What do the Happiest People do?
Posted on December 07, 2020 by Eloise Russo, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
The happiest people incorporate key actions into their lives that support their health, happiness, and wellbeing. What actions can you try?
Crafting Our Lives Towards Happiness
What if we could craft our lives so that we best support our happiness, our resiliency, and our sense of thriving? The good news is that there is great research into what works that we can all learn from. Key actions the happiest people take include:
Invest in loving, supportive relationships
Actively cultivate positive experiences and emotions
Pursue personally meaningful goals
Get regular exercise
Learn to interrupt rumination / overthinking
Cope effectively with painful experiences and emotions
Express gratitude
Practice optimism
Help those who need it
Practice self-compassion
Live reasonably comfortably within their means
Much of this really boils down into where you put your focus. Choose to focus on relationships and experiences over things, on purpose over financial gain. Focus on empathy over comparison, on hopes over fears, and activity over passivity. In doing so, you’ll be moving towards a more meaningful, resilient, and happy life.
Putting it into Action
We can each choose the small actions and habits on a daily basis that will ultimately build the arc of our lives. By choosing to incorporate actions that support our happiness, our resilience, and our thriving, we can intentionally craft our best lives.
You may already have incorporated many of the above actions into your life, or maybe there are a few (or several), that you look at and know you could work on. Are there experiments that you can take that help incorporate some of the above actions into your life? If you’re interested in building your self-compassion, you can start by taking a self-compassion quiz on Kristen Neff’s website. Then, you can read her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Or maybe you want to experiment with adding more gratitude to your life. You could experiment with taking time once a week to journal about who and what you are grateful for in your life.
There are endless experiments that we can run, and if we find something that works for us, we can keep it. If some of the practices don’t resonate, that’s ok too, it’s about finding what works best for you. And like anything, the more you practice something, the more likely it is to become an ingrained habit. The more second nature a habit is, the more that you can lean on it to sustain you in the long term.
Additional Happiness Action Support
If you’re excited about digging deeper, it may be helpful to explore if coaching may be a good fit. Coaching can be a great way to build your happiness action muscle, and have support with building happiness supporting actions into your life. If you’re interested in exploring this in greater detail, please reach out. This is a topic I love and am always happy to share more.
Note: The above is based on a compilation of many of the key findings from Positive Psychology research. For a deeper dive, check out Sonja Lyubormirsky’s book, the How of Happiness.
