Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
Most of us are chasing a feeling in life. We might call it happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, joy, or something else. We achieve things, we check boxes, we get the job, the promotion, the title, and then we wait for the feeling to arrive. Sometimes it does. And yet sometimes not long after, It fades. What if that fade isn’t a personal failure? What if it’s actually biology? My guest today, Linda Hand, is an executive coach who spent decades leading at the highest levels of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Now, she’s helping other leaders do what she learned to do for herself and her teams, find the meaning behind their work.
Linda Hand [00:00:50]:
Hi, Linda.
Bernie Borges [00:00:51]:
Behind the Motion. Recently, Linda dug into the science of happiness, not the self-help version, but the peer-reviewed neuroscience-backed research that explains why we feel the way we feel, and more importantly, what we can actually do about it. This conversation is going to challenge some of your assumptions about fulfillment, happiness, And what’s really within your control. We’re going to discuss why fulfillment and happiness are more connected than you might think, the neuroscience of why we normalize good things and what to do about it, how 40% of your feeling is yours to shape intentionally, and practical tools for building a more meaningful career in life. Linda, welcome to the Life Fulfilled Podcast.
Linda Hand [00:01:45]:
Thanks for having me, Bernie. I’m excited to be here.
Bernie Borges [00:01:55]:
I’m excited for this conversation. Boy, we just— I just summarized a lot that we’re going to unpack in this podcast here. So, let me first introduce you to my listeners. As I said in the introduction, you have spent decades in C-level leadership roles. You’ve helped high-potential leaders unlock their full capabilities and achieve extraordinary results. You work at all levels across diverse industries and continents, and you bring both the lived experience of a senior leader and the rigor of someone who keeps going deeper on the science behind what actually helps people thrive. And we’re digging into that today. So, Linda, I know this is a little bit unfair, but why don’t we begin our conversation before we dive into the science of happiness? Let’s begin our conversation with the backstory.
Bernie Borges [00:02:44]:
Summarize, if you would, in just a few minutes, your 4-decade career and really what led you to this moment.
Linda Hand [00:02:51]:
Yeah. So, as you say, 4 decades is a lot of team building. I started with a degree from Berkeley in computer science, but the universe very quickly taught me the lesson that I was meant to be leading people and managing things and making a lot of stuff happen. And so, that led me up the chain of executive leadership. But you don’t build great stuff without great people. Not everyone fulfills their potential in the same way and the same speed. And so, I think my superpower has always been people, realizing and helping people see the things they can do that they couldn’t see in themselves, the people they could be, their potential. I also became a mentor for Mentium Corporation, which is a volunteer mentor position, and you get a new mentee every year.
Linda Hand [00:03:42]:
And so, they’ve been in different industries and they’ve been in different functions. And what that taught me was it’s not just my teams. As different as all of those things have been, it’s all the same. There’s patterns that get us stuck. There’s things that we’re all trying to achieve with different chatter in our heads. And, I got really good at identifying that and helping people, giving them tools to unlock their potential from that perspective. And so, when I decided to retire from the stress of CEO life, I thought, I’m really good at this and I love it so much. I love seeing people fulfill their potential.
Linda Hand [00:04:20]:
So, I created LTH Coaching and sort of launched that business and I’m just having a blast. And so I also decided to become a life coach because a lot of what you do is professional, but everything blends together. And so giving tools to people and trying to understand how do they work and why do they work. I know they do because I see the results in people, but, you know, that’s what drew me to going to this Greater Good Science Center.
Bernie Borges [00:04:49]:
Well, let’s, okay, so let’s unpack that because I know in your background that you are an engineer at heart, meaning that that’s what you got your, your undergrad and graduate degrees in, as you mentioned, at Berkeley, right there in your sort of in your backyard. So how did you discover and decide that you were gonna actually go to this program? They call it the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, is that right?
