What People Don’t Realize About Happiness

No one stole your joy. You gave them your attention. You're the gatekeeper. Up here, you're the generator. Up here, you're the commander. Up here. Emotions pass. Usually in 90 seconds to three minutes, the emotions actually pass. When you think about it, you're like, oh yeah, I am kind of happy. But you can't intellectualize happiness and gratitude for a lot of people. They have to generate it. You have to take it as a job. I have to put myself in a good state. I have to summon the best of who I am. It doesn't happen by default. Most people are actually happy. They're just unhappy that they're not happy all the time. Hey guys, it's Brendan. And as you know, I rarely do sit down interviews with anybody. And so this is a special episode. I'm doing a six part series with my friend Pastor Steven Furtick talking about how you can use faith and mindset and high performance to improve your life. This was a rare sit down interview for either of us in our busy lives. We're both New York Times bestselling authors. We both teach millions of people every single week. We have the opportunity of reaching so many people. Me with personal development and high performance training. He of course in ministry in Christianity and sharing his message as a pastor of faith and how to improve your life through a connection with God. And it was kind of a cool sitting down and coming together of these two worlds to talk about one thing, mindset and how you can become the new you. What? His new book is entitled do the new you. It's a six part series, so I hope you'll enjoy it here. It's rare that I put anything like this on my YouTube channel because most of my channel is my keynote presentations or my live casts or replays for my courses. But you're getting an exclusive look right here in some behind the scene conversations I get to have in my life all the time. But this time we recorded it. So with no further ado, please enjoy this conversation with myself and Pastor Steven Furtick, author of the new book do the new you.

How to own your emotions so you don't run around saying stuff like they didn't make me happy or I left that company because it wasn't making me fulfilled. Well, happiness, fulfillment, all of those things aren't something that someone else can make you. And I think that ownership process of our own joy is a lifelong process, a moment by moment process. You know, in the church, people say they stole my joy, then what in the world were you doing putting it where they could steal it. You should have locked it up. You should have had it somewhere safe. You should have put your joy somewhere other than just how somebody else treats you. But really, like I told you, in so many of these mindsets, these are the things that I preach to me because nobody is going to vote me for the naturally happiest human alive. That's not my disposition. That doesn't mean that it can't be my destination, though. I can become more joyful, I can become more grateful. I can practice these things. And that's why I brought the world's best life coach to help me. So make me happy, Brendan. It's your job. Make me happy. Make me joyful.

I don't know if I can make you happy. I'll start with the coaching piece.

Yeah.

He said a second ago, they stole my joy. And a lot of people say that. I say, no one stole your joy. You gave them your attention.

Wow.

That's what happened. You took your. That's what happened.

That's what happened.

No one took it. You gave them your attention. You gave them your belief. You gave them your thought pattern. Instead of owning the fact that you control this, you're the gatekeeper up here, you're the generator up here, you're the commander up here. And when you know you own this, you start to own your emotions. And I always love to tell people there's a difference between emotion and feelings. Different. A nice way to think about it is we have impulsive emotions and we have ongoing feelings. And let me give you a difference. If you go into a haunted house, right, and someone jumps out from the corner, that fear that hits you, that is automatic. It's physical and it's impulsive. Fear just hits you, you get scared, right? But if you go home at night, and now it's 7 o' clock at night, you're safe in your house, the doors are locked, your husband or your spouse is there, things are good, and you still, you start kind of getting spooked. I feel like something is bad is going to happen. Now, that ongoing feeling, you're generating that with your thoughts. The first one, immediate fear, scared. That's impulsive. That's automatic. An emotion is like that just happens in your body. But psychologists found emotions pass usually in 90 seconds to three minutes, the emotion actually pass. Now our thoughts really do take over. And our thoughts are forming a story. Our thoughts are telling us what something means. Our thoughts are either taking command of us or we're gonna take command of them. Cause we can say Wait, I'm in the house. Everything's okay. Oh, I just got scared earlier, and I'm holding on to that. Unhappiness is very similar. Something can happen. It's an unhappy situation. Someone was mean to us. You know, something awful happened. It makes me feel bad. There's grief there, there's hurt there. And we can feel that. Like, in that immediate emotion, I'm just like, oh, that I feel bad. But if later on, it's an ongoing feeling of unhappiness, I promise you're architecting your thoughts in such a way that's creating the ongoing happiness. So think about it. Is the situations of your life, the bad events of your life, are they still dragging on in the feelings of today? That's where we say, oh, I gotta take back command of the architecture of my thoughts here. Because that's what's really screwing me up. That's what's stealing my joy, is I'm not architecting the thoughts that would give me that. And then you hear me teach all the time, I'm always sharing this idea that my dominant metaphor in my life is about a power plant.

