When we hear the word happy, we perk up and think of merriment, ebullience, good cheer, and smiles. However, happiness today is a fuzzy concept. Feeling cheerful or merry is a far cry from real, lasting inner happiness. Millions of dollars have gone to waste in the pursuit of happiness; they have failed to yield significant results. Hollywood and Madison Ave are the epitome of making us spend a lot to “buy happiness.” They tell us that if we buy W and drive X, or we vacation in Y and wear label A, then we will feel happy forever. We tend to choose what makes us feel good in the moment, but it’s very important to realize that too often our choices are not made for the sake of how we will feel long term.
Modern conceptions of happiness are misleading because the focus is in the wrong place. Today happiness is viewed as a mood, a feeling that passes. This understanding isn’t wrong as much as it is shortsighted. Moods shift and feelings change. While feeling happy may differ from day to day, if the overall direction of your life has provided you with feelings of contentment, peace, and real joy, you can be happy in the deeper and more permanent sense.
If you are in business, achieving a state of well-being may be particularly relevant to you. People who are happier are very often more successful at work as well. Research shows how satisfaction and happiness are connected to higher success rates and productivity, as well as better business outcomes. And many of the principles and habits that make for a happy and satisfying life are directly applicable to building a happier and more effective culture within your business.
Employees and managers are affected by how the leaders look and act, especially in crisis. One of the most important traits of leadership is being calm under stress. We quoted Warren Buffett, who said that mental stability is the most important attribute a leader needs. Happy managers make happy employees, who in turn make happy customers.
Everyone wants to be happy, yet we spend our days with our noses to the grindstone, trying to achieve happiness we’ll never have time to enjoy. At no point will we ever step back and say, “That’s enough working. I can enjoy the results now.”
It’s well worth investing the effort in attaining true happiness. When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we tend to like others more, and we are more open to share our good fortune with others. When we are down, on the other hand, we become distrustful, turn inward, and focus exclusively on our own needs. Consequently, withdrawing from others puts an even bigger distance between ourselves and the happiness we seek.
Studies have proven how being socially connected affects a person’s well-being, while lacking social ties increases depression and negative affectivity. A happy person makes a delightful companion, friend, parent, and employee. People are attracted to someone who radiates positive energy and joy, and being constantly surrounded by friends and family makes a happy person even happier.
Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, conducted extensive research on how extremely happy people differ from the rest of us. The results were that they were extremely social. They each had a meaningful relationship, were involved in group activities, and often had a rich repertoire of friends. Seligman has written extensively on the topics of learned optimism, authentic happiness, and flourishing, in which he details his findings on how to achieve well-being and happiness. He disliked the disease model, where psychologists and psychiatrists have become “pathologizers” and “victimologists” and have forgotten that people have responsibility and can make choices. They haven’t developed interventions to make people happy, and they have forgotten about improving normal lives and increasing talents and creativity.
Seligman strongly believes that we should be just as concerned with strengths as with weaknesses and just as interested in building the best things in life as repairing the worst. This can help make the lives of normal people more fulfilling and nurture talent and genius. His theory is that happiness can be broken down into three different elements: positive emotions, engagement, and meaning.
Positive emotions are what we feel, such as pleasure, ecstasy, warmth, and the like. They come from doing things that we enjoy and that make us feel good, like reading a good book or listening to great music. We learn to amplify positive feelings by savoring them as much as we can. An entire life led around these pleasurable sensations is called the pleasant life.
The second element, engagement, is what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow.” It is characterized by complete absorption in what one does and is the feeling of time stopping, a loss of self-consciousness when completely absorbed in something. In a sense, engagement is the opposite of positive emotions; when you ask people who are in flow what they are feeling, they say, “Nothing.” In flow, we merge with the object of our attention, such as a project or a game; the concentrated attention that it requires uses up all the cognitive and emotional resources that make up thought and feeling. In order to go into flow it’s important to identify your highest strengths and learn to use them more often. It requires re-crafting your life based on your strengths.
In the now popular field of positive psychology, the greatest importance is helping people understand their strengths and building their career around it. Managers and leaders alike should take the time to understand what motivates their people, and the greatest motivator is doing what you really feel energized by. I’m in the process of becoming a positive psychology coach. One of the main reasons is because it’s extremely gratifying to help people understand themselves and follow their calling.
The third and most significant element of happiness is meaning. The pursuit of pleasure and engagement are often solitary endeavors. Human beings, ultimately, need meaning and purpose in life. Meaning can come from using your highest strengths in the service of something you perceive as bigger than yourself. Refer to my past quotations of Victor Frankl and others who have said that meaning and purpose is the most gratifying work that man can do.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never
have to work a day in your life”.
—Confucius
The drawbacks to the pleasant life are, first, that it’s hard to change. Second, it habituates, meaning you adjust to it fast and the pleasure decreases. For example, when licking an ice-cream cone, in the first taste you get 100 percent pleasure, but by the sixth taste the pleasure is almost gone. So the pursuit of pleasure makes almost no contribution to happiness. Engagement and meaning are what contribute most to happiness, with meaning taking first place. When you have that, pleasure is like the cherry on top.
