Authentic Happiness Tips from Happiness Author Shawn Achor … Do you have the happiness formula backwards?

Shawn Achor is the author of the new book The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work.

One of the core teachings Shawn talks about is that a fundamental flaw in our search for happiness is to buy into the notion of “I’ll be happy when …”

Rather, we would be better served to adopt a thought pattern that instead says something like “By being happy, I’ll …”

I had the privilege of first seeing happiness author Shawn Achor speak at a conference I was attending in Cancun, Mexico in 2007.

At the time, Shawn was serving as the Head Teaching Fellow with Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar of the most popular class at Harvard University … “Positive Psychology”. The class enrolled 1 out of every 7 Harvard undergraduates making it the most popular class in the university.

I remember at the time being very taken with Shawn’s principles of authentic happiness and what much of the emerging science of happiness was really telling us about how we live our lives and the importance of the role happiness plays in our health and well being.

So I was pleased to come across an article by Shawn published at the Huffington Post.

What I especially like about the authentic happiness tips that Shawn discusses in the article … which also provides great background to findings in his new book … is that they are grounded in legitimate research.

It’s one thing to talk about the importance of being and feeling genuinely happy from an anecdotal perspective, but it is a whole lot more convincing when you start to look at the findings of real research using disciplined methodology.  This is part of why Shawn Achor’s work is so important and relevant.

So how can we pursue happiness right now? When I was counseling overwrought Harvard students, one of the first things I would tell them is to stop equating a future success (dating) with happiness. Dating does not mean you will be happy. If that was true, then everyone in a relationship would be happy. Look around and you’ll see enough empirical proof that relationship does not guarantee happiness. The same is true with success. Is everyone with a job happy? Then stop thinking that finding a job, getting a promotion, etc. is the only thing that can bring happiness. Success does not mean happiness. Check out the entertainment section of The Huffington Post to look for examples to disabuse you of thinking that being beautiful, successful or rich will make you happy.

Second, we need to break the belief that our external world (how much money we make, are we in a relationship, what the economy is doing, etc.) is predictive of our happiness. Only 10 percent of our long-term happiness is predicted by the external world; 90 percent of our long-term happiness is thus how our brain processes the external world. This is why we find people at the same job who are positive and love their work, and others see it as drudgery and stress. This is why some people love being single and others cannot stand it. The external world does not predict your happiness, which is a freeing scientific realization about how much control you actually have over your happiness.

Third, happiness is a work ethic. You have to train your brain to be positive, just like you work out your body. Doing one positive habit, like eight minutes of meditation a day, journaling for two minutes about a positive experience (it backfires if you write about negative ones!) or writing a two-minute long positive email to a friend once a day — all have been found in research over the past decade to significantly increase happiness, whatever your current life circumstances. Training your brain for gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to accomplish this. Gratitude is the recognition that the present can make you happy instead of waiting for a future event. Thus, if you think of three things you are grateful for over the course of 21 days, your level of optimism in life significantly rises.

Original story here

When you apply these authentic happiness tips to your own life on a consistent basis, you really do become the author of your own happiness.  And that happiness then serves as the catalyst to your success and more enhanced experiences.

Are you applying the happiness formula correctly in your life?