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 what we found was that when the brain becomes more grateful for the world that we're in, it doesn't mean that we're grateful for everything that's happening.

It doesn't mean we're grateful for the inequality or the discrimination or the racism that's in our world right now.

But when we find those moments of things we're grateful for in the midst of it,

It allows our brain to actually move from the part of the brain that sees how my behavior doesn't matter, that fearful part that says things will never get better or that I will never be okay, to the front part of the brain that moves forward.

And what we find is as somebody becomes more grateful, what we find is that almost every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for improves dramatically.

Our sales rise, our productivity improves, we live longer, we become more altruistic.

Everything we test for on the ACT and SAT serendipity test rises, our creativity nearly triples, our intelligence rises.

It turns out having a grateful brain is one of the greatest possible advantages you could give to someone in the midst of a world that doesn't look like it should.

It does, because gratitude is searching for the good that's in the world around us.

And it changes not only what we feel when we have water pressure or central air or food on our plate, it changes what happens next for people.

There's this amazing demonstration experiment that was done by a researcher named Richard Weissman

yeah and what he did is he had people come into a room like this one and he would give them a survey and find out do you think that you are a grateful person and that you're a lucky person the good things just seem to happen to you that if you work for it that the world can conspire in your favor or do you think you're an unlucky person the bad things just keep happening to you no matter how hard you work and then he hands him a newspaper and in the newspaper he wants you to count the number of photographs that are in it

So you go quickly through it, and if you get the number correct, you get five pounds.

It was done in the UK.

Yeah.

the people start doing it as quickly as possible, looking for all the photos in the newspaper.

But on page two of everyone's newspaper, but in big letters, but not in a photo, it says, stop the experiment now.

We'll give you 10 pounds if you stop now.

And here's what happens.

The people who felt that they were unlucky, the people who are the pessimists or the people who felt like good things wouldn't happen to them, they finished the experiment and they get paid because they get the number correct.

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