Vanessa Van Edwards on building happy teams with Tara Gentile on Profit. Power. Pursuit. 

40% of our happiness is genetic.  About 10% is our environment.  The rest of the percent goes to our behavior and mindset.  This is where we have a lot more control over our happiness.

— Vanessa Van Edwards

[smart_track_player url=”http://media.blubrry.com/creativelive/content.blubrry.com/creativelive/PPP-051-VANESSA-VAN-EDWARDS-2016_1_.mp3″ title=”How to Build a Happy Team with Vanessa Van Edwards” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]

Tara:  Welcome to Profit. Power. Pursuit.  I’m your host, Tara Gentile, and together with my friends at CreativeLive, we talk to powerhouse small business owners about the nitty gritty details of running their businesses, making money, and pursuing what’s most important to them.  Each week, I deep dive with a thriving entrepreneur on topics like time management, team building, marketing, business models, and mindset.  Our goal each week is to expose you to something new that you can immediately apply to growing your own business.

This week, we’re bringing back listener favorite, my personal friend, and friend of CreativeLive, Vanessa Van Edwards.  Vanessa is a behavioral investigator and the founder of the Science of People.  She’s also an author, sought-after speaker and trainer, and a self-described recovering awkward person.  Her recent research and her newest CreativeLive class have focused on what makes us happy.  I wanted to find out how Vanessa has been using her work on happiness to build and nurture the Science of People team.  We talk about company culture, difficult conversations, and her personal pursuit of happiness.

Vanessa Van Edwards, welcome back to Profit. Power. Pursuit.  Thanks for coming back and talking with us again.

Vanessa:  I am so excited to be back.  It’s always good.

Tara:  Awesome.  So you’ve been doing a lot of work on the subject of happiness lately.  I’m … I’d love to know what made you so interested in what makes people happy?

Vanessa:  Yes.  So it was a very personal, started as a personal adventure.  I am not one of those people who was sort of born as a happy-go-lucky, high positivity naturally.  Unfortunately.  I’m a neurotic, for sure, definitely a worrier, and so I always felt like there were, there was all these people were just like born happier than me, and I wanted to know if that was actually true from a scientific perspective, because I’m a total geek, and started to dive into it to see could I change my happiness levels as my own human guinea pig, and what would it take to do that?

Tara:  Wow.  That’s awesome.  And I can totally identify with that, too, because I am also not like a naturally happy person.  So what did you find?  Are you normal?  Or, you know, were you able to change that happiness level for yourself?

Vanessa:  Yeah.  So basically what we found is … so first, we did … I always like to start with the academic review.  So the big academic review, we looked at 246 happiness studies, and there is some basic happy math that I think everyone should know, and I was kind of surprised I didn’t know this.  It made me feel less bad about not being that happy-go-lucky person.  So here’s the happy math.  So about 40% of our happiness is genetic, and that’s, you know, directly from our parents, what our genes are programmed for our happiness expressions or happiness levels.  About 10% is our environment, and this is the one that really gets us tripped up, because as humans, we have the tendency to say, “Hmm, I’m not happy.  I am going to move to California.  I’m going to buy a new car.  I’m going to get a new house.  I’d better find a mate.”  We like have all of these things that are almost exclusively environment, but the problem is, is that’s only 10% of our happiness levels.  So we put 90% of our energy into 10% return.  Which is why we have so many unhappy people, and why I think I was unhappy for so long.  The last one is, the rest of the percent goes to our behavior and mindset.  So this is where we have a lot more control over our happiness, and the problem is behavior and mindset seems really fuzzy, and that’s where we started to dig into our research of how could I change my behavior and mindset beyond whatever Cosmo and Marie Claire article has ever told us, which is just journal more.  Just do a gratitude journal.  Just say nightly affirmations.  Which doesn’t work for me.

Tara:  No.

Vanessa:  And I think doesn’t work for a lot of people.  So that, that’s where we focused a lot of our energy was on that behavior and mindset.

