoming happy because I wasn’t feeling good all the time. Oh, I worked so hard to try and not feel any of what we call negative emotions. They were there. They were always there. I started collecting them when we immigrated, and we all encounter them in the course of our lives.

But, I never allowed myself to truly feel any anxiety or sadness or regret or doubt because I was so afraid that that would mean I would get stuck feeling those feelings forever. I would fail at having a good life. First. I tried to escape those feelings with achievements. Then to be honest, when I founded Happier and began practicing gratitude, sometimes I tried to use gratitude as a Band-Aid. I’d feel some difficult emotion and I would just try to overdo it at gratitude because, again, I used to think that happiness is just this state of positive emotions.

What happened with me was I had to go on this new journey. It was a few years ago as I was running Happier and teaching gratitude to so many people, I had to go on this journey to learn that happiness isn’t void of difficult or negative emotions—that it’s not about making our lives or ourselves perfect so we can feel good all the time. We human beings are not meant to feel good all the time. Instead, that happiness comes genuine. Deep-rooted happiness comes from embracing our lives as they are, embracing ourselves as we are, which means that sometimes we feel sad and sometimes we feel joyful—and without judgment or recrimination, to redefine what it truly means to have well-being or happiness as, first of all, not just the feeling but a skill.

I say that happiness is something you do. It isn’t something you feel. It’s something you do. There’s actions. That’s what I write about in my book—these five happier skills of acceptance and gratitude and kindness and the sense of meaning and self-care. It’s also redefining it as not something that you just feel positive all the time. It’s about embracing yourself and your life with all the moments and learning how to be able to live fully in all the moments, the good and the bad, and to be in agreement with your life instead of having to fight with it. That’s how I’ve redefined what it means to truly be happier.

This is why I wrote this book—is to offer that redefinition to folks out there because I cannot tell you how many times a day I encounter people in the Happier community who tell me, “I just don’t think I can ever feel happy.” I say, “Why?” They say, “Because I feel stressed a lot and I’m just this negative person, I guess.” That’s the journey I want on—is to understand that when you feel sadness or stress or regret, it doesn’t mean you’re failing at being happy. It just means you have to redefine what it means. It’s really not about feeling positive all the time.

TS: I noticed I feel so happy when you talked about not having feel positive all the time to be happy.

NK: Yes! Can I just say something? What you just said—do you know how many people have gotten up in the middle of my talk and gone up and given me a hug with tears in their eyes because I gave them permission to just exhale? To not have to struggle all the time, to not feel something bad? I devote so much of my book not just talking about this but offering these little practices that I’ve learned over the years that come from psychology and sociology and yoga and Buddhism—just these practices so we can learn to be OK with not being OK.

TS: Now, you mentioned something interesting. I really want to go into this, Nataly—about how it’s possible that you can use something like gratitude to be a cover or a bandage—I think is the word you used; it’s the word you use in the book—to cover over how we’re actually feeling. I think this gets into something that can be a little tricky for people. When we think about the practice of gratitude, it’s obvious gratitude is good for our health. It releases dopamine when we’re grateful. All these great things happen.

At the same time, I know in my own life if I force myself to be grateful when it’s not natural to me, I feel a little bit like I’m putting sugar over shit, just to use some very plain language. There’s something about it that doesn’t quite feel right. How do we practice gratitude when it’s not feeling true to us?

NK: Yes. It’s a great question. The incident that I shared in Vienna with the refugee camp with my father and my mom—this is exactly what I felt. I didn’t know the word “gratitude.” That wasn’t the language I was using. What my dad was doing in that moment was actually practicing gratitude. He was focusing on something that we could appreciate—being together, doing something nice together amidst—this overwhelming degree of suck that we were in.

I felt that was wrong because I felt that you cannot be grateful when life sucks. That it’s like cheating on reality. That’s the term I had with me—I think I say this in the book—that I felt that to be grateful for something when not everything is OK is like cheating, is like covering it up.

What I’ve had to really learn about gratitude is that it doesn’t ask us to pretend that things are good or to turn a negative into a positive. Gratitude is more a practice of within any moment, to find something—however small—that we can appreciate. One of my favorite ways to think about it was—David Steindl-Rast, who is—I know you guys have published some of his stuff. He’s amazing. He’s a monk who has dedicated his life to sharing gratitude. He said something in an interview once that stuck with me. He said, “Can you be grateful for everything? No, you cannot be grateful for pain or for a loved one suffering, or when you are sick, or for war or conflict. You cannot be grateful for everything. Can you find something to be grateful for in every moment? Yes.”

