Shawn Achor

speaker

350 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

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 Aug 2026 with 1.

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ReThinking · How to challenge your self-limiting beliefs with Shawn Achor · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

But when you look at the role that optimism plays in improving performance across the board, everything from performance on tests to performance in sports, to longevity, to social relationships improve.

So what my assumption would be is that, yes, there are those people, but they're actually underperforming their ability.

At the same time, the other thing that I would say is that factors into that question about success.

We know great biographies of people who are

extraordinarily mean or negative or hard on themselves who have been prolific performers and musicians and CEOs, but then they also have substance abuse or commit suicide at a young age or their relationships break down.

And so when you look at success in its entirety, not just through a single lens of their performance on a court or how much money that they have on paper, what we start to see is that

When we are optimistic, when we see meaning and purpose, when we have social connection, it leads to greater levels of success across the board.

So I think it's a brilliant critique.

I agree in terms of happiness and beliefs.

What I'm interested in is how do we realistically view the present, but maintain the belief that eventually my behavior will matter if linked to other people.

What we're looking for is behavior that allows us to feel emotions that cause us to thrive.

But if happiness is about pleasure, it leads to complacency if you get up to a nine or a 10, because...

We don't want to keep moving forward.

And that's part of what I was arguing for, why I wanted to use a different definition of happiness.

Because if you redefine happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential, joy is something you can experience even when life is not pleasurable.

But the other side of it is that it propels us towards more of our potential, that it doesn't allow us to rest on our laurels.

It's the fuel for what we're experiencing.

The only middle path is

is the one I think you're describing, that I think that the eights in those studies would describe, which is I'm not happy all the time, but I find that I function better at a positive state than a negative state.

And I can realistically look at some of the negatives we see in the world, but maintain that belief that in the midst of the good and the bad that we're experiencing, that eventually my behavior will matter.

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