Tara:  That’s really interesting, because Michael and I, before we … before we buzzed you on the Skype were just talking about how what makes you really extraordinary is this sort of crazy ability that you have to pull out really actionable, really concrete, really just, you know, take it and do it and actually run with it things from a lot of crap that is otherwise construed as woowoo.  Like you know, journal more, which …

Vanessa:  You know, I’m allergic to fluff.

Tara:  Yeah.

Vanessa:  I don’t like that stuff.

Tara:  Yeah, totally.  So that made me wonder, like, I guess, let’s just dive right into the research.

Vanessa:  Yeah.

Tara:  That you’ve done.  So what are one or two of the things that kind of surprised you about what makes people happy, and how could we immediately apply those to our daily lives?

Vanessa:  Okay, okay, I love it.  Okay, now, we’re getting to the good stuff.  So I’m actually, like, I actually … I raised my hands up in the air, you couldn’t see, it was very … it was very nerdy of me.  Okay.  Yes, I’m excited.  So the first thing that I was really surprised about was that when we did, we did a huge happiness audit.  So we took all these 246 academic papers, pulled out the patterns that we actually thought were doable.  Like, there were patterns in those academic papers that were great, but like weren’t actionable.  I think, you know, it was like live in a happier country.  It’s like, well, you know, I can’t like do an article and be like, “Just move to Switzerland, everyone, that’s the answer.”  So we took out the patterns that actually would work, and then we created what I call the happiness audit.  So it was a free quiz that we put up on our website, and it was running for a long time, because I wanted massive data.  I wanted over 15,000 responses, and I wanted them, you know, across ages and genders.  And what we looked at was not all the responses, but we specifically pulled out the happiest people and the unhappiest people in this data set, and we looked at what was different about the unhappy group versus the happy group, specifically, and we found that they were using happiness as a skill. 

So instead of thinking of happiness as a byproduct of an action, they actually thought of it like a language or a skill.  So the way they approached their happiness or talked about happiness was like a practice, and this is the biggest difference between the happiest and unhappiest people is the happiest people go for things in their to do list, their to do lists look like this, “Answer all my emails, hit my financial goal, buy a new house, and get my business to the next level.”  Very, very practical goals, but they were hoping that happiness would be a byproduct of those professional achievements.  Whereas happy people actually built happiness into their daily life in the structure of their life.  In other words, they didn’t let it sort of be the end result, they had it be the cause, and that is how happiness works from a scientific perspective as well.  When you look at a lot of the studies, you know, lottery winners are no happier than they were a year before they won the lottery.  They’re exactly the same level of happy.  If you look at Forbes 400 richest Americans, they have the exact same happiness levels as the Pennsylvania Amish.  Exactly the same.  So more money does not make us happier.  You know, the most beautiful people, they did a study with models, supermodels.  Supermodels and fashion models are not any happier than the rest of us.  And that is all those people who say, “When I lose 10 pounds, I’ll be happier.”  The thinnest people on Earth, literally, the thinnest people on Earth are no happier than the rest of us.

Tara:  Brilliant.  So you told us what they unhappy people’s to do lists look like, and why that doesn’t actually produce more happiness.  What does happy on a to do list look like?

Vanessa:  Yes, okay, so the happiest, so happy is a really weird word, right?  It’s like this sort of thing that we think of like skipping through the meadow, and I don’t know about you, Tara, but like on a daily basis, like I don’t skip, nor do I have any meadows like nearby.

Tara:  Oh, God, no.

Vanessa:  Yeah.  So typically, actually, the happy makers are things like capability.  Things like awe.  So capability is a big one.  That is the easiest way to increase your happiness.  We don’t think about capability in terms of happiness, so when I say capability, I mean, power, feeling like you are badass at something, feeling like you are better than other people at what you are doing, and so what happy people’s to do lists tend to look like is they tend to do what’s called job crafting.  So they create their day around their skills.  So they are doing things on a day-to-day basis, and they can’t do everything like this, but they know that there are anchors throughout the day where they are using their skills that make them feel like, “Damn, I’m good at this.”

