There has been a massive volume written about happiness and work. Much of what has been written is excellent and has practical application. Here is the challenge I see working with organisations, specifically the larger ones that number in the thousands of employees, changing a company culture can be tantamount to moving mountains with the speed of continental drift. Now don’t get me wrong there are a few examples out there where change has literally been revolutionary, but these are few and far between.
So where does that leave the individual professional who is seeking greater happiness? Well that leaves them turning to themselves. To some degree happiness has its external triggers, but a majority of it lies in the internal work each person has to do.
Let me elaborate…
A great majority of your happiness is going to be determined by how you invest your attention. Not too long ago a survey was conducted by an accident prevention charity. About 80% of the respondents admitted to going through life on autopilot. Actions like arriving at the end of a car journey with no memory of driving there, buying the same item twice without realising, and turning up at the office on a day off.
So what? Well, this means we are very much like preprogrammed machines nearly oblivious to most of our actions. We are all creatures of habit, spending our days playing out ingrained behaviours and responses over which we exert no control.
The upside of is automating routines is that we don’t have to constantly be conscious of how to breathe, how to the walk, how to eat or drink. But like every coin there is the flip-side. Treading the well-worn paths of habit, we easily get stuck in jobs, relationships or ways of thinking that make us miserable, in lives we'd never have consciously chosen.
System One & System Two
In Daniel Kahneman’s influential book, Thinking, Fast and Slow he describes two systems of thinking - system one and system two. System One is fast thinking and is the home of unconscious attention and automatic processing. This system is responsible for our ingrained responses and behaviours. System Two is slow thinking and is the home of conscious attention and deliberate reasoning. This system is engaged anytime we are called upon to learn something new or take on a new perspective.
Since the brain wants to constantly conserve energy, it tries it’s very best to quickly automate any new behaviour. That is, to move it from system two to system one. Learning anything novel whether it is a new physical skill or a new way of thinking requires vast amounts of energy (system two). But once it has been learned system one takes over and runs with extraordinary efficiency requiring minimal energy costs.
Is There a Key to Happiness?
The key to happiness comes down to how you invest your attention. What you attend to drives your behaviour and that in turn determines your happiness. The key to happiness by design is to notice what you pay attention to and then to organize your life in ways that actually make you happier without having to think to hard about it.
In the context to this blog entry happiness is made up of two-parts - pleasure and purpose. There is pleasure (or pain) and purpose (or pointlessness) in all that you do and feel. They are separate components that make up your overall happiness that comes from what you experience. You are happiest when you manage to strike a balance between pleasure and purpose that works best for you.
In the context to this blog entry happiness is made up of two-parts - pleasure and purpose. There is pleasure (or pain) and purpose (or pointlessness) in all that you do and feel. They are separate components that make up your overall happiness that comes from what you experience. You are happiest when you manage to strike a balance between pleasure and purpose that works best for you.
Attention is the Glue
There are two elements here. The first is attention, which is the glue that holds your life together. The second is happiness, which is ultimately about the pleasure-purpose principle over time. As time is the only truly scarce resource, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Our life clock is more like a timer which counts down. You cannot neither recover lost time nor lost happiness. There are no resets and no rewinds.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for us to pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focusing on what actually does. Too often we evaluate something as satisfactory even when the actual experience is not pleasurable, leading to poor choices about what really gives us happiness.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for us to pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focusing on what actually does. Too often we evaluate something as satisfactory even when the actual experience is not pleasurable, leading to poor choices about what really gives us happiness.
Happiness is something you can achieve by becoming more conscious of what actually contributes to it. More specifically day-to-day happiness is composed of pleasure and purpose. This means you don't want to just feel good, you also want to feel that you are doing good. With this mindset, you can tolerate short term strife if you know that it is being suffered for a purpose. At the same time, pleasure must be included in the calculation as it is fundamental to feeling happiness.
From my experience working with a wide range of professionals, most of the time we are not even conscious of the ways we hinder our own happiness. I think many of us think we are going to be happy from acquiring new toys but that usually wears off rather quickly. Along with this we do not give enough credit to the happiness of experiences and in turn we don't value them as much. To our own detriment, we tend to focus on accumulation rather than participation.
London Cabbies and Hippos
Before someone can actually become a London cabby they must pass a difficult test that requires them to navigate 25000 streets. Those that pass the test, which is only half of the test-takers, have larger hippocampi. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for forming long term memories and spatial processing. The growth of the hippocampi was a result of studying for the test and as they learned more and more. So paying attention can literally change your brain.
The brain is a highly complex and sophisticated processing system, with billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections, and you can learn to focus your attention on more meaningful stimuli that contributes to your sense of pleasure and your sense of purpose. The first step is then to be aware of what brings you pleasure and purpose. The second step is to keep your attention on these stimuli. The reality is that most of us don’t do this.
Situational Blindness
One of the fundamental mechanisms of attention is when you attend to one aspect of your environment you do not attend to another. This can lead to a mental phenomenon referred to as situational blindness, whereby you are so focused on one aspect of your surroundings that you fail to notice the bigger picture. Follow this link to test your own situational blindness (http://bit.ly/1gXmThe). It takes less then two-minutes.
One way of overriding situational blindness is to trigger your conscious attention. This is when deliberately direct your focus on something. The following exercise will help you to overcome situational blindness.
Moving Forward Exercise
If you want to be more happy then you need to make the conscious effort to identify what brings you a sense of pleasure and what gives you a sense of purpose. It means you literally need to stop-up and think what aspects of my job meet these two criteria. At first, it may seem like a difficult task. Give it some time and be patient. Your brain may not be use to thinking in this manner. Let your brain warm up and settle in. Believe me, after awhile your brain will start spitting out answers.
Here is a simple exercise I take clients through. I ask them to scale their answers from 0 to 10. 0 meaning not-at-all. 10 meaning completely.
Step 1: On an average day, how satisfied are you with your work?
Step 2: On an average day, to what extent do you feel your job gives you a sense of purpose?
Step 3: What do you want to do in order to increase your answers in Step 1 and 2 by one value? (e.g. moving it from
a value of 5 to 6)
If you want to increase the level of happiness in your professional life much of the ownership lies with you. You want to take deliberate action to identify what functions and aspects of your job gives you a sense of pleasure and purpose. This effort of consciously focusing your attention engages system two - slow thinking and conscious reasoning.
Similar to the brains of the cabby drivers that grew in response to learning to navigate the streets of London, your brain will grow to automatically search for the elements of pleasure and purpose in everything you do and experience. This is the mental shift I mentioned earlier - from System 2 (conscious reasoning) to System 1 (automatic processing).
On average, it takes about 60 days to set the foundation for a new habit - mental or physical. From my experience working with a broad spectrum of professionals, a definite shift in mindset and overall happiness begins to happen in those 60 days. It simply becomes so much easier for people to discover those factors that make life more meaningful.
Take Home Message (THM)
The first THM is to stay attentive to the aspects of your job that bring you a sense of purpose and that bring you a sense of pleasure.
The second THM is to be dedicated to the change, disciplined to stick with the change, and decisive to take the actions necessary to sustain the change.
Happiness is not simply some enigmatic state of mind. Happiness is a result of our efforts to direct our attention, which in turn has concrete and tangible biological and chemical effects on our brains.
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