I think that’s the perspective shift. To me, like what you’re saying, sometimes you’re in a place where you’re not feeling very grateful. The first thing I would say is the first happier skill I talk about is acceptance. Accept that right now, you’re not feeling very grateful. That is OK. That is part of being human. Then after you give yourself that permission—so you’re not sitting there and beating yourself up, “Oh, you’re so ungrateful,” which again is something we do—once you give yourself a little bit of that space to realize, “OK, this is how I feel. It’s OK,” to me, that practice of gratitude is to connect to something—and it may require a little bit of digging—that in this moment, it doesn’t have to be joyful. This is the other thing. Sometimes we are grateful in very difficult moments for something that isn’t joyful. The example I always think about—my grandmother passed away last year. I grew up very, very close with my grandparents. My grandpa is 93. He’s still alive. They came over with us. She passed away and it was this horrible, horrible thing for all of us—for my mom. We were so sad.

I remember at my mom’s house, everyone came over after the cemetery. My cousins were there—the family. I just was filled with so much gratitude. It felt weird to me because, “What, am I grateful my grandmother died?” No, I wasn’t grateful for that. It doesn’t mean I didn’t feel sad. Gratitude doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel pain. It’s just in that moment, I could also find appreciation for being part of the family that was coming together. I could also find appreciation for the memories that we all had of her.

That was really a powerful reminder that, again, gratitude is not this bandage that’s going to cover all the other feelings. I think of it as a lifeline we can hang onto, particularly when things are difficult—when we find something within the difficult that we still truly can appreciate.

TS: Now, you also mentioned a myth that many people have about happiness, which is, “I’ll be happy when . . .” I do think that this is something—maybe we don’t fully admit it to ourselves, but most of us have some notion that we’ll be happy when something or other changes in our life. When we finish decorating this part of our house or when our child grows up, et cetera. I don’t know. Everyone who has their own—”When I make this much money.” How do you help people see through that myth?

NK: Yes. This is a hard one because of what you said. Sometimes we are not aware that we’re hanging our well-being and our happiness on conditions outside of us. I’ll tell you, it’s not like I was aware that this is what I was doing as I was doing it. It’s not that I had that awareness. It’s just that was the path I was thinking about. It’s not an easy shift to make. I’ll tell you a couple things that helped.

For me one of the—I’m the daughter of a scientist and I grew up with this great respect for science. Looking—and I put a lot of research into this book. Just understanding how our brain works and why “I’ll be happy when . . .” doesn’t work has been really helpful. I usually share that with folks.

That is the curse and the blessing of the human brain is that it’s very adaptable and it’s adaptive. We get used to things pretty quickly, good and bad things. It’s not that we are wrong to think that “When I get a better job or make more money or write a bestselling book . . .” It’s not that we’re wrong to think that we’ll be happy. We actually will be happy for a short amount of time. Then our brain gets used to it because our brain—that is what it is meant to do. It’s trying to help us survive. We adapt to change.

Once we get used to that milestone that we felt would make us so happy, our brain becomes—I call it the curse of the moving baseline. Our brain simply now looks at it as the new normal. Our brain has adapted.

So, it’s not something we did wrong. It’s just the brain doing its most natural activity of adapting to change. I can tell you when I learned this science and when I share it with people, it creates a shift because I think that we have to understand—the thing I don’t want to say is, “Oh, you’re doing life wrong if you’re doing, ‘I’ll be happy when.'” It’s not that you’re wrong. It that’s we’re not aware of how our brain functions.

The other piece from just the research is that most of us have what psychologists call a natural negativity bias. Our brain is more sensitive to negative stimuli. It’s constantly actually looking out for the negative in our environment because negative stimuli indicate danger, and the brain is trying to protect us.

What does that mean? It means that you may think that new job is going to make you feel happy. You work really hard and you get the new job. It’s fantastic for a while. Then the negativity bias kicks in and all of a sudden you start to notice this colleague is annoying and my commute is frustrating and my boss isn’t as amazing as I thought.

Your brain—again, it’s just doing its thing. It’s frustrating, but it’s doing its thing. This dream job that you had in your mind when that was an aspirational goal now becomes the new normal. So, your brain has A.) adapted, and your negativity bias has kicked in. It’s finding all these things that are imperfect. I share all this research because, for me and for many people I speak with, that’s helpful just to understand why “I’ll be happy when . . .” doesn’t work, why these goals and achievements don’t bring us lasting joy.

The other thing I would say is I do this exercise actually in my talks. It’s not a very pleasant exercise I have to say, but it’s very powerful. That is, I ask people to think back to when there was something that they thought would just really make them so happy. Everything we just talked about. Kid gets into a top college, you get a bad better job, or you lose X pounds or gain X pounds. I ask them to think of how they felt when they were working towards that goal, when they achieved it, and how [they felt] about it a few months after. Did that erase all negative feelings?

