Getting To Happy

By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC

I believe that people should be happy, and have the right to be happy. Happiness is an essential ingredient to our success.

A recent Harvard study http://bit.ly/pxylJk concluded that happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the 21st century. They suggest that if you are happy first success will follow. In other words, success does not make you happy but happiness makes you successful.

But do we really know what makes us happy?

Many of us spend most of our lives developing and valuing our first class education, our high powered career and our ability to collect material things. As a society this has become how we measure and define success. But do these achievements really make us happy? Everyone knows people who are brilliant yet unhappy or financially successful and unhappy. I know from my own life that a first class education, owning my own business and acquiring lots of material things did not bring me the fulfillment and joy that I thought they would.

The same Harvard study estimated that having a good education and great technical skills contribute only 25% of our success at work and in life. To be successful in work and life, there are other character traits that we must possess. So what are these traits? They include optimism, emotional resilience, empathy, the ability to make social connections and viewing stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. The study calls these traits the “silent 75%.” The “silent 75%.” are generally viewed as ‘soft skills’ and their long term importance to our happiness is routinely undervalued.

The study, however, concludes that long-term success at work and in life “is based upon our ability to positively adapt to the world”; to be happy, joyful and optimistic, since we are more likely to achieve our full potential when we are feeling positive. As a culture we need to focus on these ‘soft skills’- the silent 75% – and all of us should seek to build and strengthen these traits within us in order to be more joyful human beings. To be truly happy and therefore successful requires the right balance between our rational and emotional skills.

Despite achieving in my education and career I had a realization that I simply wasn’t as happy as I wanted to be. My joy was limited despite the material abundance around me and my successes didn’t fulfill me the way I had expected. I began to make a very conscious effort to focus on doing things that fed my spirit. I decided to focus on the things that brought me more happiness and joy – like making sure I have dinner with a friend at least once a week, connecting daily with family members by phone or in person and doing work that is meaningful and engaging.

I believe that happiness is found deep within, that it comes from our soul and not from external things. So take a peek inside and find your joy. The journey of self-discovery can be very personal and private and each person has to determine what truly makes them happy. But take comfort in knowing that this is important and essential work to ‘get to happy.’

Below are eleven happiness boosters outlined by Shawn Achor, the author of The Happiness Advantage. Try them out and see how you feel:

1. Smile
2. Open doors
3. Offer a seat at your table in a busy cafe
4. Make eye contact
5. Start a conversation with someone who looks lonely
6. Listen
7. Have deep meaningful conversations
8. Give money to beggars without conditions attached
9. Try and put a positive spin on a bad situation
10. Meditate so you are calmer for your family
11. Volunteer for someone who really needs it

I know many of these have worked for me! Which of these work best for you?

Original post written for Joy Campaign August 2011.

SELF-LOVE

Mastering the Art of Loving Self
By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC


I recently read Andrew Young’s book ‘The Politician’, a morality tale of his journey with John Edwards. It’s a tale of greed, power, fame, narcissism, lust, hubris and hero worship. It’s a great read…can’t believe I am acknowledging this…but it is! It’s the classic story of the sinner and the saint, self-discovery and the quest for self-love. I am moved to include an excerpt from the book since my summarization would not do it justice …he writes…

“Late one night as my father lay dying, I sat alone with him and turned for comfort to some audio recordings of his old sermons. The first one I heard included the following passage, preached in his deep and familiar voice:

Love yourself. Know yourself. Accept yourself. Most of us, me included, never learn that to ‘love yourself,” you must first see and understand your own failings, accept them without shame, and learn to consider them as you move through life. If I had truly loved my-self, I wouldn’t have been ashamed of my own mistakes and lived in fear of being found out. If I had loved myself, I wouldn’t have felt the need to devote myself to a hero and his cause.

In my father’s sermon, he also said that too many of us get caught up in trying to be ‘little Jesuses.” By this he meant we try to be perfect, the way we imagine Christ was, and judge ourselves without mercy when we fail. Better, he said, to try to be a “big you” rather than a little Jesus. In fact, he thought that was all God ever expected of any human being.

With my dad’s help, I know now the difference between understanding human nature – the combination of good and evil – and being able to love yourself and others through it all.”

As I reflect on the word LOVE in the month of February, this book confirms what I have always known; that the greatest love affair we will ever have is the one we pursue with ourselves. Learning to love ourselves first, with all our flaws and imperfections is the greatest love of all, and is an essential practice to ensure a life successfully lived.

WORLD MEDITATION DAY

Making the world a better place, one breath at a time
By Shirley Moulton - Founder, The ACADEMi of Life, NYC


Meditation is enjoying a renewed surge of popularity, penetrating the public consciousness as never before…it’s mainstream.
So what is meditation? “Meditation is a discipline that prepares one to engage in the world with greater accuracy, flexibility, and authenticity. It is not a quick fix but a discipline that, when cultivated, can provide ongoing and powerful support for the practice of a fulfilling life.”

Meditative practices are being taken up in corporate America (Google, Apple, AOL, Saatchi & Saatchi, Raytheon, Deutche Bank, Hughes Aircraft, Target, Cargill, Aetna, Genentech, General Mills) and is being declared as a 21st century management tool. McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, who has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations, heads the McKinsey’s Performance Leadership Program which uses meditation practices to release the desire for authenticity, dignity and real human connection within a critical mass of individuals in a given organization. Corporations are realizing that after arranging meditation classes for their staff, they have reduced stress levels, are less irritable, more focused, more productive, happier overall and have sharpened intuition.

Meditation is also being taught at YMCAs, hospitals (a foundation run by Donna Karan, donated $850,000 to NYC’s Beth Israel Medical Center to test whether meditation and yoga can enhance the traditional medical treatments for cancer), the military, in medicine to make doctors better, at Harvard Law School to help law students become better negotiators and in public schools to reduce the stress levels of students (the goal of the David Lynch Foundation, is to bring meditation to one million schoolchildren in the classroom).

When we meditate we create stillness. Stillness is where inspiration, creativity and solutions to problems are found. The more we practice meditation we are able to move beyond our active minds and emotions and discover great depths of lasting peace, contentment and serenity…the joy of being. From this place of joy we are able to create “fields of grace” allowing our interactions with others to be more loving, compassionate, authentic and fulfilling. With time, we become better people and the world becomes a better place.

So, to bring lasting peace and love to our world, we declare 11/11/11 World Meditation Day and at 11:11 am/pm on that day for 11 minutes, our goal is to have 1.1 million people meditating to either the Joy Of Being meditation http://bit.ly/lKjcm or any other meditation of your choosing. Eleven minutes of pure bliss. Let’s begin the practice today on 11/11/09 and start to build our meditation community and we will do it again on 11/11/10 until we get to our big day: 11/11/11.

Join our meditation community and movement on Facebook at http://bit.ly/67xaqB