This podcast features Nicole Maynard, Head of User Experience at Hyatt, and her Lightning Talk, “Cultivating Happiness” from the design leadership conference Prototypes, Process & Play on August 10th, 2017.

Prototypes, Process & Play presentation podcasts are sponsored by Balsamiq – with Balsamiq Mockups, anyone can design great software.

Nicole Maynard – Lightning Talk

Head of User Experience at Hyatt

Nicole Maynard is the Head of User Experience at Hyatt leading a team of researchers, interaction and visual designers, creating solutions that elevate Hyatt’s digital footprint and enhance the guest experience. She has taken the helm as president of the Chicago chapter of UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association).

Nicole is a versatile UX professional; she has a foundation in graphic, information and interaction design and has been performing user research well before realizing it was a profession. She has always found the inner workings of our minds to be a compelling subject of study. Her work has been published nationally and has won various design awards. If you want to get her chatting, ask about her talking budgie or her commitment to health and wellness.

For more, keep up with Nicole on Twitter as @punkynixter.

Cultivating Happiness

Neuroscience explains the delicate sparks that can either create happiness or make it elusive. Happiness has power-it makes us more productive, engaged and creative. When we’re feeling good, we are better able to create delightful experiences and have that positivity trickle into everything we touch. Let’s take a look at methods for cultivating happiness within ourselves so we can propagate it for others.

Presentation Transcript

Please note:

Podcast transcript below.​ Please note: Transcription was recorded live; there may be errors (typographical and contextual), as well as omissions or other content gaffes.

​Additionally,​ there was microphone feedback that happened in the room from time to time, and we did our best to minimize it in the podcasts. We apologize for any disruptions to your listening experience that this may cause.

Nicole Maynard:

I’m going to try really hard not to move. I’m a mover. Hi everyone, my name is Nicole. I’m the head of UX and we’re headquartered in Chicago. So at Hyatt, we’re in the business of hospitality so we need to deliver experiences that ultimately make people happy. Happiness is something that is really dear to me because there was a time in my life when I was not happy at all. I was tired and stressed, working myself to the bone, and I found myself in a whirlwind ofdespair. And one day I wake up and I realized I don’t want feel this way anymore. I took the day off work and I decided to get to the bottom of what was going on in my head.

I started researching some scientific studies that were done on the brain. And I came across the neuroscience of happiness. And it hit me like a bolt of lightning. If I can change my thought patterns, I can rewire my brain! What?

So understanding how to cultivate happiness in my own brain and keep my mental health in shape, I started to apply this thinking to my work. I saw some really good changes not only in my designs, but also in my team. You can’t fully love until you love yourself and really the same is true for happiness. If you’re not happy, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time making others hard. This is something that we’re all responsible for. We need to make not only our managers, stakeholders, especially users of our products happy, but as leaders we need to help our team members find their happy. So the more you understand the way that happiness works within your brain and learn to cultivate it within yourself, the better you are to design and deliver it to your team.

Everyone wants to be happy. Nobody says “Today I want to be miserable!” Except for maybe her. Happiness doesn’t really happen. It’s hard. We work hard to make the choices that make us happy and do the things that we enjoy. So if we all want to be happy and we’re always working towards it, why isn’t the world a happier place? It seems like negativity follows us everywhere we go. And if you look around, especially on social media and TV, we are constantly bombarded by bad news. Why? Because it gets our attention. Your brain is always on the lookout for potential dangerous things. If it’s gruesome or heartbreaking enough, that’s what it takes for you to interact with that post or watch that station’s broadcast.

Looking for the definition of happiness, I found that Google uses this as their example. She struggled to find happiness in her life. (Chuckling) Why isn’t happiness easier? Well if it were, we actually wouldn’t be alive. So if we think of our mind as a garden, the soil is more fertile for weeds than flowers. We can figure a relation for this. So our brains require two things. Positives, which you can think of as flowers. And negative, you can think of as weeds. Will it kill me? So our brains are wired to always look out for the bad to protect us. You either think A, is that a coconut that fell? Or B, you run like hell.

So it’s that tendency to see the bad in everything that kept us safe, alive, and procreating, which means the electrical circuits in our brain are much stronger when it comes to bad than good. And this is known as negativity bias, which was great for surviving back then, and super shitty for quality of life right now.

So now your brain is looking out to protect you, and when you notice something bad, your brain hyper‑focuses on it. And imagine you’re at work and everything was great except for one minor thing that needs improve. Negativity breeds more negativity. And by the way, the same thing happens to your direct reports.

