Shawn Achor

speaker

398 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Shawn Achor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Oprah Podcast · Your Life Changes When Your Beliefs Do with Shawn Achor and Oprah · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

And I talked to a pastor, one of my friends named Matt Tuggle in Dallas.

And he says that when people are crashing out or when they're at the bottom where a relationship fails or marriage fails or they don't get the job that they want or that they lose someone, his goal at the bottom is to help them to start to believe that the future you hoped for is not the only future with hope.

And what I loved about this is that we get fixed on one version of hope that changed for you, that there were other futures that had hope.

But once you see that, it gets back to the newspaper study.

When we believe that there's possibility out there, when we believe that there's something greater than me, what we find is scientifically, our beliefs predict what happens next.

And I'm not surprised to hear the incredible successes you've had in your life.

Thank you, Daley.

Yes.

So I got the opportunity to work with the superintendent of Genesee County, which is where Flint, Michigan is.

And was invited in to share this research on beliefs and happiness.

And I was nervous going in because it's Flint.

You've got...

entrenched inequality and discrimination, racism, and lead in the drinking water, they had to turn off the water fountains while they were there for the students.

In the midst of that, to come in and talk about happiness and optimism was daunting, but also, I believe, so crucial.

Because when the teachers believe that their behavior might not matter, they left on average after two years.

So our goal was, could we change the beliefs for the teachers and see if it had an effect upon the students?

Yeah, when the teachers started to believe that their behavior mattered, that they were not alone, what we saw was in the classrooms where the teachers' levels of optimism rose, the teachers' students' test scores rose, but we weren't working with the students.

we were working with the teachers and you could see the contagious effect of positive beliefs, not just upon ourselves, but upon the people that we serve as well.

And we got reports that people in the community who sometimes the teachers never even met, the guardians or the parents of those students, that their wellbeing scores were improving.

So we worked with the teachers, but you could see an effect upon the students and upon the community, which I think both of those stories that both of you described about how beliefs are more powerful than I think

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