I love this. Y' all listen to the power plant.

This.

This changed your life. This is crazy.

This changes my life every day.

Yeah.

And the idea is, you know, the power plant doesn't have energy. It actually generates energy. So technically, a power plant takes energy from one level of resource, a rushing stream or solar or whatever. It's taking energy from one level, lower level of utilization. It's transforming that energy into a higher level of utilization, and it's transmitting it. And I love it. Because the power plant doesn't have energy. Oh, it's. It's taking energy from one lower level. It's transforming it and transmitting it to a higher level. That means I can do that in my own life. You know, I'm feeling a low level of energy today. I don't have motivation. I don't have joy. I don't have love in my heart. Actually, I woke up kind of grumpy. Well, that's a low level of utilization. It's my job. How do I take the energy? The world or my situation, My life, my relationships? And how do I take ownership as a power plant? And how do I uplevel that? Why do that? With my thoughts? My thoughts are my turbines. My thoughts are the thing that can spin that energy up into a higher level. And now I can be a person of goodness. I can be a person of cheer. I can be a person of joy. And it is that choice to be the power plant of the feelings of my life that has made my life more fulfilling because before that I was at the whim of everybody else and everything else. Because, see, most of the world right now, it's a pretty low level energy. There's a lot of division and vitriol and hate and us against them. It's low level. But you can say, I'm not going to live in that mud puddle. I'm going to take the water out of that mud puddle. I'm going to turn it through these turbines of joy and faith and reasoning and logic and a desire for an extraordinary life. I'm going to spin that up and boom. I'm going to feel different and transmit different.

Yes. See, man, now you make me want to be in church. I want it to be 10 o' clock on a Sunday morning. I want a Hammond B3 organ because I want to talk about the power plant. And Jesus said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, what's that? That's taking the power and then transforming that power into a witness. So you see what he just did? He said, I'm going to give you power from another place. And then I want your faith to be the turbine by which you take what I've given you and take it to the world. And that's so much more empowering to me than it is to sit there and go, lord, give me joy. I'm trying to get people out of this pattern that we have, Brendan, sometimes of going, lord, give me joy, give me joy, give me joy. And the Lord gave you somebody to help that would have brought you joy if you would have helped that person. And I also think that we should talk about this. Isn't the happiness that we want often hidden in the thing that we resist?

Wow. Say more about that.

Well, I have had so many times where it was the exact thing I didn't want to do that gave me the mood boost that I needed. You know, I'm sitting here thinking of all the things we try to do to be happy. You know, all the things that I've bought to try to be happy, all the things I've done to indulge. There's a time and a place for that. But there's also times where maybe there was somebody that was put on my heart to call them and check on them. And three hours of prayer wouldn't have done for me what reaching out to somebody and saying, how did it Go. I know you had the thing, man. How did it go? You remembered? Yeah, I remembered. My natural instinct was I need somebody to call and check on me. Maybe I'm even sitting around feeling sorry for myself that nobody's checking on me. The last thing I want to do is reach out and check on somebody else. And I noticed that God hides the resource of joy in the act of obedience. It's kind of like, wow, do the thing that you don't want to do, and you will receive the thing that you need. Like the Bible says, give, and it will be given to you. Holly preached a message one time that we kind of worked on together called give what you want. And the feeling of it was, if you want joy, like you say, generate it. How? Through loving somebody. And so I think this idea of happiness as an end game is killing us culturally. Something that we chase that's out there, and it's marked by acquisition, or it's just in a pleasurable experience. So I've heard a lot of preachers get up and say, well, the Lord don't care if you're happy. He wants you holy. The Lord don't want you happy, he wants you holy. You know? And then that same guy ends up cheating on his wife three years later.

