How 7 Core Beliefs Shape Your Health, Happiness, & Success | Shawn Achor

Jonathan Fields (0:00)

So what if, no matter how much you thought you were in control of your life, there was a core set of beliefs, largely invisible to you, that were secretly running the show, determining success or failure in nearly every domain of life, from work to relationships to mental and physical health.

So often, we're told to fix our habits or build better systems and just try harder. But what if the real driver underneath all of that is the beliefs we hold about ourselves, about other people and about the world? And what if every attempt at change was forever limited by these underlying beliefs and the only way to truly live the life you want was to make them visible and then do what's needed to rewire the ones that need rewiring? My guest today is Shawn Achor. He spent 12 years at Harvard studying the science of belief, happiness and success. His Ted Talk has been watched more than 25 million times. And his new book, The Power of Beliefs, it grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and also watching his own daughter fight for her life being born three months early. In this conversation, he breaks down seven core beliefs that shape how we experience life. Beliefs like whether we matter, whether we're alone, and whether our actions actually make a difference. And we talk about why the same situation can feel just completely different depending on the story we tell ourselves, how stress becomes more damaging when it feels meaningless, and why even small belief shifts can create big changes in health, happiness and performance. If you have ever felt stuck in the same patterns, this conversation offers a fresh and practical way to look at what's really going on and what it takes to move forward. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump right in after this short break.

I'm fascinated by the topic that you have been really diving into. I've been following your work for quite a long time now.

The world of beliefs and behavior change is something that I have been so curious about for so long.

I don't know if I've met anybody that you can bump into on the street. And if you ask them the question of, is there anything about you or your life or your circumstance that you would love to be different? I have to imagine almost everybody's gonna have an answer to that question. That there will be something. And yet most people think about change as, well, this is about willpower or having the right system or the plan or the habits or enough time. And you think that those, they're not completely useless, but they're also a bit of a distraction from the bigger thing. So take me into this.

Shawn Achor (2:49)

Sure, well, I think you're right. I think that oftentimes when we think we need to make a change in our life or when I'm invited to give a talk, they ask for practical takeaways, which means another habit. And every speaker at the conference is doing that. So by the end of the day, you've got 37 things you need to be doing.

But my research is not that those are not important. I've been talking about the value of habits my entire career.

But there's a precursor to it. The precursor, before we even decide whether or not a habit is worthwhile or whether or not change is possible, we have a belief about change, about ourselves, about whether the world is for us or against us, how much free will we have, that change not only the math about what's possible and probable, but our beliefs change the very paths we decide to take. They decide which hills we're going to climb. They decide which goals we're going to go for. It tells us when we're unhappy with parts of our life and that we believe that something should be different or that we believe that we feel alone, but that we feel like that that shouldn't be the case or we feel like we're being moral or immoral. Those stem from a belief system and we have beliefs about so many different types of things. We have beliefs about whether or not it's safe to get into a self-driving car. We have beliefs about whether or not we should be working or at home with our kids. We have beliefs about whether AI is great or it's gonna start a market crisis or it's gonna steal our kids' education. We have beliefs about a lot of different things. And the question that drove a lot of this research is we have beliefs about everything, but not all of those beliefs really change us. What I'm interested in are there certain beliefs that are most predictive about what's about to happen next in the path that you take.