What does happiness mean to you?
Where do you find it in your life?
As a wellness coach, happiness is something that I discuss a lot with my clients and often times, we uncover they don’t actually pursue happiness enough compared to everything else in their lives. To break it down, I walk them through what I call, The Order of Happiness. Today I’m your wellness coach, so let’s get started:
1) Am I happy?
When I am coaching people through how to be a little happier in their lives, the very first question that I ask them in The Order of Happiness is, “Are you actually happy?” Getting to the core of what that actually means is one of the first things we get into.
This is where Maslow’s hierarchy of needs comes in, pictured above. The first, largest portion of the hierarchy is your physiology. If there are problems in the physiology, everything else on top of that foundation will be challenged.
It is hard to be happy at the top two or three steps in the hierarchy if your body is not in the right order. Once your physiology is in order, you can start to consider, “Am I actually safe? Am I perceiving my environment as a safe place to be?” If the answer to those two questions is no, then you are going to have some troubles.
As you go up the pyramid, you start to tackle belonging and love with questions like, “Do I have love in my life?” and “Do I hold myself in good esteem?” This one hits home for me. One of the reasons why I do so much self research into helping people with bringing love and esteem into their lives is because I’ve had so many problems with this myself. I started noticing that if I was not taking care of my physiology and safety, the quality of my sessions with clients started to suffer. I would be thinking a lot about their problem, but internally my biology was screaming for either more sleep, more water, more good food, a good workout, and all sorts of physiological needs. I knew that I was not holding myself up to a high enough standard and I could not give clients what I did not have. So, I started taking care of these lower levels of the pyramid, I started noticeably feeling happier and feeling an increase to the limit of my happiness.
The top of the pyramid is reserved for actualization and transcendence. This is actually where most people spend too much time worrying about. Worrying about topics, such as the state of the world, politics, or socio-economics, causes you to move past yourself and focus on the top of the pyramid. You need to take care of the bottom three levels first, before you have the potential to increase your happiness to the top levels.
2) What is happy-making?
The second question your wellness coach will ask you in The Order of Happiness is, “What is happy-making for you?” Think about something that you actually want to do. It is not about determining what you should be doing, but what you want to do. If you are anything like me, you may love doing things with your hands. I just strung up lights for my wife as a surprise and getting my hands into wood, concrete, and paint was a very joyous activity for me. For others, happy-making activities may be reading books, watching documentaries, etc. Others may find happiness in planning and managing their finances because they love numbers. Whatever it may be, once you start to notice what is happy-making, you also can start to realize some of the ways other activities are taking away from your daily happiness.
For example, for years, I used to smoke a lot of hookah. Looking back on it now, the first couple months of smoking was a social activity because I was always with friends. Eventually, the social aspect fell away and I spent most days smoking alone. Health ramifications aside, it got to the point where I realized that I was just going through the motions and it was no longer a joyous activity for me and I was able to stop.
3) Do I have space and time for it? (Get it on the calendar!)
The third question in The Order of Happiness is that your “How are you going to make space and time for the activities that make you happy? Are they on the calendar?” For example, my family and I are going to go to a lake house this summer since we are all water people, whether we are playing in it, or just around it. Knowing this, we made a point to put it on the calendar months in advance. If happy-making experiences are not in your calendar, then your priorities are backwards.
A concept I learned from Paul Chek is the I-We-All model.
I – WE – ALL
I am happy.
We are happy.
All are happy.
I am happy.
It has to start with this first. Another wellness coach or self-help book might tell you that success means getting what you want. If you have a goal or a dream and you achieve it, that is success…but is it? You might feel some immediate happiness once you accomplish your goals, but what if you fail? Happiness can be the difference between learning from failure and just beating yourself up. Happiness is wanting what you get regardless of what it is.
We are happy.
When my friends and I were smoking hookah, talking about the world and politics, it was really about the we. We were exchanging happiness back and forth.
All are happy.
This is about the world, the esoteric, and all of the plants and animals that contribute to the environment.
The biggest thing we need to understand with this model is you need to be happy first. It starts with the I. We implies you and others and All implies you and the world. If you are not happy, then you cannot satisfy the We and All levels.
This is where a lot of people start to get in trouble. When I talk to my clients as a wellness coach, there is definitely no shortage of things that people can care about in the world right now with world events, politics, economics, the environment, etc. While it is important to care about all of that, if you are not happy in the first place, you may ask yourself, “Is changing anything of that actually going to make me any more happy?” The answer is, no, it won’t, because you have to take care of yourself first.
4) Do I help make others happy?
Once you are set with knowing if you are happy, what kinds of activities make you happy, calendaring them in, then it’s time to tackle the fourth question in The Order of Happiness, which is “How can I help make others happy?” You need to go after the I first, but there are a lot of other “I’s” out there. My clients are a great example of this. It is up to my wellness coach clients to walk themselves up the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs themselves. I will coach them through it, but then I hand the baton off and it is up to them to be happy in the long run. It is up to them to go through the first three stages to try and figure out what is happy-making, get it on the calendar, and start experiencing happiness, so they know how to look for it more and more.
5) Do I contribute to world happiness?
Finally, the fifth and last question in The Order of Happiness is “How do I contribute to the world’s happiness?” I like to use the serenity prayer:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
When thinking about the world’s happiness, ask yourself, “Is it within my power to actually do anything?” For example, I’m Middle Eastern and while I can make videos about Middle Eastern conflicts, am I really gonna be able to go over there and put everybody’s weapons down? No, I’m not. So, while this does not mean I am going to be completely selfish and wall myself in and not think about it, I realize I need to get myself (the I) to a happy place first. Once I do, then I can start taking care of my family and friends (the We). Then I can start worrying about the rest of the world (the All). If I do not have that order right, then I am just not going to be happy. Even if I could somehow put down all the guns, I still will not be happy until I take care of myself first. Instead, I will become resentful.
Last thing we are going to cover is Four Lights Wellness. The Four Lights are:
- The light of happiness
- The light of quietness
- The light of diet
- The light of movement
If you do not know what is happy-making for yourself, if you have no idea what direction you need to move in, or if you do not care for my physiology right, then you will not be able to actually become happy. That is why there are two arrows on the diagram. You may know what you want, but may not actually be able to move there.
Lastly, the bow and arrow of the diagram shows that the movement of the body itself is based on the diet, hydration, nutrition, physical structure of your body’s building blocks, and the quietness to know when you are rested enough to go in the direction that will make you happy. We might be moving in the wrong direction, eating the wrong things, not taking enough time to take care of ourselves, and making the order of the arrow backwards.
It always starts with you. I say this over and over again, but it is ok, especially if you have had trauma in your life, to be a bit selfish at first. Get the “I” done first. Get yourself happy first, and then you can come back to the We, your family, friends, colleagues, and folks you interact with on a daily basis, one to one. Eventually, you can start tackling your workplace, the country, the world, the universe, the soul, the God, whatever you want to put into the All.
The order of operation (the Order of Happiness) is really important. A great place to start, especially if you have trauma, is with my course, Healing (e)Motions, which will rewire your brain to healing with specific, regenerative, easy exercises.
As always, I hope this information is very helpful to you. Have a happy and healthy rest of your day, and I will chat to you in the next one.