How to Unlock Happiness

This is episode 315 of the Empowered Team podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast where we unlock the secrets of self mastery for leaders who want to elevate their impact in both leadership and life. Your journey to being your best so you can give your best starts here and now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. Today. Today, I'm so excited to be with you to talk about something that isn't just about a little part of your life. It's about all of your life. It's happiness. How can we have more happiness in our lives? And I want to build this topic off of a previous topic on our episode, which was living life in a day. How do you live life in a day? Why did I want to live life in a day? Because I wanted more of that whole life fulfillment happening in just one day. So. So of course we gotta explore happiness because most of us want to experience a fulfilled and happy life. One that really feels amazing. So I broke down this topic of happiness so that you can have more of it in your life by distinguishing what it is and what it isn't. What you need more of, what you need less of in order to have happiness. Are we in or what? Awesome. First, I'm going to tell you I about a part of my life that I was working my tail off. I was working so hard. I had opened my business, I had a young daughter. I was literally going from home to the business and back and forth, and that's all I did. And then a few little activities for my daughter so that she could get to her swimming lessons or her gymnastics. I had no social life. Everything was about work. So. And then this unusual thing was happening in my life. I was eating more than I would ordinarily eat. And I didn't understand why. I was so excited about my business. I was doing things I love. I was fulfilled in my purpose. And then I found myself when I would zip home for lunch. Cause I positioned my business 5km away from my home, so it was very close in proximity. And I would often go home for lunch, but it was the only time I was alone. And then I would be heading right back to the business. And when I went home for lunch, I found myself eating my lunch and then going back for a second serving of whatever I was eating and then going back for another serving of some little treat because I was only really allowing myself to have a break and. And sit down when I was eating that lunch. Now, to give you a backstory I was not typically someone who was overeating. When I was a little kid, I was so skinny and so small. And my dad would make fun of me and say, hey, you eat like a bird. You just peck at things, you eat like a bird. And I literally had such a small appetite. I would eat such small amounts at my meals. I would hate feeling overfull. I would be like a little snack, a little peckish. So I wasn't a person who would typically eat a lot of food. So this was a very, very unusual scenario for my history and my life. So when I actually looked at it, I realized, like I said, that I was only allowing myself to sit down and relax and have a break when I had lunch. So in order to prolong that break, I was subconsciously choosing to eat in order to have a longer break. It was really interesting. And what I realized now in studying these different types of happiness is that I was looking for what's called hedonic fulfillment. Hedonic happiness. I was looking for pleasure. And in the past, I had done some research on hedonic compensation. And all that means is that when someone feels that they worked really, really hard, they'll often take on more of something that's really pleasureful. So the research was done with. With candy. They would have amounts of candy that could be measured. And if somebody had done a hard workout, they would be subconsciously taking more of the candy than the people who hadn't done the workout, per se. And they didn't realize they were doing it. They thought they were taking the same amount as any other time they took the candy or chose the candy. And so there's this interesting subconscious conscious thing that we often do which is try and give us ourselves this amount of pleasure when we perceive that we've been working really hard. Now, that's the research on hedonic compensation. But we're talking about happiness. So what does this mean in the context of happiness in our lives, fulfillment in our lives? Well, what's really, really interesting is that there's two main types of happiness. There's hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness. Now, it sounds like a musical definition or something. Maybe it stems from that, I don't know, the Latin roots of the word. However, hedonic happiness. If you think of hedonism, that is where this one comes from. It's pleasure. Hedonic happiness is the kind of happiness we get from immediate pleasure, not just any pleasure. Now, pleasure, this is indulging. Think of indulging in a delicious dessert or, or buying a new gadget or having a spontaneous fun night out. It usually has a sensory experience, an emotional experience. It's all about having pleasure and avoiding pain. It's feeling good. These moments are great, but they're fleeting. It's the now pleasure that's hedonic happiness. Now, eudaimonic happiness is very different. This is the flip side. It's the deeper, more sustainable, more fulfilling happiness. It comes from living with purpose, aligning with your values, your personal growth, and contributing to something larger than yourself. It's the satisfaction you get from working on meaningful goals and cultivating strong relationships. This is eudaimonic happiness. Now the truth is, it's not one, it's not the other. It's both. It's both and how you combine both in your life in order to really feel this strong sense of happiness consistently throughout your life. And I think that's what most of us want, is this strong fulfillment, fulfilling feeling of happiness throughout your life. So here's the research on this. Studies show that hedonic happiness gives us that short term