Being Happy: Documentary on Finding Joy and Strengthening Your Resilience

Professor Meg Warren, who teaches in the Management Department of WWU's College of Business and Economics, appears in “Being Happy,” a documentary about finding joy and strengthening resilience that explores groundbreaking research on happiness.

“As society becomes more diverse, one particular way of stepping up to help is to become an ally. Research has found that acting as an ally can have a big impact in many ways.

There are quite a few definitions around allyship. Primarily, the most general commonly accepted definition is people from dominant social groups in our society stepping up to support people from marginalized groups, such as women, cis women, people of color. That is the general idea: that you step up in order to support people from marginalized groups in the face of discrimination, in order to reduce discrimination, in order to reduce inequities.

My work has primarily honed this definition to also include the idea of well-being. So it’s not just about reducing discrimination, but making sure that people are actually able to flourish and thrive and actually experience well-being. We don’t want to only try to make it less bad. Let’s really focus on what it means to thrive.

Every single one of us will probably find ourselves having some privilege and even when it comes to, for instance, age. In certain aspects, being older is a privilege, and in others, being younger is a privilege. It all depends on the context, when you may find yourself having a little more power than another simply because of certain identities. 

That’s when, if you see discrimination or even the fact that someone else is being treated less nicely than they could have been, you have an opportunity to step up and be an ally. 

In one of our recent studies, we looked at the benefits of allyship, not only for people from marginalized groups, but for people from dominant groups too. And there were some really strong psychological benefits to being an ally. One of which is that folks noticed that they had better relationships even in their personal lives. 

For men, becoming an ally and doing more allyship work in their organization where they’re supporting women who are being marginalized allowed them to become more tuned into the sorts of issues that their family members — their daughters, their partners, their sister, their parent — they were going through that they had not noticed in the past. And as they had started to notice these things and do more work in the organization, they started to have these conversations at home because they’re so shocked that they didn’t think about this before, and it started to really strengthen their relationships at home. So there’s some really clear benefits. 

Another important one is the sense of personal growth, feeling like I am growing as a person and that I have the power to change my own life and my own well-being, as well as others. And they can have that impact. That is a really powerful sense that one can come away with when you step up as an ally.”