KISS Your Way to Happiness

“Happiness is letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like and celebrating it for everything that it is.”

– Mandy Hale

Extremely simple

Computers are, of course, devoid of emotion, so perhaps Deep Thought was expressing, in it’s computeristic way, that the answer – to what appears to us humans to be a thoroughly intricate issue – is really extremely simple.

Indeed, some would argue that the whole point of life is to experience maximum happiness, or in other words joy, pleasure, contentedness, satisfaction and well-being.

Living a purpose driven life requires time

At New Insights, we equip our trainee life coaches to help others to come to terms with their purpose in life because we believe that living a purpose driven life is the only sustainable way to experience happiness.

But finding and living one’s life purpose is, at least for most people, the outcome of a personal process of transformation and not something that happens from one day to the next.

Happiness on a day-to-day basis

So, throughout the coaching process, we impart the importance of learning to allow oneself to experience happiness on a day-to-day basis.

You may be thinking: “Why allow oneself? Surely happiness is the outcome of getting what we want and that takes dedication and hard work?”

Our capacity to manufacture happiness: a revealing TED talk

At this point, let me refer you to a fascinating TED talk called ‘The surprising science of happiness’ by Dan Gilbert.

In it, Gilbert references the role of the prefrontal cortex in our brains in helping us to simulate experiences in our minds before we have them in real life. He cites the example of liver and onion flavoured ice cream – most of us have absolutely no desire to try it because of our ability to simulate the experience of tasting it in our minds!

But the results of extensive research has shown that our mind simulators are inclined to make us believe that different outcomes are a lot more different than, in fact, they really are.

To illustrate this, Gilbert asks his audience to contemplate two different futures brought on by different experiences and then, through mind simulation, choose which one they believe would result in them being happier.

Experience one is winning the US lottery and experience two is becoming paraplegic.

Nervous laughter rings out from the audience as they think the answer is all too painfully obvious … but then he references real data for people who have had such experiences only to show that a year after the experience, lottery winners and paraplegics report almost exactly the same levels of happiness.

If you’re interested, look up the video for more detail, but the essence of Gilbert’s message is that we tend to spend time and effort chasing experiences and outcomes that we think will make us happy, whereas it so happens that those are far less reliable predictors of happiness than we think.

Or, in other words …

Whether we believe it or not, we all have the capacity to \’manufacture\’ our own happiness, no matter the experiences we have or the situations that we find ourselves in !

Fifty Things Thant Make Me Happy

Let’s bet back to New Insights life coaching.

There are numerous exercises in our coaching programme that encourage clients to ‘manufacture’ their own happiness. One that I particularly like is called ‘Fifty Things That Make Me Happy’.

Note the wording ‘make me happy’ as opposed to ‘will make me happy’.

The elegance of this exercise is that it moves clients from living in a state where they constantly strive for happiness to a state where they recognise the happiness that exists in their lives every day.

The KISS principle

In creating the list of fifty things, the trick is to Keep It Straightforward and Simple (KISS).

Surprisingly perhaps, it is the simple and most natural things that are best at promoting our happiness.

Here’s a few examples:

• Getting into a cosy bed on a cold night
• Hugging my partner / a dear friend
• The unconditional love I get from my pets
• That first cup of coffee in the morning
• Watching a beautiful sunset/sunrise
• Strolling in the park
• Listening to my favourite music
• The smell of breakfast cooking
• The feeling of sand between my toes on the beach

Why don’t you try this exercise for yourself?

Coming up with fifty things may sound like a lot until you start … and then my guess is you’ll start wondering what to leave out!

Associating happiness with the present

Getting used to associating happiness with your present day-to-day life, rather than some imagined future, is, I believe, the secret to developing a ‘happiness mindset’.

I wish you happy days!