Linda Hand [00:05:11]:
Yep, and you can look that up on their website. I actually am a, you know, because I’m an alumni from UC Berkeley, but I also graduated from the Haas School of Business Executive Program. And so I get little teasers now and then of things that are coming up. And, I think one, this particular thing sort of hit me with a nerve of I want to understand more about the science behind what I know these tools do for people in terms of calming their nervous system and helping them feel more fulfilled and recognizing issues they have with their self-awareness. And so, what I also thought was really fascinating about this and is kind of in the intro to the class was that there’s been decades of study around anger and negative emotions and things like that, but not a lot of money in research and science poured into the positive affectations. So, really thinking about clinical trials, which I have a history in, in life sciences, and the studies behind that to kind of give the method to the madness, if you will.
Bernie Borges [00:06:18]:
And so the course is called The Science of Happiness. Why is it called that?
Linda Hand [00:06:26]:
Well, I think they use the word happiness as a very simple word that’s easy to translate to everyone. But when you get into it, the very first module is all about the fact that it’s not just the fleeting moment of happiness. It is the science of goodness, the science of forgiveness, the science of compassion, the science of gratitude, the science of meaning and purpose in life. And so, they really kind of blend all that together to say, happiness truly comes from being fulfilled. And there are several aspects to fulfillment.
Bernie Borges [00:07:02]:
You know that I define happiness as generally an emotion, a feeling that we have largely driven by circumstance. I use simple examples of the sky is blue and the sun is shining today. So, You know, I’m happy that I can go to the park on a sunny day, or my favorite sports team won and I’m happy about that. But it’s circumstantial. Contrasted by fulfillment, which is the emotion or the feeling that I experience when I either achieve something significant, it doesn’t have to be humongous, it can be anything, or I’m doing something with purpose. And in most cases, Linda, I say that fulfillment is immutable. Nothing can take it away. So using my definitions of it, Give me and the listeners some of your perspective based on your life experiences and everything that you’ve learned from the Science of Happiness course at Berkeley.
Linda Hand [00:07:54]:
In terms of the differences between that, like, I think you’re spot on in your definition of, you know, if you’re just talking about happiness. One thing that I thought was really interesting was, is it possible to always be happy? Should we be chasing happiness all the time? This makes me feel good. This makes me feel good. In fact, no, that isn’t going to create that kind of long-lasting sense of fulfillment and happiness. One, material things won’t give you that. That’s going to be a wheel that you’ll never get off. In other words, happiness and fulfillment is a sign of how fast you recover from the negative. The negative’s always going to happen.
Linda Hand [00:08:32]:
The circumstance, it’s going to be raining, you’re going to get a flat tire. How fast you recover from that is sort of your level of happiness. And I think being very self-aware about that is a key part of being a happier person. But there’s a lot of things that you can do. And I think that the course really pointed out that, like, let’s say gratitude. Okay. That’s a positive, prosocial, you know, thing, behavior. But the more— and they did a bunch of clinical trials on this— you express gratitude, you feel happier.
Linda Hand [00:09:08]:
Happier people are more grateful, and it’s a circle that happens like that, right? The more empathy you have, the happier you are. The happier you are, likely you are more empathetic. And, they did clinical trial after clinical trial that all of these kind of prosocial emotions lead to higher and higher levels of happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose.
Bernie Borges [00:09:31]:
So then, I think We can say that it almost doesn’t matter whether we’re labeling something a feeling of happiness or labeling it a feeling of fulfillment. It’s really about the intentionality toward that.
Linda Hand [00:09:47]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Choosing to be more prosocial will bring you more happiness. Those things also spread happiness. Being around happier people makes you happier. You know, it’s sort of like the gift that keeps on giving, if you will, no matter what you call it or no matter what aspect of those words I just used that you focus on in a moment will bring you greater happiness.
