You have to do hard things to be happy in life. The things most people avoid, such as those that make you uncomfortable, that are far easier to hide from, that others can’t do for you, that make you second-guess yourself and question how you’re going to find the strength to push forward.
Why?
Because the hard things ultimately build you up and change your life. They make the difference between existing and living, between knowing the path and walking it, between a lifetime of empty promises and one filled with progress and fulfillment.
We know this now, but we didn’t until we hit rock bottom.
At the lowest point in our lives—when we were stuck in a shared bout of depression and every step forward was difficult to even consider—we learned the hard things were in fact the right things. They provided the only logical path forward.
We had just lost two loved ones to death, then we lost our family’s primary source of income. It all happened suddenly and in quick succession. Our lives came to a halt, for months, as we desperately struggled to cope with our new reality.
As Marc recalls it:
“On your deathbed, it’s too late to honor and respect the people you’ve lost,” Angel said.
I kept a downward gaze, but nodded my head in agreement.
Through her tears, she continued. “On your deathbed, it’s too late to truly prove your love to the people you love.”
Again I solemnly nodded, but this time I felt inspired to add, “On your deathbed, it’s too late to pick flowers for your wife.”
Angel quickly glanced at the flowers sitting on our nightstand, cracked a half smile, scooted across our bed, and rested her head on my shoulder.
I continued. “On your deathbed, it’s too late to be who you might have been. To make wish lists, to do the hard things required to check them off, and to appreciate the little bits of daily progress you’re making on your journey back to happy.”
That’s a taste of a conversation we had on a Friday ten years ago at three o’clock in the morning.
We were both up because we couldn’t sleep.
We couldn’t sleep because we had just lost loved ones back-to-back to illness and suicide.
We couldn’t sleep because without a new source of income in a brutal economic recession, we feared we’d be on the streets soon.
We didn’t know how to sleep and cry at the same time.
Yet somehow, in the dark, we found hope in a really difficult and slightly twisted conversation about our deathbeds and the obvious fact that neither of us was on ours yet.
Unbeknownst to us, that conversation was the beginning of our journey back to happy.
But let me back up for a moment and tell you how we got to that conversation in the middle of the night.
It was five o’clock in the morning in San Diego the day after my twenty-seventh birthday. Angel and I had been up late the night before celebrating at a local sports bar with some friends. And we would have slept in for a few more hours if both of our phones hadn’t started ringing nonstop.
“Who in their right mind is calling us this early?” Angel muttered as she rolled out of bed.
“I don’t know. Just turn the ringers off and come back to bed,” I said as she walked into the living room to check our phones.
But as soon as Angel glanced at the phones she knew something was wrong. There were more than a dozen missed calls and text messages from some of our closest friends and family on the East Coast. One of the text messages read “Have you heard about Josh?” She called for me to take a look. And that turned out to be the very last moment we still had hope we’d share another good laugh with one of the kindest human beings we’ve ever known—one of our very best friends.
Josh died from cardiac arrest (provoked by an asthma attack) in the middle of the night at the age of twenty-seven, leaving behind his wife, Cami (who now works with us), and their two baby boys, Ethan and Jacob.
A few weeks after Josh passed away, Angel’s older brother, Todd, died by suicide—he was only thirty-six, and had a constant smile that made everyone around him smile too. Why did he do it? Why didn’t we know he had lost hope behind his contagious smile? Those questions haunted us in every waking moment for a long, long time. We cried a lot. For him. For Josh. For both of them at once.
And as our hearts and minds hit rock bottom, so too did the economy.
Angel had lost her breadwinning job during our struggles with loss, in one of the worst job markets in U.S. history. So with two broken hearts, we were forced to reinvent ourselves not only on a personal level, but on a professional one too. And it certainly didn’t happen overnight. We had a lot to learn before we’d be back on our feet again.
Although our journey has been anything but easy, we’re wholeheartedly grateful for the lessons we gleaned as we battled our way through it, one day at a time. These life lessons are the basis for our blog, for our life work teaching others from our experience, and now for this book. The key to our progress and evolution has been building specific daily rituals that gradually allowed us to do the hard things no one else could do for us, to heal, to grow, and to move our lives forward again—which is precisely what this book will show you how to do.
Based on our personal journey, extensive positive psychology research, and over a decade’s worth of life coaching with hundreds of coaching clients, course students, and live-event attendees, this book will guide you through a daily process of learning how to change your thinking and behavior so you can turn major and minor trials into personal triumphs. During the process that ultimately led to the creation of this book, we asked ourselves hard questions such as:
Where can we discover the silver linings of the issues we’re dealing with?
