How We Choose to Be Happy Read online

  Two critically important themes emerged repeatedly in our discussions with extremely happy people. First, you truly can choose happiness-it is not a matter of luck or happenstance. Second, happiness comes from within-you can’t find it outside yourself. We believe, as do all of the people we’ve researched, that you have the power to create your own happiness. These themes will emerge constantly throughout this book.

  The two ideas are not a result of New Age chic. The idea that our deepest happiness comes from within us has echoed for centuries throughout world literature and religion. No less a philosopher than Aristotle said: “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” Marcus Aurelius wrote in Rome: “To live happily is an inward power of the soul.” The religious texts concur. In the Bible, Jesus proclaimed, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you... Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all things will be added unto you.” This philosophy is also reflected in the two-thousand-year-old collection of Buddha’s words, The Dhammapada: “The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”

  That we can actually choose happiness is also abundantly discussed in the great texts. From Tibetan Buddhism we learn: “The student ... can strive to furnish this relative world, his own creation, with things likely to lead to his own well-being, his happiness. ” The American forefathers had similar things to say about individuals being the source of their own happiness. Abraham Lincoln knew that happiness is independent of circumstance. He said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be” The nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer summed up the thousand-year-old discussion with a warning about relying on things outside ourselves to generate happiness: “Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.”

  It is unlikely that the people we interviewed have read extensively on the subject of happiness. Choosing happiness is simply the way they live. But what we heard from them coincides with the thinking of some of the world’s greatest philosophers and writers.

  What You Can Expect?

  This book is about choice in its most fundamental and creative form. Be prepared to be honest with yourself as you answer some key questions.

  • What are the choices available to me?

  • What will I get from each choice?

  • Which choices reflect the person I want to be?

  Expect to take a voyage of personal discovery in order to increase your awareness of the choices you make. Along the way you’ll be able to look deeply into your heart and soul to discover how to create happiness. You’ll be able to evaluate how you live, and to examine closely the kinds of choices you might make to become happier.

  Don’t expect profound change to happen overnight—it requires practice, study, a lot of self-evaluation and sheer honestly. Happiness has to do with the kind of personal authenticity that grows over time. As you read you’ll be able to evaluate your inner self—your true desires, wishes and expectations-and to find ways to bring this to bear on your daily life.

  How Happy Are You? Rate Yourself

  Are you curious about yourself? How happy are you? Here’s an opportunity to rate yourself. You can use the following “Happiness Inventory” to create your own picture of happiness. It is both descriptive and prescriptive, providing you with a view of where you are now, and giving you a sense of what you can do specifically to become happier. This scale is not designed to be an absolute instrument. Your score is unrelated to other peoples’. It is simply meant to be your personal point of reference as you read.

  Try to identify the way you feel physically and mentally at this moment. Do you feel content, centered, capable? Are you calm, oriented and rested? How deeply happy are you? Rate yourself:

  1. Intention (Chapter 1) requires both the strong desire to be happy and the commitment. It is the fully conscious decision to choose happiness over unhappiness. As you go through your day, to what extent do you actively intend to be happy?

  2. Accountability (Chapter 2) is the choice to assume full personal responsibility for our actions, thoughts and feelings, and the emphatic refusal to blame others for our own unhappiness. It is the insistence on seeing ourselves as having control over our own lives, rather than being at the receiving end of circumstance. To what extent do you assume personal responsibility for your life and take a proactive stance in the face of circumstance?

  3. Identification (Chapter 3) is the ongoing process of looking within ourselves to identify what makes us happy. As you go through your day, to what extent do you ask yourself “Which choice or direction will truly make me happiest?”

  4. Centrality (Chapter 4) is the happy person’s non-negotiable insistence on making that which creates happiness a central activity in life. Happy people don’t “wait to retire” or put off that which gives them greatest joy. To what extent do you centralize?

  5. Recasting (Chapter 5) is the choice to turn problems into opportunities and challenges, and to recast extreme trauma into something meaningful, important and a source of life-giving energy. To what extent do you recast everyday problems by turning them into opportunity ? Do you allow yourself to feel unhappy emotions deeply, and then move through sadness by converting trauma into opportunities and meaning?

  6. Options (Chapter 6) is the decision to approach life by being open to any new possibilities, and of taking a flexible approach to life’s journey. In your own life, are you aware of opportunities? Do you take risks? Are you flexible enough to jump into the unknown for the experience of trying something important or new?

  7. Appreciation (Chapter 7) Happy people actively appreciate their lives and express gratitude and thanks to the people around them. They revel in each moment and transform that which is ordinary into something wonderful. To what extent are you aware of the moment and grateful to those around you for what they mean to your life?

