My 3 days at the Cutting Garden were lovely. I wish you could have been there with me! The following exercise implementing 5 keys to happiness came about through work I did with a client during that time – thanks goes out to her.
Key #1: First and foremost, you must decide to be happy. Intention has enormous power, as does attention. “Energy flows where attention goes.” If you pay attention to what’s making you happy, instead of what isn’t, it’ll create a huge shift in your experience.
Key #2: Find out what makes you happy. Here’s a quick, easy way to do that. Sit down with paper and a pen, and go through your life, decade by decade. List the most joyful, fun-filled, wonderful memories you have for each 10-year period. You’ll begin to see patterns. When you are done, summarize using broader categories. (Like “relationships, travel, writing, music, math” etc.) Come up with the top 8 to 10 areas that have brought you joy so far in life. This won’t include something you haven’t yet experienced, but it’s likely that new things will fit somewhere within these, rather than outside of them.
Key #3: Rank these joy-sources according to efficacy. You don’t have to guess at this. Compare the first category to the second, then the first to the third, first to the fourth, and so on until you’ve brought each of these categories head to head and made a decision. Which one of these brings me more joy? The one that’s more joyful gets a “1,” the other gets a “2.” Each category ends up with a string of 1’s and 2’s. Add the numbers in each category. The one with the lowest number is your number one joy-source, next lowest is number two, and so forth.
Key #4: List the same joy-sources in order of current frequency. Tell the truth about how often you incorporate this category the way you are living your life right now.
Key #5: Compare the two: efficacy and current frequency. After doing this exercise with my client, I came home and did it for myself. Like her, I had 2 –maybe 3, of those categories that were wildly out of whack. Dancing (NIA, ecstatic dance, and regular ol’ dancing) rated really high as a joy-source, and I’m doing very little of it.
Coach’s Challenge: Adjust your life accordingly. I’m going to see what I can do about adding in more dance. What do you have to change to put these 5 keys to happiness to work? I’d really love to hear, and so would the other readers. So leave a comment, and we can make it a conversation!
Want to use this article on-line or for your e-zine? Feel free — just please include the following: Lindy McLaine, of www.wecansoar.com, helps people in the second bloom of life pinpoint their Life Purpose and create the best possible lives they can imagine. She is using her creativity to attract a community who responds to today’s challenges by stepping up to the plate and into their gifts, while believing in each other and themselves.
