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How We Attain Great Happiness

If you want to live a more happy and successful life it can be helpful to know more about what happiness is and how it comes about

If someone were to tell you that you can have a happier and more successful life by consciously investing no more than about ten minutes a month, would you be interested? If so, read on.

Let’s start by specifying exactly what we mean in this discussion by the word happiness.

Happiness

a positive state of mind about both what currently is happening in one’s life and what has happened during one’s whole life.

How we think and talk about happiness can be confusing. Happenings in our lives sometimes affect our immediate happiness and long-term happiness differently. Things that sometimes make us happy can at other times make us unhappy. We often are happy about some things and at the same time unhappy about other things. And finally, what makes us most happy and what makes us most unhappy can change constantly.

All these things make it difficult to pin down exactly what being happy actually means. So laying out a happiness goal or vision is a logical first step to achieving a higher level of personal happiness. If you have not already considered what happiness means to you personally, perhaps this example of a happiness goal may be helpful.

To achieve and maintain a sense of well-being that comes from living a good life,
a life that encompasses meaningful achievement, justified satisfaction,
and profound contentment.

Knowing the state of happiness we want to achieve enables us, at some level, to choose what actions we need to take. An interesting thing is that we cannot just decide to have happiness and expect it to occur. The path to happiness is more indirect and far more complex.

Being consistently happy requires constant thought. Fortunately for our personal productivity, this thinking occurs mostly in our subconscious minds. Our conscious minds apparently are generally limited to directing the focus of our thinking and to imagining that which does not yet exist. This means that we first must consciously decide what is enhancing or impairing our happiness. Only then can our subconscious mind take on the heavy lift of keeping our behavior aligned with our own unique vision of happiness.

As changes we make in our conduct or situation move us toward achieving our happiness goal, which they almost assuredly will, our success is an incentive to make a long-term commitment to a perhaps new way of thinking. And as it turns out, it is a way of thinking that not only enables us to maximize personal happiness throughout our lives, but also to achieve greater personal success.

This probably is a good place for a short detour to point out a couple of things about happiness and success.

Success

Accomplishment of something desired, planned, or attempted.

When the definitions of happiness and success are seen together, it is apparent that both concepts are related to many of the same things. Probably the biggest difference is that success is mainly associated with objectively observable facts, while happiness is a state of mind involving both emotional and cognitive judgment of fact and opinion. In one particularly important way, however, they are remarkably similar. The same actions that make a person happier generally also produce greater personal success.

Our happiness improvement efforts typically are most effective when what is making us happy and unhappy are identified and evaluated. This usually is done best by using a systematic appraisal process that produces reasonably detailed assessments of –

  • The attitude and mindset one has.
  • The state of one’s aptitudes and personal skills development.
  • The extent personal character and behavior align with one’s happiness goal.
  • The circumstances and conditions in which one lives.

An appraisal of the extent to which these things are enhancing or impairing your happiness probably does not need to be done more than once a month. This should be sufficiently frequent to get you into the habit of being alert to the causes and effects of what is going on in your life.

Appraisals should be in some written form. Physically recording your assessments spurs your subconscious to remain vigilant about when and where changes in conduct and circumstances may be productive, even while the conscious part of your mind is focused on other things.

An easy-to-use online appraisal form that can make quick work of this task is provided on the Appraisal page of this website. Using this happiness measurement device is completely free and unrestricted, and it enables you and no one else, unless you decide to share, to build a paper or electronic file that contains all of your appraisals.

To close the circle on this discussion, one other thing must be further considered. To some extent, we already have touched on it.

Choices

A range of options from which one or more may be selected.

We all make choices, every day, lots of them. Decisions that involve sizable commitments of money or time usually result from mostly rational thinking, but sometimes also from cognitive distortions. The diagram shown on the Decisions page of this website provides ideas for making sensible choices when faced with big decisions, but also when making perhaps less significant decisions.

Typically, we give little thought to the many other choices we make that mostly are related to our conduct. We may not even think of personal behavior as involving choices, but in fact it does. We choose all the time, frequently with lightning speed, whether to be, for example, honest or deceitful, respectful or intolerant, and principled or unscrupulous. It really is hard to overstate how much these kinds of choices affect our happiness and also our success.

Since choices we make are fundamental to what we experience in our lives, it is important to recognize some basic truths about them.

  • Each person has choices, but only about some things.
  • Each choice we make is in accordance with what we then believe most effectively advances our own overall well-being.
  • Choices we make can be influenced by our instincts, biases, motivations, goals, intelligence, knowledge, beliefs, ethics, interests, and concerns, and may be constrained by the circumstances of a situation and the energy and time one has available and is willing to expend when making a choice.
  • The complete set of options available when making a choice can be either more or less obvious.
  • Choosing to act requires a person to expend more effort and time than choosing to do nothing.
  • Choosing to do or not do anything has both immediate and long-term consequences.

Certainly there are circumstances and events in all our lives that distract from our happiness, and sometimes even cause us great misery. But it also is true that no matter how great the adversity we face, there always is some action we can take to position ourselves to be where good fortune is most likely to shine.

Like it or not, achieving greater personal happiness is unavoidably a personal choice.