Time for a quick review, in case you are just jumping in to the middle of this series. I’m sharing 5 crucial ingredients to being a happy person. And in saying “happy person”, I’m not saying 100% of the time. Of course there’s a time to be sad, lament, and overcome with grief. In fact, those are signs of emotional health.
What I’m referring to is the overarching mood of your life. Is it glass half full, or its half empty and leaking every day. Are you forlorn and downcast, feeling like everyone and everything is against you, and that you have no power to do anything about it?
So these steps, or elements, or actions, are ways that you can help to secure your own emotional stability, and not be at the whim of the way people treat you and how your circumstances seem to be falling.
If you want to focus your attention on all the ways people let you down and the circumstances of life seem to knock you about, then be my guest. But I find that most people, healthy people, don’t want to live that way. But all of us need a few tips on how to keep from the gravitational pull of disappointment or fear or rejection, etc.
So, the first 3 pieces were these, in brief:
Practice Gratitude: focus our attention on people, events, and things we have in our lives that we appreciate, no matter how small.
Be aware of our emotions: Emotions are like the dashboard on your car – they tell you what’s going on inside – if you’ll pay attention to them. Take time to know and understand the range of emotions and what they tell you.
Make choices: Lots of unhappiness comes from delay in making decisions, and we lose energy by putting off. Anxiety builds as we seek the perfect solution, thinking somehow more facts will magically appear. Not deciding is a grind that eats away at you and produces more stress over time. (With big decisions, its helpful to break the decision into a process you follow, so that your neither too hasty or dragging your feet.)
Now, finally, after all that, I’m going to give another key component for happiness:
#4 Connect with people
I don’t know any happy people that are isolated and disconnected from others. My mom is 95 and lives in an independent living complex. She has aches and pains, but is always reaching out to connect with people. She also sees the people who have few or no connections. They are not aging in a happy way. My mom, despite the general health issues common for her age, is generally happy, because she is connected to her family and the people there. She has faced the loss of friends and my dad, but she keeps connecting with people. Hats off to Mom! She’s built a happy life day after day, year after year, and the habit is paying off.
Ironically, the era of social media to keep up with our friends has turned us in to the most disconnected generation ever. The promise of greater connection has turned us into throngs of people staring at small screens where ever we go, running into people and objects as we stare at our phones. Its not uncommon to see a group of people at a restaurant all staring at their phones instead of conversing with each other.
You want to be happy. Reach out to others and show an interest in them. If you wait for others to reach out to you, you’ll wait a long time. Be curious, and connect with others. Get a couple of good questions to ask to get to know people beyond what do you do and where are you from? Or at least some follow up questions like: what was the most enjoyable part of living there? Or tell me more about your job – what is the hardest thing about working as a ______? Have a couple of go-to questions, even if its just “tell me more about that”. These work with everyone: your family, your friends, your neighbors, the people you meet at church. (By the way, most people you meet at church have no idea what to say either, so if you want to meet people there, you better initiate with them – don’t wait for them to initiate with you – its just a fact.)
Beyond initial and new connections, we all need some close friends. You need to be able to invest some time to be with people and risk opening up to grow closer, to build a small yet close knit community that brings connection and joy to life. I’m so grateful that we have some really close friends, in addition to our family members, that we can talk to and be completely honest with. They don’t judge us on our bad days, and they celebrate with us in our good days. They pray for us. They make space in their lives for us. And we do the same for them. On a consistent basis.
There are also some tips to connecting with people, whether long time friends or new people at work or the neighborhood that I gleaned many years ago from the book, “How to Really Love Your Child”. The first three points directed toward our own children are just good tips for any relationship. Put in biblical terms, these are ways to really help others experience you “loving your neighbor as yourself. The last one is not in the book but is central to being connected to people.
Focused attention: put your phone down and give people your undivided attention.
Eye contact: Look at the person you’re talking to, but don’t stare a hole through them. Your eyes tell the story of your interest.
Appropriate physical touch: We’re in a world that is hyper-sensitive here, so be smart. But the occasional genuine pat on the back or shoulder with colleagues, and with family and the friends you know well – a big hug, Tommy Boy -is healing and healthy.
Words of affirmation: Bless people by telling them what you like about them. Get excited with them about their interests, adventures, and accomplishments. You’re not in a competition.
Remember during Covid, we had those awful plastic walls built up between us, and people talking and “touching” through window panes. There was trauma in not being physically present, the inability to connect with those we loved the most. I’m not sure we’ve fully recovered from that isolation.
Don’t live a pandemic-like isolated lifestyle. Practice connecting with people around you every day. You will be a happier person.