I think when we reflect on these past moments in our lives, we pretty quickly gain the awareness that we’re just more complex than that—that this one thing that we may think makes us so happy, we can’t battle our negativity bias or adaptive brain. Also, even if that thing is amazing, we’re complex human beings. Other things are going on. When I do that exercise, again, it’s not necessarily the most uplifting, but it’s very informative and revealing to us.

I remind myself of this, by the way. I have to do these practices still. I can get myself in this mindset sometimes. I catch myself. “Oh my God, only when my book comes out and so many people buy it, it’ll be amazing.” I have to do this practice of really understanding that I’m doing this “I’ll be happy when . . .”

It’s an ongoing practice. Those are some of the things I share to really help us all have the awareness of why that doesn’t work.

TS: Now, you also mentioned—because I think this is part of your redefinition of happiness that’s important—that it’s a skill. I think that in and of itself—happiness as a skill—is something that probably a lot of people haven’t considered. I think there’s still this idea that it’s like, “The sun came out, the weather was nice, the breeze felt good. It was a miracle, I felt happy. Everything was perfect.” I didn’t do anything. It was just there was some perfect moment that happened. Then of course it left, but I was happy for a few seconds there.

NK: Yes, yes.

TS: That’s very different than thinking of this as a skill like making a good meal or building a home or something.

NK: Yes. I have to tell you, it’s been so interesting. When I started to use that term—that happiness isn’t something you feel, it’s something you do—I’ll tell you that there’s two very different reactions that I get immediately when I say that. They’re very different. The first—I just see this joyful relief when some people recognize that, “Oh, I don’t have to wait for the perfect circumstances. Wow, this is something that I can start practicing? Awesome.” It gives this relief because it removes this dependence of our own happiness on outside conditions or circumstances.

Some people react with this hopeful excitement. On the other hand some people—the initial reaction is, “I have to work at this? Uh-uh. I don’t want to work at happiness. I really—you know. I want that perfect moment.”

Both are completely understandable. I’ve had them both. They’re absolutely OK. I think that thinking about happiness as a skill just like any other skill that you can improve through practice, you can start wherever you are today, some of us are better at it than others—just like some of us are better cooks than others. Some of us are better at painting than others. You can start wherever you are. You don’t have to be of a certain sex, live in a certain place, have a certain personality.

I think, for me, when I had that breakthrough for myself, it was huge. I’ll tell you—not to sound too grand—but somebody asked me the other day if I could summarize in a very short way [what my mission is] and I said this. It really stuck with me—that I feel like I’m on a mission to democratize accessibility of happiness. To me, thinking about it as a skill and there’s these very, very simple practices—I think I put something like 37 of them in the book. Each one is literally less than a minute. There’s so many others, obviously. It’s not like I exhausted the pool. If we treat it as a skill that we can all improve through practice, I think that means it’s accessible for everybody.

To me, that is so exciting. That is what gives me meaning every day.

But, the difficult truth is that, yes, we have to give it our intention. We have to choose to practice. We have to practice on days we may not feel good when we get up. The beautiful thing is that practices don’t take a lot of time. I include this in the book. I do this with so many audiences. I teach a five-minute happier workout. It’s five minutes. In five minutes, we practice the five core happier skills—

TS: OK! Let’s do it. Let’s do it, Nataly. Let’s do it. Five minutes. We’ve got five minutes. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do the workout.

NK: OK, fantastic. OK. The first, we’re going to do an abbreviated version, because I can’t see it. The first part is acceptance. We’re going to practice the skill of acceptance. Acceptance is very simply being where you are, and acknowledging and witnessing where you are, how things are, and how you feel without judgment, without wanting it to be different, without wishing it were different. That’s a skill of acceptance.

One of the most powerful ways to practice it in a short amount of time is what I call “two minutes of stillness and silence.” Maybe we can just do one, but it’s up to you. It’s just taking a few moments to be still and silent; just observing how you feel, observing your thoughts, and every time you find your mind judging or rushing to somewhere else, just asking yourself to come back to this moment of stillness and silence. I don’t know if you want to time us or I can.

TS: You can just take us through a minute—is fine. I’m on your happiness workout. I’m doing it. I’m right here with you.

NK: OK. Let’s spend a minute in stillness and silence. Just practicing acceptance of how we are and how things are.

[Approximately one minute of silence.]