  8. Giving (Chapter 8) Sharing one’s self with friends, community and the world at large without the expectation of a “return on investment” is a hallmark choice of happy people. Giving is a constant in life, and may manifest itself in one’s profession, community work, or sharing through art. To what extent do you give richly of yourself to others?

  9. Truthfulness (Chapter 9) Happy people “speak their truth” in an accountable manner, enforce personal boundaries, and will not conform to the demands of society, the corporation or the family whose demands violate their personal belief systems. Their truthfulness becomes a contract they have with themselves and, most important, it is a way to check their thoughts and actions against their own internal, personal code. How truthful are you with yourself?

  What Do Your Scores Mean?

  The inventory is meant to give you a personal reference point as you read, a portrait of the way you choose to be happy. Remember, statistically the scores are unrelated to those of other people. For example, your “6” reflects your view of yourself, and may mean something completely different relative to another person’s ”6”.

  The inventory becomes meaningful when you evaluate your own scores. Where did you score lowest? Highest? Were all your scores on the low side, or were most of them in the higher range, with just a few on the low side?

  If you start by evaluating your lowest scores, you will pinpoint where you might start some personal work. These are likely the areas that will be most difficult for you to change.

  The following chapters will explore in detail each of the nine choices of happy people. As you read you can expect to be moved by stores about people who have overcome extraordinary hardship. You’ll also laugh at their mistakes and foibles along the way. Though the model you’re about to discover is fundamentally about happiness, it’s also about so much more: the quality of your relationships, success in your career, and your health.

  Chapter 1

  Intention

  All of us who are happy have the intention of being happy. It seems to
me that intention is the key.

  Janet Jantzen, fund-raiser

  Those who wish to sing always find a song.

  Swedish proverb

  The adventure of happiness begins with the intention to be happy, the most hidden, yet powerful choice we make. There’s a reason that intention is at the center of the wheel of happiness. In our research and subsequent work with individuals and groups, intention is the force behind all happiness, the fundamental choice that drives the other eight. And here’s why: Unlike most forces in life that are out of our control, our intention is fully in our control. In other words, we can’t always choose our circumstances, but we can always choose our attitude and reactions to things around us. Unfortunately, in today’s chaotic world, most of us fail to capitalize on that reality, and instead stumble from one activity to the next on autopilot-all because we are unaware of our intentions.

  But whether we’re aware of them or not, our intentions are driving the show. Minute by minute, they are the internal messages we give ourselves that dictate what we say, how we say it, and how we see things. This is why the happiest people in the world consciously set their intention before each event of the day. They understand that they have the power to choose a focus for each experience. And what they focus on is happiness.

  The intention to be happy is a mindset that propels us toward living as happily as we can, predisposing us to make our days as joyful and significant as they can be. It’s the point at which we stop responding unconsciously to the world around us and actively choose to be happy. We make a promise to ourselves, a commitment to happiness that becomes our compass, guiding the decisions we make and the actions we take.

  If we don’t truly intend to embrace happiness, we have unconsciously chosen something different. Without setting our intentions, even fleeting happiness is haphazard. But once we have intention firmly in place, happiness is no longer accidental, it is purposeful-something we are creating all day long.

  The two of us have spent much of the last five years actively teaching people from all walks of life how to harness the power of their intentions to get the joy and invigoration they want, and to purposely craft their own experience of each event. If this seems unrealistic, let us show you how it works:

  Setting Intentions All Day Long

  You set your intention by seizing the fleeting window of opportunity that occurs between perceiving something and reacting to it. It is in these precious few seconds you actively choose your modus operandi—how you plan to be. Rather than responding reflexively, you choose your frame of mind in advance. You ask yourself the fundamental question: What attitude will best enhance the quality of this experience right now?

  No matter what we’re about to do, whether it’s going to a baseball game, grocery shopping or even doing our income taxes, asking this question gives us the opportunity to shift from negative to positive feelings. Let’s look at an example many of us have dealt with.

  The Dinner Party

  Suppose you are in the car on the way to a party at which you don’t know a lot of people. For some of us this seems like walking into a social mine field fraught with booby traps and anxieties.

  Our intention dictates the kind of evening we will have. We can clarify our intention by asking, “How do I want this evening to go? Is it my intention to worry about how I look, what I say, or what others are thinking about me? Do I want to spend my time being critical of others? Or, do I want to have the happiest time possible?”

  To truly experience that happiness we need to let go of the mind-set that gets in the way. When we stop making negative judgments about ourselves and others, we can then focus our attention on fully engaging in the most enjoyable parts of the party. By repositioning our intentions toward the interesting social possibilities, developing new networks, sharing things about ourselves, learning something new, or making new friends, we are directing our feelings and actions towards a happy and satisfying experience.

