What Is Happiness? A Master Life Coach’s Perspective

Happiness has been defined in many ways by many different thinkers, and there is no consensus. This video discusses my view of happiness and steps you can take to form habits and a practice toward a more meaningful life.

Happiness Video Transcript

The funny thing about happiness and defining happiness, is that there’s thousands of people that study it and there’s all kinds of literature about it and and all kinds of scientific research about it and nobody can really decide on a specific definition. So there’s as many definitions of happiness as maybe there are schools or researchers.

To me, happiness, or the big goal of all of this personal development stuff that I’ve been doing my whole life, is to maintain as often as possible– not all the time it’s impossible, we can’t–but to maintain as often as possible a state of peaceful contentment.

Peace as Part of Happiness

Most of us just want more peace in our own heads.

Now, peace is something everybody’s looking for but they usually don’t know it right now, right? A lot of people when you ask, “hey what what do you want in your life that will make your life better?”, they name all kinds of things and peace is not the first thing on the list.

But once we dig down, most people want peace up here. They want peace in their mind. They want all of the the thinking that is controlling them, or all the thoughts they have–they want it to slow down and have more peace. So that’s one thing….. peace.

Contentment

And the second part I mentioned was contentment, and the reason I talk about contentment and not happiness or joy…Joy and happiness, by my definition, they’re not sustainable. It’s something you can have briefly, but it can’t be a goal, because it’s not going to last forever.

But contentment…contentment is this feeling of wholeness of fulfillment of “everything’s good” and “I have it pretty good.”

Gratitude Fosters Contentment

So the way to foster more contentment, the way to create more contentment is gratitude. And gratitude is not an attitude like your hear “attitude of gratitude”– no gratitude is a practice. The people in this world who have a state of contentment in their life most of the time, they practice gratitude. Whether they pray, whether they write it down, they do something maybe every day maybe not every day. But they have a habit of paying attention to what’s good in their life and why — not just listing things, but naming some reasons why they’re grateful for those things.

And for these same people, when you when you practice gratitude long enough, what starts to happen is the bad things get on your gratitude list, because you learn something from it, or you get some insight about yourself. So when you can get to that place, you start to fill the hole of this “more, more and more” thing that we have in our society; of, you know, “if you’re not happy, get more — if you’re not, you know, you have to progress or you’re falling backward…” No!

You’ve Got It Good

When you are content, you realize you have everything right now, and just being on the path to more–if it’s something that is meaningful to you–you can be content without being at the goal. You can be content now while you’re working toward it.

So that’s what I mean by peaceful contentment. That’s the way I would define happiness when people talk about happiness in the context of “what’s the big picture?” or “what am I working toward?” or “how do we know when I’ve arrived?” Well, two things: number one, you’ve never “arrived,” but if you, most of the time, can feel peaceful contentment I think that’s pretty darn good.

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