by Doug Lennick
HAPPINESS MEANS LIVING IN ALIGNMENT
Seligman's theory of Authentic Happiness, Leider's work on purpose, Lyubomirsky's definition of happiness, and co-author Roy Geer's insight about values-based goal achievement validate the idea that true happiness requires engaging in activities that are aligned with principles, values, and goals. The people we know or have worked with professionally who live the happiest lives are those who take action to live in alignment with principles and values, and who set and achieve goals that support principles and values. So, let's review some elements of the alignment model that can help you pursue true happiness.
Happiness and Principles
The first frame of the alignment model consists of principles and values. As mentioned earlier, numerous studies show that there is a set of principles that is part of the moral codes of all cultures throughout the world.8 To have the best life possible, to be as happy as possible, we need to keep universal principles in mind and put them into practice. All four universal principles connect strongly to happiness:
Integrity
Responsibility
Compassion
Forgiveness
These principles are a result of both nature and nurture. They are rooted in our inborn disposition to be moral; they are activated primarily by learning. Much of that learning happens as children grow up when ideally the “Golden Rule” is taught by parents, teachers, and other caretakers. Our ability to live in alignment with principles also depends on lifelong “re-learning,” that is, by engaging in regular practices that enhance our ability to apply principles to our everyday behavior.9 Later in the chapter you'll find detailed descriptions of practices that allow you to deepen your ability to act in concert with principles, thereby increasing your level of happiness.
When it comes to happiness, each of these principles are important, but none more so than the principle of responsibility. As Martin Seligman notes, happiness depends on serving, that is, being responsible for the welfare of others. To fully serve others requires that we embrace other principles as well: We need to be compassionate to others; we need to actively care about others. To be happy also means we need to forgive others when they let us down. If we expect perfection from others or ourselves, we will always be disappointed, and we will always have excuses to abandon our commitment to serve them. When we forgive others, we do them a service. We give them another chance with us. But just as important, we serve ourselves, because our brain isn't wired to feel happy and miserable at the same time. When we forgive others, we feel happy because we have preserved our relationships with the people who help give our lives meaning and purpose.
Happiness and Values
Happiness also depends on living in alignment with your values. Unlike principles, which are universal, values are a matter of personal choice. In Chapter 2 you had an opportunity to identify your top five values. Did you list happiness as one of your top values? Whether or not you listed happiness as one of your top values, the more you live in alignment with all of your values, the more likely you are to experience happiness. But you're even more likely to be happy if you consciously value happiness. When you decide happiness is important, you can plan to be happy. When you make happiness a key part of your ideal self, and set goals to increase your happiness, you're well on the way to making happiness a consistent part of your real self.
For co-author Doug, spending time with his family makes him happy. Doug's travel schedule keeps him away from his family more than he'd like. When he is in town, he likes to get home after work to spend time with Beth Ann. That's why he limits after-work gatherings to an hour. Several years ago, Doug lost a friend who was annoyed with him for being unwilling to stay out late with him. As the saying goes, “With friends like those” Friends worth having don't disregard your values. They support your alignment with values. Real friends want you to be happy.
Happiness and Behavior
Aristotle, the famed Greek philosopher from 300 BC, understood that happiness was a function of action. His views about happiness include the following:
Happiness is activity.
Happiness is a sort of action.
The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make.
What Aristotle meant when he spoke about action included everything in the third frame of the alignment model—Behavior. When you align your thoughts, emotions, and outward actions with principles and values, you increase your happiness, especially if you value happiness itself, because happiness comes from working to become your ideal self.
HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Of course, living in alignment is easier said than done. Behaving in ways that are consistent with values requires that we manage our thoughts, emotions, and outward actions in a positive way. Daily life offers many road mines that can cause irrational thinking and destructive emotions. Those in turn can lead to negative behavior or distract us from taking positive actions. If we want to be in charge of our behavior, we need emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is often defined as “the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.”10 Emotional competence is the application of emotional intelligence that allows us to live in alignment in the presence of competing and difficult to deal with emotions.
Key to emotional intelligence and emotional competence is the ability to recognize what we are experiencing at any given time and that begins with self-awareness.
FREEZE!
One of the simplest and most powerful ways to cultivate self-awareness is to practice the Freeze Game.11 When you use the Freeze Game, you declare a short time out from whatever you happen to be doing at the moment. Imagine you've just hit the pause button on the streaming video of your life. Then ask yourself these three questions:
What am I thinking right now? For example, what am I saying to myself inside my head? Am I thinking about a problem at work? A relationship issue? The weather?
What am I feeling emotionally? Emotions are words, not sentences; for example, I feel sad, excited, angry, frustrated.
