The #1 thing we require in order to create happiness, why we struggle to 'find' happiness, and the shame associated with unhappiness.
It’s my dream to one day be invited to do a TED Talk. If I had such a privilege, my topic would be about happiness. This is a video about what my 'talk' would would entail: the #1 thing we require in order to create happiness, why we struggle to 'find' happiness, and the shame associated with unhappiness.
Please get enriched and inspired to live a happier life by watching this video. And please help me spread my message!
Video transcript
When clients come to see me, typically they come in at low places in their life. The weight of the world is on their shoulders. Some are fighting to hold back tears.
The majority feel unworthy, unconfident, and unlovable.
I connect instantly because those same thoughts were once my own.
But An hour or two later the client leaves looking revived. ‘feeling’ lighter.
And Relieved. Hopeful.
Even Happier.
So what happens between the time they arrive and time they leave? What changes?
One word…perception. It’s the lens we choose to perceive our outer world that affects our ability to create our inner world. The external world, in that hour or two, doesn’t change for my clients. The same ‘problems’ and ‘challenges’ still exist.
The house is still untidy.
The paycheque is still barely paying the bills.
The dreadful job is still the same.
And the number on the scale didn’t change.
But, in that one or two hours, their inner world changed.’
They experience transformation. Validation and reconnection to their authentic self. The painful story they constantly reiterate in their minds is profoundly altered.
The snapshot of what my clients hear in those sessions is this:
There is nothing wrong with you.
You’re human.
No matter what you've done,
I love and accept you and you are worthy of that love and acceptance.
Sometimes we really need to hear that.
Sit with this for a bit.
The key to being happy is not attaining happiness, it is having the ability to let go of all things in your internal and external world that make you unhappy.
We must release the old habits, beliefs,
stories, influences, and fears that cause pain. We can’t just add in pleasure and keep all else the same.
This may sound simple but the letting go is the difficult part most of us get hung up on.
Happiness requires effort. It is also intrinsic. Yet most of us have it backwards. We think Happiness is external. We think if we have a good partner, good kids, good job, good bank account, good friends, then that should be enough to fulfill us. We reason that if we have nothing to complain about then we should be happy, right?
Yet we’re not. In fact almost 70% of us aren’t.
We chase happiness up the block and down the street, all in a futile attempt to find it.
My question is, why are we so unsuccessful finding it because we’re not incompetent creatures?
Here’s the key. First off, that was a trick question in case you didn’t notice. Secondly, the reason people do not find happiness is because it is not something to be found. Happiness is an effect. Let that absorb in for a second.
Most of us see happiness as something to be attained like a carrot dangled in front of us out of arm’s length. We think when I get that job, when I get that raise, when I find that husband or wife, when I graduate, when I finally lose those last 10 pounds, then I’ll be happy. But it doesn’t work that way.
Let me paint a picture.
If I were to ask you to smile you would probably show me a small smile. But if I asked you to laugh, you would look at me with a blank face. The reason is because in order to laugh we need to have a reason to laugh—be compelled to laugh beyond a request.
In order to be happy, and I mean the inner fulfilment and joyful kind of happy, we need a reason to be happy. Just as laughing is the effect of experiencing something funny, happiness is the effect of experiencing a deep connection and alignment to our authentic self. And to align we must release all that is inauthentic which causes unhappiness.
So attaining that perfect job that we think will make us happy, is only half of the equation of happiness.
Now let that sink in for a moment.
The problem is that there is no instinct or tradition or cultural norm which explicitly dictates what to do when we feel unhappy. Currently, there is no mandatory course we all take to accomplish happiness and become proficient in the art of being truly happy.
With the absence of suitable instruction, we end up saying I'm happy enough, then do nothing, and settle. Or we imitate others who have not figured it out. We miss the opportunity to live within our full potential.
According to the Harris Poll Happiness Index 8 out of 10 people will tell you they are happy even though they aren’t. That means that only 2 out of 10 people are actually admitting to others they are unhappy. That number may seem very low but not surprising because admitting unhappiness tends to create shame.
And The number one thing that kills happiness is Isolation.
If we can’t admit to others we are unhappy, then we choose to live in isolation which destroys the potential to create happy.
The problem is that when we talk about happiness, we want the sunshine and rainbows. We don't want to talk about the serious, heavy kind of stuff.
But I do.
I personally lived in isolation for over two decades. Every night I would fall asleep to that negative voice in my head resounding lack of self worth…
Christine you are a failure, a reject, a disappointment, a waste of space. Then I’d fill my emptiness with bags of chips, glasses of wine, and hours upon hours of mindless TV.
I’d plead with the universe to take my life because I didn’t have the courage to do it myself. I wanted my mental anguish and suffering to end.
I was too afraid and proud to ask for help so I thought if I could just get in an accident or get cancer or get some disease which would take me from this earth then my anguish would end. I used to think this was the answer. Not to fix it, but to escape it.
I was also uncertain of whom I could trust who could relate to me, talk me through it, and explain to me the complexities of my suffering. Someone who wouldn’t just offer me a temporary escape or pat on the back saying it will all be okay. I needed someone who could effectively interrupt my story and perception.
So instead I researched.
Unhappiness results when we fail to meet expectations – social, cultural, egotistical. It happens when our lives are not in alignment with our authentic self.
And the suffering of unhappiness increases with the unhappiness of being unhappy.
If people were given the opportunity to be dignified of their suffering and would consider it as a neutral emotion (meaning not good or bad) rather than degrading, then we could relinquish shame associated with being unhappy. We could get together with friends and share our suffering rather than put on a fake smile and make up a story of how things are fine.