joy, one of these joyful experiences. But it's the you die, not diamond, you demonic happiness say that fast five times. That's the one that leads to long term well being. So this research is by Ryan and Deci, for example. It highlights how intrinsic goals like personal growth, relationships, relationship strength offer more sustainable happiness over the long haul than the extrinsic rewards like money or fame or, or food or binging Netflix, any of those things. So it's a really interesting thing. Now there's a research study I think most of you have heard of, because if you're in the fulfillment or personal growth world, the Harvard grant study is this long term study. It's been going on for decades and it's followed people over decades in time to try and find out what contributes to their greatest well being, what contributes to their happiness, what contributes to their health. So this is a very, very interesting study. It's one of the longest running studies on happiness and it's tracked hundreds of lives over many, many decades. One of the most fascinating findings was that wealth and career success weren't the biggest contributors to happiness. Instead, listen in here. Instead, it's meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose were the keys to long term satisfaction. Now I have to read this quote because it's from the studies director and the studies director was actually a participant in the study, which is so cool. But this was his quote. Happiness is love, full stop. Happiness is love, full stop. Now if we Pull this together in hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness and you pull that quote in with happiness is love, full stop. You realize that those short term hedonic joys are the things you really love. Maybe it's your favorite chocolate or your really wonderful joyous music you love to listen to and dance to right in the moment. And then at the same time, it's the eudaimonic happiness. It's those really fulfilling and loving relationships, even the highs and lows, you embrace it all, that's bringing in the eudaimonic happiness. It is love, full stop. So what I want to bring to you in this topic today, really bring the value in, is how does this look? What does it look like in your life? How do you do this? And if I go back to that example that I gave you, I gave you an example of how not to do it. How not to do it was focusing only on one and not the other. Now, I gave an uncommon example because what I was doing in the example of working on my fulfillment, working on my purpose only, I was giving you an example of how little hedonic happiness was in my life. I wasn't having favorite meals, I wasn't going out for dinner. I wasn't seeing friends. I didn't have social environments. I wasn't dancing. I was working and doing the full on purpose all of the time and parenting all the time. That's all I was doing. So I was missing on just small little bouts that were needed on that hedonic happiness. Now I think majority of society has it flipped around the other way. There's less focus on deep and meaningful purpose or fulfillment or strong relationships, and more of a focus perhaps on too much of the hedonic joys, too much of the maybe Netflix or the food or maybe the immediate pleasures in life. So what there really is, there's actually a ratio that tends to work for most people. And the ratio is 80% of the eudaimonic happiness and 20% of the hedonic happiness. Well, what does that look like? That's the timing. How do we fit this in? And this goes back to that episode that I recorded on living a life in a day. If in a day I wanted to have an amazing life, but I wanted to compress all those amazing things that I want in life into a day. What does that look like? Well, it looks like there's going to be a bout of laughter. There might be some movement and dancing. There might be outdoor time. There might be some pleasurable food in There. And I'm doing that day in and day out as much as possible. Or at least if I couldn't do that, living life in a day, I could at least compress it into a week. So in that week, I'm experiencing all those things that I really want to experience in life. So here's what it comes down to. The first thing is really reflecting on your values. Because this is something that you probably have heard a lot if you've listened in from me about values. It is the foundational thing in all of my clients in any of the companies that I work with. Company core values, Individual values. When you understand your values and you reassess your values on the regular basis, you understand more about what matters to you. You and who you really are, who you want to be and what values you're going towards, what values you're going away from. If you know this, then you're in a situation where you are primed to choose the actions or choose the events or choose the interactions that you want to bring into your life. Because if you're bringing those things into your life, you. You can create your fulfilling experience of happiness. But if you don't know your values, you don't know what matters to you, you don't know what you want to work towards in your values, or what you want to go away from in your values, then it's very hard to determine what's going to be the thing that feels good in the moment and what's going to feel good in the long term that's sustainable. So this is why reflecting on what really matters to you, what your values are, is going to be a key step. Step. Now, we do this all of the time in our mastermind, our empowered team mastermind. What we do once a year at least, is reflect on our values and recreate our values. And with clients, I often like to explore them or revisit them about every six months so that we really understand how our values have evolved. Because they do, and they have. If we've grown or we've had something happen in our lives, typically our values have changed either completely, as in we don't have the same values or they've just adjusted in priority or order. So it's a really