Ashish Kothari argues happiness is subjective well-being, not just an emotion. He outlines five practices: presence, purpose, acceptance, nourishing relationships, and resilience to handle suffering.
I talk about this a lot in my book, Hardwired for Happiness, Courtney, where I talk about happiness, first of all, as subjective well-being. If you look at psychologists and what's happiness, they'll say it's subjective well-being because different things bring happiness and well-being to different people. But second, it's a lot more than an emotion. So I talk about this notion of fundamentally it's about cultivating a state of being that allows you to dance in the rain, to be able to handle all the emotions that come with it. And that state of true surrender and acceptance, it's a state of living in orientation to your purpose. It's cultivating presence, being in the here and now rather than constantly being torn apart, languishing the past and worrying about the future. It's around relationships and one that fuel us. So it's all about that foundation. It's a place from which we can handle suffering.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
