Stupidest happiness mistake is knowing what is happy and

yet not choosing it.

Happiness is one of the most important goal and yet we repeatedly sacrifice the same thing.

One in four people are willing to sacrifice their happiness for a higher salary. The tendency is so common
that even when you are given a golden opportunity and most of you wouldnt think of happiness.

Genie question only 12 percent asked for Happiness, The most asked wishes were Wealth, Success and
fame

Why?

Because we have a lack of clarity of what happiness means to us. Because its abstract and not
quantifiable which makes us devalue it. Misconceptions about happiness.

Happier people do well at work

Medium maximization. It refers to seeking things for things that have stopped making us happy. E.g.
paychecks. There will be appoint where it will not make us happy

Three steps

Happy things list Because then happiness will be less abstract to you

Will dispel any misconception /

Do things on the happy things list Less prey to medium

maximization

Asking yourself. AM I prioritising happiness

When you make happiness as a goal you want to chase and that means you begin to monitor and when
you begin to do that it turns out you dont achieve it. For example sleep. Trying to monitor sleep doesnt
help because when you are asleep you cant monitor it anymore.

Happiness paradox Peopel realise it is important but forget it and give opportunities to maximise it

Five things for life of happiness

Bare neccessities

Mastery

Belonging

Autonomy

Which is am MBA to be happy

Abundance mindset Doing what you do with kindness and compassion

Simple and complicated.

Great social relationships, sense of purpose and positive attitude in life.

Complicted

Smart not satisfited with what but also why

This not enogh but how you are going to achieve

There are several practices or exercises that can help not only mitigate the seven deadly happiness sins, but also nurture
what I call the "seven habits of the highly happy". The seven core exercises include: defining and incorporating happiness,
expressing gratitude, creative altruism (basically, random acts of kindness), leading a healthy lifestyle (eating right,
moving more, sleeping better), exercising "smart trust", forgiveness and mindfulness.