Tara:  All right.  So I want to get back to the job crafting thing in a little bit, because I think that that’s a great thing to talk about in terms of your team, which is where I want to head, but there was one other thing that I want to make sure that we talk about maybe a little bit further, which is something that’s interesting about the way you’ve talked about the research so far is that you were focused on the biggest ways you could have an impact on your personal happiness level.  Like what your personal happiness ROI was going to be, and you pointed out that, you know, the things that we think about, you know, moving to a different state, getting a car, changing your job, whatever it might be, those things are really only 10%, and so if you spend 90% of your energy just affecting 10% of the results, like that’s not good.  Like, right, the 80/20 Rule tells us that we want to spend 20, or you know, we want to spend time on the things that create the biggest output, right?

Vanessa:  Yes.  Yes.

Tara:  So can you talk a little bit more about that?  Like what does … how does that impact, you know, our daily routines or the ways we approach structuring our lives to be in that state of happiness more often?

Vanessa:  Yeah.  So here’s the good news, is that the things that make us the happiest are actually the smallest things.  So, and this … we don’t … this is why a lot of people who feel like they are either anxious or they dread their mornings or they wake up with anxiety, they fell like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to have to quit my job or move or restructure my entire life to get happier,” and that is not the case at all.  Actually, the smallest things have the biggest impact.  So the three things that you really want to focus on, if I had to sort of boil it down into three things, it would be focusing more on capability.  So using more of your skills and more of your skills in new and different ways, and that can be as small as making an amazing breakfast, making an amazing cup of coffee, responding to an email in a really organized and conscientious way.  Whatever, you know, sort of that your capability is.  Second is hope.  Now, hope is a really kind of an abstract concept.  When you break down hope, we can easily do that by learning, and that … that I do with what I call a learning bucket list, which we can talk about in a little bit.  And the third one is awe.  So awe is the easiest, cheapest way to get more happiness into your life, and what studies show is just thinking about watching your favorite movie produces pleasure. 

Tara:  Wow.

Vanessa:  It actually increases 27% more endorphins, just thinking about watching your favorite movie.  So when I talk about awe, I’m talking about what are the very, very small things, including your lunch that you have waiting for you in the fridge, the movie that you’re going to watch this weekend with your friends, or a beautiful view on your Instagram account, those very little things are actually the things that add up to much greater happiness.

Tara:  That’s incredible, and it sounds like it’s really just sort of an ounce of mindfulness about how you can pre-plan to experience those little things that do add up.  Is that accurate?

Vanessa:  Yeah.  It’s … you know how we’re all really conditioned to like eat well?  We’re like, oh, you know, people track their calories and they try to get 30 minutes of exercise in a day and they get 8 ounces of water.  Just like you measure your calorie output, your exercise minutes, and your water ounces, you can do the exact same thing with your dopamine, your endorphins, and your serotonin.

Tara:  Well, brilliant.  I mean, that’s great news for nerds like us, right?

Vanessa:  Exactly, exactly.  And I promise for my non-nerds listening, I will break that into a much more digestible, non-geek chemical words as well.

Tara:  Yeah, okay, awesome.  So I do want to transition a little bit and talk about your team and what role happiness plays inside the Science of People, because it’s one thing for you to study it as a team, it’s one thing for you to teach about it as you and as your team, but it’s another thing to kind of engineer it into your company culture.  So let’s talk about exactly that.  What role does happiness play in your team culture?

Vanessa:  Yeah, okay, so there are kind of four ways that we tackle happiness from a team perspective, and I actually think that talking about my team is a perfect way for you to think about your own happiness, because they are used in the exact same way.  So the very first thing that we did after doing this research, and we finished this research about a year ago, so all of these changes have happened in the last 12 months, and it’s been incredible to see the changes in productivity, in ROI, our numbers.  The ROI has been tremendous in terms of the growth of the company.