NK: OK, so it was a little bit less than a minute, but that’s our practice of acceptance of just being in this present moment. The second skill or the second step is gratitude. What I ask folks to do is pause and capture in some way two or three things you are really grateful for. Now, we have to capture them because our brain is fantastic at ignoring our thoughts. We can do it by sharing something we’re grateful for with each other. That’s another way to do this workout—teams that work do this workout together. You just turn to the person next to you and you share something that you are grateful for, however tiny or big in this moment. We’ll share it with each other, Tami. I’ll go first.

I’ll tell you that something I’m grateful for is that I spent most of my life in a very crazy, lots of travel, very intense tech executive jobs. For the last two years I’ve been working out of a home office. I still have a very hectic schedule. What that means is when my daughter comes home from school, sometimes if I’m here I can pop out and say hi. It’s just been this amazing gift.

Today what I’m grateful for is she came home, and I could just immediately see something was wrong. I just made her a snack. She’s 13. We hung out. Then she told me she’s very sad. She’s having this issue with a friend. Of course I’m so—as a mom, my heart breaks. I am so grateful that I could be here. I am so grateful that I’m able to do work in a way that allows me to be here. In particular, I’m just very grateful for this moment today. It happened about an hour ago—that I could be there for Mia when she was going through something really difficult. How about you?

TS: I’m very grateful for our strong and sweet and pure-hearted engineer, Jeff Mack, who’s here with me and helps me with these podcasts.

NK: I happen to have met Jeff. I love that I actually know the person you’re talking about.

OK, so that’s the second skill of gratitude. Again, capturing in some way by saying to someone or writing down a few things you’re grateful for.

The third step—the third skill—is what I call “intentional kindness.” We talk about kindness as random acts of kindness often. I’m actually asking us to be more intentional about practicing kindness every day. As part of this workout, the folks have a choice to either do something kind that doesn’t take a lot of time, or if you can do it at that moment, you make a plan for how you will do something kind that later in the day.

One of the easiest kind things to do is to think of someone in your life who you appreciate or you want to check in with. Do it. You can do it by text or by email or by voice. I have this opportunity—you just mentioned Jeff. Jeff was kind enough and amazing enough to work with me on my audiobook. My act of kindness, Jeff, is to tell you—I was going to email you this. Since you’re listening, I’ll tell you. This is my act of kindness.

I was in a coffee shop today, and the owner is a friend that has a galley of my book. There was a woman there who saw me on the cover—on the back cover—and said, “Oh my God, you’re the author.” I said, “Yes.” I went over and chatted with her. She started crying because she read a part of book that was about being OK with not [being] OK. She said, “You know, I have trouble with my eyes. Do you think you will do an audiobook at some point?” I was so excited to tell her that we already recorded the audiobook. So, Jeff, I’m sharing this with you as my act of kindness because I know how hard you worked on it and I know this will be meaningful for you.

TS: All right: so, an intentional act of kindness. This is something I’m going to do kindly toward someone else. I can’t do it right now, Nataly, because we’re in the middle of our broadcast.

NK: That’s OK! Make a plan.

TS: OK, I’ve made a plan. I can imagine a conversation I’m going to have with someone.

NK: Fantastic. The fourth skill is what I call “the bigger why.” That is connecting a sense of meaning—connecting to something that gives you a sense of meaning. This is one of my favorite ways to practice it. You glance at your to-do list. We all have our to-do lists. Sometimes we write them down. Maybe it’s an on your calendar or your computer. You glance at your to-do list, and you look at one or two to-dos. You ask yourself, “How does this help someone else?” because our sense of meaning in life comes from when we do something that we can be good at that contributes to someone other than ourselves.

This is one of my favorite ways to practice it as part of the workout. I will tell you I’m just looking at the first thing on my to-do list. It says “create slides for the talk in Vegas on 4/13.” On the thirteenth of April, I’m giving a talk. It’s 1,000 customer service agents actually, and I have to send in my presentation. To be honest, we have actually been putting it off because I don’t love creating PowerPoint presentations. The practice of the bigger why is, “OK, this is the to-do—to create slides.”

Who does this help? These slides make my talk better. It’ll help all these people who come to my talk, learn about these skills—these happier skills that we’re talking about—and hopefully experience a little bit more joy and less stress in their lives. This to-do now for me has a little bit of meaning. It’s a reminder of why I’m doing this to-do.

TS: OK, the last step of the workout.

NK: The last step of the workout is self-care. The way that I would ask folks to do it as part of these five minutes is: say something kind, supportive, or compassionate to yourself. We don’t do this often. We are fantastic at being harsh towards ourselves. We’re not great—most of us are not very self-compassionate. So, [this] is the last step of the workout: say something that is supportive, kind, or compassionate to yourself as a way to practice self-care.

TS: That is a gosh-darn good workout, Nataly. That’s a lot.

