Before my colleague-friend Mele-Ane travelled to Bhutan in 2014, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Bhutan, much less Gross National Happiness (GNH). Small Giants was investing in a hazelnut farm there and developed a relationship with Saamdu Chetri from the Gross National Happiness Centre, who later featured in the pages of Dumbo Feather magazine, and after that, was our special guest in Australia. By the time Saamdu came to visit, several of our team had been to Bhutan and returned with stories about a beautiful land with beautiful people who has a commitment to measuring Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product.
When Saamdu, and later his colleague Julia Kim (who now runs the GNH Centre in Bhutan), visited, they both hosted Gross National Happiness workshops, allowing many of our team in Melbourne to experience GNH in action. They took us through the nine domains of GNH and asked us to reflect on how we were faring in each of them in our own lives. We shared our responses and realised that according to this measure, all of us were happy and doing quite well. That is, the kind of deep happiness that comes from feeling safe and secure, being connected to culture and community, having access to clean water, living in a democratic society and receiving a great education. Prior to knowing this work, I had not considered that my access to education was a cause for happiness, much less that the happiness of a country was a way to measure success. But once you know about GNH it’s increasingly difficult to buy into GDP as a measurement tool for the health of a country. And you’d better believe I was a (cheerful) thorn in the side of my economics professors during my MBA when GDP was peddled to us as the only legitimate measurement tool for assessing how a country is doing.
When we first went into lockdown in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, GNH wasn’t really on our minds. Adapting to the new work environment (aka home), business continuity, managing homeschooling and keeping our heads above water was the focus. As we wore on and wore down over the first few months, minding our mental health and that of our colleagues also became a focus. We were starting to fray. Part of my work is to help create the conditions for our team to flourish but if I’m honest I didn’t feel like I was flourishing much myself.
Luckily, I work alongside people much cleverer than I who suggested we run a survey for the team, to check in on their engagement and connection to the work. To complement that, we decided to host a GNH workshop to gauge our team’s happiness. We sent everyone some reading about Gross National Happiness and a blank template of the nine domains, and asked them to reflect and colour theirs accordingly. You can see mine below. Doing this exercise was a shift in gears for all of us. We stopped treading water for a while and returned to ourselves and each other. We had a deep and reflective conversation with one another about who we are and where we’re at. It was grounding and gratitude-giving.
Once I’d coloured and reflected on the domains I was reminded that I am happy. What a relief. Four of my nine domains are 100 percent. In the height of a pandemic, I scored 100 percent for health. Well, that’s quite something. I also want to clarify that I scored myself low on time-use because at that stage of lockdown I still believed I was supposed to use my time to self-improve and get fitter, and was feeling guilty about the consumption of TV series. Six months into the strictest lockdown in the country, I don’t feel guilty about that anymore.
The invitation beyond our GNH workshop is to consider what domains we might like to improve on, if any. For example, there was room for improvement around the cultural resilience section. At Small Giants, we’re now working on growing our relationships with First Nations people in Australia. We’ve started acknowledging Country at the beginning of our team meetings and sharing an Indigenous learning with one another, and we’ve engaged a local Elder to become our Elder in Residence. The aim of the domains isn’t necessarily to have them all full all the time (though that’d be nice), it’s more about taking stock, reflecting and considering how we might like to move forward.
We now plan to run a quarterly GNH team workshop and send a culture and engagement survey every second month. Aside from providing a temperature check and data on our culture over time, we hope this process will help us maintain perspective and a deeper sense of happiness while we move through a time of huge transition. The beauty of the GNH framework is that it offers us an invitation to engage with what really matters. It’s an opportunity to rethink the meaning of happiness and reset priorities. Happiness isn’t something we chase, or that comes and goes according to what we have or don’t have. Happiness is a state of being that we commit to and work on.
