I'll be happy when...

One of the things that has been coming up in conversations with a lot of my clients recently is the idea of ‘I’ll be happy when …’

I’ll be happy when … I get a new job.
I’ll be happy when … I get a house in the country
I’ll be happy when … My golf handicap is 6
I’ll be happy when … I lose a stone of weight
I’ll be happy when … I’m earning £100K
I’ll be happy when … My business revenue doubles
I’ll be happy when … I get married and have a family

You get the idea.

It could be anything we want that we don’t have … or something that hasn’t happened in our lives that we want to happen.
It seems to me that when we get what we want, we can experience a spike of happiness or some other similar emotion … and sometimes we don’t. And even when we get the ‘happiness spike’, this tends to pass … often very quickly and our level of happiness returns to its pre successful outcome level or maybe just above or below that level.

We get the new job, we have a new boss, we have new goals and targets to reach and the demands of the new job and our thinking about those demands soon takes up more space in our mind. The spike in excitement about getting the new job subsides. It may be a better job. We may have a better boss. The company might even align better with our values. Our new on-going level of happiness may actually be higher … but does it come from the job?

We build our business. Revenue doubles. We have a bigger team with a bigger wage bill. More customers or clients to satisfy. More costs to cover. We might have been able to structure things to step back from the day-to-day pressure, or not. For sure there is a decent chance if we set out to double our business, that if we achieve the goal, we’ll feel a spike in excitement or happiness … or maybe we won’t. It’s also fairly likely that if we do get the ‘happiness spike’, it will pass, and we’ll find a new level of happiness either higher or lower than it was before we decided to double the size of the business. Or maybe we have already decided to ‘double’ our business again and our attention is fully focussed on that.

Can doubling your business, make you happier?
Can earning £100K make you happier?
Can getting your golf handicap to 6 make you happier?
Can losing a stone of weight make you happier?
I want to share a distinction called ‘living and the game of life’ to illustrate.

The games we play are things like I have mentioned above. Doubling our business, having a salary of £100K, getting our golf handicap to 6, running a marathon, getting married and having a family. We play the game of getting from position ‘A’ when we don’t have what we want, to position ‘B’ when we do have what we want.

A problem is that, if we win the game and get what we want and aren’t happy or as happy as we thought we’d be, we can conclude we were playing the wrong game to get happy and start a different game in search of the same feeling.
Maybe I’ll be happy when my salary is £150K … or when my golf handicap is 3 … or maybe I need a bigger house or car or …. you get the picture.

We attach happiness or some other good feeling to the outcome of the game.
We live under the assumption that happiness is ‘out there somewhere’.
We look out into the world and have thoughts about what would make us happy. We decide we know the things that will make us happy … without really knowing. Then if we’re not happy or not as happy as we thought we would be with the outcome, we move the goal posts onto some other external outcome that we have decided will definitely make us happy.
What if happy comes from somewhere else?
What if the source of happiness isn’t out there?
What if happiness is an inside job?
Take a look at the graph below.

The X axis represents the games we play. Position ‘A’ represents where we are now. Position ‘B’ represents where we want to be. We do whatever we need to do to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ in the hope or expectation we’ll feel happy.
The Y axis represents how we feel as we live … how we experience our life. Let’s call that axis ‘Living’.
Position ‘C’ is low on the living scale and could be unhappy, frustrated, angry, hopeless, emptiness, trapped, despair or some mixture of these. Position ‘D’ or high on the living scale looks more like, peaceful or happy or creative or empathic or love or spirit or true self. The thing we need to figure out is, the relationship between the Game of Life and Living. We tend to live as if the correlation is high.

Here’s the problem with that. It looks to me that people who are highly successful in life or who are good at playing the games of life and winning, can be either happy or unhappy or swing from one to the other.
It also looks to me that people who aren’t so successful by the same standards can be either happy or unhappy or swing from one to the other.

I remember times in my past when I have had everything I ever could have wanted and been blissfully happy. There have also been times when externally I still had it all and was miserable.

What if there isn’t any long-term link between living and winning at the games of life we make up?
What if it’s actually possible to be anywhere, literally anywhere on this graph.
What if our position on the ‘living’ scale is 100% a function of our moment to moment thinking?

As Michael Neill once said in his amazing TedTalk, ‘Why Aren’t We Awesomer’ … We are only ever one thought away from a totally new experience of being alive.’ You can see that TedTalk here.

A client once told me they wanted to 10X their business. They thought they’d be happy and free and fulfilled. I asked a question that involved them choosing between the following 2 options …
Put your head down and 10X your business in the hope that you’ll be happy and fulfilled and free when you’ve succeeded … or … be happy and fulfilled and free now and spend whatever time it takes you to 10X your business being that way.
I’ll leave it to you to guess which one they chose.

As I see it, the Games of Life and Living are independent variables.
Winning or losing the games is just that … winning of losing the games. Nothing less or more.
Living is something completely different. In one moment, we are on top of the world and the next we are in the depths of despair and the only thing that has changed is how our thinking has taken shape in our minds.
This inside-out understanding of how we experience life has changed everything for me. It has allowed me to take my power back (a lot of the time) from whatever circumstances I am in. It doesn’t mean I don’t get sad or angry or frustrated or scared. Whatever we are feeling is never wrong. But what I now know is that my experience is being internally created by thought and not by my circumstances.

When I remember this, it is easier to be with whatever I am experiencing. It is easier to know that nothing outside of me can cause me to feel anything and I am only ever one thought away from a totally new experience of living.
Please don’t take my word for what I am trying to explain here. Check it out for yourself.
I’ll finish with a story that has really added weight to me seeing that I live in a thought created reality …

My Dad died in September 2018. Just three months after he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. He was 78. For 50 years he had been a huge figure in my life. The best Dad I could ever have had. He had always been there for me. He was loving. He was wise. He was generous. He was brilliant when I had a problem to work through. As I shared at his funeral, ‘he was my hero.’ I didn’t know how I was going to cope without him. I was sad, really sad. I was fearful. I felt unsure of myself. I cried a lot of tears.

Then one day about three weeks after he died, I woke up and my first thought that day was one of gratitude, not sadness. I held onto that and reflected on many reasons I could be grateful to have had Brian McCammon as my dad for 50 years. This was followed by a realisation that he had equipped me amazingly to navigate life even though he wasn’t around.
That feeling of gratitude stuck with me. And while every now and then I feel real sadness that my dad isn’t around, the feeling I most experience when I think about him is gratitude.

I don’t go to his grave very often. I’m not a fan of graveyards. But I go to a park 3 or 4 times every week to walk our dogs. Shortly after he died, I picked a tree at the park to remember him. Every time I walk past it, I stop, put my hand on it, in exactly the same place and say, ‘Hi dad. Love you. Thank you.’ For me, I see that my experience of losing my dad is 100% thought created.

What about you? How do you see this? What reality do we live in? What creates our reality? … a thought created reality, an experience created reality or a mixture of both?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Much love

Peter

What Happens If We Don’t Have Anything To Prove

Unreasonably Committed

The Shift Starts With You