How to Find Happiness

What if our true nature, our most authentic self, were blissfully happy? What if all those times we've been upset, down or agitated were just the result of mental constructs that we invented and accepted as real?

(photo by D. Sharon Pruitt)

And furthermore, what if we could adjust our thinking so that when we felt tense or upset we could change our story so that we felt really good again? This is what Dr. Srikumar Rao suggests in his new book, Are You Ready to Succeed?

It sounds like this could be a fun game. Think about it. Every time life throws you a curve, you swing in a more effective way. By effective, I mean in a way that creates less irritation and more joy. Your boss tells you he needs you to fly out to the West coast tomorrow and ease a crises. Your mind leaps into a frenzy of thoughts. You think about the preparation you’ll need to do while packing a tight suitcase all evening. You think about the cramped airplane, the lonely hotel, and, of course, the tension you’re likely to face when you confront the crises. You worry you will fail.

So what might Dr. Rao suggest?

He will probably tell you to come up with an alternate reality--one that you can believe. He’s not big into positive thinking, in part, because, he says, if you do not believe the platitudes you are telling yourself, then you are wasting your time saying them. In other words, he wouldn’t suggest you tell yourself that the trip will be a blast and that you will come back feeling energized because all that would be too unbelievable to you. What he might suggest, instead, is that you think about the trip as a challenge. Though it may not excite you, it could be a good chance to learn something new about how to better serve a customer. This, in turn, could be good for your career. If you begin to feel better as you apply the new thinking to the situation, then you, he says, are on your way to finding more peace and lasting happiness.

Martin Seligman, researcher and author on finding happiness suggests, ironically, that happiness comes not from inventing alternate stories as much as from minimizing the damage of a perceived negative event. Happy, well-adjusted people seem to have a knack for taking a universally stressful event and minimizing it. How do they specifically do that? According to Seligman, in one of three ways.

1. Happy people do not take whatever happens personally. They do not blame themselves. Stuff happens to all of us. Accidents happen. So do mistakes and events sometimes spiral out of our control. The pessimist says, “It’s my fault.” Not the optimist.

2. Happy people do not make an event pervasive. It does not have to effect every area of an optimist’s life. The spouse may leave or the stock market plunge. So what, they think. This is just one small facet of an otherwise happy life. The event is minimized. The pessimist, on the other hand, dwells on the event much more and thinks about it effecting every part of their life.

3. The optimist realizes the negative event is not permanent. It will all be over one day. Or as my father has been fond of saying for decades, “This too shall pass.” So far, he has never been wrong.

Just think about it for a moment. What if we had this amazing place inside us--full of joy--barricaded off by our own erroneous or at least ineffective thinking? And what if we could unleash some of that joy just by adjusting the stories we tell ourselves, by minimizing the worst parts, so that the joy inside us could bubble up instead of the toxic thoughts? Rao says, if we are willing to try this, we would, over time, find ourselves happier and more aligned with who we really are. That’s not bad. In fact, it might even change your life.