NK: Five minutes. It took a little bit longer, but when you do it on your own—so by the way, it took us exactly five and a half minutes. I was talking a lot.

TS: OK. Now, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. You mentioned that in your own life, early on—based on your own upbringing and personality bent—you had this idea that you would find happiness through achievement. I think a lot of people feel that way—if they achieve enough, earn enough, et cetera. How were you able to shift that?

NK: Yes. It’s a great question. The first thing I want to say—and people ask me this often when I talk about the shift. They say, “Oh, but you’re so really ambitious. You still are working really hard. You still are trying to achieve all these things. What do you mean?” It’s not that achievement is bad. Working hard towards something that is meaningful to you is actually one of the most essential components of living a happier life. This is why a sense of meaning is one of the five skills. Working hard towards achieving something meaningful is absolutely fantastic.

The difference is that I no longer hang my happiness on the outcome of these things I’m working towards because it is this internal practice. That’s the difference. It’s not that I don’t want to achieve things. I have lots of things I’m trying to achieve. I’m trying to reach millions of people. That’s my message and my teachings to change your lives and improve your lives. That’s a pretty ambitious goal. But, it’s that I am OK during the steps to get there and I derive joy and meaning as I’m working towards my goal. I’m not waiting to feel happy later. My happiness won’t be destroyed—my well-being won’t be destroyed when I don’t reach a certain goal.

That’s the thing. That was a huge discovery for me. I used to think that if I paused to appreciate little things, that would distract me from working hard—that that would make me complacent, that I won’t work as much if I am grateful for things or I appreciate things or that I feel joy. It’s exactly the opposite. Research supports this—that when we’re celebrating the little things, the little steps on the way to our goals, when we are grateful for things, when we practice kindness and a sense of meaning, our resilience increases. Our ability to get through challenges increases.

That’s the shift. It’s not that I no longer want to achieve things or I’m asking people to not think of achieving things. It’s that we don’t hang our well-being and our lasting happiness on the outcomes of our achievements and that along the way, we practice these skills so that we can fuel ourselves with the joy and the kindness and the human connection and a sense of meaning.

TS: Now, one of the things I read in your blog, Nataly, was that you started painting not that long ago. This was very interesting for you because you discovered that in taking time away from your more “productive” work and spending time doing something that you enjoyed—painting—that it actually had a net result of you being even more creative and in some ways leveraging your productivity in an interesting way by spending time doing something that seemed unproductive. I thought that was really interesting.

NK: It was very surprising to me. Nobody was more surprised than I was. I’ll tell you, I wanted to paint my whole life. I’ve always loved art. I grew up with it. But, I never allowed myself to do it because, as you said, I thought it would be, “How does this fit into my life and my career? It’s a luxury. It’s an indulgence. I can’t waste time on it.” As I began this journey of, again, learning to live more fully and genuinely happier, I allowed myself to do it. The first thing that happened is there’s just so much more joy in my life because I enjoyed it so much.

Then, as you said, what shocked me—and I’m using that word on purpose—was how much more productive I was even though I now was actually spending fewer hours working because I was taking a couple hours to paint. This blew my mind. Not only was I more productive, I had all this creativity in my work. I connect this Happier at Work program that I talked about that we’ve piloted with several companies and we’re now going to be rolling out. I don’t think I would have come up with the way that I’ve done it—it’s very interesting and unique—if I hadn’t allowed myself to paint and really open up. Research supports this.

This is what I always share because I meet so many people who are afraid to take time to rest or they’re afraid to take time to do something just for the joy of it, because they feel like they have so much “productive”—in quotation marks—stuff they have to do. Research shows that we are actually most productive when we alternate times of focused, hard work with times of what researchers call “constructive rest.” For me, painting is constructive rest. I am resting the thinking, emailing, talking part of my brain and I’m moving from a very different part of myself. There’s a lot of research that shows just how beneficial that is.

By the way, you don’t have to paint. You just have to do something that feels restful. For some people it’s going for a run or reading or walking or gardening. Research shows that when we alternate periods of really hard, intense work with periods of constructive rest, we increase our productivity and our creativity. That is because there’s this part of our brain that’s called the DMN network. It’s a part of the brain that is responsible for making unexpected connections, for organizing information that we’ve taken in, for filtering through it. The thing is: it only is active when the thinking, the rational, the frontal cortex part is resting.

That’s why we also literally come up with ideas in the shower—because when we focus on solving a problem or doing things, then we take a shower. We take a break. We’re not really focused on activities in the shower. It’s kind of autopilot. That part of the brain gets to come online and make all these unexpected connections. For me, that’s what painting has done. This is why painting for me is a type of self-care. This is why I made self-care one of the happier skills. Again, I used to think that it would to make me a lazy sloth, and it’s exploded my activity and creativity. I hear this from people experiencing this all the time.

