"Happiness Comes After Experience" Day 2

Continued from yesterday:

Certainly, in my life looking back, I have had to live with a long-term medical condition, NEAD (Non-Epileptic Attack Disorder), which is very difficult because the seizures come and go at different moments in my life. But even through the dark times, I have learned to be happy. This is because I can manage the condition, and that is what we call rationalizing our thoughts.

And for those of you who have ever had counseling, we go through the process of that. You will sit down in the counseling session and talk through what you're going through, and the process here allows the brain – both the conscious and unconscious brain – to soothe and be comforted, and when that happens, we as humans start to heal, even from conditions like PTSD.

So how we conquer happiness is really about faith – I am not talking about religion – I am talking about stepping forward. Step forward if you are nervous and make a decision. You can have a hundred people give you a bit of advice about your business or about where to go in your next career move or whether to resign from your job. At the end of the day, it's you who makes the decision. It's you who kind of says, "OK, I have listened to the advice, and this is what I am going to do. I feel this is going to benefit me." You're going to talk it over with people, but it's you who makes the final decision. After the decision has been made and through the experience you will go through a line chart/graph of happiness levels going up and down. And that is the beauty of life, I think. I've learned this through my own personal experience, but I know that the science says that having a growth mindset or if we improve our emotional agility, which are the settings and surroundings of our emotions, we can, in this instance, be somewhat happy. We can be happy through the process of knowing where our thoughts come from and rationalizing them.

However, there is nothing better in life, I don’t think, than experience. Experience teaches us so many different things. Through the experiences, we have as humans, we will improve our emotional intelligence, emotional agility, and our general confidence, mostly importantly, our happiness.

That said, sometimes in life, we can't control everything. I can't control everything and press a button to stop the war in Ukraine, for instance, as much as I want to. So, it's about how we respond in life. Now, are you the kind of person that says, "I just give up," and we have all been there? Or are you the kind of person on the other side of the coin that says, "You know what, I went through that. I did not like it, but I learned a lot."

So, in my own personal journey, just before I close off on today's Steve Talks, when I lost my career as a teacher because I had too many seizures, I simply had to give it in the end. I really felt kind of depressed. I felt down. And I felt, I suppose, in one way a bit of shame, shame because I love helping people, and I had felt somebody had come up to me and taken my ability away from me.

In contrast, though I look at what I am doing now and building three different kinds of brands. All my humble brands are based on my personal brand, me as a core teacher, as a researcher, and also as a thought leader that specializes in Emotional Intelligence. My brands and their offering to the LinkedIn community are all working, and even though they are not making me money – I am sure they will in the future – I am happy because I know the feedback I am getting from others online. They are happy with my kind of performance on giving them insights.

I know from data what companies are looking at my content. I know from the data I get from LinkedIn polls that people are supportive. Sometimes I get negative feedback. Sometimes that can be hard to take. However, you know what? “The toughest decisions we make in life are based on what I would say negative feelings that we experience as humans.” This is what is formerly known as feedback, and when you get back feedback, in actual fact, we learn more, and if you learn more, you will increase your progress. Therefore, your happiness chart increases.

So, I don’t think humans have got a modern-day concept about what is happiness. I mean, you have to define it for yourself. I would say, in my lived experience, it's more about the lived experience after an event has happened, mainly bad experiences as it teaches us to be resilient towards our own Self Leadership practice. Ok, that’s you as a person. Who are you – “Who is Steve today” – “who is Tom today” “Who is Sarah today”, who am I. And that will change from one day to the next. That's the beauty of life: our emotions change. Our motivation changes. Our inspiration changes. If we keep learning, we will keep inspiring to learn more.

Therefore, there are more chances of experiencing happiness. Happiness comes in small shots. It's not like a big bucket where you just jump in and say, “Oh, I am happy.” I don't think that is happiness. I think happiness comes and goes, but you know what the triumph is learning and trying because we learn so much more through experience and through failure. We have then a bigger gap and/or opportunity to jump from being low to high because we have learned so much in that one instance.

So, I will end it there. It's really up to you to embark on that journey. You'll get help. You'll get feedback. You'll go on courses. You'll study. You'll be a parent. You'll be a father. A mother. A daughter, and all through those experiences, you'll be happy in different parts of that journey.

Life, for me, would be to say to people always try because sometimes in life, we just don't know where it is going to take us. Life is about trying, and if we try hard, we learn more. If we learn more, we can actually be happy. So, I will end it there, finally on SteveTalks .Thanks for joining me. And if you have any feedback, drop it in the comments or anything you want to share. The more comments we get, the more hope we have to build Steve Talks up to a nice platform where others can also share their learning experiences.