Gratitude and the DNA of Happiness
Greater Life
As an entrepreneur over 50, your time is just beginning… Live the Greater Life
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It's an underappreciated truth that states are trainable.
What do I mean by this???
Well today, as we discuss the pillar of happiness and with our week's theme of gratitude, it is important to recognise that in our world today, still, there are certain myths (aka fallacies) that pervade.
One of these is the ‘confidence fallacy’ - the idea that some people are just naturally confident, while others missed out at birth and therefore are doomed to be shy and nervous their whole lives.
Of course, most people know this to be patently false, however, the echoes of this fallacy echo still. And we’re going to tangent slightly here, but given the link between confidence and happiness, we’ll allow it.
Very often, the fallacy gets to work in childhood, where introversion is erroneously labelled as lacking in confidence or ‘just being shy’. That’s like saying that football and cricket are the same game. True, they're both sports. So there will be elements that look very similar across both games, but they are fundamentally different.
Similarly, confidence (or a lack of it) and extraversion or introversion are not linked. But people assume they are. In the West particularly, we laud the traits of extraversion, being outgoing, bubbly, and talkative, all of these that we would associate with extraversion, we also tend to associate with people who are confident.
Conversely, those who are introverts, who get their energy from their own company, who need solo time to recharge outside of groups, and who, very often will not say anything in groups, unless they really need to, get labelled as being shy or nervous when their external presentation is simply what introversion looks like.
Ok. That’s our tangent on the fallacy of confidence, taken care of and I hope it helps with your journey to happiness because, if you are someone who, as a child was labelled as shy or nervous, when actually you were simply an introvert - then perhaps the above, in some small way, gives you permission to believe and behave differently if you wish.
Now we come to the idea raised at the start of the article: that you can train for states. Meaning you can train for confidence, you can train for creativity, and you can train for happiness.
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How? Tony Robbins and other NLPers would suggest language, physiology and focus. I prefer the simpler version that my friend Harry Sibghs taught me: body words and focus - that we can, through how we use our bodies, through the words we use to ourselves and others and through the focus of our attention, guide ourselves into certain states of being.
Of those three, the context of this conversation on gratitude, our attention is on focus. Because the more that we can focus on the things to be grateful for the more we can cultivate an attitude of gratitude and what we are then creating is a state within ourselves of gratefulness.
And I like to think of gratefulness or gratitude as the second spiral on the DNA helix of happiness, the other being Joy. The joy when we are doing something that we totally love and are engaged in that is bringing us joy, gratitude being the capacity to reflect with pleasure and to re-experience that joy as a result of that reflection. The two really go hand in hand the more we do joyful things, the more we will reflect with gratitude, and therefore the more we will be guided to do those joyful things again, and so they fuel each other.
So this is what we mean when we say that gratitude is part of the DNA of happiness, and indeed that gratitude is a mission-critical practice when it comes to helping us cultivate and develop, more consistently and more predictably, the state of happiness.
If you want happiness, we know focusing on Joy is a must. Now you know it’s DNA twin – gratitude.
Focus on either, and watch as more happiness floods into your life.
It’s a state.
Train it.