The 7 Happiness Sustaining Strategies

Lecture transcript
Hi everyone and welcome back. At the end of this video we're gonna do a happiness measurement,
the third and final one. Hopefully, you will see that your happiness levels have improved. I fully
expected to actually since you've obviously been diligent for watching all the videos if you've gotten
to this point. It's also very likely that you've done all the exercises diligently and also been open-
minded. But just because your happiness levels have improved since you started the course doesn't
mean that it will continue to stay improved in the future. It's gonna take quite a bit of conscious effort
and smartness on your part in order to keep your happiness balloon big. One big reason for this has
to do with the fact that old habits die hard. Old habits are difficult to break. As several authors,
including Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis and Chip and Dan Heath, Switch have noted.
Your own habits, which were the cause of your lower happiness levels have been conditioned into
you for years, if not decades. For example, if you work in a typical corporation you're probably
surrounded by messages that reinforce the need for superiority and more generally the scarcity
mindset. Likewise, if you follow news every day, you've probably been bombarded with negative
news and stories that instill a sense of distrust of others and of life itself. During this course, you may
have managed to keep some of these negative influences at bay. But now that the course is over,
those old conditionings may re-emerge and re-assert themselves. And it is important that you do
your best to not just be aware of how various genetic and social influences might reinforce the
scarcity mindset and the seven deadly happiness sins. But it's also very important that you take
action to fend them off. As Jiddu Krishnamurthi, a famous Indian philosopher once said, It's no
measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That is, for your happiness
balloon to continue to stay inflated, you need to find ways of mitigating the happiness sense and
reinforcing the happiness habits in the future, for the rest of your life I would say, in fact. Okay, so in
this video I'm gonna discuss seven strategies that you can use to help you do this. The first strategy
is based on something that my good friend Marshall Goldsmith, the world renowned CEO coach and
best selling author of several books including, What Got You Here Won't Get You There and more
recently, Triggers, told me when I spoke to him recently. I asked Marshall, why is it that even the
smart and successful people, those people who are otherwise brilliant at setting and achieving their
goals, falter so badly when it comes to leading a happy and fulfilling life? Here is what he had to say,
listen. What I tell people Matt, is I'm gonna teach you a process that takes two minutes a day. It
costs nothing, will help you get better almost anything. And about half the people will quit within two
weeks. And you won't quit cuz it doesn't work, you'll quit because it does work. Now this is called the
daily question process. Every day I have someone go through questions with me. For example, Raj,
one of my questions is how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it was
not worth it? Kind of hard for the old executive coach not to be right all the time. Now how about
professor Raj? You ever try to be right just a little bit too much on occasion, yeah? How many angry
or disturbed comments did I make about people yesterday? Did I say it would be something nice for
my son, my daughter, my wife, my son-in-law? Every day, I ask myself these questions. Why? To
keep it in my head. Why don't people do what I teach? As you probably know, I'm the only person I
would bet you've ever met that's collected feedback and published it from tens of thousands of
people who have been in my classes. And I measure do they do what I teach and do they get
better? Well, the people that do the stuff get better. Shockingly, the people that do nothing don't get
better. Well, why don't they do what I teach? Years ago, my biggest client was Johnson & Johnson. I
had the privilege of working with the top 2,000 leaders all the way from Ralph Larsen, who was the
CEO, down to number 2,000. They all went to my class, and they all said they were gonna do what I
taught. 98% said I would do what he thought. A year later, 70% did something, and 30% absolutely
zero, nothing. And we got to interview the people that did nothing and said why didn't you do
anything? They would say nothing to do with ethics, values, or integrity. They won an award that
year, most ethical company in the world. They're good people. Had nothing to do with intelligence.
They're smart people. Why didn't they do it? It had to do with a dream. This is a dream I've had for
years, and I'm gonna predict many people listening to me have had this dream. The same stupid
dream on a recurring basis for years. And it's gonna describe why in life we don't do what we should
do. The dream sounds like this, I'm incredibly busy right now. Given pressures of work and home,
and new technology that follows me everywhere and emails and voicemails and global competition, I
feel about as busy as I ever have. Sometimes I feel overcommitted. I don't tell others this, but every
now and again my life feels just a little bit out of control. But I'm working on some very unique and
special challenges right now. And I think the worst of this is gonna be over in two or three months.
And after that I'm gonna take two or three weeks to get organized, and spend time with the family.
And I'm gonna begin my new healthy life program. And everything is going to be different. And it
won't be crazy any more. How many people have ever had a dream that resembles this dream? How
many years have we been having the same dream? Why don't people do what I teach? They're
busy, they're overcommitted, they're tired, they're depleted, and it is very, very hard to keep stuff in
our head. Why do I pay someone to call me everyday, because if I didn't, I wouldn't do it. It's hard.
