Happiness is an Inside Job

•  Yesterday I wrote about choosing happiness.  There are numerous aspects to choosing happiness, and the most important is realizing that you and only you are responsible for your happiness.  This may seem self evident, but it bears taking a second look.  Even people who easily agree with this statement about happiness, live their life as if people, places, things, and events outside them are the source of happiness.  Never has been true, never will be.

This is actually good news.  It means you have the power to launch happiness in your life.  You have the power.  Which also means you have the responsibility.  Choosing happiness is about taking full personal responsibility in every moment for choosing happiness.

What does this look like?  Let’s imagine that you already are living from a consistent state of happiness.  You get up each and every day happy to be alive and eager to engage with life throughout the day. You make your way to the kitchen where your spouse is drinking coffee and finishing breakfast with the kids.  The school bus is due in 5 minutes and the kid’s lunches are not made.  What happened?  It was your turn to sleep in, and your spouse’s turn to handle the morning routine of getting the kid’s off to school.

This is where you get to choose.  This is where you get to take responsibility.  The question to ask is “What am I willing to have get in the way of my experience of happiness?”

The most common reaction I get to this scenario is, “Don’t I have a right to be pissed off that my spouse didn’t fulfill the morning duties?  I always get it done on my mornings!”

Sure, (in the commonly accepted behavioral code of our culture) you have a right to be mad any time you want to be.  You also have a right to the consequences of your frustration, upset, anger, etc.  And one of those is that you cannot experience happiness and anger simultaneously.

Your life is made up of these moment to moment interactions.  And the choices you make in these moments add up to your overall experience of life.

Although this kitchen scenario is relatively innocent and simple, it is also representative of the millions of moments throughout our daily lives during which we choose something other than happiness – whether it be complaint, anger, resentment, judgment, worry or fear.

Begin to be aware of the choices you are afforded in the many moments of your day.  And as your awareness grows, see if you can create the space – in those moments – to ask yourself, “What am I willing to have get in the way of my experience of happiness?”

p.s.  The kitchen scenario above was related to me by one of my coaching clients.  It turned out that the lunches did not get made because the children were upset about something that was happening at school and the spouse had taken the time to sort it thru with them.  The kids ended up running to the bus with lunch money in their pockets – a rare treat.