Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

When I finally got up the nerve to leave corporate life it was like finding the off-switch on a perpetually-talkback-tuned radio. Realizing I could have silenced the maddening demagogue and his band of yokels all along was a shock – I’d become so blinded by the daily scramble of desperate deadlines, so trapped into thinking I needed the overblown paycheck and accoutrements to survive, that I’d lost sight of what made me happy and how much power I had to create it for myself.

It’s not easy to shake off a mantle you’ve worn for a long time – even if it no longer suits you. And that makes it hard to re-connect with any passion lurking below.

For me, the answer to the question What work would bring me happiness? came with time, and from reading books. Books always seem to have the answers I’m looking for.

But you might prefer a different approach – perhaps using exercises, writing and active self-exploration. If that sounds like you, I’ve found a resource you might like.

Cheryl Richardson has suggestions for locating your latent love in her Passion Path of Development. This is a four-stop journey to finding where your ‘deepest delights’ lie:

Stop 1: Make space

Stop 2: Be an explorer

Stop 3: Find the gold

Stop 4: Take action

Along the way she suggests specific exercises, activities and journal-writing tasks as tools for helping you move toward your passion.

I remember being in that post-corporate limbo, trying to recall what my likes and dislikes had been before I’d sacrificed them to the God of suck-cess. Along with clarity about work came other realizations: that the music I liked was classified as alternative; that I wasn’t, and never had been, a people person; that I much preferred fun costume pieces to real jewelry, and that I was inordinately fond of anything pink and sparkly.

So if you’re committed to uncovering rather than imposing, be warned that your natural inclinations may be less polished or sophisticated than you’ve been telling yourself all these years.

But whatever you do – please don’t discover you like talkback radio.

Related posts:
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion #2

Image by by Lost in Scotland under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

If Monday’s post got you considering your own calling, you may be interested in this week’s TIME magazine article Happiness on the job, which asks the question: Which jobs make people happy?

The answer, it seems, is not necessarily the best-paid ones. According to the article:

- Americans are reasonably happy workers. About 90% rate their jobs as moderately or very satisfying.
- The highest happiness scorers are firefighters and priests, occupations with incomes around the US average.

I won’t go into the hierarchy of happy vocations diagrammed in TIME because I’d hate to imply that a particular job makes happiness more or less likely. In fact, even though I’ve provided the link I don’t recommend you check out where your job sits on the index – unless you’re already pretty happy and won’t be discouraged if your job ranks low. There are happy and unhappy people in every occupation, so knowing the happiness rank of the average person with your job isn’t all that enlightening.

TIME asks which jobs make people happy, but a better question is which job will make you happy. The kind of work that can bring you happiness will most likely:

• Tap your talents and strengths
• Be enjoyable
• Give you a sense of purpose and meaning.

It’s no wonder, then, that firefighters and clerics top the list – you wouldn’t choose either career path to dodge the family business or make a quick buck – you’d have to feel called to it. It’s also significant that these high happiness scorers are average income earners.

Once again, it seems that meaning matters more than money in making you happy. (Hey – I could have said merry.)

As if we needed more convincing.

Related posts:
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion
How to be happy – 10. Don’t keep up with the Joneses

Looking back, there have been clues that I didn’t choose my ideal career. The fact that I was roused from a deep sleep (not study-induced) by an invigilator during a microeconomics exam should have been the first indicator that commerce may not have been my true love.

Determined to make my way in the world, I took my commerce degree and spent the next 13 years in financial-services marketing. The early years were fun and exciting, but the higher up the ladder I went, the more urgently flashed Stephen Covey’s warning that my ladder might be up against the wrong wall. I dismissed it as an after-image indelibly burned on my retinas from all those eighties nightclub strobes. (Steps, anyone? Rogues?)

That was until I got married and things became more skewed – I discovered that my husband (the betrayal still smarts) enjoyed his work. Clearly, something was very wrong with one of us. Probably him, I rationalized.

Then one day I was chatting to a friend. I said, ‘You know when you’re heading back from lunch and you see a truck and you think: How cool would it be to get run over – not seriously hurt, just enough to spend a couple of weeks in hospital…’

Well, I never got to finish the thought – my friend was so alarmed I had to pretend it was a joke and change the subject. That’s when I knew it was time for financial-services marketing and I to part ways.

It took several months to work out what I wanted to do, and when I did it was so blindingly obvious that you’d think I had been hit by that truck and suffered several unsuccessful rounds of remedial frontal lobe work.

Three books were immeasurably helpful – both to me and to the many friends and family members who’ve since sought guidance in navigating their own career crossroads. Each book fills a different role, and together they make a fantastic set of resources for finding your passion – even if it turns out to be blindingly obvious.

Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
by Marsha Sinetar

Do What you Love is like a long conversation with a wonderfully wise friend. It goes the deepest of the three books, encouraging you to think about who you are and to explore the importance of finding a way to express yourself. Don’t be scared though – I’m not a touchy-feely person and I wasn’t freaked out at all. The insights are well worth the journey.

The Money or Your Life
by John Clark

The Money or Your Life is more of a practical workbook.

It’s filled with fun cartoons, motivating quotes, thought-provoking diagrams and good common sense.

Follow Your Heart by Andrew Matthews

Andrew Matthews writes delightful books that he illustrates with great warmth, wisdom and humor. Follow your Heart  is encouraging, motivating and charming. This book is the most ‘lightweight’ of the three, but is still loaded with helpful insights for the career-challenged soul.

Note: The first two are a little hard to find, so I’ve included the best links I could ferret out. The last one is easily available on Amazon or through my Happy Store.