Happytalism: How Mindfulness Practices Redefine Success with Luis Gallardo

Anil Ramjiani

Hey HAPPINESS SQUAD, it's great to have you with Ashish and me as we host guests who are industry leaders helping individuals and organizations to unlock inner happiness and flourishing.

Have you ever considered the difference between contemplation and thinking? Our next guest shares a game-changing practice that will unlock your potential in meetings and so much more.

Meet Luis Gallardo, Founder and President of World Happiness Foundation, World Happiness Festival, and the author of ‘Happytalism’. He's also authored the exponentials of happiness. Over the years, Luis has been an advisor to CEOs, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates, and political institutional game changers on strategic personal positioning and brand building.

We hope that the tips and practices that we share support you. In fact, we've already invited Luis back to share more in the coming days as the insights were just too much to capture in just one episode. So, join Ashish and me as we welcome Luis to the Happiness Squad podcast.

Luis, Ashish, it's a pleasure to be with both of you. Thank you, Luis, for taking the time to be with Ashish and me.

You know, before we start, I just have to say one of our favorite questions that we love to ask our guests is the definition of happiness and how it's changed for them since their younger years.

Seeing your background, Luis, I feel like this one might be incredible. So, I want to pass the mic to you and share with us your definition and how your experiences have changed it over time.

Luis Gallardo

Yeah, I love being here. Thank you so much. I love what you do and I'm super happy to share with you this time.

Happiness, as you've been exploring by interviewing many people and focusing on what it means, I believe, means different things to different people. What we know is that science has decided to define it in a certain way so we can advance the science.

But for me, beyond science, happiness is a state. I like to define happiness as a state because when you define it as a state, it's beautiful. Then what you have to learn is how to get into that state.

Once you tap into that state, and there are thousands, millions of different states, that's where you can feel it and that's where you can really intervene. That state exists regardless of who we are and where we are. What we have to learn is how to get into those states. For today's podcast, my definition of happiness is a state.

Ashish Kothari

I love that, Luis. And you know, it's so beautifully put. It's a state of being. I always say it's cultivating joyfulness rather than chasing joy. It is a state we can choose to be in. And in fact, the power of that is so present right now for me.

We lost our 14-year-old pug yesterday. She was old, had lost her sight, and was completely disoriented. Anil's been with us, so he knows. I probably used to kiss her, I don't know, a hundred times a day. I don't think anybody kisses their dog a hundred times a day. But she used to always spend the evenings in my lap. It used to be her favorite thing to do. And we had to unfortunately let her go because she was suffering.

You know, I experienced grief in such a deep way for a moment. It goes through you when you lose somebody that is so close to you. And she was close to my wife and my son. My son had her in his life from his first day. She had been a part of his life.

And I can clearly state that, while I can experience the emotion of grief and sadness, I'm doing it from a state of joyfulness. Because our brains luckily are not slotted for just one emotion. And how we can choose to experience that event, that experience, both from the learning of impermanence, but also from a place of a fundamental state of peace and joy around what we had in the life we had with her, and the end to her suffering makes that experience different. I can be of more service to my wife and my son and others because I'm experiencing that event from that state versus from a different state.

We can research and fine-tune what makes us happy, what doesn't make us happy. There is so much out there, and my hats off to Tal, Emma, Sonia, and so many others who are constantly advancing the field, like Marty Seligman from the positive psychology and science side.

There's also a lot of spiritual wisdom that has been there forever. I know you spend a lot of time with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and so many other learned teachers. There's also spirituality, what we know from spiritual wisdom traditions. But what I really love, Luis, and what I find the most inspiring is your mission around taking the science and the spirituality, but making it practical and accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. And you do that through the World Happiness Foundation, the World Happiness Fest you've created. You and I are going to be together at the YouPeace event, the academy, so that's what I love.

And that's where we are kindred spirits, where it's not just about knowing, but practicing and making it accessible. Nothing becomes possible unless we do that.