What am I doing, and what is happening with me physically right now? For example, am I sitting or standing? Am I smiling or frowning? What's the look on my face? Is my heart racing or calm? Is my breathing pattern normal or accelerated? Am I tense or relaxed?
The Freeze Game is intended to help you become aware of your “experiential triangle,” the constellation of thoughts, feelings, and physiological state or actions that defines your moment-to-moment reality (see Figure 6.1).
Source: Joseph LeDoux, New York University.
FIGURE 6.1 THE EXPERIENTIAL TRIANGLE
These three categories of experience are shown in Figure 6.1 as points on a triangle—the experiential triangle. Thoughts, feelings, and actions are interconnected and usually influence one another. For example, if I think about someone who was critical of me yesterday, I am likely to feel angry; my heart rate will go up (physiology), and I may clench my fists (action) at the thought of what happened. My feelings and actions may even set off a new cycle of the experiential triangle, perhaps causing me to think about being critical in exchange, which in turn stimulates new feelings, and so on. Why not try playing the Freeze Game right now? You can jot down your answers in the Freeze Game Exercise Worksheet in Appendix F. You can also download a copy of the exercise from the book Toolkit at www.leveragingfi.com.
EXERCISE: PLAY THE FREEZE GAME
What am I thinking right now?
What am I feeling emotionally?
□ Angry □ Helpful □ Frustrated □ Playful □ Tired
□ Happy □ Sad □ Confident □ Scared □ Excited
□ __________________ □_____________________ □ ______________
What am I doing and what is happening with me physically right now?
□ Breathing □ Heart rate □ Muscles
□ Jaw □ Movements □ Appetite
When you played the Freeze Game, what did you become aware of that you hadn't noticed before? Many people are surprised by how much is going on internally and externally, even when engaged in a supposedly simple activity such as reading this book. Your ability to maintain a state of well-being depends to a great extent on making self-awareness second nature. That takes practice. And that means playing the Freeze Game dozens of times a day for at least three weeks (research shows that's the minimum length of time needed to establish a consistent habit). The more you play the Freeze Game, the more natural it will become to check in with yourself to see what you're thinking and feeling and doing. As you regularly play the Freeze Game, you'll probably begin to notice many benefits in your life. You'll develop a deeper understanding of how you really think, feel, and act, and that may translate into more positive relationships with family and friends, reduced stress, more productive behavior at work, and greater overall happiness. Of course, simply recognizing your experiential triangle during many life moments won't in and of itself make you a different person. But “knowledge is power,” and self-knowledge is even more powerful. As you begin to recognize how you show up on a moment-to-moment basis, you can decide whether you're happy with your experience, or you'd like to change it in a more positive direction.
In addition to understanding your emotional state in a given moment, you can use the Freeze Game to identify patterns in your cognitive, emotional, and physical state over time. For instance, make enough copies of the Freeze Game worksheet (download from the book Toolkit at www.leveragingfi.com) to record your responses several times a day over the course of two weeks. Schedule several regular times each day to practice the Freeze Game, such as after a morning workout, in the middle of the day, and before going to sleep. At the end of two weeks, review all your responses and make note of any consistent patterns in your experiential triangle. For instance, do you tend to feel relaxed after working out, physically tense by the middle of the workday, or thinking about problems right before bedtime?
CAPITALIZING ON SELF-AWARENESS
The Freeze Game keeps you in touch with who you are moment-to-moment. The point of such self-awareness is to use what you learn to take steps to maintain or improve your level of well-being and living in alignment. But before you can leverage self-awareness, it helps to recognize how much control you have over your thoughts and actions. You don't actually control your emotions. Emotions are stimulants to action. The word itself gives a hint about how emotions drive behavior: E-Motion. In other words, Feel It, Do It. In fact, you are responsible for your thoughts and actions. If you're angry, you still get to decide what to think and what to do. Your response to emotions can be mediated by your thoughts. Instead of E-Motion, you'll make better decisions if you change that phrase to E-Think-Motion. If at any time you are not behaving as you would ideally like, you can choose to change your behavior in the direction of your ideal self. Try the following experiment to discover how much power you have to change your experiential triangle:12
First, close your eyes and concentrate for two minutes on a memory of something that happened that really made you angry.
Focus your attention on what happened and who was involved, and think about that situation for two minutes.
After two minutes, open your eyes and recognize what you just experienced relative to your thoughts, your emotions, and your physical being.
What you will notice, if you are self-aware, is that you thought about what made you angry. It usually was a person, and within two minutes you might have thought about how that person angered you more than one time.
You may also have noticed that your emotional state changed. You might have become angry again; or you might have felt guilt or regret. Your focus on your initial response may change how you are feeling emotionally within the two minutes. You probably also noticed that you were beginning to feel physical tension in your shoulders, your heart rate picking up, and your breathing becoming shallower.
