Work Happy. Live Happy. Be Happy.

Some of the awesome coach tribers at WOHASU2018. Can't you just feel the HAPPY energy oozing out of this picture?! | Miami | March 2018

NEW YORK
"You should go to this." It was a simple and short text with a HUGE message and attachment. A friend of mine from high school had suggested I attend the World Happiness Summit (WOHASU) in Miami. 

I was in New York prepping for my first ever public Happiness Workshop (set for May 2018), so Miami didn't seem like that much of a schlep. Within minutes, I had rearranged my flight back to Korea, booked tickets to Miami, and was perusing hotels.com for hotel deals. Oh and I decided to apply to be a "Tribe Facilitator," in WOHASU speak means a coach who leads daily discussions with attendees.

I was psyched when I found out soon after, I would be able to attend my very first WOHASU event as a Tribe Facilitator--WOOOOOOT!

MIAMI
The event was everything it promised to be and more: positive psychology + happiness experts from around the globe who were humble, down-to-earth, and the kinds of humans you wanted to just hangout with when your plane gets delayed 5 hours (true story: I spent a few hours with one of the Google speakers who was on my flight to San Francisco). The people in my tribe were eager to learn, excited to create change, and had already done a bulk of the legwork themselves.

But it was the other tribe facilitators who were truly living and breathing their creed. 

THE COACH TRIBE
On a whim, I decided to see if some of the other tribe facilitators wanted to grab dinner the evening before the event started. A handful responded to my FB post, and admittedly, I did have images of me eating alone in a Tapas restaurant...but everyone showed up, and boy did they continue to show up for me and each other throughout the conference.

3 HAPPY LESSONS LEARNED:

1. PUT THE HOURS IN: One of the speakers who was talking about purpose and meaning asked a pointed question: "How many hours do we spend studying other subjects in school?" I immediately thought of Korea and the grueling amount of time people study/work. Then he asked, "How much time have you spent learning about yourself?" Wow. Not enough. Then I looked around at my coach tribe, and thought, they have all definitely put in the work to learn about themselves and it shows.
2. HOW DO YOU WANT TO BE (NOT WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE)? Whenever I would talk to one of the coach tribers, their focus was completely on me, their cell phones were away, they made eye contact, they were fully present, and super energetic/enthusiastic despite the conference's crazy schedule. At times, I almost felt less than deserving of all this attention, but then I thought: how checked out have we come as a society that when people actually pay attention to you, you feel special?
3. DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE (NO MATTER WHAT YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED): One of the highlights of the conference for me, was meeting a Happiness Hero of mine, Mo Gawdat. He wrote Solve for Happy, which has changed 93% of of readers' lives. I am part of that 93%. I also wrote about him in a previous blog post. Serendipitously, some of the coach tribers and I ended up sitting next to him at lunch one day. They encouraged me to go up to him and talk to him after hearing how much I adored him. So I did. I was greeted with a hug, humor, down-to-earthness, and later on an email message (as I sent him my blog post). How cool is that?

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After the conference many of the coach tribers wrote messages of GRATITUDE, LOVE, THOUGHTFULNESS, KINDNESS + more on our FB group page. I was in disbelief. I mean, how much more amazing can a group of people be? Imagine if the world were full of people who did the EQ work, lived and breathed it fully, and then gracefully shared it WITH others?

Gosh, ​I'm just happy thinking about it. 

*Dedicated to and inspired by my coach tribers. May you continue to love + lead with happiness, kindness, compassion, and everything else this world needs to succeed.*

Me + Mo. What a great guy. | WOHASU2018 | Miami | March 2018