So, I'm curious, Luis. I know my journey and I've shared that on this podcast several times. I'm curious about your life journey and how life apprenticed you to get you to be doing what you're doing now.

Luis Gallardo

Yeah, well, thank you so much for all your kind words. I know what it feels like to lose a pet animal and a service dog because I've been through that before. Pets, especially dogs, are pure joy and happiness. They are one of those examples of animals where there is unconditional love, unconditional happiness, unconditional love and joy every second.

You can leave the room for a few minutes, come back, and they get super excited. That purity in joy and happiness is just remarkable. We should always look at that emotion and those animals as a way to learn how we, as humanity, could behave. So, I'm with you on that grief and I understand very well.

And I completely agree with your introduction. We can be in our mind all our life, and when we talk about states, you mention the state of being, which I love because beyond being, there is nothing, it's pure consciousness. But if we want to be practical, we have to place happiness somewhere. In this case, what we've decided is to start with the mind.

So, we say happiness is a state of mind. We can live in our heads all our lives because that's how we are as humanity; we create through our mind. But nothing happens beyond our mind unless we are pure manifestors, manifesting at another state of energy, unless we do something. The doing can also happen through energy, because that's our energy.

This is the important and strategic part that brought me where I am today. I understand and want to focus happiness in our mind. Our mind is a combination of multiple relationships between different elements. That can be the body, consciousness, mind, brain, and so many different elements. But at some point, we have to simplify this into, 'What do I do in my daily life to make a difference and to make a change?'

That's why I think we have to be inspired by wisdom. In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are the two wings of realization. You cannot fulfill and get out of suffering without those two wings. Here we already have a path: how do we cultivate wisdom with compassion? When you go into Sufism, Kabbalah, Buddhism, Islam, and so many different spiritual traditions, they all get to the same point. It's a point of suffering, love, happiness, trauma, joy, and a path to those states.

I think we have a framework like this, and I say that because I come from the consulting space as well. I know you were at McKinsey; I was at Deloitte for 12 years. In this case, my job at the corporate level was to create and develop the brand from a strategic point of view for both employees and clients, and stakeholders.

When you work with a strategy team, with a chief financial officer, when you work with a C-suite to elevate the value proposition for clients and customers, you have to be very practical. It's like, 'This is where we want to be. This is our aspiration. What are the key performance indicators? What do we actually do? And what do you measure?'

That was my first book. 'Brands and Browsers' is a whole business book focused on six elements to create high-performing business careers and brands. Before I got into the corporate world, that took me 12 years to write. And that's why probably Deloitte today is 450,000 people, billions and billions of dollars. We were able to build, and I'm very proud that I helped build the foundations for sustainable growth for a huge multinational company. Before that, what I wanted to be was a diplomat.

Ashish Kothari

I can see that, Luis, with all your travels and what you do, you are a diplomat.

Luis Gallardo

Yeah, I feel that my space is listening. I love listening. And to be a good diplomat, you have to listen a lot. That was what I studied. I studied politics, sociology, international relations, and peace statistics. I was actually part of the first class of the first ever Master of Arts in Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Richardson Institute in the United Kingdom. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get into the roots of conflict and understand it.

So I did that from a theoretical point of view when I did my masters, then from a practical point of view when I was an international observer with the United Nations. I went to post-armed conflicts, such as the one in the former Yugoslavia.

When you are there as an international observer, you are observed. And the first thing you realize is that just by being an observer, you change reality. Because the moment you are there, present, people behave differently.

This is interesting because normally we talk about theory, the theory of quantum mechanics and quantum physics, about the observer changing the reality of the particles. I saw that as an international observer. I was just there, going from one school to another, and the behavior of everybody in those schools changed.

Ashish Kothari

And Luis, it's so true, isn't it? Friends, I'm going to repeat what Luis just said. For those who are scientifically inclined, this is one of the most core elements of spiritual traditions, but science, quantum physics in particular, clearly highlights that there is no impartial observing. The act of observing changes what's being observed.