interesting thing that happens with our values. But if we don't know what they are, how are we going to tell what we want to bring more of into our lives in order to fuel that happiness that we want? So that's, number one, is reflecting on your values. Number two, we want to Take these actionable steps. So if I go back to that action, that example that I gave you, the action I was taking to get some hedonic happiness was overeating at lunch. I wanted more relaxed time, I wanted more of the treats that I enjoyed. I wanted more time to myself, and I wasn't giving myself that. So the one moment I had, all of a sudden I was overindulging in that moment. So start with small action steps. If you are in the boat, like I was, where I was too, I had too much, I had a hundred percent of eudaimonic happiness in my life and not enough of the hedonic happiness in my life. So if that was the case for you, or is the case for you, then you want with small, you want to start with small action steps that will help you create some hedonic happiness. Maybe it's that you take a break in the morning before lunch and in the afternoon before the end of the workday, so that you're giving yourself that little moment of Zen. Maybe it's a 10 minute walk, maybe it's a little coffee or tea and alone time, just a moment. Or listening to your own favorite podcast, like this one, whatever it is for you, but something that you're giving yourself a small action step that supports that hedonic happiness, that 20%, you know, and maybe for you it's 30% or 15%, whatever it is, but there's this ratio that's there so that you can about a one to four, so that you can have that one part hedonic happiness inserts, whatever that is, to bring the pleasure into your life. And the three parts eudaimonic that are all about the sustainable long term fulfillment, your purpose, how you give back to others, the strong relationship, whatever has to happen. Now, some of those eudaimonic ones do not get into the mindset that they're feeling the same as the pleasure ones, as the hedonic ones. They don't. They might feel a little more like commitment or discipline or working hard towards a bigger goal. That's what that zone might feel like. But the hedonic ones are pure bliss. They feel like joy, they're a party in your mouth, they're a dance in your butt. Like whatever it is, it is the joy in the moment, it's pleasure, it feels good, it's sensory. Whereas the eudaimonic one is that long term, it might feel like it's worth it, it might feel like it's hard, but it feels good to do that. That's what that one might feel like. So. So take a look at. Inserting whatever you need more of with small steps doesn't mean you revamp your whole life in an hour. It means that you look at. Well, I think I need a vacation and I'm gonna look towards planning a mini vacation called a day off. Just a day off during the week that I wouldn't ordinarily have. And I'm gonna take that day off or another small step like introducing dessert at lunch. Just a small piece of dark chocolate. It's a small step, but it's bliss to me. I love it. And then I'm so motivated to eat my eudaimonic happiness of the huge salad that I love and then I have my piece of chocolate. That meal right there is an example of true happiness to me because I get all this great food fueling energy out of my salad that has protein and all kinds of veggies and it's so good. And then even though it's not my favorite party in my mouth thing, even though I love the taste of the salad, I adore the salad. But if I could eat chocolate all day and feel great, I would. But it doesn't feel great to eat chocolate all day. So it's my little, you know, 10% at the end of the meal of having that little bliss, that hedonic happiness, joy. So I'm giving food as an example here because it's so easy. It's the low hanging fruit and it's easy to see that. But it might be work, it might be your relationship. If you look at mine and Paul's relationship, it was very much like our lives where there was so much work going on, but then we'd throw in one getaway in a year. But what about those little bits of joy during each day? So we get more hedonic happiness instead of just the long term partnership of parenting, partnership of running a household, partnership of earning money for our family. You know, we had a lot of eudaimonic purpose in our relationship, but probably need a little more insert of joy in our relationship. Fun, laughter, funnies, sending each other jokes or little messages, those things. And it's all about that in every context. Not just the eating, not just the relationships, but work as well. So find that balance of the pleasure, the joy and that eudaimonic of the long term sustainable fulfillment. And really that's the last one is number one, it's the values reflecting on your values. Number two, it's making sure you're inserting those small actionable steps like volunteering even or setting a time, some setting aside, some time to read just for yourself. And maybe it's not a personal growth book, maybe it's a novel, maybe it's a fantasy book. Whatever it is, whatever lights you up. And then lastly, the ratio. The ratio of eudaimonic to hedonic. That hedonic being that 1 to 4 ratio or 20, the 8020 rule, 80 being the eudaimonic and 20 being the hedonic. So that my friends is a little snippet into how you can create the fulfilling happiness with the blissful joy of happiness in your life. Really give yourself that joy. So quick little mindset Monday on this one. Happiness. How to get yours? Do it. Add what you need. Identify right now. Which one do you need more of? How are you going to insert it into your life and give yourself that gift and cultivate happiness in your life? Keep being Empowered. If you love these episodes, give us a rating and review and share it out to those who you love to keep empowering yourself and others. Love to you all. Have a wonderful day and week. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. 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