My guest today teaches happiness for a living. Which is ironic, because she grew up in a country where smiling at a stranger means something is wrong with you.

Tatiana Koval spent 15 years as an HR consultant in Russia. When the war in Ukraine started, saying you were against it could put you in jail. Within days, she left the country with her husband and two sons to emigrate to Brazil.

This is a conversation about happiness at work, life in Russia, and moving to Brazil, a place where strangers smile, hug, and say good morning in the elevator.

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Losing Everything to Stay Human

Russia’s war with Ukraine started February 24, 2022. On March 1, Tatiana and her family were gone. A new law had made it a crime to speak against the war. Most of her clients had government connections, so she lost them. Colleagues cut ties because being associated with her had become dangerous for their businesses. They chose Brazil because of a Facebook post saying Russians could move there and get citizenship.

Money matters, she says, “but to stay human for me was much more important.”

The Slavic Face

In Russia it’s not the norm to smile. If you want respect, you wear a serious face. Tatiana calls it the “Slavic face.” Russians grow up expecting crisis, always ready for something bad to happen. She calls that mindset the opposite of happiness. Looking back at her school and university years, she realizes she fought depression, but she never saw a psychologist. The stigma was too strong.

Tatiana holds three university diplomas: mathematics, economics, and communication. None in psychology. Then about 15 years ago she joined a US-based online conference where people were talking about happiness at work. Nobody had ever told her that work could be a path to happiness. She calls it her “wow moment.” She dove into positive psychology, taking courses on Coursera and reading Martin Seligman and Tal Ben-Shahar. What hooked her was Seligman’s famous question: if everything is okay with our lives, could we make them better?

Bom Dia in the Elevator

In her building in Brazil, neighbors say bom dia in the elevator every day. People smile, hug, and complain plenty too. Community runs deep, in church, in family, at work. In Moscow she lived in the same building for over 15 years and knew two or three of her neighbors.

But she pushes back on the idea that everything in Brazil is better. Social trust, she says, is about the same as Russia. She couldn’t go out after dark in her old Russian neighborhood, and she wouldn’t recommend it in most Brazilian cities either.

How She Learned to Love Cleaning the House

Tatiana uses a method from positive psychology called job crafting: redefining how you see a task. She hated cleaning her house. So she turned it into her hour for podcasts, dancing, and exercise. Now she refuses to let anyone else do it.

Understanding Your Why

Work becomes a path to happiness when you find the meaning in it. In Tatiana’s projects, one of the most common results is that people finally understand what the company is doing, why, and for whom. In her own business, the goal is not just to make money but to understand what the other person needs and find the true solution. If a solution isn’t right for a client, she says no and points them to someone else.

Happiness Is a Skill

Tatiana says the tools of positive psychology helped her recover from emigration faster. She had stress, losses, and plenty of negative emotions. But her recovery came much quicker than it would have without the science of happiness. During that period she asked herself every day if she was happy. The answer was yes, because the decision to leave was built on her values.

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