So the first thing is we did something called job crafting with all of our employees.  So what this is, is you look at all the tasks that you do on a daily basis, and you can do this yourself.  Make a list of all the tasks that you typically do in the average day or the average week.  And then in the column next to it, you want to write down the skills that you’re using to complete those tasks.  So you might find that all of your skill, all of your tasks, fall into the organization skill.  Or that all of your tasks, let’s say you’re a coach, all of your tasks fall into the listening skill.  So I want you to write down all the tasks and all the skills that are associated.  That might be three skills.  That might be thirty skills.  And then I want you to, on the list of skills, star or circle the ones that you feel like you are exceptionally good at.  The ones that like you’re like, “I was made for this.  I was born for this.  I love doing it.  I feel so good when I do it.”  That’s hopefully going to be only two or three, right?  We don’t … you can put modesty aside, right?  If you’re awesome, awesome at 10, cool, good on you, that’s awesome, too, but if you only have two or three, that’s about average.  So what we did is we looked at all the tasks and skills that were happening amongst our team members, and right now, we’re a team of six, and then we began to figure out which skills matched with who.  So for example, I learned that one of my employees is really, really visual.  She’s really good at graphics.  She’s amazing at seeing colors and shapes and fonts.  I’m really bad at visual things, so basically, we started to trade tasks.  So we line … I know all the skills of my employees, and we began to trade to see where could we focus our skills, and maximize the amount of I love doing this work, I feel really good at doing this work. 

That is a much easier thing than I want to do what I’m passionate about, right?  Like everyone talks about passion, but actually, you’re much better off talking about capability, and that’s an easier thing to do on a day-to-day basis than passion.

Tara:  Oh, brilliant.  Yes, I mean, I could go off on a whole tirade about passion.  I love the idea of talking about capability instead, and you know, that getting into the flow, and feeling like … Sally Hogshead talks about wellspring activities, you know, those things that energize you, and I totally agree, it’s so much easier to identify those things for yourself, and you know, tell yourself the story, remember those stories, remember those moments when you felt like that, and it seems like a much more productive conversation to have with your employer as well, but I’m sure it’s something that people can do in their own businesses, too.  So whether they have a team or not, it can be a real opportunity to look and see how could you improve your happiness?  How could you better job craft, even if you’re a business of one now, so that you better understand how you could grow a team into the future.

Vanessa:  Exactly.  And like a quick example of this is if you’re a photographer, I was just talking about this with my photographer.  So my photographer is Maggie Hudson at Honeysuckle Photography, and her skill, obviously, is photography, lighting, working with people.  She does not like editing.  She can do it.  She’s good at it.  But she doesn’t love it.  So she started building into her packages hiring a contractor editor, and that made her so much happier to take on new clients and do what she does, because she’s just putting way more energy and charging differently than she would have, because she wants to be able to know that someone else who loves editing can do it.

Tara:  Brilliant.  And okay, and so that was so important, because you said she’s so much happier to take on new clients, which means she’s more likely to do what she needs to do to sell, right?

Vanessa:  Yeah.

Tara:  And that’s one of those things that I don’t think people, especially small business owners, realize all of the personal hurdles that they have to selling.  It’s not actually selling itself that’s hard, it’s these personal hurdles that we put in front of ourselves, and that’s one of them, doing work we don’t want to be doing.

Vanessa:  And that is a surprisingly easy thing to do when you break down your tasks and your skills.

Tara:  I might be a professional educator and expert, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped learning.  When I’m ready to learn a new skill, the first place I go is CreativeLive.  Check out this great class.

Debbie:  Are you feeling stuck?  I’m Debbie Millman, the host of the podcast, Design Matters.  I’m teaching a class on CreativeLive called A Brand Called You.  In my class, I cover everything you need to know about how to position yourself to get the job that you love, the job of your dreams.  I’ll help you understand how to position yourself in the marketplace, how to create a mission with sincerity and stature, how to write a resume and a cover letter, and even how to track your progress.  This class is for anyone looking to improve their career and their life.  Join me now, and get the job you were meant to have.

Tara:  I know you just had your Science of People team all together in Portland.  It was World Domination Summit weekend, and you guys all got together.  I was watching the pictures, it looked awesome.  What did you guys do during that company retreat to kind of spark happiness for your team while they were visiting?