Bernie Borges [00:10:15]:
Now, Linda, in my introduction, I kind of set the stage for this next part of our conversation where sometimes we’re chasing something, we get there, and then we’re looking for that feeling. And, maybe it arrives, maybe it doesn’t, but then it fades. So, address that, the biology of the fade.
Linda Hand [00:10:36]:
Yeah, yeah. So, it’s called hedonic adaptation. And basically, we get used to good things. We just do. So, you’re looking at my new house, been here a year. I didn’t know when I bought this house or when I went looking for a house that I needed a water feature. But that water feature brings me so much joy. And I will tell you, when I first moved here, that I would come out into this living room and I would look at it and I’d open the door and I’d hear the water and I’d see the hummingbirds bathing themselves.
Linda Hand [00:11:07]:
And I’d just be like, oh my God, I love this place. This is so great. And then I realized month over month, you know, I still feel like it’s my water feature and I’ll sit and meditate or whatever, but like, I didn’t come into the room giggling anymore. And I was taking this class and I thought, aha, this is happening to me. I’m getting used to good things. And it is natural to do that. But what was really interesting in the science was, at what point do you— where do you get back to normal? Everybody has set points. And so part of what this class was teaching me was that 50% of our sort of levels of happiness are genetic.
Linda Hand [00:11:47]:
You know those people that just are never happy and they always see glass half empty and blah, blah, blah. 10% of it is circumstantial and environment, right? So you talked about in your definition of happiness that there can be, and flat tires, circumstances, et cetera, but that’s only 10%. It’s not everything about your life. And that leaves 40% that you get to choose. And what I find is a lot of what I do with my coaching is thinking about that 40%, reframing things, looking at it a different way, taking a minute to rethink how your response to a circumstance has changed how you feel about it. Tons of work. Now, this is literally like 90% of the work that I do with clients is really thinking about what is your narrative, Thinking about how you’re viewing something and then reframing it so that you have a different perspective. And that, and then, then you interact with the world differently with that perspective.
Bernie Borges [00:12:50]:
You know, I can’t help but wonder if, if I can influence those numbers. I almost think of it as like an algorithm that I want to, I want to modify. Meaning if I know, if I now know as a result of this conversation and before this conversation, I learned this, you know, from you in prepping for this podcast that 50% of my biology and how my attitude towards feeling happy or fulfilled, 50% was genetics. So maybe I can work on that 40% so intentionally that I can erode some of that 50%. Was there anything in the research that speaks to that?
Linda Hand [00:13:32]:
Nothing that— no clinical trials that I read about, no peer-reviewed papers on that, like trying to change your point. It’s always about getting above that set point. So, there is some control in the knowing that 50% of it is here. So, if you’ve gone back to that, circumstances aren’t changing that for you, then maybe you have 50% to play with. Change your circumstances, change your job, get a different boss. So, you can play with the 10% too sometimes.
Bernie Borges [00:14:04]:
Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Linda Hand [00:14:06]:
Okay.
Bernie Borges [00:14:07]:
You mentioned gratitude. Let’s unpack that a little bit because I love your comment about how gratitude begets gratitude and how when people experience gratitude, express gratitude, it impacts not only their own behavior, but the people around them. So why don’t you speak to that?
Linda Hand [00:14:25]:
Well, yeah. So I think just feeling grateful, they have homework, of course, in this. In this module on gratitude, and one of it was to write a gratitude letter. So, to actually sit down and write a letter of gratitude to someone and then to deliver it live, live either by Zoom or go meet them in person or whatever. And, the profound impact it had not only on the giver of the letter but the receiver of the letter.
Bernie Borges [00:14:56]:
Yeah.
Linda Hand [00:14:57]:
Gratitude is one part of that. And being grateful for the things around you is also another way to kind of fight that hedonic adaptation. Just taking time to notice it, to think about what am I, you know, what are 3 great things that happened to me today? And there was another experiment that they did, which was interesting. They had people do 3 good things. You write down 3 good things every day. And then they did an experiment to see how much, how it raised their levels of happiness and fulfillment. And doing it every day had the effect of hedonic adaptation. So, it got less and less effective.
