HappyRant

Big business. Big difference.

I love the potential of the business world to make a positive impact. One great example of that is Green Standards North America, a company built on the idea of doing well by doing good. 

On the surface, it sounds like a brilliant PR scheme. Big business shuns corporate world in favour of small-town Nova Scotia, where the players live out their dreams - and stoke their conscience - making the world a better place for poor people. Dig a little deeper, and you realize it's actually true.

It's hard to argue with their success. The multimillion-dollar company, Green Standards North America of Bridgewater, did more business in the first three months of 2007 than in all of last year. The program is called Waste to Wonder, and it involves diverting corporate waste such as furniture and equipment from landfills and donating it to worthy causes, like schools and charities. Computers, desks, chairs, boardroom tables, projectors - more than 30 million tonnes of corporate waste head to Canadian dumps each year.

The company combines money-making with money-giving.

"It's altruistic capitalism. At the front end, we've got an operating company that charges other companies to do work and makes profit. The back end of the business is a charitable trust, and the operating company covers a lot of the cost of the charitable trust. So we don't go out asking for money, we go and earn money to run the charitable trust. That's unique. The other aspect, which is equally important, is the people involved. We've got an environment here and a team of people here who really feel they're making a difference, and that's very, very motivating for those involved."

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Sharp increase in US youth volunteerism

The current generation of youth gets a lot of flack in the media for being self-absorbed and feeling overly entitled.

While that might be true, I also see that same generation as more focused on making the world a better place than previous generations. I think the altruistic focus that seems to be prevalent in that age group bodes well for the future.

Here are some statistics from a report titled "Volunteering in America: 2007 State Trends and Ranking in Civic Life" that back that up...

Volunteerism is up sharply among young Americans, according to a report released last month by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Among youths age 16 to 19, volunteer rates have almost doubled since 1989.

The article goes on to describe the trend I've seen in today's youth.

...the increase in the number of young people volunteering through their schools, churches and other community organizations is especially encouraging. Like the generation of young people who helped launched the Peace Corps in the 1960s, many in today's younger generation appear committed to building a better world through service to others.

They're doing it by mentoring younger children and helping older people live independently. They're raising money for those in need and lending a hand in times of crisis. And they're setting a wonderful example for the rest of us.

So here's a thought. What if we started focusing on the potential of this generation to make that positive impact? What if we stopped griping about how they're not like us, and started focusing on how we can support the positive energy they bring to the picture?

There's no doubt this world is in need of some serious change for the better. And if we play our cards right, today's youth will be leading the charge.

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Persistence: 75 year old lung cancer survivor skies to North Pole

Let's say you're a 75 year old woman who grew up in Harlem. And that you're a lung cancer survivor. Now let's say you want to ski to the north pole. Only you've never skied, and you don't have the thousands of dollars it's going to take to pay a tour operator to take you there.

What are the odds you'll actually do it? If you're Barbara Hillary, they're pretty good.

Hillary, of Averne, N.Y., grew up in Harlem and devoted herself to a nursing career and community activism. At 67, she battled lung cancer. Five years later, she went dog sledding in Quebec and photographed polar bears in Manitoba.

Then she heard that a black woman had never made it to the North Pole.

"I said, 'What's wrong with this picture?"' she said. "So I sort of rolled into this, shall we say."

I love a good "success against the odds" story. I love it even better when the main character succeeds because they just can't be bothered to say, "it can't be done." They're too busy making it happen. That fits Hillary's pursuit of her North Pole dream to a T.

Overcome lung cancer? Check.

Too old? Ha!

Fitness concerns? Hire a personal trainer.

Can't ski? Take lessons.

Don't have the money you need? Get private donors to sponsor you.

With her quest for the North Pole complete, Hillary is focusing on other adventures:

Hillary says she hopes her journey will inspire hope in other cancer survivors. She is already planning a new adventure: that of a global-warming activist.

"I'd like to go and lecture to different groups on what they can do on a grass-roots level (to fight global warming)," she said.

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World Laughter Day

It's World Laughter Day today! So stop what you're doing, warm up with chuckle, move on to a hearty guffaw, and top it all off with a belly laugh deep enough to make your eyes water.

World Laughter Day, started in India in 1998 by Dr. Madan Kataria (see my post on laughter yoga), is now celebrated in more than 50 countries.

What's it all about? In a nutshell, it's about feeling good.

Skeptics may think that forced or “simulated” laughter is not as effective as spontaneous outbursts, but they’d be wrong. Research has shown that the body responds chemically whether the laughter is genuine or rehearsed, much like the concept of facial expressions alone causing changes in the autonomic nervous system covered in the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Whatever else you may think of Tony Robbins, when he tells you to smile when you wake up for a good day, he does have the weight of scientific research backing him up.