It's hard for me, it's hard for you, it's hard for all of us to do these things. So as you just heard
Marshall say, one big reason why we all find it difficult assessing happiness levels is because we
postpone prioritizing happiness to a later date. We tell ourselves that we will start practicing the
happiness enhancing habits in a few weeks or months. This is a dangerous dream as we call it,
because it can sound very reasonable to tell yourself that you'll start something once this currently
busy period is over. But before you know it, the months have turned into years, and the years into
decades and you are, as Pink Floyd said, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. So it's very
important to make a very strong commitment to yourself, that you're going to do your best on a daily
basis try to, starting today to do things that mitigate the seven deadly happiness sins and reinforce
the seven habits of the highly happy. This leads me to the first strategy for sustaining happiness,
which is to respond to daily questions posed by what Marshall Goldsmith calls a peer coach. A peer
coach is somebody who will ask you a series of questions on an everyday basis, to make sure that
you're on track to mitigating the happiness sins and reinforcing the happiness habits. Each question
will begin with the phrase, today, did you do your best to. And the first question, for example is,
today, did your do your best to prioritize happiness over other goals, like being right. Another
question is today, did you do your best to be kind and compassionate, and so on. Now Marshall
himself thinks this is such an important thing to do that he pays somebody to ask him these types of
daily questions, but luckily for you and me, we don't have to pay anybody to be our peer coach. We
have each other. We can just request somebody else taking this course to be our peer coach. And
offer to be their peer coach in return. Of course if you're uncomfortable having somebody from the
course be your peer coach, you can choose somebody else from outside Or we're gonna offer you
the choice of choosing the computer to be your peer coach. Similar to how, if you remember, you
received emails reminding you to eat well and move more and see better in the fourth exercise. You
can choose to receive a daily reminder on the computer that asks you the questions. Later in the
video, I'll will tell you how to put the first strategy into practice. Let me move on now to the next set of
strategies for sustaining happiness. And in this context, I wanna mention that I recently had the
pleasure of interviewing Art Markman, a colleague of mine at the University of Texas, and a brilliant
professor of social psychology, and author of a book that recently came out called, Smart Change.
The book is all about how one can get rid of old, unproductive habits and acquire new and
productive ones. I asked Mark, why people find it difficult to break old habits like smoking or eating
unhealthy and acquire new ones, like exercising ball? You'll see in his response that Art starts by
telling us how our motivational system works. He then builds on that to derive some useful strategies
for breaking old habits and replacing them with new ones, listen. Here's the way your motivational
system works really quickly. Deep inside your brain, you have a bunch of mechanisms that try to
engage the goals that you have. Give activity to those goals and drive your behavior and then learn
habits, where they associate the environment with the behavior. And I call that system the go system
just, so that you can think about it as the thing that forces you to go and do something. And then
there's the stop system, which is really just a couple ounces of brain material above your eyes that is
really designed when the go system engages a habit or a behavior and you don't want to perform
that habit, it's that stop system that says, hey, it puts on the brakes and tries to keep you from doing
that. Now, here's the problem. A lot of the goals you mentioned, which are the ones that are most
persistent, those are the ones that are hard to change. And the reason they're hard to change is
because we frame them negatively most of the time. I wanna quit smoking, I want to eat less, I
wanna stop checking my email. The problem with that is what you're doing is saying, I've got this
goal. The go system is gonna engage the goal to smoke or to check my email and then the only
thing standing between me and that is that stop system and the stop system is very inefficient. It can
be impaired by stress, by drugs and alcohol, by overuse. There are effects called ego depletion
effects, where basically if you do something, if you control your behavior for too long, that stop
system doesn't work as effectively. And so one of the very first things you wanna do is rather than
frame your goals negatively, you wanna frame them positively. You wanna think in terms of actions
you're going to perform rather than actions you're not gonna perform. So the question is what am I
going to do instead of checking my email too often? How can I help myself to do something positive?
What am I gonna do instead of smoking? What will I do with my hands? What will I do with my
mouth? So, I'm replacing that behavior rather than just trying to stop myself. That's the first thing.
The second thing that you need to do is to remember the environment drives your behavior, cuz the
habits are really an association between the environment and the action you're gonna perform. So,
one of the things that you really need to do is to influence that environment and in particular, to make
desirable behaviors easy an undesirable behavior's hard. Now it seems simple, but we often do that.
I mean, I lost a lot of weight years ago. One of the reasons is cuz I used to have these containers of
ice cream that I would keep in my freezer and I would sit down at night in front of the TV with a big
thing of ice cream and a spoon and I would just eat it till it was gone. And I made this remarkable
discovery, which is you can't eat an ice cream that isn't in your freezer. So if you don't buy it, you
