The Hidden Beliefs That Shape Your Happiness with Shawn Achor
5/18/202643 min
Our beliefs shape more than we realize. They influence what we notice, how we respond to setbacks, how connected we feel to others, and whether we take action to improve our lives.
As part of our series on how to spring clean your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie sits down with happiness expert Shawn Achor, author of The Power of Beliefs, to explore how our beliefs about time, work, relationships, and self-worth shape happiness, success, and long-term wellbeing.
And if some of your beliefs are holding you back, Shawn shares practical ways to start shifting them. Plus, we learn one delightful fact about fireflies.
Experts Mentioned:
- Shawn Achor, positive psychology researcher and author
- Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire
- Henry Beecher, anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School who pioneered research on the placebo effect
Resources Mentioned:
- The Power of Beliefs: How Strengthening Seven Core Beliefs Predicts Greater Success and a Better Life, by Shawn Achor (2026)
- The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, by Shawn Achor (2010)
- The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, by Richard Wiseman (2004)
- "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior," by John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973)
Related Episodes:
- "Grateful Expectations"
- “How to Adopt a Growth Mindset”
- “Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: The Buddha”
- "Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Socrates and Self-Knowledge"
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLaurie Santos· Host0:00
[intro music] Pushkin. [upbeat music] Welcome back to our series on how to spring clean our well-being. So far, we've explored the happiness benefits of things like releasing grudges, redesigning our spaces, and rethinking how our screens affect our physical health. But this episode of The Happiness Lab is about spring cleaning the beliefs that lie underneath all that.
Shawn Achor· Guest0:31
So if I ask people about beliefs, like, "What do you believe?" They'll start with a political belief and then a religious belief.
Laurie Santos· Host0:36
This is author and happiness expert Shawn Achor.
Shawn Achor· Guest0:39
They'll immediately go to one of those two things, but actually, we have beliefs about everything. We have beliefs about who drives a Cybertruck. Are they a liberal or a conservative? We have beliefs about how tall I should be or whether or not it's good to be a stay-at-home parent. We have undercurrents of belief that shape everything.
Laurie Santos· Host0:55
It's true that this idea of beliefs feels almost too broad to tackle. You can believe in things like free will or Santa Claus or karma or meritocracy. The list goes on and on, from the political to the personal to the abstract and existential. So I asked Shawn, what is a belief really?
Shawn Achor· Guest1:13
For me, beliefs is simply the lens through which you view the world that changes the way you act within it. So our beliefs shape how I get a C in biology or how I have a new baby. Those beliefs help us to facilitate not only