Shawn Achor looks at the “happiness advantage”…by looking at people that are particularly successful in life satisfaction and effectiveness, he discovered that what puts a person in optimal position to be effective/happy/content. I posted a blog of him a few weeks ago…but the TEDx talk where I first saw him has now been published on YouTube. He’s funny and engaging and says some very important truths.
When in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long term happiness. Ninety per cent of your long term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. If we change our formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way we can then change the way we can then affect reality.
What we found is that only 25% of job successes is predicted by IQ. Seventy five per cent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social supports, and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success…if you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present…your brain in “positive” performs significantly better than in “negative/neutral/stressed”. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy level rises…your brain in positive is 31% more productive than in negative/netural/stressed….
We find there are ways to train your brain to be more positive….
3 Gratitudes
Journalling
Exercise
Meditation
Random Acts of Kindness
The Happiness Advantage
This is big, folks. It gives each of us an ability to work internally to regulate our emotions, to change our perspective to one that has us feeling satisfied and content. This places us in a position to be relaxed, calm, and effective in our endeavors, taking irritations/failures/disappointments as real and important but tolerable and not overwhelming.
This spring, I came across the raw footage of this talk, watched his further videos and began reading another book that had an important impact on me, One Thousand Gifts. It further got me to thinking about the value of adopting a lifestyle posture of gratitude.
After teaching at the university for the last decade, I take research very seriously. I like to base my actions not only on “common sense”, but whenever possible on concrete evidence as well. Makes for good therapy…the development of our Feedback Enhanced Therapy has been a direct example of that. Makes for a good life too. So about two months ago, I began a gratitude blog…a private blog. Don’t look for it, you won’t find it. It’s for me. More days than not, I take time in the evening to reflect on the day, and tap out a half dozen or more things that I am grateful for that day.
What I find has begun to happen is that as the day goes along, I’ll notice something, and say to myself…”I’ll have to put that in the blog”, and so, in the moment, I’m finding myself grateful. I put in videos on the blog that I am grateful for, pictures of events and people that are special to me, but more often than not, just write out what I’m thankful for. Kindnesses people have extended to me, beauty that has caught my eye, conversations that were meaningful. Sometimes little silly things….like the cost of cherries being such that I can eat them everyday, or feeling the cool mist from a sprinkler as I walk by it on a scorching day. Sometimes things that move me…like on a hard day recently, when I showed up at Starbucks with a gift card that I was wrongly convinced had money on it…I couldn’t pay for my drink (and I walked there with no wallet). I asked them not to give it to me, and when they insisted, I told them I would come by the next day to pay. The barista said: “Even if you try to give me the money tomorrow, I won’t take it.” It was grace extended on a day that begged for a kindness.
Deliberately noting things to be grateful for has been a valuable practice that I intend to continue long term. Recently, on a difficult day, I found myself reviewing past entries, and was able to recall experiences I’d forgotten about…lovely/funny/touching/profound/loving moments of life that grounded and centred me. Didn’t take away the troubledness I was feeling…but it fed my soul, giving me energy and resilience to deal with a present difficult situation.
I want to be in a space that looks at life recognizing that there is more good than not, more kindness than hatred, more generosity than stinginess. There is not doubt much evil in the world…trust me, I’m no Pollyanna. Being a therapist, I hear the traumatic experiences and broken inner worlds of people daily, and I have my own disappointments and losses. But, as much as possible, I want to choose to come from an inner perspective of quiet strength, which is calm, confident, capable and centred.
I was listening to CBC yesterday and a person being interviewed said something to the effect of: “The news headlines tomorrow will be that 1800 people are having their Canadian citizenship revoked because of fraud. It will sound like a big horrible scary number that will alarm people for a variety of reasons. There will be little or nothing said about the 498 000 people who became citizens during the same period who will happily remain Canadian citizens”. Our media and culture focuses disproportionately on the bad and catastrophic. I choose to focus proportionately on the good and wholesome.
On Saturday, I had a wicked headache and spent much of the day very nauseous. I felt awful. The next day my head was clear, and I was pretty much back to normal. And, as I wrote in the gratitude blog that day, I was grateful for not being sick to my stomach. And I realized I hadn’t been consciously mindful of my overall general good health in a while. The gratitude blog had me switch my focus away from the “tragedy” of a beautiful summer weekend day spent ill, to the many days I am able to conduct my day completely unaware of good health.
I haven’t got this all figured out, and don’t think by this writing, that I’ve found a way to be eternally “happy”. It’s not at all like that. But I am thankful for the readings and videos that have put me on the path of gratitude.
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