Where are the opportunities for growth, understanding, and learning in the midst of our present struggles?
Are the stories echoing repeatedly in our heads really true?
How are we defined by these stories?
If we were able to let go of these stories—to grow beyond ourselves and change our perspective—what else might we experience, and what about these stories would no longer seem true?
When we took the time to answer these questions thoughtfully and honestly, sometimes we were surprised by what we learned about ourselves. Ultimately we discovered new ways of thinking and looking at our circumstances that totally transformed our lives.
Since then, we’ve dedicated our efforts to teaching others that working with their stories can help them overcome whatever darkness they’re facing. In 2006, we started our blog, Marc & Angel Hack Life (www.marcandangel.com), as a passion project—a place to hold ourselves accountable to a positive, healthy, and mindful shift in our thinking. It gave us a platform, not just as a personal accountability journal for each other, but as a shared experience with others who were—and continue to be—on the same journey. We find this work to be deeply rewarding and inspiring, and we feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to help others.
Marc & Angel Hack Life, now with two million page views each month, is a place people go for guidance on thinking and living better—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. As the blog has grown over the years, we’ve expanded the reach and depth of our message through one-on-one and small group coaching sessions. We also hold live conferences, one of which is titled “Think Better, Live Better” (thinklivebetter.com), and we speak at national conferences and events. In each of these settings, we encounter courageous souls who are searching for the means within themselves that will enable them to climb out of the darkness.
We do an exercise in our live events where we tell people to look around the room and find the color red. So they look carefully and start to see red everywhere. After a minute or two, we say, “Now close your eyes, and think about every place in the room you remember the color green.” Everyone laughs, because they don’t remember any green—they were looking for red. Even though green and red exist in the room at the same time, they don’t see the green in their minds because their focus wasn’t there.
We help people see the green—the whole picture—in their present lives.
We help people like Michelle, one of hundreds of amazing students who took our online course, also titled “Getting Back to Happy.” When she signed up for the course, Michelle was in a dark place. After taking some time off to help one of her daughters with dyslexia and autism get into college and get settled, she was ready to reenter the workforce. For the first time in her life, she found herself struggling to find work. She would get to the final round of interviews and be turned down. This kept happening for more than a year and a half, and Michelle felt deeply discouraged and broken.
Hard times had hit, and not just financially. Her brother had died by suicide. Her mother had fallen and broken her hip and now needed in-home care. Her home had flooded, causing massive damage and expensive repairs. And her marriage of thirty years was falling apart due to a lack of connection and intimacy and a partner with an alcohol addiction. Her feelings of being stuck and lost got so bad she remembers one Christmas when her friends had to come over and get her out of bed because she was lying in the dark, unable to get up and face the world anymore.
“I had all ‘the things,’” Michelle says. “But it just didn’t mean anything anymore. I was in a toxic marriage. I didn’t want my kids to experience a divorce, and I kept trying to hold on. I was looking for a job and going from one rejection to the next. I couldn’t seem to make anything happen. It was depressing, and I was losing hope. I knew I needed to make some changes.”
Michelle couldn’t dig herself out of the rut she was in, at least not alone, but hope and change were coming. After working through the course and completing the included one-on-one coaching calls with us, Michelle finally understood how she was unconsciously following patterns that were holding her back. When she began breaking those patterns, she started to find the peace of mind, clarity, and confidence she needed to make changes in her life. She learned that her journey was separate from her husband’s; she learned practical ways to rebuild her self-esteem; and she learned how to accept life the way it is, not the way she wanted it to be.
Within a few months, Michelle found herself back in the workforce and rebuilding her life. Distancing herself from unhealthy relationships and getting back to work was just the beginning for Michelle and her children. She also started repairing damaged relationships with certain family members, enrolled her children in positive community programs, and began recovering financially and repairing her home. She learned how to make real progress as a single mother, as she had separated from her husband and supported his entering a long-term rehabilitation hospital. She gradually began living more joyfully in all areas of her life, no matter what was happening around her.
“Marc and Angel helped me learn how to let go,” Michelle says. “They helped me think better no matter what was happening around me and return to being an energetic person ready to take on some of the hardest and most rewarding challenges of my life.”
