The Happiness Project (part two)

Gretchen makes the point that part your happiness includes your identity or how you see yourself.  There are a lot of pieces that make this up like your job, your titles, your relationships, your skills, your accomplishments, your knowledge.  If you have many elements that make up your identity it is easier when you lose a piece of it like your job.  Although from my perspective as a child of God, this title will never go away.  Perhaps at times I will feel unworthy to claim such an identity, however, it always remains and means much more than any other identity I will ever have.  If everything else goes away, that will always be there and it will be enough to get me through anything. 

She reminds us that success seeking comes with a lot of failure, so we need to be able to embrace failure if we are ever going to be able to continue to seek success.  As she was working to get her blog up and going and her career as a writer going she hit a few bumps.  She had to keep telling herself, "It is fun to fail." Risking failure allows you to score success.  She also liked to tell herself when things got hard, "This is the fun part."  If you can see hard times as a challenge that you believe you are up for then it changes your perspective and you can remain happy through your trials. 

We need to learn to enjoy now.  She talked about three fallacies that keep us from enjoying now.  They are...

Arrival Fallacy-The belief that once you meet your goal you will be happy
Floating World Fallacy-The belief that pleasure without purpose brings happiness
Nihilism Fallacy-The belief that it is not possible to be happier than you already are

If you want to read more on these fallacies, you can probably check online or read the book "Happier" by Tal Ben-Shahar

She then quotes Friedrich Nietzsche who said, "The end of the melody is not the goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached it's end it would not have reached it's goal either. A parable."

Studies show that remembering happy times helps boost your happiness in the present.  I suppose that is a no brainer but another study showed that happy people remember happier times and depressed people remember sad times because it fits their present mood.  Just as there are stages of grieving, there are also stages of happiness.  She says these are when we anticipate it, savor it, express it and recall it.  You can follow these steps to eke out the most happiness of an experience.

Gretchen wanted to have more happy moments with her children because she discovered that parents are only as happy as their unhappiest child.  She set a goal in the month to increase her happiness with her children.  She had to work to discover what made her happy and she stressed that you shouldn't try to change what makes you happy or deny what makes you happy because it isn't cool, is too childish or doesn't seem legitimate.  Finding people who share your interests boots life satisfaction 2%. 

I am only about half way through this book so I imagine that this book will get two more posts out of me.  Then the only thing I have to do is try to discover what makes me happy and get to work on it.  :)