Vanessa:  Yeah, so the next kind of thing that really contributes to happiness is growth, and the idea, and this ties into hope as well, is that failures are not … do not mean that you’re a failure, they just mean that that specific thing was a mistake or a failure, and that anything can be learned, and actually, learning provides a lot of happiness.  So the reason why I bought my entire team to WDS was because I wanted them to know that they have a lot of learning in their lives, and so we have something that I encourage all my employees to do called the Learning Bucket List.  So a learning bucket list is all the skills, lessons, ideas, and things you want to learn about in your lifetime.  And we don’t often think about learning like that, but so I have all of my employees think about what are the skills they want to learn, and how can I fund that for them.  So I will frequently pay for trainings for them.  Like if they want to learn, like for example, one of my employees really wants to learn video editing.  Fantastic.  We do a ton of videos.  I’m happy to pay for his online course to learn how to do video editing and buy the software for him.  We also have what’s called a book fund.  So any employee who wants to get a book, and it does not have to do with business, it can be any book, they just have to submit me an email for why they want the book and what they want to learn from it, and I will buy it for them.  And so that is a way that I am trying to encourage that learning on a day-to-day basis.

Tara:  That is awesome.  I think everyone should go out and make their learning bucket list now.  I think that’s incredible.

Vanessa:  What’s on yours?

Tara:  The thing that makes me happiest in terms of learning right now is copywriting.  I just totally nerd out on copywriting, and it’s something that yeah, it just, it makes me really, really happy.  Obviously, it fulfills a need in my business as well, and it’s a skill that, you know, makes sense for me to improve, but it also makes me insanely happy.  Probably the other thing, then, is, you know, my partner and I are constantly talking about me going back to school and following through on the academic goals that I once had, and I think, you know, there’s … there’s no good reason … like there’s no good financial reason for me to do that.  There’s no, like, there’s no promotion that would be in my future if I went back to school and got my PhD, but would it make me happy?  Yeah, probably.  So those would be two things.

Vanessa:  That could be an investment in happiness, right?

Tara:  Yeah.

Vanessa:  Like, that would be a pure investment in happiness, which would definitely come out in other areas.

Tara:  Yeah, absolutely.  Absolutely.  I’m sure I could find the financial ROI on that for sure.  So you mentioned failure a little bit ago, and that brought to mind, you know, one of the difficult parts of growing a team and owning a small business, which is having difficult conversations with people?  So how do you balance performance management, having difficult conversations, and still keep this culture of happiness going in your company?

Vanessa:  Yeah, so it’s … I … what we try to focus on is progress does not mean that you can’t have setbacks, and progress is actually the number one way to motivate people.  So if you look at any kind of goal, weight loss goals, savings goals, employee goals … money, bonuses, promotions, not high on the list.  Compliments, not high on the list.  The biggest thing you can do to encourage progress, I’m sorry, to encourage achievement is actually highlighting progress.  So the way that we do this is we do monthly check-ins.  We have kind of like a scoreboard, where basically, we have all of our analytics, and we’re very analytics-driven, you know.  We just hit 80,000 subscribers on YouTube, and our goal is to hit 100,000 right?  We have 100,000 email subscribers; our goal is to hit 120,000.  So we are very, very aware of those goals.  Now, a failure could be not posting enough on YouTube or posting a YouTube video that gets a lot of dislikes or not a lot of views, right?  That could be, I guess, considered a failure.  However, it did get some views, and we can look at that video and be like why is this video different than the other videos that performed well.  So we look at every single thing as a mark on the progress chart.  So it’s not a failure, it’s just a mark on the chart.  And that helps sort of reshift the … I want them to take risks, right?  Like every single person on the team owns one of those metrics.  Right?  Like Robbie’s in charge of YouTube and Yael’s in charge of our email subscribers.  Ben’s in charge of our top of the funnel getting Google organic traffic.  Lauren’s in front of, charge of Twitter.  They own those numbers.  And so I can say to them, all right, whatever you want to do to get our Twitter subscribers up to 20,000, do it.  Play, adventure it, be adventurous, as long as you’re tracking it, I don’t care.  So that’s a very different way of thinking about failure.  It’s just a stop on the progress line.

Tara:  Wow.  Wow.  Okay, so do you have those same kind of conversations individually then?  I mean, it sounds like if people have these … have this ownership over particular pieces, you know, are you having progress conversations on an individual level and kind of what does that look like?

Vanessa:  You know, we don’t do performance reviews.

Tara:  Okay.

Vanessa:  I don’t do one-on-one performance reviews.  Which I usually will check in with people via email.  Like I’ll say, you know, how’s it going?  How you feeling?  How you liking everything?  We do something that I call start/stop/continue.  So start/stop/continue is every month, every four weeks I ask each of them what would you like to start?  What would you like to stop doing?  What would you like to start doing more of?  What would you like to stop doing or do less of?  And what would you like to continue?  So they’re very used to, and they prepare to tell me those stop/start/continue things.  Typically, they happen in a group or over email.

Tara:  Wow.  Okay, so it really does sound like everything from top to bottom in the way you manage your people is focused on making sure they’re working at their highest capability, helping them fulfill the learning, and then, you know, therefore making them as happy as possible.  That’s incredible.

Vanessa:  And I think that every … every single one of us, no matter what we do, should be doing stop/start/continue.  Just like job crafting with my employees, I think all of us, every week or every four weeks, should sit down and say what should I be doing more of, what should I be doing less of, and what should I start doing.

Tara:  Yeah.

Vanessa:  Right?  Like that is an incredibly powerful exercise for anyone.

Tara:  Yeah, and it’s also not super intimidating, either, right?  Like it leads to incremental changes, instead of like earlier, you mentioned, you know, if you’re unhappy, you might think that you have to completely change everything to create a happier experience for yourself, but stop/start/continue really gives you this opportunity to, you know, you could just stop two things, or you could stop one thing.

Vanessa:  Mmhmm.

Tara:  You know, each time you check in and little bit by little bit, you’re chiseling away at the things that aren’t making you happy or that aren’t allowing you to kind of operate at your highest capability.

Vanessa:  Exactly.  That’s exactly it.

Tara:  Awesome.  So Vanessa, what makes you happy?

Vanessa:  I really, really like quests, and that is something that I discovered I think accidentally.  It was … a Quest, a la Chris Guillebeau, for anyone who’s read The Happiness of Pursuit, is a very defined challenge or adventure.  So it could be reading every book on the New York Times bestseller list in a year, or the top 1 books in a year.  It could be traveling to all fifty states.  It could be cooking cuisine from every, you know, all the major countries.  It could be learning a language.  I have found that that is a magic, very potent combination.  One, it’s learning, right?  You’re usually doing some kind of learning in a quest.  Two, it gives you a lot of hope and anticipation, right?  Every time you think about completing the quest, you actually get endorphins.  Just like when you think about watching your favorite movie, it produces endorphins.  And third is it’s progress.  Right?  Every time you go to a state, every time you cook a dish, every time you learn a new vocab word, check, you get that off the list.  Oh, and lastly, bonus, is that you feel really, really awesome the further you go down the list.  And so I have a lot of quests constantly going in my life, both personal and professional, and that’s sort of how I gear all the chapters of my life is around them.

Tara:  That’s awesome.  What is one of the quests that you’re on right now?

Vanessa:  So one of my quests is that I want to try every single top-rated restaurant in Portland.

Tara:  That sounds awesome.

Vanessa:  I know.  And I like … and it’s basically an excuse for me to invite all my friends out, because they all know that I’m on this quest, so I have like a big spreadsheet, and I invited a bunch of my friends on it, and they just put their name down on the restaurants they also want to try.

Tara:  Wow.  That’s amazing.  That’s totally awesome.  Okay, so tell us about your new CreativeLive class.

Vanessa:  Okay, so I am … I am really, like I can’t even describe.  Like excited isn’t the right word for it.  I feel like this course is the course that I wish I had ten years ago.  The unhappiest day of my life was my college graduation.  It was one of those days where I realized that I was making all my decisions based on things I thought I should do, and nothing that I actually wanted to do, and so it took me a very long time to get off of that structure.  And we will talk about, in the CreativeLive course, about the four systems that cause us to make decisions.  And so my goal with this course is to sort of shake up the personal happiness value system that we have.  I want everyone coming into the course to re-evaluate how they make decisions.  The small decisions, like what they’re eating for breakfast and what they are going to put on their to do list, and the big decisions, like what’s my purpose here, what’s my legacy, what do I want to be remembered for.  Because I think that if we don’t stop and do that now, there’s that famous Chinese proverb that said the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, but the second best time is now.  That’s how I feel about happiness.

Tara:  Oh, that is so good.  I am definitely going to be tuning into that.  I will also be making Shawn tune into that, as well.

Vanessa:  Yes.

Tara:  And then can you tell us also about your upcoming book?

Vanessa:  Oh, gosh, yeah.  Yeah, so … so many years in the making, that book.  So I have a book coming out April 25th, it’s called Captivate, and it is on hacking human behavior.  So I love people skills, I do not consider them soft skills, I consider them hard skills.  So I want, this is the first time, I think, anyone’s endeavored to teach people skills like you would learn math or science.  So I break down conversation formulas, we talk about algorithms, we talk about basically the language of people skills from a very black and white perspective.

Tara:  Wow.  This is your life’s work to this point.

Vanessa:  This is … someone asked me recently, “So how long did it take you to write the book?”  And I was like, “Uh, 31 years.”

Tara:  Yes, that is … that’s awesome.  Well, I don’t … I don’t even know where to go from there.  I’m so excited for you.  What … is there anything else that we should know about that you’re working on that’s coming up for you in your business?  What, you know, what’s your next big project?

Vanessa:  Yeah, you know, actually, the next big project is sort of the next phase of the happiness research, so if you’re getting ready to listen to the CreativeLive Power of Happiness course, or you’re thinking about it, one thing you can do is you can actually go to our website, and take the happiness audit.  So the happiness audit will actually kind of clue you in right now, if you’re like, whoa, I don’t want to wait until October.  I know, it’s really far, I don’t want to wait to take the class.  You can go take the happiness audit now, and that also helps us with the next phase of our research.  So it’s ScienceofPeople.com/audit, and it’s all free.  Just fly through it.  You know, don’t overthink the answers, and that will not only help you give you some insight into, you know, the course and your own happiness, but it will also help us with our next phase of the research.

Tara:  Awesome.  Everyone loves a good quiz.

Vanessa:  Yeah, I know.

Tara:  All right.  Well, Vanessa Van Edwards, thank you so much for coming back on Profit. Power. Pursuit.  Thank you so much for talking about happiness and your team and yourself and your own journey.  This has been a really fascinating conversation.  I am excited about telling people about what you’ve just told us, so thank you.

Vanessa:  Thank you so much for having me.  Bye guys.

Tara:  Find out more about Vanessa Van Edwards at ScienceofPeople.com.  You can also find her new CreativeLive class, the Power of Happiness, at CreativeLive.com.

Next week, my guest is online business pioneer and social media expert, Joel Comm.  We talk about how he chooses new platforms, why he’s betting big on live video, and how his businesses have been impacted by social media.

CreativeLive is highly-curated classes from the world’s top experts.  Watch free, live video classes every day from acclaimed instructors in photography, design, audio, craft, business, and personal development, stream it now at CreativeLive.com.

This has been Tara Gentile.  Discover how to accelerate your earning as a small business owner with my free class, Revenue Catalyst, at QuietPowerStrategy.com/PPP.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit., a CreativeLive podcast.  Download more episodes of this podcast and subscribe on iTunes.  If you appreciate this kind of in-depth content, please leave us a review or share this podcast with a friend.  It means the world to us.

Our theme song was written by Daniel Peterson, who also edited this episode.  Our audio engineer was Kellen Shimizu.  This episode was produced by Michael Karsh.  We add a new episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit. every week.  Subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you love to listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode.

Photo of Vanessa by Armosa Studios