Happiness is a Learning Curve

There are plenty of learning curves to choose from.
Traditionally as our chief learning curves:
1. pain;
2. suffering;
3. sacrifice;
4. failure.
Range of more pleasant learning curves:
5. love as a learning curve;
6. authenticity as a learning curve;
7. success as a learning curve.

You choose your learning curve.

Make a list of the top five lessons of happiness your life has taught you so far. Write down each lesson, specifically. Recall when you learned the lesson. Name the names of anyone else involved. And assess as honestly as you can a) how learning this lesson has influenced your life and b) how well you have learned this lesson (so that it doesn’t have to be repeated!).

I invite you to reflect on what your life wants you to learn about happiness right now.

“Imagine you have now stepped into your future. Take a few moments to review all your wishes for the future. Then see if you can identity any major life lessons on happiness you still have to learn.”

Thinking about Happiness
Happiness is the new darling of the social sciences.

An inquiry into happiness is an opportunity to rethink your life. As you deepen your happiness inquiry you get to test the truth of all of your assumptions and beliefs. Sometimes your inquiry will confirm what you already know to be true, and other times it will ask you to let go of ideas that you may have identified strongly with until now. Thinking about happiness takes great personal honesty and courage, but the rewards are also great. Below are five examples of how thinking about happiness can help you to get clearer about everything else that truly matters.

Rethink #1:
Happiness and Money.

Rethink #2:
Happiness and Circumstances.

Richard Kammann, of New Zealand, reports, “Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness.”

Rethink #3:
Happiness and Education.

“Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness,” states Claudia Wallis, who compiled a report called “The New Science of Happiness” for TIME magazine.

Rethink #4:
Happiness and the Future.

“Nothing in the world can make you happy, but everything in the world can encourage you to be happy.”

Rethink #5:
Happiness and You.

Leading researchers David Myers and Ed Diener conclude, in their article entitled “Who Is Happy?”: “Happiness and life-satisfaction are similarly available to the young and the old, women and men, blacks and whites, the rich and the working-class.” Happiness research teaches us that the “enduring characteristics of the individual” are more important to happiness than external life circumstances.

Mark Easton, the writer-presenter of the BBC series The Happiness Formula. He said,

The logic of the new science [of happiness] is breathtaking. If it is right it requires us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about how we work, how we live, and what we are trying to achieve. In short, the science of happiness may provide us with a new definition of what we mean by human progress.

These excerpt is taken from the new book Be Happy, by Robert Holden, Ph.D. It is published by Hay House (April 2009) and is available at all bookstore or online at: amazon.com.