From People-Pleaser to Happiness-Seeker: Simple Questions to Make Life Fun
My oldest daughter is a freshman in high school. She’s tried a variety of sports but despite all my best efforts, she never really cared about any of them. Then recently, she developed an interest in Crew. As in – Rowing. Probably the only sport my husband and I know nothing about.
She started talking about Crew in 8th grade and 6 months later, we’ve learned what this will mean in time, energy and money. It’s an investment for sure. When I ask her, “Why Crew?” she shrugs her shoulders and says she thinks she’d like it.
It was a similar experience last year when my middle daughter said she wanted to play electric guitar. She was 11 at the time and this came out of nowhere. When I asked her why she wanted to play, she shrugged her shoulders and said she thought it would be fun.
We see this often with kids: they find something fun to do that’s also meaningful for them and they think, “That would be fun; I’d like that,” and then they start doing it.
Adults are different. We’re adulting. “What would be fun to do?” is a question we ask ourselves about Saturday night or our next vacation. But what about work and our day to day to-do’s? We tell ourselves there’s a reason it’s called “work.”
I’ve recently learned a lot about work and fun. It started a few years ago when the job I loved for so long wasn’t a job I loved anymore. I asked myself what else I could do, was qualified to do and should do. My answers to these questions helped me rebuild my resume but they didn’t get me excited about my future.
Then at some point, I began to ask myself What makes me happy? This was a new question for me. I’m a life-long people-pleaser so believed that if the people around me were happy, I’d be happy too. That belief worked until my mid-40’s when I got really damn tired of trying to make people happy and I began to wonder what might be fun for me… in the simple way my kids seem to ask this question. Of course, I can’t answer it as casually as my kids because there are so many grown-up factors to consider, but the question itself is a simple one.
I used to think about my own happiness as fluff. But it’s not fluff. It’s real and it’s important. I’ve gotten very curious about it and here’s what I’ve learned:
- Happiness is linked to good health and a longer life.
- Good relationships, gratitude, meditation, kindness and generosity are foundational for a happy life.
Lately, I’m fascinated with how happiness works in the Law of Attraction. I’ve started to ask this question: Does being happy and fostering a higher vibration / higher emotional state help me to attract higher-level results? The answer seems to be Yes.
“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” – Albert Einstein
There are also many scientific studies about how the brain functions when we’re happy: we’re better problem-solvers, more open and adaptable – so it makes sense to me that we’re better results-producers when we’re happy.
All of this flips my previous logic on its head. I used to think I’d really enjoy life after I produced a great result. But the Law of Attraction and scientific studies tell us it’s the other way around: when we are happy, we produce great results.
So, if happiness seems like a fluffy thing to care about, think again. Tend to your own happiness as if it’s a necessity because it is. You can increase your happiness quota by asking yourself a few simple questions: What would I like to do? What makes me happy? What would be fun?
Published in ThriveGlobal, 2018.
