Happiness by Design – How you can choose happiness
It’s been almost 4 years now that I’ve started my journey as a Happiness and High-Performance Coach, helping organizations and people perform better with less tension and less effort. This might sound result-driven and a bit vague, but hear me out. This performing better part of my work is a nice, tangible side-benefit of the work I really do: focusing on making people happier.
When you’re in a happy state, things flow easily, focus comes more naturally, communication becomes more caring, your curiosity grows, your listening deepens, empathy grows, love grows, helping others becomes more appealing and easy, understanding and respect come more easily, energy becomes abundant, you lift people up around you, you are kinder, you are more appreciative, your face lights up, you attract people.
Simply said, life is good. Nothing feels like effort and there is no tension.
It’s no secret that happiness at your work or generally in your life, makes things work for you. Plenty of research has shown that happy people are more productive, more creative, and more caring and empathetic towards colleagues (see for example research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, and Dacher Keltner).
But if we take it a step further, happiness does not mean that you always have to feel ecstatic or super excited, or strive for that. Indeed, research has shown that when you focus too much on trying to be happy, or when you believe you need to feel great all the time, it can have the opposite effect. You’re often searching for something outside of yourself, or for something unrealistic, never quite getting there.
So, happiness is not something we want to pursue incessantly. It’s about the state of mind you cultivate in both happy and less happy moments, meaning a state of mind that works in your favor and brings you the most joy.
And, without being obsessed about it, there are quite a few things we can do to increase our overall happiness and well-being.
We have a choice! And that’s a perspective that makes me happy 😊.
The happiness choice
More than we realize, we can deliberately choose to focus on happiness. We have more power than we think over how we feel and what we can do to feel better.
Here a few things you can do to add a tremendous amount of “feel-good” to your life.
I’ve added a small challenge for every happiness-choice to help you on this path.
1/ Do things you love
This one seems too obvious: choose deliberately to do more of the things that give you joy, happiness, pride, energy or satisfaction.
But why do we often deprioritize these things that make us feel good? It seems we tend to forget or ignore this option when we get caught up in our busy lives.
If you, for example, really enjoy a walk in nature and you are aware of this but ignore it because you’re busy with work or something else, you deprioritize (might be unconsciously) this thing that makes you happy and gives you energy. It’s a trap we easily walk into BUT one we can also easily avoid.
Challenge
Take a moment to reflect on what makes you happy. When do you feel alive? What are you doing? Who are you with? Write it down and schedule some time for this in the coming weeks. Put it in your agenda!
2/ Grow
When you choose to invest in yourself and your growth, you will generate happiness.
Growth or Progress = Happiness
Feel the excitement when you grow, when you learn new things, when you finish successfully a project that was a stretch for you, when you go out of your comfort zone and do something you were afraid of, or when you feel you’re becoming fitter because you’re exercising more often.
Some of these things might feel uncomfortable at first, but it’s crucial to get over that uncomfortable feeling and go for it anyways (see this article for some help with overcoming fear, or these 2 articles to build up your self-confidence: Believe & Increase Self-Confidence (in Dutch) ).
Standing still will not contribute to your happiness, most likely even push you in the opposite direction in the long term.
Challenge
Write down one thing that is a bit of a challenge for you, something that scares you a little (and ideally also makes you excited at the same time). Maybe something you are postponing for a couple of days or weeks. Do it first thing tomorrow morning. Repeat weekly.
3/ Move
We underestimate the impact of movement on our overall happiness. When we are moving, energy is generated, happiness hormones are floating around abundantly, and we feel more alive.
Compare this to a day of being a couch potato. I know this can also be very pleasant and I’m the first to defend that rest and relaxation are also very important. But if you’re a little bit like me, you know how much better physically and mentally you’ll feel when you break with your laziness and go do some sports.
The cherry on the cake: move in nature. It will give you an extra happiness and feeling-alive boost. Nature is amazing.
Challenge
Next time you come up with an excuse to not go for sports or any kind of movement, don’t give in to the laziness-master in your brain and commit to go anyways. Repeat at least once a week.
By the way, do this often, and you are secretly building up your self-confidence in a major way as well.
4/ Develop your gratitude-muscle
We’ve all heard someone say how important it is to be grateful in life. I think because our mind links it quickly to a Buddhist monk or a nature-loving hippie (and we are rational beings, Jan!), or because we think it’s too obvious, a lot of us seem to dismiss this advice.
But it is incredibly powerful!
It’s the easiest gateway to a happy life. Feeling bad? Find a way to be grateful for something around you or in your life, and the bad feeling cannot stay. Gratitude simply cannot go together with anger, hurt, sadness, etc.
You can train yourself to find something to be grateful for when you’re not feeling good. Your mind or ego will fight it initially, but the more you develop your gratitude-muscle, the easier it gets.
So, you’ll be able to use it as a tool to turn your mood around.
Important: this is NOT pushing away the bad feeling. You allow the bad feeling, but you quicken the process to feel more pleasant emotions again.
When you find an under stream of appreciation and gratitude in your life, you will be able to more easily find a stable base of satisfaction and happiness. Life is a gift.
Challenge
Write down 1 thing you are grateful for, 5 days per week, for 1 month. It can be something near you (yesterday I was very grateful for my pillow 😊), or a relationship, or something that happened. If it’s difficult for you to find 1 item, make the challenge to write down 10 per day.
Conclusion
You now have 4 not-so-difficult choices for a happier, more fulfilled life:
Do things you love
Grow
Move
Develop your gratitude-muscle
Let me know if you’d like any help with implementing these into your everyday life. I recommend choosing 1 or maximum 2 to focus on, best for a minimum of 30 days.
And there is more good news!
There are 3 more choices you can make to live a happier more fulfilled life, which I’ll cover in the next article. Stay tuned and subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Instagram , Facebook or LinkedIn to be notified when it’s released, and to not miss out on any of these tips & tricks for a more fulfilled life. It’s going to be good! For me it was life-changing, and I mean it when I say this.
Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
Questions or remarks? Feel free to contact me or leave a comment in the comment-section!
Jan Aquarius - Live. Grow. Matter.