Why?

Because there's something in us that if we don't feel fulfilled, it comes out sideways. You know, he's up there. God doesn't care if you're happy. God doesn't care if you're happy. But secretly, I'm miserable, and I'm suppressing my misery, and I'm trying to keep these rules, and I'm just trying to be holy. Be holy, be holy. But wouldn't being holy and being like Jesus and letting God's character flow through you make you more happy? So I'm really against this false dichotomy of, well, it's not about happiness. No, that's not my ultimate goal, but it's the byproduct of living the way God wants me to live. And I've always wanted to ask you if you agree with that. We've never been able to talk about it, that happiness often comes as a byproduct, and it evaporates when it's what we're after. But it comes when what we're after is doing what God has called us to do.

100%. It's in our language. It's full engagement. When you engage something, whether you want to do it or not tends to be positive. Emotions come from it because you chose to Engage it. So, you know, I don't feel love. Okay. Engage in a relationship, and all of a sudden, like, love starts happening there. Yeah, I don't feel motivated today. Engage in doing something, and that motion generates motivation. And so I think you have to think about it as, like, oh, I want a feeling. I want something good to happen. Well, I have to engage in it. Like, I never feel like working out. I'm sure we're different on this. Like, I have to force myself to work out. But once I start, I feel, I keep going.

Do you force the feeling?

No, I just go. I discipline my mind that this is good for me. Even though I don't want to do it, I know it's good for me. And if I engage in things that I know are good for me, God amplifies it and the abundance happens there. I don't feel like working out, but when I do it, all of a sudden, as I'm getting it, maybe 15, 20 minutes in, I'm like, I'm liking this. This is going good. And so doing the things opens you up. So doing good things for yourself opens you up to more of those things. Most people are actually happy. They're just unhappy that they're not happy all the time.

I'm unhappy that I'm not happy all the time.

That's right. People mistake it. It's like, well, I'm supposed to arrive at some kind of destination someday where I'm perfect and all of a sud. I'm perfectly happy, and I'm perfectly happy. I'm perfectly content all day. I'm never hungry. I'm never mad. I'm never irritable. I don't cuss in, you know, church, and I don't cuss in traffic anymore. I'm perfect. And that's. We think I'll arrive at this destination of a perfect feeling. And the thing is feelings, just like everything we've talked about, it's generative. It's always gonna change. It's gonna change by the situation. Cause emotions are gonna naturally come up. Everyone struggles with emotion. Everyone struggles with, I wish this didn't have to happen, God. And when we got. When we say, you know, when we tell ourselves this story that this shouldn't have to happen. Sometimes we don't know. And sometimes happiness is recognizing that there's not a perfect destination or perfect state that we have to consistently. Because of that, we have to generate as much as we can. We have to become the power plant again. We have to find and fight through the. To generate the Joy and the forgiveness. We have to. We have to, like, try. That's why when I read this chapter, I was like, I hope everyone will buy this book. Because it's your job to do that. The natural happy state that lives forever doesn't happen every day. You have to take as a job. I have to put myself in a good state. I have to summon the best of who I am. It doesn't happen by default. We wish it did, and that's why we're unhappy.

I'm giggling a little bit, man, because it's funny how you'll start saying a scripture, but you're not quoting it, but you're saying the scripture. This is what always happens to us. It's like you're saying, I have to generate it, and it's my job to do it. And I'm thinking of how most of us wake up and we're like, it's just one of those days. Like, in the first five minutes, we've decided, am I feeling today's gonna be a good day, or did I feel like the room was a little hot and I woke up sweaty? And so it's just gonna be a day. Like, it's just gonna be a day. It's gonna be a day. I can tell. And we're starting to try to predict our day in the first five minutes. Whereas the scripture says, this is the day the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it. Now, the first one is a fact. This is the day the Lord has made. If you got another one, that's a starting place, right?

Yeah. I will rejoice. I like that.

That's a decision. I will rejoice. Which rejoice is kind of like bringing joy back again, isn't it? It's kind of like a turbine. It's kind of like cycling back through what you've been given. It's like, okay, God has been good to me. And I know there's, like, a lot of teaching out there on gratitude. Gratitude journals. Gratitude practices. Here's my confession. I do gratitude practices gratitude journals. But I have a hard time feeling it. It's almost like I have to force it. And when me and Holly were getting away last summer, she saw me doing my gratitude exercise. And she said very lovingly, not in a judgmental way, I think it's awesome that you do it. In fact, I give an exercise in the book called Grateful eight. Because my contention is that a grateful heart is a stable heart. So the best way for me to get back grounded in God and who he is is to begin to express thanks. So I walked through an exercise in the book, but Holly was watching me do the exercise, and she said, do you ever just feel grateful, too? And I was like, yeah. Like, yeah. But I realized it's when everything is just right. Everything is completely aligned the way I want it to be. And what she was trying to get me to see was that if gratitude is just in my head, I should be grateful for these things, but it doesn't penetrate my heart, then it's not really gonna soak in and change how I see the world.

This is gonna be a big shift for a lot of people because we've been told as a society, you know, make sure you do your gratitude journals. And by the way, I'm a huge journaler. In my software, we built mindset journaling. It's something I deeply believe in. However, we've been taught this idea that gratitude is something you capture at the end of the day, Right?

Get to the end of the day.

Do your gratitude journal, and you'll be happier. Now, the science actually shows that's true. You can improve your gratitude and your sense of happiness by single digits by consistently at least three times a week, journaling about the things your gratitude. Most people say, do it at the end of the day. I think a lot of more positive psychologists say, do it at the beginning of the day, capture your gratitude. And I always kind of got rubbed wrong by that because, again, I'm the power plant guy. I'm the generative guy, I'm the high agency guy. I go, I don't want to just capture things because there's an intellectual thing that's happening there. And for some people like yourself, I'm going to guess on this, it's like, things will line up, and when you think about it, you're like, oh, yeah, I am kind of happy. But you can't intellectualize happiness and gratitude for a lot of people. They have to generate it. Let me give an example and also give you and the whole team here a lot of praise. During the pandemic, I was not feeling happy and I was not feeling grateful. And I was having a difficult time. I went from doing these huge seminars with thousands of people eight times a year to being in this back room on this island we were literally laboring on. And I was feeling kind of lonely and attached. It wasn't feeling good. And I was like, I gotta get out of this funk. So I'm trying to write. I wrote a book. I was doing my gratitude Journal. It's. Something wasn't hitting. The Blessing comes across, somebody texts me the blessing, the song. So I listened to the Blessing and I was like, wow, that's really emotional. The song's really emotional to me. I don't know why. And so that day I thought of, you know, what I need to do. I need to generate gratitude in a different way. So I put my earphones on, I put the blessing on replay. And I thought, who are the three people I love the most in my life? And I went on a walk, probably 20, 30 minute walk on that song on loop. And I thought of the person who I was grateful for while listening to music, while moving. Nice. And I was flooded with tears, man. Wow. I mean, I cried. It's beautiful. I think I cried for two hours.

Yeah.

And so there's a difference there for a lot of people listening. I want you to capture this for me. Generating happiness and gratitude. I had to kind of go multimodality on it, you know, I can't just sit there on my, you know, I got to move. I got to get some music in. I got to visualize. And all of a sudden it's like. It's like a movie. It's like the clouds open up and God hit me with the light, you know? So what I want to encourage people to do is sometimes if you don't feel gratitude and you've done the gratitude lists and you intellectualize and you think about it, is there a song you could play? Is there a gift you have, you could engage in? If you're musical, could there be music that you're participating in or listening to while you capture a person in your mind? While you maybe think about God, while you maybe think about your mom, you think about your dad, you think about your lover, your spouse, just draw them to mind. Think of all the reasons you're happy for them, but do it as an activity. Go. I'm going to generate the feeling and the emotion of gratitude right now. I'm going to flood myself with that. And now that's very different than sitting down for five minutes.

Very different.

And it will shock you if you can do that literally two, three times a week. Life feels differently because now you're coming from that place that's way more emotive than just intellectual.