Welcome to Happy Productive #7 and today let’s discuss the difference between success and happiness. Especially with everything going on today I think it’s more important than ever to understand what each of these actually mean.
One of the biggest mistakes I made for years and I work with my clients on, is making success and happiness mean the SAME THING.
They are not.
In our culture today you see it all the time, people striving for success because they THINK it will make them happy, but it’s just not true. Let’s dive in further…
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Happiness and success are NOT the same
It’s important to know the difference and define them for yourself
Happiness is a feeling, so why keep putting it off
It’s happiness that leads to more success, not the other way around
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello hello my friends. Hello and welcome to Happy Productive episode No. 7. And today I want to talk about the difference between success and happiness.
So especially with all of the craziness that’s going on today, and in fact during today’s episode, you might hear some loud banging why because I have children from school, running around like little mad men all over my house today. But the show must go on and so even more now than ever before, I really think it’s super important for us to understand the difference between success and happiness.
Now, this is one of the biggest mistakes that I made for myself for years and years, especially when I was growing my first two companies, and now this is something that I see my clients making this mistake too, which is making happiness and success mean the same thing. But here’s the thing, here’s the deal, they are not the same thing, not at all. And in our culture today, you see this all the time, people striving for success, because they believe that it’s going to make them happy. But it’s just not true. Now, that doesn’t mean that if you achieve a goal that you’re not going to be happy about it. Of course you are, you’re going to experience momentary happiness, but it often doesn’t last.
Think about it for a second. Let’s say that you want this new car, and you work hard, and you get the new car, and you drive the new car and it makes you so happy and you think Oh my God, I will always be this happy. But then fast forward, you know, six months later a year later, that new car kind of loses, loses it right and you’re just not as happy as you are the first day that you got it. And you’ve got to move on to other things to try to achieve that level of happiness.
So also think about for a second successful people. If you’re standing in the line at the at the grocery store and you see all of the magazines, like there’s plenty of quote successful people on the covers that are clearly not happy. Or even look at the Royal Family. What we know about the royal family so you’re either born or you’re you marry into ridiculous wealth and you have cars and people at your beck and call, you have huge homes and fabulous trips. And yet what do we see? We see that they are not actually happy. Okay, so this is where I really want you to start to kind of separate the two and understand that being successful does not guarantee happiness.
So let’s dive in a little deeper and look at the definition of success. Because when we think about success, we usually will associate this with a high salary or lots of money, the ability to buy big things right? So, the actual definition of success is “the accomplishment of a name, attainment of popularity or profit, right attainment of popularity or money and achieving desired aims,” meaning that you got what you set out to do achieving desired aims. There is absolutely nothing in that definition that says anything about being happy.
So what is happiness? Happiness is defined as “a feeling of contentment, delight, or being pleased.” Note that it has nothing to do with success, meaning it doesn’t have anything to do with how much money you make, or how popular you are, or how many people know your name. And this is why it’s so important to know the difference between the two, and then define them for yourself. So happiness, remember, is a feeling. And because it’s a feeling, it’s always available to us. And I truly cannot think of any good reason why we should postpone our happiness until we meet some goal or until we achieve some level of happiness.
And this is what I did for years, and I see so many people doing is that we spend way too much time, like beating ourselves up because we’ve not had that “success” with a goal. And so we keep postponing our happiness and putting it off and putting it off until we achieve this “success” right that’s in our minds. This huge thing that we need to have happen in our future so that we can be happy. So other than just like sucking, there are so many reasons why this kind of thinking is actually backwards thinking. So numerous studies have shown that it’s happy people who actually achieve more. They live longer, they’re more likely to be promoted at work. And in fact, a Harvard study found it was not success that led to happiness. But in fact, it was the opposite. That was true. And it was happiness that led to more success.
