A Formula for Happiness
As a behavioural psychologist and Life-skills coach, the study of happiness is important to me.
Not just professionally, though a lot of my clients are in pursuit of happiness, but also spiritually and personally.
I grew up in a family that follows the Indian spiritual Master, Meher Baba.
His best known quote (used by Robby McFerrin in the song 'Don't Worry, Be Happy') is "Don't worry, be happy.
I love you more than you can ever love yourself.
" As a child I took this quote for granted, but my belief was tested many years later, when I was going through the break-up of my marriage and subsequent divorce.
One time I was with Meher Baba's sister Mani Irani when she said to me, "Don't think that Baba's message to not worry and be happy is merely a feel-good saying.
It is an order from your spiritual master and has to be obeyed.
You owe it to Him, if not to yourself, to not worry and be happy.
If anything or anyone stands between you and the carrying out of that order, you need to remove that thing or person from your life.
" Having been given such a strong directive, I had to think about my life and what exactly was making me unhappy.
After a lot of heart-searching and honest evaluation I realised that the main cause of my unhappiness was not my husband at the time but my expectations of him, my marriage and our life together.
As a behavioural psychologist I knew I could find a way to work through this.
I would be a pretty useless behavioural psychologist if I didn't! So I started keeping an 'Expectations Diary'.
This was a small notebook that fit into a pocket and had a pencil tucked in the spine.
Each time I had an expectation, no mater how small - the toast will turn out just as I like it, I'll not hit too much traffic on my way to work, my son will not track mud through the house, my husband will remember to say 'thank you' for the meal I cooked - I made a mark in the diary, a five-bar code.
If it was a big expectation, I wrote a bit about it, but mostly the book was filled with five-bar codes.
At the start I had well over 750 expectation incidents a day.
No wonder I was unhappy! Day after day over a period of five years I reduced my expectations.
My husband did not, so we ended up separating and eventually divorcing.
But I ended up with between 250 and 150 expectation incidents a day.
No matter how I tried I couldn't get them down further.
But it worked! I was happier than I had ever been.
People started noticing that I was more positive and had a much more realistic approach to life and they began to ask how they could achieve the same results in their own lives.
So far I had ignored reality, and only focused on expectations, but I looked at how reality impacted on the level of happiness in my life and I came to the conclusion that there is an almost scientific formula for happiness: HAPPINESS = REALITY / EXPECTATIONS or H = R/E We have two ways of increasing the happiness in our lives.
The one I had used was a reduction process, I reduced my expectations and increased my happiness.
But there is a second way.
You can expand your reality by setting and achieving realistic goals to become more qualified, wealthy, popular or whatever.
A lot of my clients were over-achievers, and reducing their expectations was very difficult for them.
So we had to work out a programme of expanding their reality side by side with cutting out some of their more extreme expectations.
The perspective needed to shift from merely looking at overt success - professional growth, promotions, big contracts, more business, more money - to real success.
The apparently successful had to look behind their outward achievements to the desolation in their personal lives - the broken marriages, failed relationships, estranged or neglected parents and children, lack of true friendships and a hollow spiritual core - and decide if they really wanted to be happy.
Did their inner happiness mean enough to them to sacrifice some of the outer trappings of material success? If they could honestly answer in the affirmative, we worked together, if not they had to find another therapist.
Over the years I have helped a lot of individuals move towards real happiness, not just for themselves but also the people they care about.
They in turn have gone on to spread the message of the Happiness Formula to others.
In case you are thinking, "What on earth did she do with the Expectation Diaries?" After five years I had quite a few collected, so I burnt them.
I had a great time symbolically saying goodbye to the obstacles to my happiness.
There is something of an arsonist in most of us that loves a good bonfire, I think.
Not just professionally, though a lot of my clients are in pursuit of happiness, but also spiritually and personally.
I grew up in a family that follows the Indian spiritual Master, Meher Baba.
His best known quote (used by Robby McFerrin in the song 'Don't Worry, Be Happy') is "Don't worry, be happy.
I love you more than you can ever love yourself.
" As a child I took this quote for granted, but my belief was tested many years later, when I was going through the break-up of my marriage and subsequent divorce.
One time I was with Meher Baba's sister Mani Irani when she said to me, "Don't think that Baba's message to not worry and be happy is merely a feel-good saying.
It is an order from your spiritual master and has to be obeyed.
You owe it to Him, if not to yourself, to not worry and be happy.
If anything or anyone stands between you and the carrying out of that order, you need to remove that thing or person from your life.
" Having been given such a strong directive, I had to think about my life and what exactly was making me unhappy.
After a lot of heart-searching and honest evaluation I realised that the main cause of my unhappiness was not my husband at the time but my expectations of him, my marriage and our life together.
As a behavioural psychologist I knew I could find a way to work through this.
I would be a pretty useless behavioural psychologist if I didn't! So I started keeping an 'Expectations Diary'.
This was a small notebook that fit into a pocket and had a pencil tucked in the spine.
Each time I had an expectation, no mater how small - the toast will turn out just as I like it, I'll not hit too much traffic on my way to work, my son will not track mud through the house, my husband will remember to say 'thank you' for the meal I cooked - I made a mark in the diary, a five-bar code.
If it was a big expectation, I wrote a bit about it, but mostly the book was filled with five-bar codes.
At the start I had well over 750 expectation incidents a day.
No wonder I was unhappy! Day after day over a period of five years I reduced my expectations.
My husband did not, so we ended up separating and eventually divorcing.
But I ended up with between 250 and 150 expectation incidents a day.
No matter how I tried I couldn't get them down further.
But it worked! I was happier than I had ever been.
People started noticing that I was more positive and had a much more realistic approach to life and they began to ask how they could achieve the same results in their own lives.
So far I had ignored reality, and only focused on expectations, but I looked at how reality impacted on the level of happiness in my life and I came to the conclusion that there is an almost scientific formula for happiness: HAPPINESS = REALITY / EXPECTATIONS or H = R/E We have two ways of increasing the happiness in our lives.
The one I had used was a reduction process, I reduced my expectations and increased my happiness.
But there is a second way.
You can expand your reality by setting and achieving realistic goals to become more qualified, wealthy, popular or whatever.
A lot of my clients were over-achievers, and reducing their expectations was very difficult for them.
So we had to work out a programme of expanding their reality side by side with cutting out some of their more extreme expectations.
The perspective needed to shift from merely looking at overt success - professional growth, promotions, big contracts, more business, more money - to real success.
The apparently successful had to look behind their outward achievements to the desolation in their personal lives - the broken marriages, failed relationships, estranged or neglected parents and children, lack of true friendships and a hollow spiritual core - and decide if they really wanted to be happy.
Did their inner happiness mean enough to them to sacrifice some of the outer trappings of material success? If they could honestly answer in the affirmative, we worked together, if not they had to find another therapist.
Over the years I have helped a lot of individuals move towards real happiness, not just for themselves but also the people they care about.
They in turn have gone on to spread the message of the Happiness Formula to others.
In case you are thinking, "What on earth did she do with the Expectation Diaries?" After five years I had quite a few collected, so I burnt them.
I had a great time symbolically saying goodbye to the obstacles to my happiness.
There is something of an arsonist in most of us that loves a good bonfire, I think.
Source...