Opinions are coming at you from left, right, above, below, and all around. You begin to ruminate on a decision, as there are as many options to choose from as there are menu items at The Cheesecake Factory. Your pro-con list has an equal number of pros and cons. How do you know you’re making the right decision, the best decision? You seek clarity by asking peers for advice, googling until you’re on the sixth page of search results, and getting wrapped up in the Reddit conversations on the topic. This overcomplication goes on for days, sometimes weeks, or even months, then you crash without making a clear decision. The complications and answer-seeking lead to sheer mental and physical exhaustion. You’re depleted, yet you still don’t have your answer.
Pause.
What if this cycle of endless rumination isn’t about fear or your inability to come to a conclusion?
Perhaps it’s about too many external inputs shaping your plan to progress. External expectations can drive you to a level of perfectionism that simply isn’t realistic, amplifying anxiety around your choices. The pressure to constantly “get it right” combined with endless options overstimulates the mind.
The real problem isn’t that people don’t know what they want. It’s that the competing external viewpoints become louder than their own inner voice. The advertisements on every website telling you they have the perfect solution. Leading a team of hundreds where you want everyone’s voice to count, and you end up with hundreds (or thousands) of opinions in a survey. How do you make aligned decisions when every decision seems mission-critical?
Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which tested and studied the effects of positive emotions, found that joy leads to expanded neurological behaviors, including creativity, pushing limits, and the urge to play. Most interestingly, it found that an increase in joy leads to “increased personal resources” defined as “pathways thinking, environmental mastery, self-acceptance, purpose in life, social support received, positive relations with others,” which are all leadership skills for fostering trust and building team alignment.
Joy builds the internal fortitude that fuels advancement. Positive emotions broaden your thinking, help you see more options, and, over time, build durable resources like optimism, problem-solving capacity, and social connections. This is the psychological “infrastructure” you need to take on bigger opportunities.
Save time and reduce stress by letting joy lead. Leverage joy as your greatest tool, a decision-making functionality, not simply a feeling. Your learned and lived experiences prepared you for more than you realize. You are overtly over-qualified for your role and to make the types of decisions you’re faced with. You have taken the time to get to know your team. You are ready to make decisions rooted in joy. Leveraging joy as your compass empowers you to explain less, as the decision will easily integrate with the team’s work, how you run your household, or your budget. Your mind and body feel at ease after you make the decision. Mental negotiation with yourself comes to a halt when you lead with joy.
When joy is missing, decisions feel heavy. When joy is present, decisions feel clearer, even when they’re hard.
Defining Joy
Look deep within. This is the fascinating part, and the difficult part is that no two people are exactly alike. You might wonder if it’s the lack of something, the addition of something, or something else altogether, along with where joy is located.
And you might think something like peace is a universal joy, but I was recently surprised. I met a woman who told me she “thrives in chaos” because she loves solving problems. It was fascinating to hear her talk about different times of turbulence and how she handled them. I watched her body language ignite as she shared how she navigates difficult times. She literally gets joy from thriving in chaos.
I don’t, but it stuck in my memory. And I know who to call when I have a big, tangled, messy challenge that feels like too much for me to see how to untangle.
Joy is not universal. It’s not something that is the same for each of us, and that’s the most beautiful part about joy. You get to define your joy!
It takes me back to Fredrickson’s research, as it showed that joy doesn’t lead directly to better relationships. First, you experience joy, which “broadens feelings of warmth and caring toward others,” then that leads to “building personal resources.” The key step is activating joy within yourself, as it enables you to develop deeper relationships with others.
When your goals are rooted in joy, you’re more excited about them and accomplish them faster because they no longer feel like a mundane task to check off the list. When you’re clear on your goals, you can build community more easily, as it comes naturally since you have goals and joy factors you’re excited to talk about. Then, once you have joy-based goals and a network that supports them, you’re ready to be a leader who helps others succeed.
Think about it for a minute.
Can you truly lead without first building community? And can you build community without clarity? The quickest way to clear objectives is through your lens of joy.
This is why I am building the business case for joy by teaching teams how to leverage it as a strategic advantage for goal setting, networking, and team alignment.
Starting With Joy
Joy, as a foundation for living life, will take you further than you ever imagined. It will take you around the globe and back again.
Starting with joy means that, even in the hard times, you’ll persevere, knowing you’re working toward something personally meaningful to you and your life. Joy is the most powerful tool in your toolkit. No matter what your job is—entry level to C-suite, blue collar to white collar, corporate to nonprofit to government—across the board, joy makes the people around you happier about their workday and leaves a lasting impression.
This is an adapted excerpt from The Stay Joyful Method: Using Joy as a Tool to Rise, Lead, and Redefine Success by Bose Akadiri, reprinted with permission from the author and publisher.