Again, the way I got myself there was by accident. I didn’t know that painting would make me so much more productive. Then I looked at the research, and it supports it. It’s been this enormous gift of just pure joy, but also increased productivity and creativity in my life, which is why I share it with others.

TS: Now, I want to talk for a moment, Nataly, to that person who might be listening to us who—for whatever reason—at this point in their life is really having a hard time. What I noticed in your five skills in the workout we did was that you started with acceptance. I really appreciated that because I thought no matter what anyone’s feeling right now, we can start there. So I want to talk to that person who says, “You know, I feel inspired by what Nataly’s saying. The truth is I’m just going through a really hard time right now. It’s a little hard for me to connect even with these skills. I just don’t quite have it in me. Maybe I feel a little super gray or depressed.”

NK: The first thing—this is a podcast, so people can’t see my face. The first thing: as you’re saying that, I feel so much empathy because I’ve been there. I think we’ve all been there—in that really dark place. It’s so hard.

This is why acceptance is the first thing—because I’ll tell you that until I learned to give myself permission to sometimes just feel crappy or sad or hopeless, until I actually gave myself permission and learned that it was OK to not be OK, that first step was always missing. That makes it impossible to connect to any of the other skills.

In fact, I talk about this as the missing ingredient of happiness—the idea that it’s OK to feel not OK. So, the first thing I would say to that person—I shared this when I was doing my kindness for Jeff. This woman—this happened to me this morning—I ran into this woman in the coffee shop. She started crying when she said, “I’m going through a hard time.” I said, “I understand.” I didn’t tell her to cheer up. I didn’t tell her it’ll get better. I think that’s very, very hard when you hear that someone is in pain, whether they’re a stranger or a loved one, to not try to fix it or get them to move through it faster. That is actually the first step. The first thing I would say is that’s OK. That is how you feel.

That’s why I think acceptance is so essential, and understanding that this is part of life and you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not failing at life. You’re not doing anything wrong because you may feel so down right now. I think that in and of itself, to be honest with you—and I share this with my book in many ways—that was huge for me. When I was able for the first time in my life—I know exactly when it happened. I was very lucky to be introduced to a teacher who’s since become my spiritual teacher. I didn’t know that’s who she would be. After a few times that I met with her, I got up enough either courage or desperation to tell her that I felt really hopeless.

It’s a very scary thing to say. As soon as I said it, the reaction she had—she didn’t tell me to cheer up or she didn’t tell me things to do. She just looked at me in this very loving, accepting way. I felt like I got to put down this huge weight that I’ve been carrying my whole life for 40 years.

So, that’s the first and maybe the most important thing I want to say to anyone feeling that way—is that is OK. It doesn’t feel good. It absolutely doesn’t feel good, but you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not failing at happiness. You’re being a human being.

The next thing I would ask is to be self-compassionate toward yourself because I did this, and I find so many people that I work with do this. When we feel down, so many of us actually become even harsher towards ourselves. We beat ourselves up for being down. We beat ourselves up for not being able to get out of this funk or the sadness. That’s very counterproductive. What I ask is, “Can you talk to yourself? Can you treat yourself in this place where you are the way you would treat a good friend?”

So, if a good friend came to you and they told you they’re very sad or they’re feeling down, what would you say to them? I don’t think you’d say to them, “You suck at life. You’re doing it right wrong.” That’s often what we say to ourselves when we feel like we feel sad or down or the way we don’t think we’re supposed to.

What I ask and what I invite folks like that to do is the thing that I do when I feel down or sad. The thing that really changed my life around is first give yourself permission to not have to change right away. Just accept it. Then: can you be self-compassionate toward yourself? Again, it’s a skill. I am asking for a little bit of effort. I find that those two things really open up the opportunity for actually feeling better.

TS: When it comes to the core skills of happiness now, what’s the hardest for you, Nataly? Where’s the place where you’re like, “Yes, that’s the place where still I’m really on the learning curve,”?

NK: It’s a great question. You know what it is? I’m going to—in the skill of kindness I talk about, I actually talk about something I call “advanced kindness.” That is compassion. That is compassion towards difficult people—compassion towards people who have hurt you, or who are behaving in a bad way, or may be hurting people you love or causes you love.

That’s very hard. I call it advanced kindness in my book. I think it’s very hard for me to do. It’s very hard for me to practice compassion, which is a part of kindness, towards people who are wronging me, or being angry at me in a small or big ways, or people who I feel like are doing bad things to people I love. It’s very, very hard.

I struggle with that. I talk about my struggle in the book. I’ll make it—be even more open about it. I write in the book about how as I was getting to a very, very dark place in my life a few years ago, so was my relationship with my husband. Avi and I have been together for 20 years. We met in college, so we’re this old married couple. Our inner darkness affects everything. I didn’t know whether our marriage was going to make it. He used to be my best friend. We had hardly talked for years at that point. I was very hopeless about our relationship.

One of the things my teacher asked me to do is, “Can you be compassionate? Can you be compassionate towards Avi?” even though I had this very long list of ways he hurt me and very long list of things he had done wrong and I had done wrong. I was trying to do this math of, “OK, who did what wrong more often and that person should go first.” I write about this in the book—that one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to be kind towards Avi first before I felt like—in quote marks—he “deserved” it. He was trying to be compassionate toward someone who I felt had hurt me. I can honestly tell you that it saved our marriage. Not only because I did it—because when I did it, he did it. We would just start doing this with each other. When people ask us, “How did you guys save your relationship?” we say, “With compassion.”

It was very hard to do. I fought it with all of me. It continues to be a difficult skill to practice when I encounter people who hurt me in some way or people out in the world who are doing things I disagree with. That’s my hardest one. I need more practice.

TS: What helps you do it? What helps you do it? What enabled you to do it with your husband?

NK: What enabled me to do it with my husband—I’ll tell you honestly—was really my teacher and something she said to me. She said, “I’m not asking you to do it for him. I’m asking you to do it for yourself.” That stuck with me, and it’s something I still think about all the time—that when we practice kindness and compassion towards others, whether it’s people we love or people who are very difficult or painful or hurtful, we experience 100 percent of the emotions that we give to others.

When we practice feeling compassionate towards someone else—and what is compassion? Compassion is recognizing our common imperfections and struggles. It’s not about excusing the other person’s behavior, but it’s about allowing for the possibility that they’re not an evil human being who is intent on making your life hell, but maybe they’re struggling with something. That’s compassion.

When we practice compassion, we feel compassion inside. When we practice kindness, we feel kindness inside. When we practice anger, we feel anger inside. We all know how painful that is.

What shifted me—what allowed me to open up and do it was my teacher opening my eyes to this idea—that I wasn’t doing it to excuse Avi’s behavior that I disagreed with, or to get them off the hook, or even for him. I was doing it for my own well-being. That’s the reminder that I give myself when I struggle with it—that we experience 100 percent of the emotions that we give to others. When we practice compassion toward someone who is difficult—I call in the book—I call this practice I just described “the lens of compassion.”

When you encounter a person who is being difficult or rude—even someone who’s cutting you off on the road—we know how angry we get. Can you practice the lens of compassion? Can you make up a story—doesn’t have to be true—of what the person might be struggling with that could be causing them to act that way? You’ll never know if the story is true if it’s someone you don’t know. By practicing compassion, you are experiencing compassion and kindness. It increases your patience and it allows you to not be overcome with anger that will ruin your entire well-being.

So, that’s what really shifted my thinking, and that’s the reminder I give to myself when I struggle—is that I experience 100 percent of the emotions that I give to others. If I choose anger, I feel anger. I am actually ruining my own well-being.

TS: That’s a powerful teaching, Nataly. Thank you. Now, it’s interesting that you started your educational training company Happier after you had a certain amount of discovery around the power of gratitude. Then you went through a pretty difficult journey having already started a company called Happier. Pretty difficult. Pretty dark. You discovered lots of things that have led you to redefine happiness and write this new book, Happier Now. I’m curious if at any point did you think, “God, I started a company called Happier. This is terrible. What did I get myself into? Now I have to live up to this. I have to wear a happy mask of some kind.”

NK: Yes, yes. Absolutely. I will tell you actually, I call this book “a coming out.” It is a coming out for me. I share the story in it. I share my journey. I share how to feel happier.

I was on the front page of the tech section of the New York Times at one point. They wrote this huge article about us. It was an enormous success by every startup story. I share that I was in the darkest time of my life. I was literally, Tami, hardly functioning as a human being. I was not functioning as a CEO. I was hardly functioning as a mom. I talked about my marriage. It was the darkest, most hopeless time.

The fact that I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone because, “Oh my God, does that make me a fraud? I’m supposed to be teaching people about happiness. Look at me,” that made it even harder. It was excruciating because I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone this reality because I was still in that place where, yes, I was practicing gratitude, but I believed that I had to appear like a perfect performer of everything I was teaching. I didn’t actually allow myself to be a human being. I had not yet embraced my imperfections. I had not yet given myself permission to not be OK. It was excruciating. I have no words.

