The Happyologist; What Science Says Makes Life Happier - Susanna Halonen - #021

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. This week, we're talking about happiness. The field of psychology for a very long time was focused on making bad people okay, as opposed to okay people better, or happy people even more happy. I'm happy to sit down, pardon the pun, with Susanna Halonen, who is the world's first happyologist. She is a positive psychology specialist, the author of Happiness Is Here and Screw Finding Your Passion. She's a published researcher, TEDx speaker, online columnist and a regular commentator in the media from the BBC to The Huffington Post and more. And we're gonna try and find out how we become a little bit happier in life. I was incredibly surprised at how many basic steps we can take in our day to day life to actually make our level of happiness, our baseline level of satisfaction, improved. It was very enlightening and there was a lot of new information that came out of this. Now, one of the key tools that Susanna suggests that everybody should be using is a journal. And I know that I will be asked for some advice on which journal I recommend and which one I use. So The 6 Minute Diary, which I've mentioned is on numerous life hacks, the podcast with Warren Cass and the podcast with Ewan Lawson will be linked in the show notes below. It's my favorite way to develop a journaling habit. Three minutes on the morning, three minutes in the evening with prompts for questions. Susanna gives you a lovely little program that you can follow as well on a weekly and a daily basis. You can add those in, I've chosen to, as there are sections in the diary to add weekly notes as well. If you follow the link in the show notes below, you will be supporting this channel at no extra cost to yourself. So please do so. If you want to start journaling, consider using The 6 Minute Diary, it's my favorite. Now let's chase after some happiness.
Susanna Halonen, welcome to Modern Wisdom.

**Susanna Halonen** (2:26)
Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
It's fantastic. How are you?

**Susanna Halonen** (2:31)
Yeah, I'm very good. I'm feeling good. The sun is shining. I've had a good start to the week. So yeah, it's all good.

**Chris Williamson** (2:36)
That's brilliant. So let's get straight into it. Can you tell me what a happyologist is, please?

**Susanna Halonen** (2:44)
Yeah, so basically as my job, as the happyologist, my mission in life is to make the world a happier place. And the way I do that is anything from one-to-one coaching work, to workshops, to keynote talks at organizations. And I've recently started also doing more online courses on it and some books as well. And it's basically just all about helping you to live a happier and more fulfilling life in short.

**Chris Williamson** (3:15)
Yeah. Okay. Well, it sounds like a, a pretty noble pursuit, I suppose.

**Susanna Halonen** (3:19)
Yeah. I mean, I love it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:22)
It must be very fulfilling.

**Susanna Halonen** (3:23)
Yes, it is. It absolutely is. And it is really the opposite almost of what I used to do, because I haven't always been the happyologist. So I went initially into the corporate career doing, well, a mix of things from project management to marketing communications, to PR and very quickly realized it wasn't quite the world for me. And also I felt it wasn't meaningful enough for me. So I felt like I wanted to connect to the work that I was doing more and feel like what I was doing was making some kind of positive impact. And when I discovered positive psychology, I just had this epiphany moment that that was it. That was kind of the thing that would help me to help others as well.

**Chris Williamson** (4:09)
That was your calling in life, right?

**Susanna Halonen** (4:10)
Yes, absolutely.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
That's fantastic. I've seen you've done TEDx speaking. You are a commentator from BBC to Huffington Post as well. So for a subject area as hapiology, which I guess is not tremendously mainstream, it's obvious that there's a demand for your work and your talents.

**Susanna Halonen** (4:35)
Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's a growing field as well. So how I kind of got into it is initially just my exploring positive psychology with books and blogs and people in the field, and then eventually I want to do a Masters of Science in it because I really wanted to specialise myself in the actual science behind it. And I mean, the university where I went to do it was the University of East London, and that was only the second university to offer positive psychology as a Masters of Science study.