In September 2009, Canadian professional lacrosse player Jim Moss was training for the new season by running up a mountain.
Just 48 hours later, he couldn’t walk.
Moss and his wife Jennifer, who was seven and a half months pregnant, were told that Jim had contracted a rare auto-immune disease and would lose all use of his legs.
“I was losing my profession. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to walk again. We were just about to have a baby. I had lost 85 per cent of my salary, and we lived in the most expensive zip code in the United States,” he recalls.
In other words, happiness was in short supply.
And yet, Moss’s hospital bed became the unlikely incubator for an ambitious project to create happier, healthier workplaces.
As his recovery process began, Jim realized his mood was having a significant impact on his physical rehabilitation. He began taking notes on the small things that brought him joy during his convalescence. Although he had not yet realized it, he was tapping into the theory of neuroplasticity. Its premise: that positive behaviour can rewire the brain and body for the better.
A month later, Jim Moss walked out of hospital.
It was almost certainly not the sole reason for his rapid recovery, but Moss was sufficiently convinced by the science of gratitude to begin studying it in earnest. The couple returned to Canada, settling in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. And four years after Jim’s collapse, their company, Plasticity Labs, launched a product whose understated goal is “helping a billion people find what makes them happier.”
The office was a natural starting point.
“I’ve been in a workplace that was negative,” says Jennifer. “I had to constantly fight and battle being in a negative environment, and then try and bring positivity into the home. And it was very, very difficult to do.”
Enter the Plasticity app, which celebrates its one year anniversary this month. It’s described by Jim as a “mash-up of Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, with a shot of Survey Monkey.” It’s the first attempt in the world, Jim says, to combine a social platform with research-based analytics in a single technology
Here’s how it works: employees log-in to the phone app daily by rating their happiness on a scale of 1 to 100 and explaining the reason for their score.
Once inside, the app works like “a really positively focused Facebook stream.” Employees socialize online and share their successes — an exercise guided by the principles of neuroplasticity.
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