Is Happiness A Lost Skill For Successful People? - Nosh Detox

Is Happiness A Lost Skill For Successful People?

Is happiness a lost skill for successful people?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does anyone else find it annoying when people tell you to chill?

Or even worse to relax? and to take time off?

I appreciate I may not be the easiest person to deal with but I am an entrepreneur, a mother, a boss, a girlfriend a 'house-keeper & runner' and a cat owner dammit! All of that takes a lot of time, effort and focus to manage and make look effortless.

When you add to that the fact that as I run a health business and I am a busy professional I also have to look good, be groomed and stay successful - it doesn't leave a heck of a lot of time for 'chilling'. [Am I the only woman in the world who hates manicures?]

Ask me if i mind? Go on ask me? No! i wouldn't change my life for anything. I am really happy being a driven alpha female type, it gets stuff done in my life, pays my bills and gets my kids through school. So all in all, I'm good and not complaining.

But I ended up doing a Wheel of life coaching session with one of my clients and as they say - you learn what you teach. We were talking about how she was stuck in Survival and I wanted her to move to 'Thrival'. She'd forgotten how to be happy, to have joy.

Which got me thinking about joy. I am really not sure about joy. I mean I feel happy, regularly. I am grateful ALL the time. But joyful? I dunno really. its not that I think I've never felt it, but just that I am not sure I remember how to do it?

I decided I needed to 'learn' how to have more joy in my life. Yes my friends started laughing too..................

But here's what I think. when you are little you don't grow up knowing how to survive do you? Its a lesson painfully learnt along the way, incident by event by experience. And we really applaud and praise people who survive. Its almost rude not to.

But where do we 'learn' joy growing up? Even more importantly I have never ever heard myself say to anyone 'Wow you are so happy well done!!' It even sounds silly. But its so important.

And its really hard to change brain function after your mid-20's because that's when our brain builds all the neural pathways it needs for your most common behaviour. To change behaviour you need to be really focused and use repetition and practise. Why? because this is the only way you’ll actually grow new neurons strong enough to connect with existing neurons, forming new pathways writes Tara Swart, a senior lecturer at MIT, in her book Neuroscience for Leadership

She explains that “Depending on the complexity of the activity, [experiments have required] four and a half months, 144 days or even three months for a new brain map, equal in complexity to an old one, to be created in the motor cortex.”

During this time, motivation, willpower, and self-control are necessary to achieve your goal."

The interesting thing is this, that I resisted all suggestions to slow down and chill for so long because honestly I like my drive. I like my ambition. I need it to help me live my life and its made me successful. but 'happy and joyful' to me sound very much like 'slowing down and failing' in my brain. I know that's not true, I am just saying that subconsciously that's what I connected.

So I experimented with [carefully.........] letting go. I started choosing 'happier' choices, I started checking in with how I felt and stopping when I wasn't 'happy'. I have to say I found this very difficult. Most successful people allow a certain discomfort in their lives as a price we pay for succeeding. We just don't discuss it.

But you know what? Working with joy is actually not slowing down. Or failing.

What I have found is that the more joy I let into my life the stronger and more powerful I feel. And even better, the more successful I have become. And the better I am at helping my clients and my family and my employees to succeed.

How happy are you? Email me let me know what makes you happy.