How Identifying My Beliefs Helps Me to Be Happier -- and to Have Better Habits

In this series, professionals share how their beliefs have shaped their careers, businesses and the workforce. Join the conversation by writing a response (please include the hashtag #Belief in the body of your post).

Last Wednesday, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend an advance screening of Oprah’s fascinating, epic new mini-series, “Belief.”

As part of this, she asks, "What do you believe in 3 words?" I love this kind of challenge: distilling ideas. I came up with "Always. Be. Gretchen." (Though Love. Love. Love. was an option I considered.)

Watching the gripping first episode of the "Belief" series got me thinking further about my own beliefs. Looking back as my life as a writer, I realize that whenever I grapple with a new subject, I always do push myself to condense my conclusions into some distilled form. This exercise allows me to identify my core beliefs.

The fact is, it’s all too easy to go through life without recognizing my core beliefs—yet once I recognize them, I find it easier to live up to them.

For instance, when I was writing The Happiness Project, about how to make my life happier, I wrote my “Eight Splendid Truths” (inspired by Buddhism’s many numbered lists):

First Splendid Truth
To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

Second Splendid Truth
One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

Third Splendid Truth
The days are long, but the years are short. (Click here to see my one-minute movie; of everything I’ve written about happiness, I think this video resonates most with people.)

Fourth Splendid Truth
You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.
Many argue the opposite case. John Stuart Mill, for example, wrote, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” I disagree.

Fifth Splendid Truth
I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature.

Sixth Splendid Truth
The only person I can change is myself.

Seventh Splendid Truth
Happy people make people happy, but
I can’t make someone be happy, and
No one else can make me happy.

Eighth Splendid Truth
Now is now.

It was fun to write "Splendid Truths." Then, when I started working on Better Than Before, my book about how to master habits, I set myself a different kind of challenge. This time, I wrote my Habits Manifesto:

• What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.
• Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.
• Focus on actions, not outcomes.
• By giving something up, we may gain.
• Things often get harder before they get easier.
• When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves.
• We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important.
• It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves.
• We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change.
• We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse.
• We manage what we monitor.
• Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

How about you? Do you have any strategies that help you identify, and live up to, your core beliefs? Writing a manifesto, Splendid Truths, Belief in 3 Words, or other exercises along those lines, really are imaginative, creative ways to identify what we truly believe.

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To further explore humankind's ongoing search to connect with something greater than ourselves, watch Oprah Winfrey's interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner below and tune into Oprah’s groundbreaking television event “Belief” at 8 p.m. ET/PT tonight on OWN.

Other posts in this series:

• The World's New Product — Is You by John Hope Bryant
• Belief’s Big Contradiction — And Why It Works by Deepak Chopra
• 6 Reasons I’ll Never Stop Believe (and Neither Should You) by J.T. O’Donnell
• Conviction in the Power of Altruism, Cooperation and Transformation by Matthieu Ricard 
• When It Comes to Faith, What Do Americans Believe? by Marianne Cooper

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Gretchen Rubin is the author of the blockbuster New York Times bestsellers, Better Than Before, The Happiness Project, and Happier at Home. She writes about happiness and habit-formation at gretchenrubin.com. Follow her here by clicking the yellow FOLLOW button, on Twitter, @gretchenrubin, on Facebook, facebook.com/GretchenRubin. Or listen to her popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin.

Photo: Gretchen Rubin