Declan Edwards has spent the past decade trying to get people to take happiness as a serious skill that you can learn and practice, not a personality trait or a temperament, or something that descends when the right combination of weekend, weather and serotonin happens to align.
The founder of BU Happiness College, an award-winning social enterprise, and Declan Edwards is often known as “That Happiness Guy.” Edwards holds a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology, has taught the science of happiness to the United Nations, PwC, the Red Cross and the NSW Department of Education, and has built a framework called the Wheel of Happiness Skills that reframes flourishing as a cluster of teachable human capabilities. For HR leaders staring down a culture of high burnout and low engagement, this reframe is much more than philosophical housekeeping.
Here we unpack the four stages of moving happiness from knowing to doing, and shows why leaders who deliberately build these skills create the kind of ripple effect that doesn’t show up in a perks audit but absolutely shows up in retention, performance, and the trust foundations that define great workplaces.
Happiness as a second language
A great analogy of Edwards’ is one anyone who’s ever tried to order a coffee in another language can immediately recognize.
“I think of learning the skills of happiness as similar to learning another language,” he says. “You don’t need to know every single word to have a good conversation, just as you don’t need to master every skill to live a happy life, he says.
“It would be really hard to have a conversation in another language without knowing the words for ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘I’, or ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and it would be really hard to build a flourishing life and career without what I consider to be the core happiness skills of emotional literacy, emotional regulation, introspection, acceptance, and self determination.”
So that’s the working vocabulary. The Wheel of Happiness Skills draws on evidence from Positive Psychology, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and a fair chunk of philosophy, and from there it expands into 75 specific skills clustered around personal happiness, personal growth, and interpersonal capabilities. You don’t need all 75, you just need enough to have a conversation with yourself.
The high-performer paradox
“A lot of people can relate to the feeling of ticking all the boxes but still feeling unfulfilled,” Edwards says. “A lot of the time this comes down to people overdeveloping an area of the Wheel of Happiness Skills at the detriment of other areas. For example, someone could have exceptionally well developed interpersonal skills. They’re a good leader, a great communicator, and an exceptional support person,” Declan explains.
“But they may not have given their own personal happiness skills like boundary setting, self worth, or managing their inner critic the same attention and focus. The wheel helps expand people’s vocabulary and understanding of the skills that are connected to living a happy and fulfilling life.”
There is a particular flavour of professional burnout reserved for people who are excellent at looking after everyone except themselves. The Wheel functions as a diagnostic to see which spokes you’ve polished into a mirror and which may have started to rust.
From “I know this” to “I live this”
There is a phrase Edwards reaches for often, and it’s the bit that explains why most happiness interventions don’t take. “I’m a big fan of the saying ‘the only way to move knowledge from the head to the heart is through the hands’,” he says. “It means that if we want to take a skill from something that people know about and are aware to something the live through we have to help them get their hands dirty by practicing it. That takes time, and effort.”
“From my work I’ve seen that it takes a minimum of 3-6 months for psychological, behavioral, and emotional change to really take root. But people, and workplaces, often expect change to happen much more quickly than that. Ensuring a change is kept front of mind, regularly practiced, and resourced for an extended period of time is the best way to help people shift from theoretical knowledge to embodied wisdom.”
The four stages Edwards teaches map this journey: from awareness (you know the skill exists), to understanding (you know how it works), to application (you’re practicing it badly and clumsily, like a toddler with a fork), to integration (it’s now second nature and you barely notice you’re doing it).
The skills that move whole cultures
Ask Edwards which happiness skills, when leaders actually build them, do the most cultural heavy lifting, and his answer is consistent across every organization he’s worked with, from boardrooms to UN offices.
“Without a doubt the interpersonal happiness skills. Skills like active listening, conflict resolution, communicating clearly, nurturing connection. However these skills need to be built upon a solid foundation of personal happiness skills and personal growth skills,” he says.
“If an organization’s leaders don’t know their own strengths how can they help their team discover and practice their strengths? If the leaders can’t cultivate a sense of optimism within themselves how can they hope to do it with their department? I often see leaders who are practicing the right interpersonal happiness skills but have lost themselves in the process. The result is burnt out, disconnected, exhausted, and reactive leadership. Sometimes it’s about coming back to basics and learning how to manage your own wellbeing, and develop your own potential, as a leader first.”
This is where the Wheel meets our own GPTW Trust Model. The five dimensions GPTW has measured for three decades (credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie) are not delivered by perks. They’re delivered by leaders who can listen without interrupting, name what they’re actually feeling, and walk into a difficult conversation without their nervous system staging a small rebellion.
