Thursday, April 16, 2009

Susan Boyle, Bo the Dog, and Being Happy

As I type this over 14 million people have already watched Susan Boyle, the 47-year old never-been-kissed contestant on "Britain's Got Talent" who wows YouTube watchers throughout the world with her voice and story. I know I've already watched the clip at least a dozen times.

Then there's Bo, who joins the White House as First Dog. There are those who question why the nation cares (a lot) about the Obama dog when there's so much bad news and problems we can focus on instead.

What the public is proving to the media, and to themselves is this: We want to be happy. We like having things to cheer about. Joy can be a goal, however we decided to find it.

At a meeting yesterday, the facilitator started by asking everyone to tell a story about something really good happening in their businesses. And everyone had a story. Then we were taught the rest of the day how to use our stories. I really liked that we were all really happy from the start of the stories, through the rest of the day.

Let's give ourselves permission to be happy. And our associations permission to be happy. Even if it's simple things like watching a crowd cheer for Susan Boyle (you go girl!), or watching Bo sniff out the First Lawn, or spending 10 minutes at the start of a meeting discussing happy things. Life is good.

2 comments:

Kevin said...

Amen. While I don't care much about the first dog, the Susan Boyle clip is that incredibly rare media-manufactured moment that breaks cynicism instead of feeding it. We don't get enough of those, it seems.

Anonymous said...

And I care about Bo, too. Not only did the Obamas make a great choice in breed (of course I have two Portuguese Water Dogs myself) but promises kept are a wonderful story in and of themselves.