We love stories like Michelle’s, and we have hundreds more like hers. Our goal for this book is to help you too learn how to think differently about the inevitable struggles you face, and provide you with the tools and strategies to cultivate a fresh perspective and make powerful positive changes. For every thought, there are many perspectives. If we can recognize the thought we’re experiencing in the moment, we can train ourselves to focus on the angle that most benefits us, and then act accordingly. Getting Back to Happy is about seeing more than the rabbit hole of negative thinking we so often fall into. It is about controlling our thoughts and broadening our focus so we can make room for growth, opportunity, and healing.
When we’re able to think more rationally about our present situation and expand our perspective, we’re able to see the whole picture, beyond the narrow focus brought on by pain and disappointment. In other words, if we can learn to think better, we can ultimately live better. And we can then apply that principle to everything we do going forward. Learning to cultivate the big-picture perspective—considering the whole truth—isn’t easy, but it eventually allows us to step forward and live better, no matter what happens next.
Let us quickly share three more stories with you . . .
“On my nursing shift at the hospital this evening, I was forced into a moment of clarity when I got off my phone, utterly flustered after having an argument with my husband, and an eight-year-old patient who’s dying of leukemia asked me if I was okay.”
“Today is the ten-year anniversary of the day I had planned on ending my life. It’s also the ten-year anniversary of the day I found out I was pregnant with my now nine-year-old son. He’s the reason I changed my mind. And he is so worth it! But perhaps most important, I now realize I am worth it too.”
“This afternoon I learned that the lady who I thought was a very young mom of the two twin girls I have in my fifth-grade math class is actually their twenty-five-year-old half sister, who is raising them after a tragic car accident took their parents.”
These anecdotes have been transcribed with permission from coaching sessions we’ve recently conducted. And if there’s one thing these students’ stories have in common, it’s the importance of our perspective. What we see in life—how we feel about ourselves, our lives, and the people around us—greatly depends on how we think. And the somewhat scary truth is, our perspective on just about everything comes from the psychological cage we’ve been conditioned to live in. A cage created by . . .
A difficult or disappointing past
A privileged or sheltered life
Social influence
Pop-culture and mass-media stereotyping
And the list goes on.
Gradually, unbeknownst to us, our cage—our conditioning—drains our mental energy, leaving us vulnerable to bad decision making. The key? There are many. And we’re going to cover them extensively throughout this book. But in a nutshell, you have to learn to . . .
Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.
That’s the supershort version of our advice for those moments when nothing seems to be going as planned; when everything you want seems out of reach; when you feel utterly stuck.
Yes, just be right where you are, with an open mind.
Let go of what you think your life is supposed to look like and sincerely appreciate it for everything it is.
Easier said than done, of course, especially when tragedy strikes. And although Angel and I have coped and grown through our fair share of real tragedies, which you will hear more about throughout this book, let’s be honest about something: 98 percent of the time we create tragedy in our lives out of fairly minor incidents. Something doesn’t go exactly as planned, but rather than learn from the experience, we freak out about it and let stress define us.
Our challenge for you is to start choosing differently—don’t let the little things that are out of your control dominate you!
The biggest difference between peace and stress is attitude. It’s all about how you look at a situation and what you decide to do with it. It’s remembering that there are no certainties in life; we don’t know exactly what the future will bring. So your best strategy for living is to make the best and most positive use of the present moment, even when it disappoints you . . .
Especially when it disappoints you!
How disappointed would you be to get twenty years down the road and discover you were meant to appreciate and enjoy life, while all you did was resist and doubt it?
Your life, with all its ups and downs, unexpected twists and turns, has brought you to this moment. It took each and every intricate, confusing, and painful situation you have encountered to bring you to right here, right now.
And if you have the courage to admit that you’re a little scared, and have the ability to smile even as you cry, the nerve to ask for help when you need it, and the wisdom to take it when it’s offered, then you have everything you need.
You just have to believe it so you can take the next step.
It’s interesting how we all outgrow what we once thought we couldn’t live without, and then we fall in love with what we didn’t even know we wanted. This is part of living and growing as a human being. We discover more about who we are and the way life really is, and then we realize there are some changes we need to make. The lifestyle we’ve been living no longer fits. The environments and relationships we once found comfort in no longer exist, or no longer serve our best interests. So we cherish all the great memories, but find ourselves at a crossroads, choosing to embark on the first step of a brand-new path.