So what do you actually do during laughter yoga? The formula is simple. According to Dr. Kataria's website, these are the steps involved in a 30 minute laughter yoga session:

1. We clap in rhythm while chanting "ho ho ha ha ha"
2. We breathe deeply
3. We simulate specific life situations and replace words with laughter
4. Repeat

The “life situations” are appropriately silly. There is "milkshake laughter," where everyone mimes pouring milk (while shaking). There is "lion laughter," where the tongue is stuck out and eyes opened wide, while making claws with your hands. "Cellphone laughter" involves pretending to hold a cellphone to your ear while making different gestures, reminiscent of the classic "banana phone."

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Study: Doing good makes you feel good

You probably know it already from personal experience, but a new study reported in the Journal of Research in Personality shows that there is a direct correlation between doing good things for people and feeling good.

[University of Louisville in Kentucky research Michael] Steger couldn’t help but wonder which behavior makes people happier — seeking pleasure or doing good?

To find out, he and his colleagues asked a group of 65 undergraduates to complete an online survey each day for three weeks that assessed how times they participated in hedonic, or pleasure-seeking behaviors, versus meaningful activities, such as helping others, listening to friends’ problems and/or pursuing one’s life goals.

The surveys asked the subjects how much purpose they felt their lives had each day and whether they felt happy or sad. The subjects also completed two sets of questionnaires at the beginning and end of the study to assess how they felt about their lives more generally.

They found that the more people participated in meaningful activities, the happier they were and the more purposeful their lives felt. Pleasure-seeking behaviors, on the other hand, did not make people happier.

They ran the study twice, getting the same results both times. The study supports a point of view that is polar opposite of a lot of what gets continually reinforced in our society.

“A lot of times we think that happiness comes about because you get things for yourself,” said Richard Ryan, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the study. But “it turns out that in a paradoxical way, giving gets you more, and I think that’s an important message in a culture that’s pretty often getting messages to the opposite effect.”

Wary of reading the results the wrong way, the researchers looked at the order of events...

In order to make sure that the relationship between happiness and doing good wasn’t the other way around — that happiness instead leads people to do good things—the researchers looked at which tended to come first. They found that the subjects became happier after they did something good, suggesting that happiness does, in fact, come about as a result of doing good things.

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A walking, talking symbol of hope

Eighty year old Osceola Wesley spent the first forty years of his life descending ever deeper into a cycle of drugs and prison. He has spent the last forty years helping others break that cycle.

[In Coatesville, FL], he is a revered figure, for his work as a counselor, for the antidrug marches he led, for the hundreds of people he helped escape addiction and the lives he redeemed and redirected.

"He's a true community hero," says former Chester County Commissioner Colin Hanna, who joined Wesley's antidrug marches during the 1990s. "He's a natural leader with a wonderful way about him. He can be impatient with people who don't share his sense of discipline and self-reliance, yet he has a gentleness and tenderness of heart."

His effectiveness stems in part from what Chester County Judge Anthony Sarcione calls Wesley's "pedigree" - as a drunk, a heroin shooter, a man so desperate for a high he used to boil off the alcohol in paragoric acid to harvest the trace opiates.

Today, Sarcione says, Wesley is "a walking, talking symbol of hope."

The turning point came when he finally hit rock bottom.

He can cite the exact date of his turnaround: Oct. 25, 1973, the day when he dragged himself to the VA hospital in Philadelphia for detox. He had no choice. All his veins were collapsed. His body was pocked with abscesses. His ankles were so swollen he could barely walk.

"I had no more flesh to shoot in," Wesley says. "I had run out."

Wesley's life has taken its toll on his body. In 2002 he was given no more than a few months to live. He was recently diagnosed with diabetes and hepatitis C. With all that in mind, I started seeing his story from the perspective of close to the end of their run. Specifically, I started seeing it from the perspective of someone looking back and asking, "What was my life about? Did it matter?"

Wesley's story could easily have been different. He could easily have let it all go to waste. Instead, he had an enormously positive impact on hundreds of lives. If I put myself in his shoes and ask, "Did it matter," the answer would be a resounding yes.

That's what I want to be able to say when I reach the end of my run. Each of us - regardless of where we are in our lives - has the possibility to say, "Starting today, I choose the path that matters." And the decisions we make and the directions we take from here on out are the way we'll get there.

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Study: Careers helping others are among the happiest

Want to up your happiness and satisfaction with your career, and life in general? How about a career focused on helping people? According to a new study out of the National Opinion Research Center out of the University of Chicago, "workers who spend their days improving the lives of others are among the most satisfied in the country."

The new report links people’s jobs to how satisfied they are in their careers as well as to their general happiness. “Work…is one’s main source of social standing, helps to define who a person is, and affects one’s health both physically and mentally,” wrote Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey (GSS) at the University-affiliated National Opinion Research Center, in the report.

“We found that occupations that involved a high degree of prestige, particularly those involving caring for others…were the highest in job satisfaction,” Smith said in a telephone interview. Clergy ranked the highest, with 87.2 percent saying they were “very satisfied” in their careers. Firefighters (80.1 percent) and physical therapists (78.1 percent) were close runners-up. Rounding out the top 10 were education administrators, painters and sculptors, teachers, authors, psychologists, special education instructors, and operating engineers.

The results are drawn from over 27,000 face to face interviews with people across the US done between 1988 to 2006.

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