Linda Hand [00:15:37]:
The optimal was once a week. So, just once a week, taking stock on what are good things, how can I be grateful for what’s happening in my life? And it could be simple. I’m glad that there’s a hummingbird out there. I’m so glad that the magnolias are blooming. I’m glad that I had breakfast this morning, whatever it is. Those things. So to do it once a week as opposed to every day so that you don’t get used to good things.
Bernie Borges [00:16:02]:
What about gratitude in the workplace? Given how many C-level roles you’ve had, specifically CEO roles at tech companies in Silicon Valley, what role can gratitude play in team morale, collaboration, and performance?
Linda Hand [00:16:20]:
Huge impact. Huge impact. Like we talked about, gratitude begets, right? You’ve got just having an employee base that knows that they’re appreciated raises the level of performance. They’ve already done studies on that. It raises the level of trust in the employee base. But remember I talked about the happiness and the balance of good things and bad things? Well, in a company, as I know very well from 3 that I ran, not everything goes so well. And how do you create resilience in your organization? Well, upleveling your level of gratitude and how much you thank people, et cetera. When things aren’t going well, one of the key tricks is to use gratitude in that moment.
Linda Hand [00:17:07]:
Thank you for getting us there. I know that it’s hard, right? I know that you’ve worked really hard and we didn’t quite make the goals, or we haven’t made our sales, or we lost a customer. In spite of it. Those things help to recover from bad things that happen in a company. But it all has to come from the top. It has to be sincere. It has to be the right timing, and it has to be specific. The general gratitude sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually you get used to that, right? And you stop hearing it.
Linda Hand [00:17:42]:
Thanking people who are never thanked, The ones that are behind the scenes that go and worked all night and made the event happen hardly ever get thanked in public. And it’s really, really the quality versus the quantity.
Bernie Borges [00:17:59]:
So, you may or may not know this, but in my training program in Fulfillment-Centric Leadership, there’s an exercise in there. I call it the C-Scale. C stands for complexity, and it’s complexity of work. work activity, and I break the complexity into 3 buckets, low, medium, and high. Simple. And the idea is to recognize, which is a synonym for showing gratitude, for all 3 levels, including low and medium, because most of the recognition or gratitude goes toward high complex work activity. You closed a deal, you delivered the project on time and on budget, whatever the big achievement was. That gets recognized and gratitude is shown for that.
Bernie Borges [00:18:39]:
But seldom is gratitude or recognition shown for the low-complex work activities. And I tell this kind of half-jokingly, the person that should be thanked often, maybe not every day, but often enough to feel valued in the kitchen of a restaurant is the dishwasher. Because you want that person doing their job every day and doing it really well, right?
Linda Hand [00:19:03]:
Exactly.
Bernie Borges [00:19:05]:
And that’s just, I think it’s just an example of gratitude. Where I want to go next is we’ve kind of touched on the concept of self-awareness. I think it’s kind of been inherent in the conversation, but let’s call it out. You know, from our previous conversations that I often talk about the data point that I’ve gleaned from a recent Harvard study that only 15% of all of us are sufficiently self-aware.
Linda Hand [00:19:30]:
Yeah.
Bernie Borges [00:19:31]:
And I think that’s very, very problematic. So where does that fit into this whole science of happiness world?
Linda Hand [00:19:39]:
Yeah, I think it’s huge. Just understanding sort of where you are in the world and how you think about the world and how you frame things in your head. You know, I can give you some real-world examples from the clients that I work with, and I call it the chatter. But it’s literally how you understood something that happened, how you projected onto something that happened. And if you can simply reframe that to look at it differently. So I’ll give you an example of one of my clients came to me and maybe I’ll back up a little bit first. A lot of the coaching that I do kind of has some themes. What I’ve found is that people either get to a place where they just, I can’t do this anymore.
