My speaking gigs
I’m giving two free presentations in Copenhagen over the next month, one on October 2nd on stress and happiness at work and one on Novemer 1st about happiness at work coaching.
They’ll be held in Danish and you can read all about’em and sign up here:
Last week was a very busy one for me, where I had no less than 4 gigs last week of a wildly varying nature.
From talking to a group of students from Aiesec about happiness at work in a volunteer organization, to talking to a group of insurance claims handlers about stress and busyness. That last presentation, incidentally, happened on one of their busiest days, because Denmark had just been hit by severe thunderstorms – giving insurance companies nationwide a lot of extra work. Talk about good timing :o)
Thursday I presented on happiness at the reboot conference. Preparing for this, it turned out that working with happiness at work for the last 4 years has also taught me a lot about happiness in general – partly because I’ve been keeping up with a lot of the research done in positive psychology and in economics, but mostly because in that period I have literally lived for happiness – mine and others’.
The presentation content itself turned out to be completely different from my “happiness at work” presentations, and I had to develop a completely new presentation for this event.
My main points were:
I like how the presentation went and some people told me later that it was one of their favorite reboot experiences.
Stephanie Booth was there, and she was kind enough to blog some amazing notes. You can also download my slides.
Then on Friday I went to Stockholm to do my first presentation in Sweden and that went even better. A group of around 50 business leaders, HR people and journalists heard my standard presentation on happiness at work and they really, really seemed to like it.
Which is good, because I did the event together with Swedish speaker bureau 4good, and we’re hoping to develop many more speaking gigs for me in Sweden.
I’m at Reboot9 today – If you’re at Reboot too, please find me and say “Hi!” :o)
But do it today – I can’t be there tomorrow because I’m speaking on happiness at work in Stockholm.
And if you’d like to know more about happiness, please join my presentation at 15:00.
I’ve previously mentioned the reboot conference, how good it is and that you should definitely get yourself some tickets to reboot9, which is happening later this week right here in Copenhagen. If you didn’t listen and get yourself a ticket, it’s now too late – the event has sold out.
I’ll be speaking again this year on a theme that is tremendously important to me: Happiness. Not happiness at work, mind you, but happiness in general.
Specifically, I’ll be talking about the fact that:
I’m on Thursday at 15:00-15:40. Read more about my presentation here.
Nicole Simon did a pre-reboot interview with me again this year – and we had another great, fun conversation. Visit her blog or click play below to hear the whole thing.
I’m giving a presentation about happiness at work in Stockholm on Friday June 1st at 9AM and I would LOVE to see you there!
I’m doing this in cooperation with 4good, who are representing me in Sweden. Here’s a snippet from their invitation:
Inhouse och 4good vill härmed bjuda in dig till ett exklusivt miniseminarie med Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf, för första gången i Sverige!
Alexander är en av världens främsta inspiratörer på temat arbetsglädje och work-life balance, han är en nytänkande entreprenör och författare till boken ???Happy Hour is 9 to 5 – How to love your job, love your life and kick butt at work???. Han driver också inspirationssiten och bloggen www.postivesharing.com med över 100.000 besökare varje månad.
Vi är glada över att ha Alexander Kjerulf här på ett unikt Sverigebesök! Kom och lyssna till hans mycket intressanta åsikter och insikter om varför arbetsglädje är så viktigt för att driva framgångsrika företag. Varmt välkommen till en av vårens absoluta höjdpunkter på 4good! (read more).
It will be held at the Scandic Continental on Klara Vattugränd 4. If you’re in Stockholm on Friday and would like to attend, send me an email, and I’ll make sure to put you on the guest list.
I’m at the web.start conference in Zagreb where I’ll be giving a key-note presentation tomorrow on happiness at work in internet startups.
My claim is, that happiness at work is the #1 factor that will make or break a startup company. I’ll be posting my thoughts on this (and what startups should do to be happy) tomorrow – but I don’t want to give it all away before my presentation.
In the meantime please enjoy the picture above from Zagreb (a beautiful city), where the architecture seems to be either:
There will be another brief blogging gap while I have a few busy days speaking. Yesterday it was 2 gigs for a local meeting of Aiesec (a student organization) and tomorrow it’s for a group of supermarket managers.
Meanwhile, all the action is over at the Happy Link Collection. Check out the links, vote for the ones you like and submit your own.
I’ve been absent from my blog for a couple of days – things have been crazy busy here at Happiness HQ. I’ve been selling and doing speaking gigs like crazy – in fact I have another one in 3 hours, so this will be a brief message.
Anyway, I’m back and I’ve got great news: I’ve added a new feature to the blog called (so far, until we come up with a better name) Happy Links.
It’s a place where you can discover and vote on great stories, links and blogposts about happiness at work. You can also submit great stuff that you’ve found or created. There are some great articles on there already.
Go check it out and let me know what you think.
Once a week I will do a sort of resume of the week’s stories and take the highest rated stories and post links to them on the blog itself – just to tie the whole thing together. Whaddayathink?
Yesterday I spoke at a half-day conference about stress for knowledge workers. And I kicked ass, if I do say so myself :o) That new presentation format I designed back in November is really working well!
Knowledge workers are architects, designers, writers, programmers, etc… People whose input and output of work is immaterial, rather than physical. In recent years, these people have turned out to be very prone to stress and the mini-conference examined this phenomenon.
Christine Ipsen presented the results of her phd study, which examines the source of this stress. Two friends of mine, Lene Thomsen and Nina Tange spoke about meaning at work and how this can reduce stress.
The main point of my presentation was of course that we can’t be focusing on fighting stress. That only makes people more stressed. We need to focus on promoting happiness at work – when people are happy at work, they’re not stressed. I also talked about some myths about stress.
I’ve previously blogged about the fact that happiness at work is important to all kinds of employees. It’s not limited to people in creative, high-paying or high-status jobs. But that being said, I think happiness at work is even more important for knowledge workers.
Here’s why:
Happy knowledge workers are more motivated
If you’re a welder, you can probably weld even if you’re not very motivated that day. If you’re a trash man, you can still take out the trash. But what if you’re an architect trying to come up with a new design, a programmer trying to solve a tricky problem or a journalist writing a tricky article?
When most of the work you do goes on inside your head, motivation is critical! And of course happy people are waaay more motivated.
Happy knowledge workers learn better
For all knowledge workers, the knowledge you have is almost never enough. That stuff tends to go obsolete real fast. You need to constantly learn new things. And all studies show, that people learn much better when they’re happy.
Happy knowledge workers form better relations at work
Relationships and teamwork are crucial to most knowledge workers. And you form much better relationships at work and participate much more efficiently in teams when you’re happy.
Happy knowledge workers share knowledge
Most companies that deal in knowledge also want employees to share that knowledge. As I wrote about previously, people only share knowledge, when they’re passionate about what they work with. People who don’t care, don’t share. Which is why so many corporate knowledge management systems fail miserably. The systems are fine – they’re simply asking people to share information they couldn’t care less about.
As you probably know from reading this blog, I believe that everyone should be happy at work. It’s just that happiness has an even bigger impact on the productivity of knowledge workers than it does on others.
So if you work mainly with knowledge, increase your happiness at work. If you lead knowledge workers, do everything you can to make them love their jobs.
So how do you make knowledge workers happy? Same way as everybody else. Read all about it.
Since I released my book a mere two weeks ago a crazy amount of great stuff has happened.
Here are some of my favorites:
All of this and more in just two weeks. Things are almost happening too quickly now. I LOVE it!
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