That moment changes it because whatever energy is present changes the direction of the particle. Many things, like waves, when trying to be seen, become particles. The classic dual-split experiment of photons, if you haven't looked it up, shows how light acts both as particles and waves.

The same is true for our own mind. If you are experiencing, rather than being caught and becoming the thought and emotion, stepping back and observing the thought and emotion is a wonderful exercise of awareness and seeing how you change your reality.

So I invite you tomorrow to take any thought, any emotion that you're experiencing. But as Luis suggests, just become an observer of the emotion, the body's feelings, and the beliefs around it. Notice what opens up for you; something will change. And we are curious to know what that is.

Luis Gallardo

Absolutely. So, when you have that in mind and you understand that observation changes reality, that was my breakthrough moment when I was observing how people reacted to war.

Ashish Kothari

How old were you, Luis?

Luis Gallardo

I think I was 25.

Ashish Kothari

Wow. What a gift.

Luis Gallardo

Oh my goodness. That was an incredible gift. I was the youngest international observer because I was there with politicians and many diplomats. But because I was in the first class of peace studies, the foreign office wasn't able to say no.

I applied as the first class of professional peacemakers. That was a huge gift, being there and observing the drama, the terrible situation of the victims of war, that's when you ask, how is this possible? How can we as humanity commit such crimes? And what are the roots of all this?

Now we look around and we see this in Ukraine, in Gaza, South Sudan, Mexico, in the favelas. We see it everywhere. At some point, we get into states where we use heavy violence to defend our positive intention.

This is something important that you discover once you go into the deep psychological route of decision making. It's the positive intention we all have. Even when we kill somebody, it's because we're defending ourselves, our beliefs, our family. There’s a “They deserve this because I believe in something.” There is a subjective truth in everything that we do, rooted in positive intentions.

So imagine, everything gets so complex when you think this way. And that's why we can't even solve a conversation with friends that ends up with fights.

I said, "It's very early. The school opens at 8 a.m. You're going to be waiting. Do you want a chair?" She said, "Don't worry. I have hope to live in peace and to be happy one day again. I lost my family, my pets, my neighbors. I lost everything in my life. I haven’t hope to live in peace and to be happy one day again."

You're 85, you've lost everything, but you haven't lost your hope to be in peace and happy one day again. Oh my goodness.

Hope, peace, and happiness come as seeds. They were planted as seeds in my mind.

It's like, wow, I have to explore this. I was doing my thesis at that point, and that's what I wrote. The first thesis I wrote was "The Fulfillment of Identity as a Way for Conflict Resolution." So I went deeper into the fulfillment of our identity.

And this is very important because most conflicts, I would say 99 percent of conflicts in the world, happen because of the access to resources, material resources combined with our mindset. That's how all conflicts are around the world.

Ashish Kothari

That’s it. You're so right.

Luis Gallardo

All conflicts start in mindset. So, that was the beginning of the research that I did. That was a long time ago.

Ashish Kothari

Luis, it's so amazing. We had Professor Shrikumar Rao, and Shrikumar and I are spending some time exploring what our collaboration looks like going forward. This notion of awareness and mindset is at the heart of the work we are doing as well, which came from my first introduction to awareness through the work of Julio Olala and Flora Flores Fernandez, all about awareness, our beliefs, and the power of assessments.

Anil's going through a new field certification program right now as well. Awareness is at the heart of our model around Hardwired for Happiness. To your point, identity and beliefs are at the heart of how we create our own suffering. That's the work of Professor Shrikumar Rao, where he says, if there is one learning from me, it is “our mindsets shape everything”.

If you want to be happy, change your mindset. If you want to create something, everything we manifest there, we create here first, and almost everything we create, we are the hero and somebody else is the victim. That gives us enough justification, because otherwise it's hard to take action that hurts another. Our compassion is also deeply rooted in us.

But somehow we have to make the other person the villain, something who is not even worthy of living. That gives us the right and the force to take action. You're so right. I loved how simply you put it. Resources, access to resources, our identity, our mindset, and the story we are holding is at the heart of the conflict. It's at the heart of suffering.