Linda Hand [00:20:30]:
And the it is, I don’t want to build a widget. I came to that point in my career, and that’s how I got into healthcare. I wanted to do something more noble. There’s another couple of flavors of, I can’t do this anymore. I have worked for 4 crappy bosses in a row, or, I keep picking companies that go out of business. I can’t do this churn anymore. And then there’s the, I’m ready for a career change. Like, this isn’t fulfilling me, but I’m not done yet.
Linda Hand [00:20:57]:
What do I do next? So in the, I’ve worked for a crappy boss, what am I going to do? This guy came to me and he said, you know, I really need to find a new job. And obviously it’s easier to find a new job and get a new job when you have a job. And he was extremely unhappy in his current situation. And so, in order to keep the job while we looked for the new job, we did a lot of reframing. How the boss asked for something and how he took it and how he responded. So, we started working on tools to kind of change how he interacted with the boss, how he interpreted what the boss said. And that takes a lot of self-awareness. So, sometimes people don’t have enough self-awareness, as you pointed out.
Linda Hand [00:21:41]:
And so, they don’t notice it until a week later when they’re talking to me and we have an aha moment.
Bernie Borges [00:21:46]:
Yeah.
Linda Hand [00:21:47]:
Well, then we keep talking about it and now it gets to be an hour after it happened. And then it gets to be in the moment. And that self-awareness gets tighter and tighter and tighter to the point where they can change how they think about it and how they react to it. And that contributes to their happiness.
Bernie Borges [00:22:04]:
And you just said something, Linda, that I wanna, I just wanna unpack a little bit because it’s easy to gloss over it. You said in the moment, I don’t know if this is what you meant by it, but The self-awareness thing can be in the moment. It doesn’t mean that if I’m generally a self-aware person, it doesn’t mean that I can’t have a moment where I lack self-awareness, because I know that I’ve had those moments. In fact, recently, even though I try and think I’m— think I’m generally a self-aware person, but— Those moments can happen. Right. And so I want to acknowledge that not only in our conversation, but for the listener as well, so that, you know, people don’t think that it’s a black and white thing that you’re either self-aware or not self-aware. You can literally have moments of self-awareness or lack thereof.
Linda Hand [00:22:53]:
Yeah. And that can contribute to your 15% number too, right?
Bernie Borges [00:22:57]:
Yeah.
Linda Hand [00:22:57]:
Like this, the sparse moments where one is versus one isn’t, maybe it’s 15% of the time people are self-aware or otherwise, I don’t know. But, you know, this guy basically has reframed so much about what his work is, how he interacts with his boss, which has then changed how his boss interacts with him, that he’s literally given up looking for a new job. He loves his job.
Bernie Borges [00:23:25]:
Wow.
Linda Hand [00:23:25]:
And he’s still the same human, right? He’s just using these tools and getting better and better at using them.
Bernie Borges [00:23:32]:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. You know, Linda, that my entire platform on the Life of Ho podcast and the leadership training that I do is based on the 5 life pillars: health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy. And I say that that just comprises the entirety of our humanity. And so, I’d like to get your perspective on how this conversation, the principles that we’re discussing here today on the science of happiness and fulfillment and, you know, generally the way we feel in our life, how that maps against my 5 Life Pillar platform.
Linda Hand [00:24:12]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in my experience, they all kind of blend together. Like, people come to me for professional help, but you’ve got one heart, one head, one body. And if you’re not fueling it for the grind of the job that you have, Or, so you’re not hydrating, you’re not eating the right things, you’re not getting rid of your stress through exercise, you’re not, then you can’t be at 100% or 200% of what’s needed in your job. You can’t also do that for your family. And so, there’s an ebb and flow across all of those things. Interestingly, the Greater Good Science Center, when they did this class, they covered all of the things like the impact on your mental health, your physical health, on levels of happiness. And yes, all of those pillars, even the spirituality, you know, how that contributes to greater sense of purpose and meaning, you know, in life.
