Where’s your happiness?

When I finished university in 1995, I decided not go the normal route of getting a job in a company, but to start my own coaching practise.

This was way back when nobody even knew what coaching was!

Suffice it to say, it was slow going building my business… money was tight and life was tough.

a better life!

Then a friend of mine spoke to me about a corporate coaching opportunity in a large multi-national.

Not as an employee, as an independent contractor.

The work was great. The money was amazing.

It would mean I could leave the stress of struggling to start my small practise, not having money, an unclear of my future… and enter this new life where everything would be great!

As you can see, I quickly fell under the I-will-be-happy-when spell.

I Got It! But…

I got the contract and I was elated!

Wow, this was going to change my life and it did.

I moved back to London, bought a nice car, went to work in my new job doing what I wanted to do coaching!

But then something strange happened.

The happiness, that this new lifestyle had promised me, started to fade.

I wasn’t getting those great feelings I had in the beginning anymore.

The happiness was short-lived.

I-Will-Be-Happy-When… Again!

And after not too long, I found myself doing it again…

I was thinking to myself… If I get this other thing, THEN I will be happy!

The spell was being cast again!

And like a zombie caught in its magic, I loyally went along believing this was true.

I did this over and over again for years until one day I found myself on a beach in Hawaii, feeling miserable and wondering what I needed in order to be happy!

And it hit me like a ton of bricks!

Miserable In Paradise

I’d been in rainy old London, thinking to myself, “I-will-be-happy-when I get to live in Hawaii” and here I was, in what most would consider paradise, and I was still not happy!

You see, chasing happiness, like it’s some THING you can get, is a fools errand.

It’s like chasing the horizon, it never arrives.

Or like a mirage in the heat, that when you get there it’s gone.

You do get the sense of achievement for a while, the congratulations for getting there, the immediate recognition that your circumstances have changed for the better…

But the lasting happiness that was promised IS NOT THERE!

It’s Me, Not My Situation

I realised something important that day, on the beach in Hawaii?

The situation does not make me happy, I make me happy (or not!).

There’s a saying that’s so true here:

Wherever you go, there you are.

It basically means that you bring your own weather with you.

Unhappy in London, unhappy in Hawaii… it was me, not the place or my situation!

And what was it that I brought with me… I brought my thinking.

It was my thinking ABOUT my situation, not the situation itself that I was feeling.

It’s a lie that the situation you want will make you happy. It can’t.

Psychologically, it doesn’t work like that.

Because happiness is not a THING you can get.

It can’t be GIVEN to you.

A situation will not MAKE you happy.

Happiness is something you DO

Happiness comes from what you choose to think about.

It comes from what you decide your situation means to you.

One person sees the cup half full and feels happy, another sees the cup as half empty and feels sad.

It’s not the cup, or circumstance, that they feel, it’s their thought about it that they feel.

In a nutshell…

We feel our thoughts, not things.

We feel happiness when we have happy thoughts about our circumstances.

That’s it.

So, when you catch yourself falling under the I-will-be-happy-when spell…

Thinking that if you just had this, were there, with them then you would be happy…

Remember THAT will not GIVE you the happiness you think it will…

How you’re thinking about your life does that…

So, rather than going on the chase…

Find a way to change how you’re seeing your situation, and you’ll find the elusive happiness that you seek.