can't eat it and those simple kinds of changes to your environment influence what you do and what
you don't do. So if you wanna walk more often, then put yourself in a situation in which you have to
walk more often. People who are driving somewhere, don't park closest to the store. Park at the first
space you come to in the lot and walk across the parking lot. Put yourself in the situation where you
have to engage more activities, because of the way the environment is set up. A third big thing is
you wanna engage with people. We're a social species, we can't do anything alone. I mean, take the
biggest, strongest, most powerful athlete you can think of. Put him up next to a bear. I'm betting on
the bear every single time, because alone, we're really not all that impressive. But together, we're
pretty amazing. And so if you think about all of the social things that influence our goals, one of them
is this idea of goal contagion. If you hangout with people doing a particular thing, your goals are
literally contagious. You will wanna do what they're doing. So hangout with people who are doing the
behavior you want to perform and naturally, you're gonna join in and the other thing is don't be afraid
to ask for help. A lot of people are a little embarrassed by the changes they wanna make or they feel
like they have to do it alone, there's no extra prize. You don't get an extra gold star, if you change
the behavior all by yourself. So give yourself a chance by asking people for help. Find out how did
they do the thing that you wanna do and allow them to help you and then when you reach that GUI
middle stage of changing your behavior, like in New Years a lot of times people will setup a
resolution to change behavior. And for three weeks, they are great and then it just sort of falls off.
And maybe if they had a goal to lose a certain amount of weight and they managed to stick with it,
their motivation might kick back in towards the end. What do you do in the middle? One of the things
you can do in the middle is actually to begin to serve as an advisor or a mentor to somebody else,
because a lot of times if you've been doing something for a month or two months or three months,
you've forgotten the amount of progress that you've made. If you can turn around and help
somebody else, suddenly you begin to realize how far you've come and that can be really
motivating. So in a lot of ways, if we change the nature of the goals that we're trying to achieve the
focus on the positive one. If we change the environment, so that we're making desirable behaviors
easy, undesirable behaviors hard. And if we engage with people, both by hanging out with the
people who do what we want to do and learning from them and then serving as a mentor ourselves.
We're doing a lot of things that we need to do, that will really help us to change behavior in a way
that works with the structure of our motivational system. So according to Art, there are for things that
can help replace old habits with new ones. These four things form the basis for the second, third
fourth and fifth strategies, which are second strategy is to frame your goals in positive terms versus
negative terms. For example, make your goal, I want to be a happier, more fulfilled person, not that I
don't want to be depressed. And frame your goals in terms of I wanna take internal control rather
than I wanna be less controlling of others. We have already done this positive framing for you in the
way the daily questions are phrased as you will soon see for strategy one, but you may want to
remember the importance of positive framing for the other goals you set for your self as well. The
third strategy is to alter your environment, so that it's easier for you to make happiness enhancing
decisions. For example, put unhealthy snacks in difficult to reach places. We already talked a little bit
about this in week number four. Likewise, if you know someone who makes you feel scarcity-
minded, avoid them. Similarly, if you know that being out in nature Reinforces an abundance
mindset, do that. In the reference section this week, you'll find a bunch of books and movies that
help me to give the scarcity mindset, and reinforce the abundance mindset. Please take advantage
of them, and also please share your own set of movies, books, videos, articles, and other resources
with everyone through the discussion forum, so that all of us can benefit from this. The fourth
strategy involves joining other seekers of happiness and fulfillment. As you may know we have
Armando Sulsa, and Kim Conga, they've already started such a community for this course on
Facebook. Which has close to 1,000 members as I speak. You might want to consider joining this
group. You can also sign up to receive free emails from dailygood.org. Dailygood.org is one of those
initiatives that my friend Nipun Mehta, the guy who helped start Karma Kitchen, helped found, when
he and his friends recognized that few media outlets disseminate good news from around the world,
of people behaving in kind, trusting, forgiving ways. Personally, I find that reading an email from
DailyGood helps me reinforce the abundance mindset. Particularly when I go to work early in the
morning, it's a good thing to do. Of course, in addition to being part of these virtual communities, it
will be great if you also considered putting together a face to face group, and met with them, say, at
once a week. Perhaps you can actually start a group like that in your own city if you have other
people taking this course from your city. The fifth strategy is to serve as a mentor to somebody else,
that is, to help someone else figure out how to go about leading a happier and more fulfilling life.
Now, even as I say this, I also have to quickly mention that please be careful in implementing this
strategy. Most people don't like to get advise from other people, particularly on happiness. I think
that's because most of us have our own pet theories on happiness and we don't like to have those
theories challenged. So pick and choose your mentees carefully. Close friends and family are okay,
