…or why the pursuit of happiness makes you more successful
Last weekend I was sitting outside, taking a break from gardening. I was watching Lucy, aka ‘Trouble’, our Miniature Schnauzer puppy chasing after bumble bees, leaves and Toffee our cat. Her tail happily wagging, she bounced around, until she collapsed next to me, exhausted and ready for a belly rub and a good snooze in the sun.
The epitome of ‘happiness’.
Sipping my Latte, the Harvard Business Review forgotten, I reflected on the concept of ‘happiness’. Is happiness simply the fleeting emotion of situational contentment?
Happiness is my central core value. It is what motivates and drives me. It’s not a result or outcome, it’s the journey. The pursue of happiness is the reason I get up every morning.
If I’m happy and in a good place, I can set my mind to anything I want – be it playing with Lucy or writing a business plan. But what does happiness mean for other people and is it equally important for everyone? Positive psychology offers various definitions, and they all centre around the feeling of contentment and joy and the overall appreciation for my own life as a whole.
In Buddhism, ultimate happiness is achieved by overcoming craving in all forms and involves daily practice of mindful thought and action. “If one speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
Even though this comes from a completely different angle, the concept corresponds extremely well with what PCM is about. Taking elegant care of myself and others. PCM is like a behavioural plug-in, a skill set that guides me every day on that journey.
In PCM terms, the key to happiness depends on how well we are able to nurture our psychological motivators and how well we are able to stay in a positive frame of mind – and what happens if we’re in not a good place.
PCM makes internal processes and external behaviours transparent in a completely non-judgmental, objective way. I therefore understand what is happening. I can intervene when things go wrong. And most importantly I can proactively practice to stay in a positive mindset.
In essence, with PCM I’m practicing to speak and act with ‘pure thought’.
In my current phase in life I’m very much motivated by setting goals and achieving them. I like to plan and focus a lot on efficiency and effectiveness. That’s true for my professional as well as my private life. I’m as much motivated to develop a marketing strategy, as I am to plan our next holidays. Knowing what charges my ‘batteries’, is the single most important ingredient to happiness and to success. It sounds very simple, but is indeed a very profound insight. Not many of us know what makes our motor go, nor how to keep it performing at its best. By nurturing those needs in a positive way, I develop my emotional intelligence, practice a growth mindset, boost my energy – and increase my happiness. Today I’m also the most successful I’ve ever been in my life.
That was not always the case. Growing up, I was a tomboy, very spontaneous and creative. I loved to experience the world by interacting with it. I wanted to see how things and people react to me, that’s how I figured stuff out.
As you can imagine, that wasn’t always easy for me nor my environment. School especially proved to be quite tricky. The older I got, the more academic my schooling became, the more I had to listen and read and absorb information in a logical way. Because I didn’t know PCM back then, I had no explanation why I simply wasn’t able to learn from text books. It has nothing to do with intelligence, it’s the way my brain works. I needed to explore, learning by doing.
I became increasingly unhappy. The unhappier I became, the more destructive I behaved. And as a consequence the less successful I was in my professional and private life. At least one decade of my education was utterly, devastatingly wasted time and I was not very successful.
Even my 8 years of training as a psychologist sadly didn’t give me any answers.
I attribute everything positive I ‘achieved’ back then to pure luck, a lot of goodwill from people around me, and survival instinct. I knew I was self-destructive and damaging all kinds of relationships and opportunities for me, but I didn’t know how to change the course of actions that unfolded in front of me. And quite frankly, I couldn’t give a sh$*t, because I believed it wasn’t my fault anyway.
And then I learned the PCM skills. After a period of serious turmoil, self-defence and a lot of self-discovery, I realised that I truly am the ‘master of my fate, the captain of my soul’. I learned how I function, what my strengths and pitfalls are – and how to take care of myself and my motivation. I created positive learning experiences and suddenly started to achieve more. It wasn’t so much overcoming my obstacles and hurdles, it was consciously creating situations that nurture me.
Neuroscience supports my very personal experience.
E. K. Miller and his team from MIT showed that, contrary to common belief, we learn better from our successes than our failures. “We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviours were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behaviour was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what was learned. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain – nor was there any improvement in behaviour.”
The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms linking environmental feedback to neural plasticity – the brain’s ability to change in response to experience.
To put this all together, the more we know about what makes us tick, the more we can create positive learning situations that increase the probability of success. This increases not only the chances of sustained success, but it also makes us happier. Which in turn provides the foundation of positive learning experiences. A ‘positive catch 22’ so to speak.
So, when I take Lucy to puppy class tonight, I will remember that a positive learning experience will not only accelerate her learning, it will also make her happier – and me as I won’t have to clean up her ‘accidents‘ inside our home.
