Plug into your hard-wired happiness

Idea

Executive, educator, writer, happiness teacher and life coach Srikumar S. Rao gave a speech Plug into your hard-wired happiness at Arbejdsglæde Live! 2009 conference in Copenhagen.

Srikumar argues that happiness is everyone’s innate nature. It is hard-wired in everyone. So why so many people feel unhappy? The common mental model people have about being happy is that they need to get, do or be something in order to be happy (get a raise, get promotion, get children, send children to college, get married, wish that the spouse left them etc.). So the focus is always on outcome.

This model has two flaws:

1. The outcomes to reach in order to achieve happiness keep changing. After reaching one outcome, another outcome is set. So, happiness keeps always being postponed to the future.
2. We are often not in control of the outcome of our endeavors. However we relate our happiness to these outcomes.

How to get out of that? While the outcomes are out of our control, our actions are. So we need to focus much more on the process rather than the outcome. We need to focus on outcome only to get a direction. Afterward, we need to shift the focus on process. If we succeed, it is wonderful. If we don’t succeed, it is still wonderful - because we have a new staring point. We select a new outcome and keep going.

Srikumar gives an example of John Wooden, the only person who won NCAA Championships both as a player and as a coach. When speaking to the teams, he never spoke about winning: “When it is all over and you look in the mirror. Did you do the best that you were capable of? And if you did the best you were capable of the score does not matter”.

Srikumar also gives an example of children which learn to walk. While learning to walk, they invest in process. That keeps them going and prevents them from getting frustrated about the outcome. However, later in life, we learn to focus almost solely on outcome, which leads to states of more or less frequent unhappiness.

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