Seligman believes that each person possesses several signature strengths. Strengths are traits, not just one-time actions. They are virtues and are valued in their own right in almost all cultures. He compiled a list of strengths that can be measured. Among them are wisdom and knowledge, spirituality and transcendence, love and humanity, courage, justice, and temperance. These are strengths of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and can exercise every day in many areas of life. The idea is to use your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring authentic happiness.
When a leader uses their strengths and encourages others to do the same, it creates a lot of positive energy. People feel good about doing what they do well, and that creates a positive energy culture. Recently I worked with an organization that struggled with keeping their good employees motivated. It required many meetings based on a win-win outcome that allowed these employees to articulate their need to feel important and empowered, which resulted in them taking ownership of many executive functions, which in turn freed the executives to do greater things.
To have a meaningful life is to use your strengths and virtues in service of something bigger than yourself. The larger the system you attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life. There are lots of pre-packaged systems as well—systems such as family, religion, political parties, and the like—that can help you find meaning.
Then there are jobs, careers, tasks, and so forth that you are already engaged in but don’t see much meaning in. Converting your ideas about them, however, can result in a more meaningful life. For example, being a lawyer can either be a business just in service of making half a million dollars a year, in which case it’s not meaningful. Or it can be in service of good counsel, fairness, and justice; that’s a meaningful life.
There are other ways to live a meaningful life. You need to examine your values, beliefs, strengths, and talents to determine in which direction to go. According to Seligman, gratitude and doing something altruistic are among the top on the list. Gratitude is the ability to be keenly aware of the good things that happen to you and never take them for granted. Grateful individuals express their thanks and appreciation to others in a heartfelt way, not just to be polite. If you possess a high level of gratitude, you often feel an emotional sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life itself.
Researchers are finding that individuals who exhibit and express the most gratitude are happier, healthier, and more energetic. In various studies, grateful people reported fewer physical and emotional symptoms such as headaches, stomachaches, depression, anxiety, and stress. On the flip side, when an individual has an insufficient appreciation of good events and an overemphasis of bad or unfortunate experiences, contentment and satisfaction with life are greatly undermined.
A simple way to improve your gratitude is to write down five things for which you felt grateful for, once a week, for ten weeks in a row. Exciting results will emerge. Students that did the experiment reported feeling less stressed and more content, optimistic, and satisfied with their life. It’s interesting to note that while counting your blessings on a regular basis can improve mood and overall level of happiness and health, expressing that appreciation to others will do so even more. Even noticing, appreciating, and expressing our feelings for life’s little blessings can produce just as much benefit as noticing the monumental moments.
Although we may acknowledge gratitude’s benefits, it can still be difficult to feel grateful when we are going through a difficult time. It may be human nature to notice all that is wrong or that we lack, but Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychology Professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy, even when things don’t go as planned.
He claims that our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong, and he says that natural happiness is what we feel when we get what we wanted, while synthetic happiness is what we make of when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind, that putting a good spin on a bad situation or being a good loser is just a way to save face, but that is not the case at all. He supports this premise with intriguing research. (www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html)
Altruism is another thing that can greatly affect the level of meaning in your life. By doing things to benefit others, you will become a much happier person. For example, volunteering just one day a month can give your life a greater sense of purpose and can make you feel more connected to your community. There’s a significant correlation between well-being and volunteer work. Think you’re too busy? It’s not about how much time you give, but about forming an identity as a volunteer. Many companies see the value of giving employees one-day paid leave for volunteer work, or they match donations, all for the purpose of creating altruistic and compassionate employees.
There are many different ways in which you can help others: being a listening ear to a friend; helping a friend or neighbor who is ill; doing something for someone else that requires time and effort on your part. One day each week, commit five random acts of kindness, and when possible, make them anonymous.
Following are more suggestions that can increase meaning in your life:
•Creating: Writing, drawing, painting, playing music, inventing something, building a business, coming up with a clever marketing campaign, and forming a nonprofit are all ways of contributing to the world in a positive way will give you a greater feeling of significance.
•Relating: It’s not “family” that makes life worth living, but the relationships we create with members of our family and the way we maintain and build those relationships. The same goes for friends, business partners, students, and everyone else.
•Playing: Letting go of restraints, imagining new possibilities, testing yourself against others or against yourself, and finding humor and joy can all help you stay feeling positive about life, no matter what situation you’re in.
•Growing: Learning new things or improving knowledge and ability in the things you’ve already learned help you to constantly feel renewed and are a way to continue to grow.
Finding meaning in your life isn’t hard, but it’s definitely harder than living a fast-paced, superficial life. Make the decision to start your search for meaning, and experience everything that life has to offer. You won’t regret it.