My coaching advice on sustaining happiness is always short, sweet, and dual-pronged:
- Until you’re happy with who you are, you’ll never be happy with what you have. Happiness is a place — a conclusive state of mind — and it is hard to feel successful about the lives we’re living if we are looking through a grumpy, unhappy lens.
- Do more and want less. Do more for others and want less for yourself. Many of the people I coach earn excellent livings. When one moans or gripes I will stop and tell them to walk around outside and come back after they see someone in a worse predicament. Few need even five minutes.
Happiness and feeling successful are symbiotic. Each feeds off the other, thanks to the ingredient balance of four quadrants:
- Physical
- Emotional
- Mental
- Spiritual
Physical. One of my favorite surveys from years gone by I saw while reading a USA Today waiting for an airplane. The question was simple: “Do you consider yourself better looking than others?”
I loved the results. Eighty percent of people think they’re better looking than eighty percent of people. This, of course, explains why “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It also means that for most of us, we’re okay enough with our physical state to feel fortunate, at least compared with others.
Feeling good about yourself physically is one-fourth of the recipe to feeling successful.
Emotional. From an emotional fulfillment standpoint, how comfortable are you at this stage of life? Do you have good balance or are you out of balance?
Emotional strength comes in all packages. I have seen remarkably humble men and women deal with tremendous challenges with such a steadfast courage and even keel that I openly admire their fortitude.
And I’ve seen big, rich, powerful men crumble like cookies.
Emotional fortitude involves a cocktail of strength, courage, resilience, guts, staying power, grit, stamina, determination, and endurance. Some are deeply anchored within it, others are light.
I have a phrase taped to my computer and look at it from time to time. It reads, “Even the strong are broken in places.”
It’s true. But none of us need remain broken forever.
Mental. Where’s your head? Does your mind live in a good neighborhood or does it wander where you know it doesn’t belong?
It is hard to feel successful about the life you are living if your head frequents a bad place. Since we find in life what we look for, consistently looking for the good in situations (and others) helps us get and stay where we need to belong.
Years ago I decided to quit hanging around with negative influences and negative people. Some I kissed off were friends. I thought I’d miss them. I haven’t. All of those former “friends” have been upgraded and replaced by “true friends.” My life in infinitely richer because of the people in it.
Having been on both sides of this one, I can tell you from experience that there is only one place to be: the land of positivity. Get to that place, be grateful for that place, and stay in that place.
Spiritual. The greatest gift my occupation has bestowed is the eye-opening respect the planet has taught me about how all means of spirituality shapes cultures, values, goodness, kindness, meanness, and badness.
I have traveled the Earth ’round and ’round and witnessed religion in countless variations. I do not think there is one “right” religion, but I do think it’s important for each of us to reconcile, in our own way, what’s right for us.
Having a spiritual void is, I believe, less fulfilling than having a spiritual contentment. As such, I’ve come to believe it is important to encourage everyone to pursue his or her own truth, even if that truth is different than yours and mine.
Spirituality impacts feeling successful. As there is no right or wrong religion, the real question you need to feel comfortable answering is, “Are you comfortable and committed to your beliefs?”
Summary
A feeling of personal success is determined by our level of completeness with each of four categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. When you are happy with who and where you are relative to all four, you will feel successful.
When a gap exists in one or more and that gap needs to be closed, you will feel less successful. Close the gap and you’ll feel more successful. Guaranteed.
Being aware of these four separate, important domains, makes it easy to diagnose why we may slide into a funk and not feel successful.
Boost your physical state of mind. Grow stronger and more confident emotionally. Protect your mental health and take pride in its insulation. Attain and retain a spiritual comfort.
Achieve all four of these things and you will feel successful because you are; you are winning the game the way it was meant to be played.
Success comes from being better, not perfect. Perfect is too hard and none of us is. None of us needs to be whole with all four of these categories but we do need to be good with them.
So the day’s big question is, “How good am I entitled to have my life be?”
The answer, of course, is, “As good as it is right now.”
Today does not lie. Everything in life added together has brought you to today. If you are in a good place and feel your life is a success, keep cooking that recipe because a good today leads into a good tomorrow and a good tomorrow leads into a good day after.
But if today you are not in such a good place, study the four elements — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — and change your equation. How you look at any of those four is changeable. A change in thoughts, feelings, and actions will take you to a different place — a better place.
Once you are in that better place, coach others how to feel more successful, too. Life is a team game played by individuals. Success can come to us all.