Available April 22, 2025
Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.
What does happiness have to do with achieving excellence and success? Do happy students learn more deeply and go on to more fulfilling careers and lives? Most educators understand the intrinsic connection between emotional well-being and deep learning, but “happiness” doesn’t tend to show up on our classroom rubrics. Dan Lerner, author, performance coach, and professor of the famous New York University class “The Science of Happiness” joins host Morva McDonald to discuss why we might want to rethink the value of positivity.
Dan shares his quest to understand the difference between highly successful people who appear to be leading happy, fulfilling lives, and those who are highly successful but appear to be deeply unhappy. Giving contrasting examples like Andre Agassi vs. Roger Federer, or Steve Jobs vs. Richard Branson, he says that he began studying the link between psychology and performance to better grasp the relationship between emotional well-being and achievement. Dan cautions that it’s not necessary to be happy to achieve success, but says there is an opportunity to set ourselves up for success through the practice of “priming” our emotions.
He offers examples of studies demonstrating that even at early ages, people who are asked to complete a challenging task will generally perform better and more efficiently if they’re primed with positive emotions and memories before making an attempt. In study after study, Dan shares, everyone from kindergarteners through college students and successful physicians shows a boost in performance, speed, memory, and creativity when they begin tasks with positive affect. And crucially, he says, we can understand from the data not that happy people will be fated to outperform their unhappy peers, but that everyone can work to prime their brains toward the positive in order to reap the benefits.
Dan also offers the perspective that “happiness” is a bit of a misnomer. He delves into the 27 different positive emotions that encompass what is simplified as “happiness” for the sake of the conversation, and he points out that all of them are beneficial to our performance and all can be harnessed to direct our efforts and leadership in a more effective way. He explains the difference between priming and praise and offers examples of what he calls Active Constructive Responding, a method of communicating that he says helps unlock positive affect, growth mindset, and agency.
Dan explains the acronym PERMA—Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment—and how understanding the vital importance of each of these five aspects to overall success and well-being can profoundly impact our performance. And above all, he stresses the importance of being relational in our leadership, our feedback mechanisms, and our daily practices, to create the conditions for positivity to take root within our school cultures and within each individual in our communities.
Key Questions
Some of the key questions Morva and Dan explore in this episode include:
- What does research demonstrate about the link between happiness—or other positive emotions—and performance?
- Do we have the ability to impact our own happiness or emotional well-being? In what ways can we effect change in our own mindsets, and how can we practice doing so?
- Is cultivating happiness or positive affect in schools necessarily anti-rigor? How can we understand rigor and positive psychology as coexisting?
- What are the practices the best leaders undertake to help build a positive affect that can then improve performance?
Episode Highlights
- “So there is certainly an element, genetic element, component, of happiness, right? For folks listening out there, try to think of someone who you always think of as, that person's always a little gloomier than other folks, right? And that is the way that some people are sort of set. Think about it like a thermostat, right? They are set to a certain number. But we also know people who tend to seem to be a little happier than other people, right? And their thermostat’s set, let's just call it a little higher. So there is certainly a genetic component to that, that we know. But a considerable amount of how we experience positive emotion is through rightly directed effort.” (9:23)
- “Positive emotions come in lots of different shapes and colors. When we look at the research on positive emotions, we research different positive emotions separately. Hope is researched differently than joy. It's researched differently than pride. It's researched differently than love. It's researched differently than calm or tranquility or peace. So being able to go in and allowing someone to express what they're excited about, what they're looking forward to, and then getting into, all right, so what are the challenges? Means we have potentially primed our colleagues or our direct reports or whoever we're meeting with to be operating in a different way.” (14:17)
- “What I would argue is when you're, let's say your coach is standing next to you as you drag that bag of boulders or your teacher is standing next to you as you're taking the really hard math test. Are they saying … you're never gonna do it? Or are they saying, you know, you are doing great. I believe in you. I know we can get this done. When you're done with that workout session, do you go home and stare at the ceiling? Is that effective? Or do you go talk to another teammate and you're like, man, that was tough, you know, it's worth it. And I'm so glad you're here to have the conversation with.” (26:13)
Resource List
- Get a copy of Dan’s book, UThrive.
- Listen to Dan speak on the Good Life Project Podcast.
- Watch Dan talk about being “Passionately Successful.”
- Check out Dan’s episode of the Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman.
- Read an NYU student review of Dan’s Science of Happiness class.
- Watch the video Dan references, about the Newark Boys Chorus School.
Full Transcript
- Read the full transcript here.
Related Episodes
- Episode 66: School in a Time of Hope and Cynicism
- Episode 60: Student Voices on Learning Self-Reliance
- Episode 59: School and the Emotional Lives of Teenagers
- Episode 51: What Schools Can Do About Achievement Culture
- Episode 42: Seven Lessons for School Leadership
- Episode 40: Student Voice and Agency in Education
- Episode 35: The Relationship Between Emotions and Learning
- Episode 22: The Purpose and Nature of Higher Education
About Our Guest
Transformative, forward-thinking and always striving to help others realize their full potential, Dan Lerner has become known for his exploration of how positive psychology can affect the pursuit of world-class development, particularly how to leverage the advantage that a healthy psychological state can bring to performance excellence both at work and at home.
As an in-demand speaker, author, strengths-based performance coach, and instructor of one of the most popular undergraduate courses at New York University, Dan’s expertise in positive psychology helps people lead thriving, successful lives.
Employing cutting-edge research into positive psychology and peak performance, Dan works with students, established and high-potential performing artists, athletes and numerous Fortune 500 companies and executives around the world, helping them manage stress and anxiety, achieve well-being, uncover their core strengths, and define and realize their own brand of success.
With a deep passion for helping the next generation of talent achieve their utmost potential, Dan, along with his co-author and teaching partner Dr. Alan Schlechter, wrote U Thrive: How to Succeed in College (and Life). Filled with fascinating science, real-life stories, and tips for building positive lifelong habits, U Thrive addresses the opportunities and challenges every undergraduate faces and helps students grow into the happy, successful alums they all strive to be.