I actually—part of what I do in my talks now to really walk the walk of coming out about this is I—often, when I share the story of Happier, I put up the slide of the front page of the New York Times tech section where there is me—there is a huge photo of me sitting on the hood of a little more orange Mini Cooper that was branded Happier that I had. I had this little car; we branded it Happier. I say, “Don’t I look so happy?” because I do. People are like, “Yes.” I say, “What would you say if I told you this was the most hopeless, darkest day of my life? Because it was.”

Tami, I’m not sure I came the day of that photo shoot. I don’t know where I was. I would have these blackouts. I was just at the bottom at the barrel. I was so hopeless. I just felt I couldn’t share this with anyone because I thought, “Wow, as the CEO of Happier, my job is to inspire and uplift.”

I’ll tell you something that has been incredible. As I started going on the second part of my journey and learning that happiness is not about being perfect—it’s not about being always positive; it’s really about embracing my imperfect humanity and sharing that openly with the world—I made a commitment. We send this weekly email out to anyone who subscribes on happier.com. It’s a couple hundred thousand people at this point. I made a commitment that I was going to start writing more honest and personal emails.

So, I slowly—I took baby steps at first—started to share a little bit of my struggle with people. Oh my God, Tami. What I got back—I write this in the book, I can only describe as love. I don’t mean romantic love. I don’t mean that kind of love. But. it’s just this outpouring from all these people saying, “Thank you so much for sharing this. You give me hope. I feel uplifted because you shared your struggle—because if the CEO of a company called Happier struggles, that gives me hope that I’m not failing at life because I’m struggling, that maybe that’s OK.”

What I have discovered [is] it’s this gift that my work is giving me and being able to share this is that I used to think that my job was to uplift people. I thought to uplift people, you have to be inspiring and positive. What I’ve learned is we can uplift each other just by being honest. My honesty, my coming out, my sharing my struggles through my journey—and now I still encounter struggles big or small—that is uplifting people. I had never considered that before. That’s been the huge realization. I have this gift of so many people who have been able to give me that feedback. It was the scariest thing—being at that hopeless place and feeling like I couldn’t tell anyone because they would think I was a fraud. Then to begin to share little by little.

Every time I do, the more I do it, every time I discover nobody runs away from me. No one says, “You’re such a fraud.” No one says, “Oh my God, you’re such a failure.” It’s the opposite. People embrace me. Sometimes physically they hug me. They start sharing a little bit of themselves. They feel uplifted. If you ask me, that is why I share my journey in this book—is to give hope. I feel like it gives hope to other people who are struggling. Yes, it’s possible to get through, but also that it’s OK. It’s OK to share our struggle.

TS: OK. Now I’m going to say something I almost never say, Nataly. Are you ready? We can uplift each other just by being honest. That was your quote. We can uplift each other just by being honest. Now I’m going to say that I think that sounds true.

OK, I’ve been speaking with Nataly Kogan. She’s the author of the book Happier Now: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Embrace Everyday Moments (Even the Difficult Ones).You know, Nataly, we didn’t talk that much about everyday moments. I think that’s a beautiful place to end our conversation. You talked about how your gratitude practice tuned you in to these absolutely little things. Tell me the kinds of everyday moments that really bring you a lot of happiness.

NK: Oh, what a great place to end. I’ll share a few. I love the morning light. There’s something about the morning light that is so hopeful to me. I try to always get out for a walk in the morning. Even if I can’t take a walk, I peek outside because I love the morning light—even when the sun is not out. That’s one of my favorite everyday moments.

I love every day before my daughter goes to sleep—she’s 13, but my husband and I still go in and kiss her if she still lets us. I find so much joy just in that moment of the familiarity of saying, “Night, babes,” and giving her a kiss. It’s like a joyful explosion every time.

I love—and this is one of my favorite little rituals. When I make coffee or tea, I don’t multitask. Sometimes it’s 30 seconds, it’s a minute. It’s one of the ways I began practicing gratitude. Now I love just taking that little time. The coffee’s brewing or I’m drinking my tea. I have a favorite cup for tea and I have a favorite cup for coffee. My family knows you do not interchange the two. I love that little experience of going to get—if I’m having coffee I’m getting my favorite coffee cup. I made my coffee and I’m just take a few sips. I’m just there in that moment, enjoying it.

Those are just some of my little highlights of my day that are absolutely ordinary moments. As I always say, what makes the moments in our lives extraordinary is our honoring them with our full presence and attention.

TS: Nataly Kogan, thank you so much for being a guest here Insights at the Edge and for your new book, Happier Now: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Embrace Everyday Moments (Even the Difficult Ones). Thank you so much.

NK: Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been amazing.

TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.