The positive and negative emotions in your brain was activated when you read that part of your review. And it kicked off an alarm to really stress hormones throughout the rest of your brain. And then it comes along and says oh I don’t want that to happen again. It makes a memory of it and making those connections even stronger. Over time the more bad things that happen, the stronger the alarm system is. And it’s harder to move on from that negative thing that happened in your life. And because those negative connections are so strong, they weigh a lot higher on the brain. It takes 5‑20 positives depending on the context of that negative experience to balance things out. Think about what that means not only in terms of the solutions we fill, but our relationships with our team members. One minor misstep or frustrated response and we have a lot to make up for.

Don’t worry, I actually do have good news. Our brains are malleable. This is known as neuroplasticity. We can make the soil in our brains more fertile for flowers and positive thoughts. As we learned earlier, there are neurocircuits in our brain. The more you use them, the stronger they become. The less you use others, the weaker they become. Repeated neural activity builds neural structure.

So thinking back to the amygdala and how it becomes more sensitive to the positive thinking. Our experiences matter. Not just for that moment, but for the changes that they start to make in our mind. What’s key is the longer you rest your mind on something, the stronger those connections will become and over time your brain is going to take shape. The more you fertilize your soil of positivity, the bigger your flowers will grow. Let’s look at ways we can start weaving happiness into our day‑to‑day.

Mindfulness. It’s gained a lot of popularity in the last few days. Headspace. And mindfulness gives us that positive we need. It’s very simple. We’re going to do it for like a split second.

Everyone take a deep breath in. And when you exhale, focus on the comfort and support of your chair and hold onto that feeling of comfort as long as you can.

Take time to do the things you enjoy. The things that bring you peace and that you can lose yourself in. Stop the downward spiral of negative thinking not by shoving those feelings away, but by withdrawing and rest your mind and enjoy the feeling that it brings you.

Go back to the great memory that you have. Like the one. Sitting by the fire. Look at the pictures. Let those memories soak back into you and just stay with that joy that it brings you. You can use the same thinking for your team. When they’re having a hard go at something, remind them of the recent win that they had and remind them of all the details and what they did to get there.

If something that irks you and you just can’t shake it off. Any exercise that increases your heart rate for about 20 minutes releases feel‑good endorphins, which helps you focus and helps calm down the stressful chemicals that hang out in the brain. Again, you can do this with your team members. If they’re upset about something, go for a fast walk and talk it out.

You could also help fertilize your mind’s soil through food. These foods are ideal for your brain. Your focus, neuroplasticity. When shopping, just throw these in the cart so you have them at the ready when you get hungry.

If you give to another person, you feel good that you’re making someone happy. It’s like a reward for having done something good. You can give them in a variety of ways a compliment, donation, volunteering, which is an amazing team activity.

The great thing about giving is that it’s an upward spiral. The happier a person is, the more generous they’re likely to be, and therefore the more positivity they feel.

For those of us here in the UX industry, we get to make people’s lives better by taking away frustrations and as managers we get to develop our team members.

I don’t know about you, but I’m grateful I get to do that. So we get to give a little every day, which leads me to my next point. If you can’t find something positive to focus on in your life at the moment, think of something that you’re grateful for. That awesome phone that you just got, all the way to the fact that you guys are here right now. It’s pretty awesome.

And the best way to include positivity in your day‑to‑day is play time. It helps us break out of the mental straight jacket that we place ourselves in as adults. It helps us breakthrough stagnation and helps us with creativity. Schedule time for play. I schedule time for my team to play once a month, two hours at the end of the day I book a conference room and bring simple games like Apples to Apples. We drink, eat, and play. And giving my team a chance to know each other, I see an increase in productivity, creativity, and overall happiness.

So it might seem like I just went through a lot of things, but they’re actually quite easy to wrap into your day‑to‑day. The hardest part is remembering to do that. But it does take one small step to get started. Happiness is contagious and it trickles into everything we touch. When we aren’t happy, everyone around you feels it, and this is especially true as leaders.

Our jobs can be hard. Being a manager and trying to forge UX ahead in companies who don’t know how to adapt it, it can be very, very wearying. We need to take care of ourselves and our team. You’re in it to love others, by loving yourself first. Your happiness affects you, your life, and everyone who interacts with you. Let’s learn how to cultivate happiness to ourselves so we can deliver it to our team. Take the survey.

Thank you!

[Applause]

About Chicago Camps

Chicago Camps, LLC (chicagocamps.org) was founded in 2012. They plan multiple low cost, high-value events primarily in Chicago.