Be happy, that’s real success

Yeah! You reached your goal! Woo hoo!  How do you feel? Good? Awesome?

Or, are you wondering what’s next?

Do you ever just sit with your current achievement and enjoy it? I mean, really enjoy it. Revel in it? Roll around on the floor in it, smush your face in it until you can hardly breathe?

I didn’t think so.

So, just how the heck are you supposed to enjoy life if you don’t?

I’m working with several clients who are so preoccupied with the future, and so worried about letting an opportunity slip by them, that they can’t even recognize how far they’ve come, and all the successes they have achieved. As a result, they constantly critique and compare themselves to others, are almost hyperventilating from stress, and frankly, are not very happy.

When I ask them, “do you think it’s possible to live without stress?” I usually get a guffaw, yeah right.

Do you feel that way too? Do you think I’m some dreamer who’s not going anywhere because I believe this?

The body is not meant to be under constant stress. Stress is a short-term mechanism to get you out of trouble. The kind of trouble where you just might be eaten by a lion if you don’t move it, now. It’s not meant to be engaged to get that report into the boss on time. It’s not meant to be relied on so you can cram for finals.

85% of my new clients are near collapse due to outrageous stress levels in their body.

Are you one of them? Want to help yourself? Are you willing to invest (not waste) 12 minutes and 21 seconds of your life to watch this funny and face-paced TED talk by Shawn Achor? The gold is right at the end.

The ‘average’ success formula:

Work Harder = Success

therefore

Success = Happiness.

BUT, if you are not enjoying your success, how can you be happy? If you just change what success means (I have a nice house, now I need a bigger/better one), then you never get to success. And if you never get to success, you never get to happiness. And if you never get to happiness, you stay in stress.

Are you average?

21 days to happiness and success:

Shawn’s key? Get to happiness first, and the success will come with less effort and less stress. Do these things for 21 days and see the results for yourself:

• Gratitude – find three new things to be grateful for every day
• Journalling – write about them, and your mind will automatically scan for the positive
• Exercise – trains your brain that what you do does matter
• Meditation – trains your mind to focus, so you can get off the multitask treadmill.
• Random acts of kindness – pay your happiness forward.

“Do I do this’ you ask? Yes I do. I’ve even written about three of them on this blog.

I journal positive moments in my life, and I find that one positive moment begets a dozen more. Sometimes so many I can’t keep up writing about them all so I just pick the highlights.

I practice gratitude every day before I start work. It’s a simple routine with a huge impact.

I don’t exercise every day, but I do my best to get out and walk, scramble up a mountain, or go for a ski a few times a week.

Meditation is a daily exercise for me. Sometimes it’s actual meditation, but mostly it’s MindScape, a tool I use to access my client’s subconscious so I can help them.

Random acts of kindness? I do this everyday by simply living peacefully, letting in the car in front of me, and heartfelt congratulations to others on their successes.

So if you’ve tried working yourself to death, and are done with being stressed out, then change. You have all the tools to do it.