Happiness and positivity are recognised contributors to our state of wellbeing and performance – both at work and in life. But attaining happiness is no quick fix. It’s a learning process that involves looking at our lives and purpose, making changes and finding that balance between work and personal fulfilment.
This article draws on current thinking around happiness, with reference to the great thinkers of the past. It offers five practical approaches you can take to help find and sustain your own levels of positivity.
The path to happiness
We could be having this discussion in Nepal, 2500 years ago with Buddha, or Athens 2400 years ago with Aristotle. Still, we seek for “happiness”. Surprisingly, both Aristotle and Buddha came to remarkably similar conclusions about how to be happy despite their very different cultural backgrounds. Neither saw happiness as a short term emotional high experienced for a few moments but rather as a way of life, a way of “being”. Finding that happiness, they both concluded, was through finding what Buddha termed the “middle path”, avoiding extremes, being “in balance”, physically, spiritually, socially, mind, body, and soul. Aristotle’s view was that happiness was a life-long pursuit and in his first book of the Ethics he beautifully comments ‘one swallow makes no summer, nor does one day’.
What is positivity in the 21st century?
The same is true in our contemporary world. Being happy and staying positive is about more than experiencing a few emotional highs, having a good time with someone you like, important as that may be. It is a state of being that is achieved through an entire lifetime of actively pursuing happiness in a disciplined and purposeful way. Striving to be happy and to stay positive, although sometimes tough and frustrating, has distinct benefits for wellbeing, health and business performance. Whether it is Aristotle or your GP, Buddha or your Boss at work, everyone will proclaim the benefits of being happy and its positive impact on you and on your performance at work.
‘Correlation is not causation’
Whilst we can track links between being happy, productive and healthy, that elusive “causality” is not always so straightforward to discover. For example, does being happy cause you to be healthier or more productive or is it in fact the other way round, that being healthier makes you happier?
There is a serious body of research from the field of neuroscience between happiness and productivity which has the potential for significant economic as well as health benefits for organisations and for individuals.
This is an area within the world of work which is gaining attention and the debate is ongoing. Whilst there is a generally accepted view that happy workers are more productive on the other side of the debate professionals point out that some unhappy people are productive, and some happy people are less productive. Understanding the impact of our wellbeing on our health and on our workplace performance is multifactorial and individual to each of us. The subjective nature of happiness means that we all experience and react to the world differently. Trying to copy what makes other people happy, or aspiring to be like someone else, simply does not work. We become frustrated with the fact that they seem to be so much happier than we are; if truth were known, though, they may be having precisely the same thoughts about you and longing to be more like you.
Happiness is a condition that ‘must be prepared for, cultivated and defended by each person’ according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. ‘People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as anyone can come to being happy’.
Other than in significant cases, it can often be our outlook and reaction to life events, rather than the events themselves, that determine whether they make us happy or unhappy.
How can I increase my own happiness?
Here are five themes that point us to where we might find and sustain a sense of happiness and positivity:
- Find a sense of purpose and meaning to your life. This does not mean becoming a superhero nor to be “best” or “first”. Find your own personal meaning, what you were meant to do, whether that be on the world stage; or simply grow wonderful fruit & veg. Whatever it is, we need to be authentic to ourselves and connect to what really matters.
- Endeavour to be content with who you are. So often the expectations we hold of ourselves, as work colleagues, parents, friends, partners, are so high that we cannot meet them and become unhappy with ourselves. Being content with our abilities, quirks and foibles is important to our happiness and may well encourage us to be more tolerant, more balanced, and less judgmental about others.
- Go out of your way to be kind. There is increasing evidence that people who are kind to others not only make them happier but are happier in themselves. Few of us want to be unkind, but most of us could do more to go out of our way to show kindness or gratitude.
- Focus on the reality of the situation. How many times have you tied yourself up in knots, worried about someone’s comments or behaviours, convinced a difficult conversation or event lies ahead? Only to find that it wasn’t as bad as you thought, any may even have been due to something else entirely. Aim to catch negative thoughts as soon as they occur and check the reality.
- Social and family networks foster happiness. Of course, families sometimes fall out and friends can be infuriating to the point of exasperation. But our family and social network are so important to our sense of belonging and are at the heart of our identity and thus to our sense of wellbeing. It is also with our family and our close friends that we can most often “be ourselves”, no longer putting on a brave face, or having to be perfect or exceptional.
In conclusion
All the above are ways to ‘live life on purpose’ and to feel happier and more positive and to gaining control, which is at the heart of work-life balance and of itself essential for work as well as personal contentment. But remember, it is a lifelong journey to find happiness, not a fleeting moment of joy “for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a summer.”
