It’s Time to Get Serious About Your Happiness

It’s Time to Get Serious About Your Happiness

Enlightened retirees are increasingly recognizing an important fact about their lives that escapes many others: The main reason we are retired is not so we can simply keep getting up every day—it’s so we can enjoy a great quality of life and be happy.

Happiness is a big topic among business owners as well as retirees these days. And with good reason: Working on enhancing happiness has a tangible return on investment and will make you more successful in leading a life of significance.

• If you are happy and you have happy people around you in your life and organization, for example, you can improve your organization’s performance and productivity by anywhere from 10 percent to 30  percent, according to positive psychology researcher Shawn Achor.*
• If your team is happier, you will take better care of your clients and have greater impact
  on them—which in turn will enable your team to do well financially.

The upshot: The efforts you put into your happiness come with a tangible ROI. With that in mind, here is a three-part process for increasing your happiness in ways that will lead to better results in your business and in your life.

This process comes courtesy of Henry Miller—a truly exceptional trainer, coach and consultant who helps  companies and organizations improve their performance and productivity. He spent years analyzing the  growing research on well-being and synthesizing it into his book The Serious Pursuit of Happiness.

Part I: Understand the basics

Some people think they are predisposed to be happy or unhappy and that’s just how it goes.  Not so. You can take steps to enhance your happiness and that of your team. Research using data from the Minnesota Twin Registry shows that around 50 percent of our level of happiness depends on our deliberate thoughts, attitudes and actions—great news for those of you who assumed your level of happiness is hard-wired.

To improve the drivers of happiness that are within our control, start with some basic ideas
to guide you:

• Happiness takes effort. Creating and enhancing happiness in your organization is just
  like any other major initiative you undertake—it requires time and effort to get up and
  running smoothly.
• Happiness is a numbers game. The frequency of positive events in your life matters
  more than the intensity of those events. You’ll have better results if you boost the number
  of small positive moments in your day instead of trying to have just a few instances that
  are hugely positive.
• Happiness is a habit. Make happiness habitual—if you are not as naturally happy as
  other people, incorporate happy habits into your life while removing other habits.
• Do more for other people. When you spend time doing things for other people and
  trying to make them happy, you actually end up happier than when you do things to
  please just yourself.

Part II: Follow proven happiness paths

Research has shown that basing your decisions on several imperatives will increase your
happiness. For example:

1. Seek pleasure within limits. Real, lasting happiness doesn’t come by chasing lots of
   short-term pleasures. Happiness is not hedonism or doing your best to avoid all pain.
   The “high” from short-term pleasures doesn’t tend to stick with us very long, and if you
   keep doing nothing but those activities, the moments when you do feel down tend to
   overwhelm you.
2. Intentionally think happy. Avoid excessive self-focused rumination on the minutiae of
   your life. Focus on building resilience and taking control. A feeling of well-being arises
   when you do these things. There’s a quote often attributed to William James, the father
   of psychology: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter
   their moods by altering their states of mind.”
3. Intentionally act happy. Expressing gratitude for the good things you have shuts down
   feelings of envy and jealousy that block your path to more happiness. If you buy yourself
   a “gratitude journal” and write in it every Sunday night, you can increase your happiness
   by 25 percent, and the positive effects can last for six months. Other happiness-building
   actions to work on include forgiving people who have wronged you, staying fit through
   exercise and diet, and getting enough sleep.
4. Cultivate positive personality traits. Honesty, courage, perseverance, tolerance,
   generosity—all are universally seen as good character traits. Consider the best possible
   future for yourself as a person at home, at work and at play. Imagine yourself in a future
   where everything has gone as well as it could go. What might your best possible self and
   best possible future look like?
5. Embrace deep connections. Close relationships are vital—Facebook friends and
   watercooler buddies aren’t enough.

We are our choices

Take time to examine the choices you make in your life and business each day and over the
long term. Are those choices guided by the tenets, imperatives and actions that have been shown to build, enhance and maintain higher levels of well-being? If not, remember that you can change those choices starting right now.

There’s a great quote by Jean-Paul Sartre: “We are our choices.” When it comes to our
happiness and our overall success, that’s truer than you might have realized.