Finding Peace in Science: Karen Guggenheim (EMBA’15) and the Happiness Movement

The day that Karen Guggenheim (EMBA’15) buried her husband, Ricardo, she came home, took off her black dress, and threw it in the garbage. In that moment, her grief was overwhelming, as was her worry about her children, two sons ages 16 and 19. Just as palpable, though, was a gut decision to honor Ricardo’s legacy, not with a black dress and the new title of widow.

Ricardo had died young and shockingly quickly from complications of the flu. He got sick at the end of February and was gone by March 6 — which also happened to be her sister’s birthday. March 6 is now a reminder to Guggenheim of the bittersweetness that defines life. She wanted her children to see that grief was important — that they needed to feel the pain to process it — but that it did not need to define what came next.

Throwing her dress away was the first of many conscious choices to acknowledge the pain, to honor her husband, to love her family — but also to move forward. In that first year following Ricardo’s death, Guggenheim moved forward with her Executive MBA, partly as an homage to her husband, but also as an homage to herself. “I wanted to do this,” she says. “When I was studying, I was so hyper-focused, and I began to feel energized again.”

This isn’t to say that Guggenheim was happy, but she sure wanted to be. “I began to copy what happy people did. For example, at Georgetown, initially, I would fly in from Miami where I was living and fly out right after class. But then I began to stay through Sunday so if I was invited to go to dinner or to socialize, I could say yes.”

She didn’t always say yes because she wanted to, of course. In fact, many times she would have rather not gone out at all. But Guggenheim had a goal after Ricardo’s death. “My goal was for my children to be okay. And for them to be okay, I had to be okay,” she says. “But okay wasn’t enough. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to have a great freaking life. And to me, that meant finding happiness.”

There is a Happiness Movement Afoot

Whole platforms and conferences and speaking engagements are focused on prioritizing personal and global happiness, and their roots extend back to 1998 and a man named Martin Seligman. Seligman, then-president of the American Psychological Association, championed a field of psychology that wasn’t centered in mental illness, but rather in wellbeing, or as Seligman puts it in his memoir, “to steer psychology away from the darkness and toward light.” The result of his work and the work of others was a branch of psychology called positive psychology, the idea that wellbeing and yes, happiness, were choices and could be “defined, measured, and taught.”

As more and more psychologists and social scientists around the world did the research and produced the supporting literature around positive psychology and the science of happiness, Guggenheim graduated with her Executive MBA and got a communications job. The job looked great to her on paper, but the actual position lacked purpose for the young, now single, mom. “I thought, I’m not going to have survived my husband’s death and then dread going to work,” she says. When volunteers visiting the agency where she worked approached her with the idea of a World Happiness Summit, she admits her initial thought was, “That’s cute.” It wasn’t until they shared the concept for the theme: “I Choose Happiness,” that Guggenheim really paid attention. “I thought, wait, I did that.”

She began reading everything she could about the work of psychologists and scientists like Seligman. She saw top academic institutions like Stanford and Harvard digging deep into the research and creating courses and curricula to study — and teach — happiness. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Guggenheim had knowledge of how the brain processes emotions and knew about things like post-traumatic stress disorder, but it wasn’t until after Ricardo’s death that she also learned about things like post-traumatic stress growth — the idea that pain can be a catalyst for individual choice and change.

Suddenly the idea of a World Happiness Summit seemed so much more than “cute.” Guggenheim saw the potential not just to change individual lives, but also the potential to change societies as a whole through systemic change. “As a society, we’re burnt out,” says Guggenheim. “We’re not doing well. Our kids are not doing well. The suicide rate in the United States is through the roof and solutions to that issue should be top of mind every single day.”