Bernie Borges [00:25:06]:
Now, we’ve touched on this, but let’s revisit it. And as we get close to wrapping the conversation here, let’s offer the listener some practical things that they can do. You’ve already mentioned a few of them. Feel free to Mention them again, sort of in the context of, here’s some actionable things that people can think about doing as a result of this conversation.
Linda Hand [00:25:30]:
Yeah. Well, if you just start with self-awareness, just understanding your narrative and deciding whether you wanna change some of that and reframe it, as I call it, right? So what’s the chatter in your head? How are you talking to yourself is really important with what level of happiness you can even get to. If your negative voice is constant, that’s what you hear all day. I talked about the 3 good things. Random acts of kindness actually boost people’s levels of fulfillment and purpose in life. They talked about, but in a sense of spirituality, how does religion contribute, et cetera? It was really all around finding a sense of awe that in terms of like there’s something bigger than me. And so, whether it’s in church or whether it’s in Yosemite looking at the rock formations or a waterfall or my little water feature, just doing something and being in a place that gives you some sense of awe, your perspective as this tiny little thing in the grand scheme of things. can bring a greater sense of sort of purpose and meaning.
Linda Hand [00:26:45]:
Writing that letter we talked about, thinking about the 3 good things, but once a week. I think that that 40% is an important thing to think about. Who do I spend my time with? If somebody brings you down, you don’t need to hang out with them. Well, maybe they’re a relative or whatever. So, Think about the environment so that it would be better. You know, make choices so that you can have more happiness experiences, more grateful experiences, more empathetic experiences, and that will buoy your levels of gratitude and happiness and also create it in others.
Bernie Borges [00:27:25]:
Yeah, the other point that we discussed is to be intentional about the way that we think about things, the way that we appreciate things, the way that we You know, the gratitude letter, right? You’re not going to write a gratitude letter if you don’t have the intention of doing that. Not only the act of doing it, but for the feeling you want to create for yourself and for the recipient of that gratitude letter, just using the gratitude letter as an example.
Linda Hand [00:27:50]:
Mm-hmm.
Bernie Borges [00:27:50]:
Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, Linda, and that is this concept of whether we use the label fulfillment or happiness, that it’s really not a destination, but it’s more of a what we’re doing with intentionality, as we discussed here today, but doing on a daily basis. Can you comment on that?
Linda Hand [00:28:12]:
Yeah, you have to make choices. If you want to be happy, you have to choose to be happy. And there’s a lot of ways to make yourself happy. And that, I think, that intentionality is important. Being aware of when hedonic adaptation is working against you, right? Like thinking twice about, I’m now going to stop and look at that water feature and make sure that I’m appreciating it. I think that just having that sense of, I am in control of this, and if I’m not feeling happy, what are those tools that I have that can actually help me?
Bernie Borges [00:28:50]:
Yeah, that’s a great point. There are tools available. That’s the point. The tools are available. And we— I think we’ve discussed several of them here today. So, you know, one of the several takeaways from this conversation, Linda, is the power of 40%. Even though 40% is less than half, wow, in this context, it’s the most meaningful 40% that I can think of in life, right?
Linda Hand [00:29:15]:
Yeah.
Bernie Borges [00:29:16]:
Because it’s actually what we can control. So, awesome conversation. Linda, where can people go to connect with you and get into your world?
Linda Hand [00:29:24]:
Yeah, you can go to my website, lthcoaching.com, and there’s obviously, you can connect with me through that platform. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Linda Hand. So, look for me there and message me. Happy to connect with anyone.
Bernie Borges [00:29:42]:
Fantastic. Well, Linda, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Life of Full Podcast. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I knew that I would.
Linda Hand [00:29:51]:
Thanks a lot for having me.