Luis Gallardo

Yes, beautiful. That's why I've been able to create a new paradigm that I call ‘Happytalism’. It's about access to resources. Why do I need resources? Because I live in a material world, and the resources are going to bring me more success, more fame, more power, or more money. That's the framework we use to measure success in the world we've created.

When I saw hope, peace, happiness as the ultimate goal of Blikna, that's when I started to work on a new framework. When you build strategies, what is the framework? The framework I started to build was based on ultimate happiness as the goal, not accumulation of wealth but accumulation of happiness.

How do you get there? You have to redefine the framework for success. If in capitalism, success is framed by money, power, fame, in Happytalism, success is framed by freedom from fear, freedom to be, consciousness to expand and evolve with three levels of awareness. The first level is awareness itself, what is happening. The second level is mindfulness, why something is happening. And the third level is transcendence, what for? And then the third element is happiness.

Happiness is the activator of the system, but it's not happiness for oneself, it's happiness to share. It's not about being happy, it's about being happiness, the incarnation of what you want to manifest. So that's the new framework, completely different from money, fame, and power. It's about freedom, consciousness, and happiness.

Where do you start? You have to start by imprinted beliefs. And then when you go through imprinted beliefs, then you get into one key activator, which is compassion and self-compassion, love and kindness for yourself.

So now from there, you have a whole system, super practical because when we do the festival, when we do the training for the academy, what we are providing all the time are tools, practical tools for founders, for leaders, for mayors, for school principals, for psychologists, for medical doctors, tools that can be applied right away to switch and to make that switch in our imprinted beliefs. That's what we are doing now.

Ashish Kothari

It's funny how we all make sense, and sometimes that sense-making independently points to the same pathway. So Luis, my book, Hardwired for Happiness, was not the original title of the book. The book I wrote, Luis, came from my own sense of feeling anxiety and fear. I wrote the book in COVID because I sensed the huge amount of fear that was present, making things worse.

The original title was From Fear to Freedom: A Journey from Within to Live Your Best Life. Amazing, and that's how it makes sense. Awareness is the center part of fear because fear is what we are creating in our brain. Knowing why we are creating the fear and understanding that if we are our own prisoners and we have the keys, we have to go there to free ourselves. Everything else was after. So, it was really coincidental that your first principle is freedom from fear.

Anil Ramjiani

And it celebrates a lot of the work that Ashish, you're leading that we're doing. Every time I have a conversation with colleagues of mine around happiness, people think, "Okay, but I'm afraid. What does happiness mean?" They're more comfortable being in fear, spending more time stressed, anxious.

I love what you're talking about in terms of unlocking our consciousness, not just being aware but becoming self-aware. How do we identify that we are experiencing fear, and how we can free ourselves from it? This is something we can rewire away from.

Part of the journey I'm on with Ashish is doing our rewire program, which is allowing me to understand where are moments when I'm triggered, when I need to pause, breathe, and observe rather than react. It's a matter of being measured and being responsive when you've identified how you're feeling.

So, I really love how you and Ashish framed that up for our listeners. What I'd like to do is shift and understand a little more about Happytalism. I want to talk and understand how our listeners can incorporate and integrate what you've been doing.

Whenever I speak to people at work about this work, the science of happiness, I get a lot of questions, funny looks like, "Okay, happiness, science of happiness, what is this?" But it actually works. It's not mainstream yet, but it's getting there.

When we think about Happytalism, I'd love to understand how it is a super and pan systematic way to solve crises and issues we face. Collective trauma requires collective healing.

I'd love for you to share with us a few practices that you've seen businesses, governments, schools adopt these Happytalism principles to create that positive impact on society that you, Ashish, and many others want to see in this world.

Luis Gallardo

That's a big question, and I love it because that's the gateway to new paradigms in many ways. And Happytalism is a new paradigm. An ism is basically a philosophy, the philosophy of something, and there are thousands of them. So the first thing that came to my mind was, if we are going to create a new philosophy, a new paradigm based on ultimate happiness, well, it has to be an ism, it has to be Happytalism. That's the combination of philosophy and happiness.

Overall, Happytalism is a philosophy. It is not a religion, not just an economic system, it's a whole philosophy about how to achieve ultimate happiness, true happiness, supreme happiness in many ways.

When you explore how other isms have been created, they all have their principles. In this case, something that we knew because after you come out with an idea, my way of creation is to co-create. I ask people, I get the experts around the world, and then from there, I start creating the path.

One thing that we all know is that in this world, we need big things going on for people to attach to them from a strategic point of view. That's how we came out, in this case with my partner Jamie Lynn, to actually lobby at the United Nations level to create the International Day of Happiness. That's March 20th.

That was 194 countries signing and passing a resolution to have an official day on the international agenda that nobody can forget because it's right there forever. Imagine how simple things are really complex, but they are really systemic. You have to play with the system. So right now, thanks to many people, there is an International Day of Happiness. And there was a second resolution where basically all countries and institutions are invited to think about how to create new paradigms for human progress based on happiness and well-being.

The Kingdom of Bhutan led a whole symposium at the United Nations level to gather and brainstorm what we could be doing, including the OECD, the United Nations, big companies, small individuals, everybody really got together from the positive psychology point of view, from the behavioral economics point of view, to rethink and say, okay, what are new paradigms of human progress based on happiness and well-being?

My contribution is this term of Happytalism, which has basically two fundamentals. One is the individual and the other one is the supra individual, which is the community. When you go deeper into those, then you see that at the individual level, we have to go into a state of what you call awareness, the second step at least, which is mindfulness. So we have to be mindful.

That's why the work from Ellen Langer and so many others around the world, and the chair that we have now at the University of Farrago with Javier Garcia Campo, who is my co-author of the Spanish edition of Happytalism, we go into the space of the mind. Being mindful, not just from a meditative point of view, but from a whole picture and understanding the why. This is core to Happytalism, being mindful.

Ashish Kothari

It's being mindful. And I love the distinction you make between mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is a way to access the mindful state, to train our brain to be present. But a lot of people think, well, I meditate for five minutes and I'm good. But it's more about being mindful throughout the day.

Are you mindful about the state and really the state of interbeing in which we live? Are you mindful of our own thoughts that are shaping our realities? Can we be mindful and present with what's present for the other person, versus just trying to force our point through? It's beautiful and so resonant with me. It's unbelievable what you've been able to create at the scale of the United Nations and countries. It's inspiring.

Luis Gallardo

Yeah, but it's not just me. The idea is there and suddenly happens because the energy brings together many people. It's a co-creation process of so many people, and I'm just one. The second element is very important for those who really want to go deeper into new paradigms, which is contemplation. Contemplation is not meditation. Yes, we meditate, we are using a technique that is being aware of your thoughts and letting them go. You label them, you let them go. In contemplation, you keep them. When you contemplate, you observe whatever you want to observe.

As I was doing in Bosnia, my job was to observe the reality, making sure that there were no threats for people who wanted to vote freely. That was my job. When you contemplate, it's amazing what happens because the moment you master the technique, in a few seconds, something happens with your contemplation, with your thoughts. What it means is that you don't have to think, and you don't have to act.

And this is what we are recommending to get into another state and a new paradigm. You don't have to think, you don't have to act. Humanity behaves as thinkers and doers, activists, those who are acting out of habit, and those who are always thinking how things could be different or better. What we are saying is there is another space, a space of contemplation, and it's between acting and thinking. Let's explore what that means. And that's silence. Everything starts with silence, letting things happen in a harmonic and balanced way by themselves. This is a core principle of how to live.

Anil Ramjiani

So when I think of contemplation, it's like things that make you go, "Hmm." You're in a meeting, somebody says something, and you're not reacting, you're holding it, you're contemplating, you're observing the room.

Just for our listeners' sake, because this is something I can truly benefit from, what would be a technique to observe that silence or to practice or form that habit of contemplation that works for you? That we could try and use ourselves.