Within six weeks of that initial pitch, Guggenheim quit her job and invested her time, talent, and treasure into making the World Happiness Summit a leading conference for researchers and practitioners to share their work and ideas and for attendees to change their lives. In the process of co-founding the summit, she also built and launched its supportive ecosystem, WOHASU, a platform to raise awareness about the benefits of happiness and wellbeing to individuals, and to businesses and civic leaders who can then use data-driven tools to build policies to make people and communities happier. After all, studies show happiness and wellbeing among citizens lead to stronger families, organizations, and economies. Her team is currently working on the next Summit, which will take place in Miami, Florida, in March of 2025.

Over time, Guggenheim has learned that happiness is not a switch, but a habit-building process and a lifelong practice. Her days start with a mindfulness meditation, an inspirational reading, and a warm cup of coffee that she holds by wrapping her hands around her cup — a lesson from a tea ceremony master, who reminded her that the handle distances her from the act of drinking her coffee and takes her out of the moment. She doesn’t peek at email before 9 a.m. and certainly not after 9 p.m. “The brain doesn’t have a lymphatic system, so the only way it cleans itself is through sleep,” explains Guggenheim.

Another key daily practice for Guggenheim is the creation of a “To Be” list — not to be confused with the running “To Do” list of any adult. The “To Be” list is based on actions within her control. “I want to be kind today. I want to be accepting. I want to be forgiving. I want to be light. I want to laugh,” says Guggenheim.

While her rituals may seem simple enough, they’re all backed by the science of positive psychology. “Happiness is a process — a by-product of purposely living a meaningful life, accomplished through engaging in actions that, over time, become habits, rewiring our naturally ‘negative’ brains to elevate well-being and increase more opportunities for positive emotions,” Guggenheim writes in her book, Cultivating Happiness: Overcome trauma to transform your life, which was released earlier this year.

What if, thought Guggenheim, we treated our emotional state the way we treat the physical body. “If you want to have your body look a certain way, you have to focus on nutrition, not once, but nearly every day.” We know, scientifically, that if we want healthier physical outcomes, it is a process of understanding what we’re after and then engaging in a process to get there: exercise, better food choices, more water. Oddly, says Guggenheim, we don’t give ourselves this same kind of space psychologically.

“When it comes to our emotional state, we wing it,” she says. “Since childhood, we are often fed the idea that external rewards will make us happy, but we’re not made that way. We keep trying to sell this idea and it doesn’t work, because it’s not true. It is remarkable that we are constantly trying to fight against our natures, run away from how our brains function, and tend to be generally unaware of our biology, especially about how our thoughts and emotions impact our wellbeing or lack thereof.”

Guggenheim is teaching her kids something different. Choosing happiness practices does not mean life is without obstacles and sadness. “The first step to getting out of pain is allowing yourself to feel it, but eventually you have to let it go. Because some people may stay with their pain too long.” Eventually we need to make conscious choices, says Guggenheim, like burning the record of music that reminds you of a breakup. Like throwing your black funeral dress directly into the garbage.

Sure, she could live in the grief of her husband’s death. She could spend her days mourning every moment he missed and assume everything he built — his career, his family — is a loss because he is no longer here to experience them. But she knew even that grief, as deep as it was, would not bring Ricardo back. Her work today is a tribute to him. “To understand the growth, you must understand the loss,” she says. “While my story has sadness, it is really a legacy of hope and love.”

In March of this year, Guggenheim took the stage at the 6th World Happiness Summit held in London. She welcomed the 1,000 attendees from 60 countries and nearly 400 cities, and announced the theme: “Wellbeing is the Purpose.” She also announced the launch of the first World Wellbeing Policy Forum built in collaboration with the World Happiness Movement and held at the London School of Economics.

The forum itself included business leaders, healthcare experts, and educators. It also included the U.S. Surgeon General who declared “wellbeing is the issue of our time.” “If we get wellbeing right,” says Guggenheim, “everything else falls into place. You even make more profit. You live on average seven years longer and better. Think about the health costs, look at the GDP. Illness and unhappiness is very costly.” And through it all, Guggenheim smiled. She laughed. And she wore pink.

This story was originally featured in the Georgetown Business Fall 2024 Magazine. Download the Georgetown Business Audio app to listen to the stories and other bonus content.