So this is why being happy right now, in this present moment, exactly the way things are exactly the way things are. This is actually the key to achieving your goals. achieving your dreams, your desires, and achieving whatever level of success you’ve defined is right for you. Instead of waiting for these things to happen, so that you can finally be happy. So hopefully you can kind of see how that’s actually backwards thinking, instead of “When this happens, then I’ll be happy.” We’ve got to flip that around and be happy now. And when we’re happy now it will actually help us achieve our goals faster and easier, and it will be so much more fun.
So if we think about success, in terms of our goals, okay, so for goals, you hear all the experts saying that you want goals that are clearly defined and measurable, right? You’ve heard this S.M.A.R.T goals all over the place, right? So if it’s measurable and clearly defined, that’s how you know when you’ve achieved it. So if you set a goal to lose 10 pounds, you’re either successful, which means that you achieved the desired result. That’s all it means, you achieved the desired role result of losing the 10 pounds, or you’re not successful, which simply means you did not achieve that desired result. And technically, that’s actually defined as failure. Now, so many of us put so many other things on top of failure, like, we’re horrible people, we’re not good enough, we don’t have confidence, whatever it is, right? All those stories and crap that we pile on top of failure. But if you look up the definition of failure, all it means is that you did not achieve a desired result. That’s all we’re talking about here. Nothing more than that. So when you keep taking massive action each day, until you do achieve the desired result, that is actually success.
Here’s the deal. You get to be happy all along the way. You get to be happy while you’re taking action, you get to be happy while you’re failing, or not achieving that desired result the first time, the second time, the third time. You get to be happy while you’re continuing to take action and change and learn and grow. And you get to be happy when you do achieve that desired results. And the good news is that the happier you are, the easier taking action and getting your intended result is going to be. Think about this for a second, you’re happy in a good place, like taking action is fun! And you know, problems just sort of bounce off of you and you’re like, “woohoo, I’m kind of just enjoying the ride whenever that happens to be.”
But when you’re not happy, the ride is not so much fun. Okay? So this is where it’s really important for us to intentionally build happiness into our day. Remember, happiness is just a feeling. So when you do more of the things each day which make us happy, then we get to produce more and more of this emotion. And here we are on Happy Productive, okay? Producing more happiness in our life, and being a happier person, it helps us achieve our goals, get the results that we want, easier and faster. It’s the happiness, which leads us to success.
So one of the things I really want you to remember here is that success is something that you achieve on your own terms, it does not define your happiness. Instead, success is actually a byproduct of your happiness. So if we’re happy in the now, right, and we’re not attaching our happiness to some goal and giving our power to that goal to determine whether or not we’re going to be happy, then where does that leave us for our goals? Well, goals then simply become that fun stuff that we want to do to achieve our potential. Goals are about growing, they’re about learning, they’re about evolving, they’re about becoming all that we can be, but they are not about so we can be happy.
So knowing this difference between success and happiness, one of the great byproducts of it is that it really helped me to slow down and define more peace and joy and contentment, and satisfaction in my day. Because when you think about it like this, if you’re attaching your happiness to some goal in the future, and so you’ve postponed your happiness, and you’ve also given away your power, so that you’re now waiting for this goal to happen so that you can be happy. So you’re not happy right now, right? You’re going to want to get to happy, and that’s gonna make you pretty anxious and in a hurry and rushed and like, “Oh my god, like, am I ever gonna get there?” And it’s almost like this needy desperation that we’re just like, “Oh, we just have to make it happen.” Well, why? Because we’re literally starving ourselves for happiness right now.
But when you turn this around, and you make the choice that you know what, I’m just going to be happy now, whether I’ve achieved the goal or not. And I focus on things that produce more happiness in my day, exactly as things are and it doesn’t mean that you give up growing and evolving and becoming. Absolutely not. Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, well, “if I’m just happy right now, I have to give up on my dreams.” No, not at all. When you’re happy right now it makes going out and pursuing your dreams a lot easier and a lot more fun. Okay, but when we turn this around, and so we’ve not given away our power to some goal, we’ve not attached our happiness to something in the future. It’s almost like this peace that will come over you. Because you know that you still get to achieve the goal.