Luis Gallardo

Yes, the first step is similar to meditation, which is focusing on your breath. You start paying attention to your breathing, inhale and exhale. At that moment, you focus on how you inhale and exhale. That's the fastest way to get your focus on something.

Once you are in that space, then you open your eyes or your mind with your eyes closed and expand wide out. Then you start expanding your awareness. Once you expand wide out, you might see a bird, the movement of a tree or a leaf, that's where you are going to be observing. Then you decide what you're going to observe. Maybe you have a thought and you observe that thought. But the first step is focusing on your breathing, and then you go from there.

There's a whole system when you want to focus on something, how you can focus on that thing. The example you gave is great. In a meeting room, people are talking. Normally, there is one person speaking and everybody's listening, but normally everybody is thinking about what that person is saying and getting ready to respond, or in your mind, you are resisting or agreeing with the thought. That's not contemplation, that's thinking or excluding yourself from the conversation because you are not interested.

There's a whole ground in that technique, and we are bringing that technique to schools. Now we have a whole program called Schools of Happiness, and contemplation is part of the system. It's an evolution of what education for peace is, education for happiness.

There are many examples. Castle is one of those organizations that brought social-emotional learning to so many schools. We are building on that. Now we are working with thousands of teachers around the world on that framework of a school. So happiness that uses contemplation is part of it. We incorporate this in the framework of companies as well.

Anil Ramjiani

We, as the Happiness Squad and the Rewire program that we're running, share with our friends habits that you're not taught at school, university, and work. Honestly, even with what you're saying, I've not heard about it, and I want to learn more.

Luis, given the time, I feel like there's so much more we want to unlock with you. I read through your blogs last night about the Chief Wellbeing Officer. The work you just described, I feel like we need more, Ashish, if you agree.

So, I don't want to limit the conversation, but I'm going to ask Luis that we wrap for now, but we bring you back to talk about the work you're doing in the academies, the schools, and how Chief Wellbeing Officers can make a difference at the corporate level, if you agree.

Ashish Kothari

I would even say, I've never heard such a beautiful distinction that you just shared, Luis, between thinking and doing, and a third state, which is contemplation. I think even just doing a podcast just on that, especially with your role as an observer into an activator.

You are not just an observer now, Luis. You are observing and nudging, because only through contemplation can you nudge systems to move the way you want. It is such a needed skill, a needed way of being. If you would honor us, we would love to actually bring that distinction because I never hear that word out there and it is so needed.

Luis Gallardo

So needed and so powerful. Yes, I'll be happy to talk about whatever you want. I love it.

Anil Ramjiani

Luis, I want to say thank you. And again, I know there are a few more questions we have for you, but we'll answer those in the next episode. So listeners, come back because we'll discuss the difference between contemplation, thinking, and meditation. I personally know I can benefit from it. Luis, thank you for your time. I wish you well and look forward to our next conversation soon.

Luis Gallardo

Yes, thank you so much. Let's do this.

Ashish Kothari

Thank you, Luis. And for those still tuned in, what are the two or three dates coming up where you're holding the fest in Miami? We're going to be in UPS. If there are dates that we want to invite people to check out and actually get involved, not just think, not just take in, but show up and act, what might be some places and dates?

Luis Gallardo

Okay, so March is a big month because that's when we celebrate March 20th, International Day of Happiness. It's Gross Global Happiness at the University for Peace, March 8th to 10th. Then we go to Spain, World Happiness Fest in Spain from the 15th to the 17th. And then Miami from the 22nd. Then we are going to be doing more festivals in Chile, Peru, later in May, June.

And now, because we have more than 100 cities around the world with chapters, they are doing their own events. But I think those three dates, Costa Rica, Spain, Miami, those are big moments where we can get together, co-create new paradigms for human progress based on happiness and well-being.

Ashish Kothari

Thank you, Luis, such a joy. It'll be amazing to be with you, of course, in Costa Rica. I'm going to try and be in Miami as well. Thank you again for joining and sharing your insights and the beautiful work with our listeners.

Luis Gallardo

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.