but if it's a colleague or a neighbor, I would think twice. So these strategies, two through five, that I
just discussed, are based on what Art Martman covers in his book, Smart Change. In addition to
these five strategies that I've covered so far, I'm gonna mention two more that I think you will find
useful. The sixth strategy, is to continue to be open minded to new happiness enhancing habits and
exercises for the rest of your life. As you know, open-mindedness is a very very important trait, that I
stressed at the beginning of the course. An openness to new experiences is hugely important in any
domain it turns up, but I think it's particularly important in the domain of happiness. It's very easy to
get wedded to a particular idea, ] that I am this kind of person. I'm an introvert, so I can't do certain
things like gratitude exercise. Or that I'm a kind of flow person so I can't hang out with status
seekers. Although some of these identities, for example I'm a flow person, are better than other
types of identities, like I'm a status seeker for happiness, all identities are ultimately somewhat
constraining. So the more you believe that you don't have a set identity and that it can change into
who ever you need to become, that is, you give yourself the freedom to evolve continuously, the
more easily you will find that you are able to adopt new happiness habits and exercises. Here is Art
Martman, talking about the importance of open-mindedness for leading a happier and more fulfilling
life. If you find yourself in a behavior pattern in which you're not experiencing much joy and fulfillment
in your life, or not as much as you think you could, then there's no reason to believe that persisting in
the same set of behaviors that you 're doing already, is gonna make you happier in the future. You're
gonna have to make some kind of a change, if you want there to be a change in your internal set of
feelings. and that is going to mean taking on a little bit of the discomfort of trying something new and
recognizing, that until that new thing becomes familiar, it's gonna feel uncomfortable. You know, a lot
of people who are on the closed to experienced end or don't want to try something will do it half-
heartedly for too short a period of time and then say see, that didn't work, that was no fun. And of
course it's no fun. The mere exposure effect that Bob Zine studied, shows that when you first
encounter anything you don't like it very much. The first time you hear a song that's destined to
become your favorite song of all time, you still don't necessarily like it all that much. Because it's
new, and then after you hear it a few times, it grows on you. Same thing with a lot of the foods that
we eat, and a lot of the people that we meet. You may not click with those things right away because
they're new, but over time, the familiarity actually makes you like them better. And see you have to
give these things a chance if you want there to be any opportunity to allow those new opportunities
to make you happier. As Art just mentioned, new things, for example, practicing loving kindness
meditation, may make us feel uncomfortable. So we may not be willing to give them a wholehearted
try. But once we get past that initial discomfort, It's quite likely that we'll find them useful because
they have been found to be very useful for many, many people in all these studies. Now if you find
that you don't want to try something because it makes you uncomfortable, or because it's not me, I'd
recommend taking a deep breath and giving it a whole hearted try firs,t before rejecting it. Here's Art
again, one last time, expressing the sentiment in his own words. I tell people who are on that closed
to experience end of things, that if your initial reaction to new things is to discount them just because
they're new, count to ten before you say no. And ask yourself am I doing this because it's a bad idea
or am I just doing it because, if I'm just saying no because it's new. And if you're just saying no
because it's new, then really give yourself a chance to try it any how. Okay so the seventh and final
strategy is a somewhat opportunistic one that kind of just fell into my lap. Just a few days back I
attended a mindfulness workshop conducted by Swati Desai, a mindfulness consultant from Los
Angeles, California. I really liked the workshop and I asked Swati if she'd be willing to lead a six-
week long virtual, mindfulness camp for those who have completed this class, and she's agreed.
Why six weeks long, and how does virtual mindfulness camp work? I will let Swati answer those
questions in the next video which is an optional one. Meanwhile, to summarize, here are the seven
strategies for sustaining your happiness levels after this course ends. I hope that you take
advantage of as many of these strategies as you can. Before we end the video, we have two more
tasks to complete. First I want you to do the final happiness measurement. You will see the
happiness measurement link come up on your screen in just a minute. You know what to do, click on
the link and complete the happiness measurement. Then come back here and finish the rest of the
video. Great. So now, you have all three happiness measurements and I do hope that you have
seen at least some improvement in your happiness levels. If you're comfortable sharing your results
with us, we'd love to hear from you. With that, let me turn to the very last item on the agenda for this
video which is to share with you the link to he website which has information on how to put in place
the first strategy for sustaining happiness, the peer coach strategy. Soon you'll see a link appear on
the screen that you will need to click on and once you do, it will take you to a website where you can
find the instructions for this strategy. That's it for now. Please don't forget to watch the next video,
which is an optional one, In which Swati Desai, the mindfulness consultant from Los Angeles, will
give us detail on the seventh strategy for sustaining happiness. The strategy of doing a six week
mindfulness practice. See you soon.