And it’s not easy. It’s painful to give up what’s comfortable and familiar, especially when you have no other choice. Angel and I have struggled through this process many times out of necessity. Over the past decade we’ve had to deal with several significant, unexpected life changes and challenges, including:
Losing a sibling to suicide
Losing a best friend to cardiac arrest
Financial unrest and debt following a breadwinning employment layoff
Breaking ties with a loved one who repeatedly betrayed us
Family business failure (and reinvention)
Those experiences were brutal. Each of them knocked us down and off course for a while. But once we accepted the truth, by letting go of the way things used to be, we pressed forward, stronger and with a greater understanding of and respect for life.
Getting to the right state of mind, one that actually allowed us to move forward with our lives, required mindful practice. Because when we were initially faced with each one of those brutal experiences, you better believe our minds were spinning with negative emotions. We had to learn to catch ourselves in that negative state of emotional unrest, and then consciously calm our minds so we could think straight and make the best decisions possible.
In other words, we had to learn how to cope more effectively from the inside out so we could let go of the thoughts that were holding us back.
We met at the University of Central Florida when we were freshmen, and this is something our undergrad psychology professor alluded to cleverly, long before we fully grasped the importance of her wisdom. On the last day of class before graduation, she walked up on stage to teach one final lesson, which she called “a vital lesson on the power of perspective and mindset.” As she raised a glass of water over her head, everyone expected her to mention the typical “glass half empty or glass half full” metaphor. Instead, with a smile on her face, our professor asked, “How heavy is this glass of water I’m holding?”
Students shouted out answers ranging from a couple of ounces to a couple of pounds.
After a few moments of fielding answers and nodding her head, she replied, “From my perspective, the absolute weight of this glass is irrelevant. It all depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light. If I hold it for an hour straight, its weight might make my arm ache. If I hold it for a day straight, my arm will likely cramp up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor. In each case, the absolute weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it feels to me.”
As most of us students nodded our heads in agreement, she continued. “Your worries, frustrations, disappointments, and stressful thoughts are very much like this glass of water. Think about them for a little while and nothing drastic happens. Think about them a bit longer and you begin to feel noticeable pain. Think about them all day long, and you will feel completely numb and paralyzed, incapable of doing anything else until you drop them.”
Think about how this relates to your life.
If you’ve been struggling to cope with the weight of what’s on your mind, it’s a strong sign that it’s time to put the glass down.
The key is to realize that the vast majority of the worries, frustrations, disappointments, and stressful thoughts you’re dealing with are a product of your own creation. And you can let them go quickly by learning how to cope more effectively with what you’re feeling inside. How you deal with unexpected stress and frustration easily can be the difference between living a good life and living a troubled one. If you choose unhealthy coping mechanisms like avoidance or denial, for example, you can quickly turn a tough situation into a tragic one. And sadly, this is a common mistake many people make. When you find yourself facing a disheartening reality, your first reaction might be to deny the situation, or to avoid dealing with it altogether. But by doing so you’re inadvertently holding on even tighter to the pain that you wish to let go of; in effect, you’re sealing it up inside you.
Let’s imagine someone close to you has become ill, and supporting this person through his or her illness is incredibly painful. You might not want to deal with the pain, so you cope by avoiding it, by finding ways to numb yourself with alcohol and unhealthy eating. And consequently, you become physically ill too while the pain continues to fester inside you.
Obviously, that’s not good.
If you notice yourself doing something similar, it’s time to pause, admit to yourself that you’re coping by avoiding, and then shift your focus to a healthier coping mechanism by using the proven tools and strategies discussed throughout this book. These tools and strategies will open your mind when you need it most. Because when you face struggles with an attitude of openness—open to the painful feelings and emotions you have—you find out that it’s not comfortable, but you can still be fine and you can still step forward. Openness means you don’t instantly decide that you know this is going to be a horrible experience; it means you admit you don’t really know what the next step will be like, and you’d like to understand the whole truth of the matter. It’s a stance of learning instead of one that assumes the worst.
Coping certainly isn’t an easy practice. But it’s worth your while. With practice, healthy coping allows us to find better ways of managing life’s continuous stream of unexpected and uncontrollable circumstances—from minor setbacks and challenges to life-changing loss. Instead of denying, avoiding, self-medicating, lashing out, and other common but unhealthy coping strategies, you’ll discover healthier ways to meet whatever life throws your way, and come out stronger, and often even more fulfilled, than you were before. In the end, the world is as you are inside. What you think, you see and you ultimately become. And this book is your guide. Let’s begin.