Beyond the toxic positivity trap
“For example; you might have a moment where you feel anxious. If you then judge that feeling now you’re frustrated about being anxious. If that goes on for a while eventually you’ll be overwhelmed by frustration about being anxious. Soon enough you’re exhausted from the overwhelm driven by being frustrated about feeling anxious. See how quickly it can snowball? There’s a saying I lean on a lot; ‘if we hope to live a fulfilled life we must expect that we will experience the full range of human emotion’. Our approach, and the happiness skills we teach, help people strengthen and savour life’s good moments and more enjoyable emotions whilst healthy navigating life’s challenges and more difficult feelings,” he says.
The point is that happiness, properly defined, is not the absence of difficult feelings. It’s the capacity to experience the full emotional range without compounding it into a four-storey building of meta-feelings about your feelings. Useful for individuals and often culture-changing for teams who learn to do it together.
Where leaders should start
Seventy-five skills is, by Edwards’ own admission, a slightly insane place to begin.
“The wheel of happiness skills can be a big leap – 75 skills can feel really daunting and overwhelming for people who are just starting to focus on their personal development and wellbeing. I’d recommend that leaders and people-managers identify 2 or 3 skills that they feel their team would benefit from improving. It might be resilience, focus management, strategic thinking, problem solving, or even gratitude. I’d rather see teams develop 3 or so skills really well than try to build 75 happiness skills in one go and inevitably drop the ball on all of them.”
Pick three and practice them in meetings, in feedback, in the way you respond when something goes sideways at 4:45pm on a Friday. This is also a much more sensible use of budget than another platform license, and it’s how happiness moves from being an HR initiative to a shared team capability that shows up in how people really talk to each other.
The most interesting argument Edwards makes, and the one most relevant for thinking about culture at scale, is that personal happiness skills are not a private indulgence. They’re the most generous thing you can build.
“By mastering the skills of happiness you become a better partner, a better parent, a better friend, a better colleague, a better leader, and the best version of yourself,” he writes on the BU Happiness College website. The leader who has done the work spreads competence, calm and trust outward, the leader who hasn’t can spread reactivity, burnout and quiet tension. The choice is which one you want pulsing through your team.
Declan will be running a series of live workshops in April and May to share the skills and science of happiness through BU Happiness College. Use the code GPTW for 20% off:
- Perth, 30 April: events.humanitix.com/scienceofhappiness-perth
- Newcastle, 13 May: events.humanitix.com/happinessscience-newcastle
- Sydney, 21 May: events.humanitix.com/happinessscience-sydney
Frequently Asked Questions About Happiness At Work
Is happiness really a skill you can learn?
Yes, and according to Declan Edwards, founder of BU Happiness College, this is the central insight that changes everything. Drawing on Positive Psychology, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the science is clear that happiness is a cluster of learnable human capabilities, including emotional literacy, emotional regulation, introspection, acceptance and self-determination. Like learning a language, you just need a working vocabulary you can practice daily.
How do I become happier at work?
Start by identifying two or three specific happiness skills you want to build, rather than trying to overhaul everything at once. Edwards recommends focusing on capabilities like resilience, focus management, gratitude, or problem-solving, and committing to genuine practice over three to six months. Personal happiness skills like boundary-setting, managing your inner critic, building self-worth, form the foundation that makes interpersonal skills like active listening and conflict resolution sustainable rather than performative.
What is the Wheel of Happiness Skills?
The Wheel of Happiness Skills is Declan Edwards’ framework that maps 75 specific, evidence-based skills correlated with happiness across personal, growth, and interpersonal domains. It draws on Positive Psychology, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, ACT and philosophy, and helps individuals and teams identify which skills they’ve overdeveloped and which they’ve neglected. The Wheel also expands the vocabulary people have for talking about happiness, moving the conversation beyond mood into measurable capability.
Why don’t workplace wellbeing programs make people happier?
Most wellbeing programs deliver awareness, the first of four stages of skill development, and then stop. Edwards calls this the gap between “knowing” and “living.” Real change requires keeping a behaviour front of mind, regularly practiced, and resourced for at least three to six months. Workplaces that fund single workshops and expect transformation by Monday are essentially funding stage one and budgeting for stage four, which explains the disappointing returns.
How can leaders build happiness into their team without it feeling forced?
The most important shift, Edwards argues, is that leaders must build their own personal happiness skills first. You cannot help a team discover their strengths if you don’t know your own; you cannot model optimism you haven’t cultivated. From there, pick two or three happiness skills (resilience, gratitude, communication clarity) and embed them into how the team actually operates.
