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This week marks the one year anniversary of The Super Fantastic Leadership Show and what better topic for the show than joy and celebration at work. We certainly feel like celebrating and so, why not talk about this within the context of leadership and work. We make some key distinctions here between celebration and joy. Joy being an emotional experience and celebration being the resultant of our experience of joy. We quote Dr. Barbara Fredrickson who is a prominent researcher of positive emotion and also, give mention to the Godfather of Celebrology, Sola Odumosu. But a big question we explore is the bad rap that “joy” has gotten in our life and what it is about joy that we feel so prone to suppress it.

Katie and I discuss the upper limit problem that is our naturally occurring propensity to keep ourselves from expanding into to much joy and our natural set point for positive experience. Secondarily, joy also opens us and can bring us into greater levels of vulnerability with each other as well. Often we experience joy with another person or with other people and when we discuss this within the context of work, we can really understand how this may feel a little weird at work. Often in a leadership setting, we don’t allow ourselves to be that open due to us being undefended as leaders. Celebration on the other hand is any activity of fun in which people indulge as a thing of remembrance to mark a given event that makes a given day memorable and evaluating it in terms of its message. Celebrating and ceremonies can be used to build relationships, relieve tension, level the hierarchy, create excitement, transform losses into gains, provide access to life’s deeper lessons, increase job productivity and a rise in quality. You can also celebrate by using Kazoos. Let us know how you love to celebrate at work by sharing your comments below. We would love to hear all about it and celebrate with you!