I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Usually when you don't feel loved, you think, oh, I need to make myself more lovable, right?

What we think, I need to change the other person, you know, try to make them love me. And then by the way, this is almost impossible,

right? This is not actually going to work. It's going to backfire. And what we have is actually a much

more empowering message, which is that if you want to feel more loved, you don't need to change yourself, you don't need to

change the other person, you just need to change the conversation, right? The conversation you're

having, because a relationship is basically a series of conversations. It's about feeling

connected and loved during those conversations. that's where it starts.

That's Sonia Lubomirski. She's a professor at the University of California, Riverside,

who for some 35 years has been focused on developing a science of human happiness.

With fellow psychologist Harry Reese, she's written the book centered on the idea that true happiness comes from feeling loved and connected.

We had a fun conversation, which got off to an unexpected start.

I'm just so excited to meet Al-N-Alda. My book is about love, and I just want to say, I love you.

You've made my life 20% better through your work.

That's great. So, Graham, don't leave that out. This is going to be really great because we talk all the time about relating and communicating,

but this is really at the heart of the whole question.

Am I right that you were being interviewed for like the second time about happiness, an earlier book he wrote?

And the host asked you a question that you didn't expect, what's the secret of happiness?

It's amazing. having read this book, that you didn't have a quick answer for him.

Well, that was like 20 years ago. I think I had three answers. It was like positive thinking,

relationships, sense of control. But after, but 20 years since then, you know, I've been doing

happiness interventions, right? So mostly what I do in my research is we're doing basically

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