World Happiness Day 20th March
Publicity about World Happiness Day got me thinking about what it is that makes us happy.
Over the course of my career in human resources and training and development, almost forty years, I have seen a shift in people’s attitudes towards work.
When I started there was an emphasis on hierarchy, grabbing the big job title, and the perks that went with it whilst avoiding any of the responsibilities.
Then the focus changed to I don’t care what you call me, just so long as you give me ‘loadsamoney’.
Live to Work – Work to Live
Looking back, I can see how many of the managers I worked with did work to live.
Nowadays their grand-children are more likely to want to work to live, doing a job they enjoy so that they can create a good work-life-balance and be happy.
Life on Credit
In reality, a happy life or a good work-life-balance is still very much measured by the number of things we own and how impressed other people are by those things and the labels on them.
External Validation
The problem is that because many people never take the time to understand themselves, what they are good at, what they dislike and why they think and function in the way that they do, they never understand themselves well enough to be able to identify what will make them happy.
Social Beings
As human beings we are social animals and so when we have not thought about something our default way of thinking is to want to fit in with the people around us, rather than look further afield for people who will fit around us.
Before Happiness Comes Bravery
If you are going to achieve some form of self-determined happiness you are going to have to find the courage to walk away from the group think of people you mixing with.
Your aim should be to either confirm that the group is the right one for you or get even braver and go out and find another group.
True to Yourself
Much as phrases like ‘being true to yourself’ or ‘living authentically’ might have become aspirational speak for some parts of the media and more than a bit annoying for the rest of us, there is quite a lot of truth in the ideas that these phrases represent.
No matter how many times you hear them the phrases aren’t really the problem, but putting them into action is.
Understanding Yourself
The route to solving the problem is says Dave Mitchell, author of this week’s free getAbstract book summary, to grasp The Power of Understanding Yourself.
Dave Mitchell who explained The Power of Understanding People, in his previous book has now turned his focus inward to help you understand yourself.
Why Do You What You Do?
Mitchell explores the benefits of metacognition the process of thinking about thinking.
He concludes that it is an approach that enables people to move beyond an awareness of what they do to an understanding of why they behaviour in the way that they do.
It is, says Mitchell, this level of self-awareness that enables people to learn how they might realize their full potential and how that will help them to define what being happy means for them.
Free getAbstract Book Summary
In this week’s free getAbstract book summary of The Power Understanding Yourself, which is downloadable from Work Place Learning Centre at this link you will learn:
- How metacognition reveals why you developed certain behaviors;
- How to identify your “core ideology” and “interactive style”; and
- How understanding yourself better leads to a richer life.
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