A Story About…Happiness

There is a lot of talk about work/life balance and how we should strive to maintain the perfect balance between the two. 50/50 being how it is represented often and there in lies happiness.

Or does it?

It seems logical to approach life like this but often it comes with high expectations followed by feelings of failure when those expectations are not met. It can come with overwhelm if you can’t separate those aspects out in order to balance them, and overwhelm tends to lead more to ‘head in the sand’ choices rather than ‘thriving in life’ choices!

I think thriving in life is the ultimate focus.

• Thriving in life is not clearly defined and delineated.
• Thriving definitely does not look the same for everyone.
• Thriving in life is as individual as we are!

Sometimes to thrive we need to pull out all the stops at work and give more time to the jobs in hand to get where we want to go.

Sometimes to thrive we need to take a step back and our foot off the gas of work and chores and obligations and swing in the hammock for a while.

Sometimes to thrive we need to cut loose from our lives and just go play somewhere else and not do adulting for a while!

I prefer to think about thriving as a happiness meter. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best and 1 being just shy of the worse ever) at any given point of the day/week/month we can check in with our own personal happiness meter.

• It helps to focus in on ourselves for a moment
• It helps us to recognise where we are and how we feel
• When we take the time to notice we can become aware
• Once we are aware we can ask why
• When we know why we feel a certain way we can take steps to change
• When we action those steps we can reassess our happiness meter!

Here’s how it works:

Stop what you are doing right now.
Ask yourself “How happy am I right now?”

Don’t overthink – go with whatever your gut tells you!
Now listen to the dialogue in your head as it tries to talk you up or down on the numbers!
Reassess your first number and ask yourself why it’s that number.

Now ask yourself “what action can I do to raise that number by 1?”
Do that action.
Then re-measure.

The beauty of this is you can do it whenever and wherever you are, as little or often as you want.

What is your number right now?
What action will you take to raise your number by 1 ?

(Picture of me in my hammock with Nelly, raising my number by 1)

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