When you look up unhappiness in the dictionary its synonyms include: sadness, dejection, depression, misery, wretchedness, despondency, despair, desolation, low spirits, mournfulness, woe, malaise, heartache, distress, grief, pain, agony, anguish, torment, suffering, tribulation.
Unhappiness is a blanket term for many negative emotions. But that’s the key. They are emotions. They don’t define who we are.
These emotions are how we feel as an effect of our thoughts, and a call to action to tell us that we are misaligned with our authentic self.
The sad thing though, is most of us ignore this call, and we end up wasting a large portion of our lives assuming this state of unhappiness as our destiny and we self-loathe. We form the belief that there is something wrong with us and that we are unworthy.
These negative emotions are not good or bad or right or wrong. In North America we tend to think in terms of black and white and place more emphasis on the morality of right and wrong rather than on perceiving existence simply as cause and effect.
We are more focused on attaining happiness, rather than on letting go to create it. We live within limitations of rules and answers rather than having freedom to question and experiment.
We have also made public humiliation a form of frivolous entertainment.
The more clicks or more views we get exposing the privacy of others, the more money there is to be made.
The more extreme the humiliation, the more laughs we get at someone else’s expense –
I’m sure you’ll agree so many of us are guilty of laughing, criticizing, and poking fun at those whose privacy we invade. We think it’s all in ‘good fun,’
but Is it funny that the person being humiliated cries in pain in the silence of the night, tears falling onto their pillow?
Living in a society like this why would anyone want to admit the humiliation of feeling unhappy? It’s not exactly an ideal environment to expose our vulnerable self. So instead we build up walls, and we push down our feelings of unhappiness.
Today I ask, rather than building up walls and tormenting ourselves about our past, what if we were taught how to change our stories, our expectations, and our responses of suffering?
What if unhappiness wasn’t linked with the terms illness, or failure, or reject, or some other negative label?
What if we just said I’m unhappy, I’m human, and I’m normal?
What if we actually embraced our truth like a badge of honour or a call to action?
What if we didn’t publicly humiliate or judge people who felt unhappy because of mistakes they made and instead offered compassion and support?
Mistakes are really just choices with an adverse effect for which we did not have 20/20 vision. Mistakes and the effects of mistakes are not intended to become a label of our identity.
They are not wrong, but only an effect.
Most importantly mistakes contain valuable lessons –
even mistakes like cheating on a partner, losing money on a bad business decision, talking behind a friend’s back, struggling to pay bills, flunking out of school, emotionally overeating.
At the time these choices seemed the best option, but the moment we realize they weren’t, we judge ourselves in contempt of our past, a past which we can no longer change yet we perpetually relive. Dwelling on the mistake, means we miss the opportunity to learn and better ourselves from it, all because we perceive the story of our mistake as wrong rather than an effect from which to improve upon.
We convince ourselves that our mistakes become our identity. For example how many times have you heard the saying, A cheater who cheats once is always a cheater.
This is a label, an assumption.
It is not the truth.
Only you have the ability to write your truth.
A question I pose is this,
Does a person who made mistakes ever get to forgive themselves, or, are they destined to always be the ‘cheater’,
the ‘failure’,
the ‘dropout’? Think on that for a moment.
Those of us who struggle to forgive ourselves end up thinking we can’t ever be fully loved – only the so called good parts of us can. This leads to unhappiness because it means we are disconnected from our authentic self unable to freely be who we truly are.
Very few of us feel we deserve to be loved completely naked, exposed of all of our truths.
Including Our mistakes, our failures, our rejections. So we hide and we keep those truths to ourselves as it eats away at us each day more and more taking away our dignity and worth.
I want to stand up today and say that unhappiness is not something for which we need to be ashamed of. It takes courage to admit we are unhappy, unfulfilled and unsuccessful.
It’s a display of strength to be vulnerable. It’s not weakness.
Working through the unhappy is the only way to experience happy, yet it’s as if we’ve been conditioned with social etiquette to hide it. How many times have you felt tension in a room, yet no one spoke of the elephant?
If you made mistakes (aka choices) which resulted in an effect of suffering, you have no choice if other people will forgive you, but you do have a choice and the power to forgive yourself.
It takes empathy, compassion and stepping out of isolation. And ultimately it takes a change in perception – an interruption and alteration of the story.
No matter the mistake, each and every one of us is worthy of happiness.
Each of us has a story.
Every one of us has made a mistake…
or, rather, a choice.
This is called life. Life is about messing up, learning and correcting course.
We need not suffer for our choices. We aren’t creatures of perfection. Yet we judge ourselves with the expectation that we should be.
Let us begin to alter our stories and perceive these mistakes now as opportunities to learn, to grow, to become better versions of ourselves.
When we embrace who we really are, “mistakes” and all, we align with our authentic self which results in the effect of happiness.
I’ll leave you with this, please do not judge others just because they make a mistake differently than you. Together let’s create a nation of compassion where we embrace unhappiness.
And finally, let us remember this:
In order to be truly happy one needs to learn how to acknowledge and let go of anything unhappy first.
I wanted to share this message with you today so you could appreciate where my passion to intimately understand happiness came from. Fueled with this passion, I researched, trialed and errored, and soul-searched until I discovered my answers to create happiness. In the process I created a concept called Collateral Happiness. So Please stay tuned and watch for a video detailing the description of what collateral happiness is and, how to create it.
Thank you.