Everything that happened to you was a result of what you were thinking about. As neuroscientist Jeff Schwartz points out, “Focus is power. What you choose to focus your attention on has power over your emotional and physical state.”13
Now, take the exercise to another level:
Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and for the next two minutes, imagine that your brain is a radio receiver and that you have three channels permanently programmed into your automatic selections. One channel is the gratitude channel. The second channel is the love channel. The third channel is the beauty channel. For the next two minutes, turn on one of those channels. Depending on the channel you choose, focus completely on what you are grateful for, or whom you love deeply, or what beautiful aspects of life and your environment you most appreciate, for instance, mountains, ocean, desert, and so on.
When you're ready, open your eyes and recognize what you have experienced. If you're like most people, you will notice that your emotional state became much more peaceful. You began to feel love, began to feel relaxed, and began to feel calm. You might have thought about all the things you are grateful for; or you may have discovered that you have a deep appreciation for certain people or natural settings. What you will surely notice is that your physiological state has changed. Your heart rate and breathing are slower, and your face is relaxed. You might have even noticed a smile come across your face. Once again you have discovered the power of focus, and the surprising amount of control you have over what you think and how what you think influences how you feel emotionally and physically.
These exercises help us understand how each component of our experiential triangle affects the others. Most importantly, they demonstrate that you can manage your emotions by deciding what to think.
YOUR BRAIN ON HAPPINESS
When you decide what to think, as you did when you focused on the gratitude, love, or beauty channels in the earlier exercise, you were in fact practicing a form of meditation. Back in the 1960s, meditation was frequently considered in Western societies to be an offbeat unscientific ritual practiced by Buddhist monks, the Beatles, or hippies living in communes. Today, thanks to considerable neuroscience research, meditation has gained its rightful reputation as a powerful tool for improving health and happiness. That's because brain scientists have recently discovered that practices such as meditation literally change your brain structure in ways that reduce stress, promote mental clarity, and enhance feelings of relaxation and well-being. A 2011 Harvard study was the first to prove that meditation causes physical changes to the brain. Following eight weeks of listening each day to a recording of a guided meditation, research participants' brains showed changes on their brain MRIs from scans taken before the meditation program.
Those who listened to the meditation audios reported feeling significantly less stressed after the eight-week period. Their MRIs showed decreased grey matter in the amygdala (which helps the body deal with stress and anxiety) and increased grey matter in the hippocampus (which controls memory, learning, self-awareness, and compassion). Researchers concluded that meditation builds brain cells, decreases grey matter where less is needed because meditation lowers stress, and increases grey matter in areas of the brain that foster increased concentration, learning, and memory.14 It's intriguing that the hippocampus, the area where neurons grew the most as a result of meditating by study participants, is the part of the brain associated with one of the principles—compassion, and with one of the emotional competencies—self-awareness. Both compassion and self-awareness are necessary for living in alignment and, ultimately, for our level of happiness. The overall conclusion we can draw from this study and quite a few others is that meditation is a powerful tool we can use to “teach” ourselves to be happy. As we've seen, meditation is not a complicated practice. It's a matter of deciding what to think—it's a matter of choosing the contents of our experiential tria
ngle. When co-author Doug was 24, and a new district manager at IDS, he knew there was something he did that other people he worked with didn't do—Doug always decided what to think. He discovered that he was unusual in that respect by accident. As Doug recalls, “At one of my district meetings, I asked my team what they had thought about on their way to the meeting that morning. Only 1 out of 15 people in my district could recall what they had been thinking about.” That was when Doug realized he had somewhat of an unfair advantage over people who don't decide what to think. That advantage has paid off throughout his career. The year he turned 25, his district was the top revenue generator in the country. He attributes that success to teaching his team to think, and to think about what they think about. For example, he would coach team members to decide to think about what to say to a prospective client, and to think in advance about how they could help a client understand what they were trying to explain.
ASSESSING YOUR LEVEL OF HAPPINESS
Exercises such as the Freeze Game are extremely useful tools for increasing self-awareness of your emotional state and setting the stage for positive changes. There are also a number of assessment inventories that can help you become more aware of your current level of emotional intelligence, which is a set of competencies that promote personal happiness by fostering self-awareness and positive relationships with others. The Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i 2.0) was developed by psychologist Reuven Bar-On, one of the pioneers in the field of emotional intelligence. The ESCI (Emotional Social Competence Inventory) was authored by leading emotional intelligence researchers Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis. Both inventories are well regarded, reliable measures of emotional intelligence. However, the EQ-i has the advantage of including a “Well-Being Indicator,” which combines information from measures of four emotional intelligence abilities to provide a picture of your current level of happiness.15 The EQ-i Well-Being Indicator includes the following subscales (among many), which research shows are highly correlated with personal happiness: