While happiness is often seen as a personal or individual state, teams and organizations can also benefit from the principles used in happiness coaching, according to Rebecca 'Becky' Morrison, founder of Untangle Happiness, which caters to high-achieving clients, such as C-suite executives.
Prior to becoming a coach, Morrison was a lawyer and finance and investment professional, so she is no stranger to high-pressure corporate settings. However, she felt unhappy and unfulfilled with her career, so she set out to find her own “Happiness Recipe” and applied it to her own life. Today, she seeks to take what she's learned about individual happiness, burnout and flourishing and apply it to teams and organizations. She works with organizational leaders to deploy the principles and change the way the team works together for the better. She also gives a broad look at the organization's processes and helps members learn more about themselves, as well as equip them with a new toolbox to deal with the stresses and pressures of a high-achieving career.
According to Morrison, group coaching usually begins when one of her clients in her one-on-one happiness coaching service notices that their team members are falling into the same pitfalls that they did prior to seeking happiness coaching. They start to see that those behaviors are not serving their team's growth, with team members lacking something in their daily activities, such as failing to prioritize the right things or being unable to delegate tasks they should be delegating.
“Many clients grapple with the questions 'Do I still want to be a leader in this company?' and 'What kind of leader do I want to be?' As they start to look at that for themselves, they start to see room for growth for others. However, they're not in a position where they feel that they can ask the people on their team to make this kind of individual level of investment. So that's where my group coaching comes in,” Morrison says.
During the group coaching, Morrison helps participants find the tools they can apply to their team and to the people around them, in order to change the way that the group works together and allow it to flourish. Morrison agrees that relationships are a huge part of a person's ability to be happy, and that having high quality relationships at work is a major factor in preventing people from getting burnt out. To achieve this, she teaches participants how to invest in their relationships with the people around them.”
“Our work includes learning how to develop a common vocabulary for the value that we see in each other. We also do strength-based work to identify the various strengths of the people within a team. And then we lean further into those, and teach them the vocabulary to talk about those strengths with each other. There's some really powerful research out there saying that when we work and experiment with our strengths and use them in new ways, it has incredible benefits for collective and individual happiness.”
Having worked with high achievers and being one herself, Morrison understands that they place a premium on perfection and may be averse to taking risks. She helps them move from a fixed mindset, where mistakes are problematic, to a growth mindset, where there is room to experiment and to grow, and where they can improve their performance over time with effort. She also lets them learn how to talk with each other and give feedback that is actionable and continues to foster the growth mindset.
“I work to equip teams with the tools to have these kinds of conversations with each other. We then introduce them to the framework of positive psychology, which helps them live a flourishing life and think about incorporating those principles into their workplace. This helps them find meaning and purpose in the work that they do, as well as keep them engaged,” Morrison says.
Media contact:
Name: Becky Morrison
Email: [email protected]