  Having helped people create happier lives for many years, we now clearly understand that the quality of our emotional experience is based almost entirely on the nature and strength of our intentions and very little on the actual things that happen in our lives. That’s why happy people we found everywhere are purposefully finding opportunities to formulate specific intentions all day long. And, the more opportunities they find, the more they feel in command of their own destinies.

  Let’s turn to a situation that most of us would not be very happy about.

  The Surgery

  Richard, a tire salesman from Charleston, South Carolina, felt his normally sunny disposition plummet when he learned that he needed surgery to repair a double hernia. A week before the operation Richard’s doctor told him that the day after the procedure Richard would probably “... hate his guts because the pain would be so intense.”

  “My life is a series of deliberate mind-sets. Before I go into any discussion, or situation, I plant a seed in my brain. I take a moment to adjust my attitude, my tone of voice, body language, focus, and how I want to feel. But my first response to the idea of surgery was fear.”

  “After a quick assessment, I decided that stress would only weaken my body. And fear had no positive outcome here at all. So I focused my attention on making my body as strong as possible and keeping my emotions positive.”

  The strength of Richard’s intention drove all his subsequent behavior. Throughout the week Richard ate well, got plenty of sleep, and did deep breathing exercises. Just knowing that he was doing good things for himself brought joy and a sense of control.

  Once Richard arrived at the hospital, he chose a specific set of intentions about the surgical procedure. He intended to find things to enjoy in the process, to approach the operation with humor, and most important, to be gracious and calm. Once again, his intention drove behavior. He joked with the nurses, watched with interest how the medical staff interacted with one another, and thought about how strong his body was. Given a choice, Richard elected to have a local-type anesthesia rather than a general, figuring he’d get to see what happened in the operating room. When Richard was wheeled into the O.R. the surgeon noted that he would be somewhat conscious so he got to choose the music they’d listen to during the surgery. He asked for something upbeat, so the doctor put on a salsa CD.

  Some interesting things happened. First, I was supposed to be in the recovery room for two hours. Instead, all my vital signs came back so quickly I was discharged within forty-five minutes and got to go home. The doctor told my friend that I was the only patient he’d ever had who tapped his toes to the music during the operation.

  In keeping with my commitment to a positive experience, I had people come over the first night. I lay on the bed while we talked and played games. The pain was fairly intense but as long as I didn’t laugh I was pretty much OK. Best of all, I didn’t hate my surgeon.

  From the outset of our research, stories like Richard’s brought together the compelling possibility that happiness and healthfulness are aligned. For this reason, applying the nine choices to health is the focus of all our long-term research. What we know for sure is that in the world of happiness, having strong intentions is the first step—the foundation of good things to come. How can we learn to be this intentional ? Setting intentions throughout the day requires practice until it becomes almost as automatic as fastening your seat belt or brushing your teeth. Like so many other internal changes we decide to make, being aware and dedicated is the key to our success.

  Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.

  Aristotle

  Daily Intentions

  Our world can seduce us into the negativity that’s all around us-the constant demands we face, the troublesome people in our lives, the fragility of our uncertain world. For this reason, some of the happiest people start their day in a unique and affirming way. Rather than preparing the traditional “to-do” list of tasks, they put their energy into formulating an intention for the day.
br />   Gloria’s Story

  During a consulting project at a large corporation, we were talking to the director of human resources about happiness in the workplace. When we asked him, “Who’s the happiest employee here?” he instantly named Gloria. As we began to ask others the same question, her name surfaced time and again. On the day we finally met her, we knew why.

  Gloria turns an interview over coffee into a memorable event. Her wry sense of humor and sparkle infuse every story she tells. How does she get through the aggravations we all deal with? Gloria makes intention a daily ritual.

  I love stories. Each morning, I tell myself a story about the kind of day I intend to have. I actually promise myself a good day. The story keeps me on track as my day unfolds. This is the single most important investment of my time.

  Let’s be realistic. No matter what our intentions, all of us occasionally have “one of those days” when it seems as if there’s a conspiracy to make us unhappy. In fact, Gloria’s day had begun with a medley of frustrating events. Her two teenage children took long showers that not only emptied the hot water tank but threw them all into morning overdrive. A jackknifed truck made the already heavy commute traffic come to a virtual standstill. After she missed an 8 a.m. meeting, her boss let his displeasure be known to the entire staff. And, midmorning, one of her biggest clients ran into a snag, which required that she cancel plans for the rest of the day. Why, then, when we caught up with her late in the afternoon was she in such high spirits?