But you get to do it without all that desperation and neediness and sense of urgency that “Oh my God, I have to get there now.” Why? Because Well, you’re feeling good today. And this was a huge turnaround for me that I could literally just like breathe and be like, “okay, I can relax! I’m happy now. All is well.” Doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It doesn’t mean that at all, but it means that I choose to be happy right now. And now as I’m taking action on my goals, it’s this fun thing. And I don’t have to be so desperate to get there so I can be happy because I already have happiness.
So this is where like success with goals now just starts to turn into “Well, did I achieve the desired result?” That’s it. Either a yes or no. If I did great. If I didn’t, then I learned from it. I may be course correct, I pivot, I do something different. I take more action, and I keep going until I meet that desired result. And I love myself the entire way through. I enjoy the process. I enjoy that becoming all I can be. Here’s the beautiful part with this, win or lose whether you achieve the goal or you don’t, you still get to be happy. So even if you don’t achieve the goal, but you became a different person and you grew and you evolve, you win. And if you achieve the goal, fantastic you win too! And it’s really, really fun to like stack those happiness odds entirely in your favor.
Now for some of you this idea of being happy in the now is going to take some practice. I know when I learned about it and started doing it. It was like wow, this is really different and this is a little uncomfortable. So depending on how many years that you’ve been attaching your happiness to these other things, it might feel a little weird for you too, but I promise you can absolutely move through it. And I want to share with you today, a quick, easy tool that you can use to generate happiness right now in the present moment.
So maybe you’ve heard of something called “soul gazing.” This is a wonderful practice you can do with your intimate partner. And the idea behind it is that you stand or sit across from each other, you can hold each other’s hands, and you can set a timer for 4 minutes. And you just simply look into each other’s eyes. And, no words are spoken, and you just look into each other’s eyes. And this is something I do with my husband and I always love it because what happens is as you start to look into the eye of another person, for a few minutes, you’ll just sort of feel like all the barriers, all of the anything just kind of melt away. And you start to feel yourself filled with this, like unconditional love and compassion and empathy for this person in your life. And I love soul gazing.
And what you can do in this exercise I want to share with you is take the idea of soul gazing, but you’re going to do it for yourself. So no matter what state of mind you might be in, you just go into your bathroom and look into your bathroom mirror. And you’re going to do this for 2 or 3 minutes. It doesn’t have to be that long at all. I actually love habit stacking this on top of brushing my teeth. So I’m in the bathroom, the mirrors in front of me anyway. And so when I’m brushing my teeth in the morning and I’m brushing my teeth in the evening, I will do this version of soul gazing with myself. Okay? And so all you’re going to do is look in the bathroom mirror, you pick one eye to focus On and just repeat the words “I love you” over and over again 10 times, 20 times and as you do this, it’s going to start to fill your heart with love and empathy and compassion and yes, some happiness right now in the present moment, exactly the way that you are. So it’s just a fun little exercise.
Even if like as you’re going through your day, you’re just feeling beat up or you’re maybe not feeling safe or you’re just feeling a little hopeless. Go find a mirror, close the door, nobody has to know that you’re doing this. And just give yourself 3 or 4 minutes to soul gains. Tell yourself that you love you, over and over and over again and you’ll start to feel everything shifting. And I just this is one of my favorite exercises that I do every day.
Okay, you guys. That’s our lesson for today. I really hope that you enjoyed it. And if you did, you might want to also check out my other coaching programs. So in Goal Achievers, we dive into one life topic like this per month. So we’re always learning and growing together in a format that’s easy and never overwhelming. And if you’re a business owner, you might want to check out Inner Circle Coaching where we do the same thing. Plus you get access to everything and Goal Achievers, but we also dive into a business topic every month. Plus, we have open coaching calls, workshops, and so much more. You can find out information on my website jenniferdawncoaching.com, about either of my coaching programs. And if you have been looking for a little help in your life, I would encourage you to get in there. What are you waiting for? I’d love to work with you. Okay, that’s it. Have a wonderful, beautiful, Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer