Our Happiness Journey
Global Communications Agency Middle East (GCA) is an advisory firm that provides expertise at the intersection of communications and policy development for clients around the world. GCA focuses on solving communications challenges with solutions that are easy to understand and implement. A key area in our work is our approach to designing happiness and wellbeing solutions for the workplace, individuals, and institutions as a whole.
Our happiness journey began a few years ago right here in Dubai. Born over mediocre lunchroom sandwiches and lively academic debates, a mutual respect for the role of happiness and policy work grew as a result of our respective disciplines. On the positive psychology side we firmly believe that science plays a guiding role in the promotion of wellbeing, on the policy side we know that what is intentionally set at the national, organizational, or personal level becomes the reality that each of us lives with.
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We consider wellbeing to be far broader than merely feeling good - wellbeing must include correlates of education, finance, governance, and organizations. Our work in policy and communications is rewarding, and we decided it was time to expand our scope and deliver a means to greater happiness to our clients. Aiming to raise the profile of organizational wellbeing, GCA happily launched Happiness Matters as a complementary service in 2019. To learn more about GCA visit our website.
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Dr. Louise Lambert
Head of Happiness Research and Policy Design
Dr. Louise Lambert, PhD, is a Registered Psychologist (#2659, College of Alberta Psychologists, Canada), author of the first and only positive psychology authoritative textbook in the Middle East, program developer and professor with almost 20 years of experience in counselling, mental health, not-for-profit organizations, higher education and research, and primary healthcare.
Her area of specialization is positive psychology and the empirically validated interventions people can use to achieve and sustain greater subjective wellbeing over time. For example, she developed Kuwait’s Bareec positive education program which is now rolled out in dozens of schools around the country, as well as Dubai College’s positive education program.
She has lived in the UAE for 10 years and is currently the leading expert in the delivery of Happiness programs across the GCC. She is the Director of Happiness Programming with Global Communications Agency, as well as an academic researcher on happiness and wellbeing in the region.
Dr. Lambert is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Middle East Journal of Positive Psychology, a journal dedicated to positive psychology in the region.
Aziz Mulay-Shah
Managing Director, Global Communications Agency
Aziz Mulay-Shah is a former senior Canadian diplomat and now the Managing Director at Global Communications Agency in Dubai. Over the past 20 years, Aziz has been a governance and public policy planner with Global Affairs Canada and was a Director of Policy in the Office of the Privy Council.
As a diplomat, Aziz worked as a senior advisor on Strategic Communications and Middle East Policy for Canada's Prime Minister. For the last 10 years, he has lived and worked in Dubai, including four years as Canada’s Deputy Ambassador to the UAE.
More recently, he taught communications and diplomacy at a university in Dubai. He has since expanded his range of interest to the science of wellbeing, particularly at the national level of policy development, and he is co-author of a chapter on policy planning, as well as lead author of a chapter on the development of the commercial wellbeing model.
