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A life chasing pleasure without meaning is an aimless existence. Yet a meaningful life without joy is a depressing one. Until
But happiness is the frequency of positive experiences, not the intensity.
“How we spend our days,” author Annie Dillard writes, is “how we spend our lives.” Rather than waiting until we’re happy to enjoy the small things, we should go and do the small things that make us happy.
As blogger Tim Urban describes it, happiness is the joy you find on hundreds of forgettable Wednesdays.
when something positive happens, I think, This will make the notebook. It’s a habit that brightens the whole day.
“A day of joy is fifteen minutes. A day of pain is fifteen years,” he said. “No one pretends this is easy, but the job of life is to make those fifteen minutes into fifteen years and those fifteen years into fifteen minutes.”
My mom is one of the most optimistic people I know, and when she gets in bed each night she always spends a few moments being grateful for the comfort of the pillow under her head.
Reverend Veronica Goines sums this up as, “Peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.”
“Joy is a discipline.”
Playing music at the edge of our capabilities is what psychologists call a “just manageable difficulty.” This level requires all of our attention, giving us no room to think about anything else.
All of these can provide relief from pain. And when these moments add up, we find that they give us more than happiness; they also give us strength.
We can start by helping children develop four core beliefs: (1) they have some control over their lives; (2) they can learn from failure; (3) they matter as human beings; and (4) they have real strengths to rely on and share.
These resilient children shared something: they felt a strong sense of control over their lives.
In How to Raise an Adult, former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims advises parents to teach children that difficulties are how we grow. She calls this “normalizing struggle.”
When a kid struggles at math, instead of saying, “Maybe math isn’t one of your strengths,” Dweck recommends, “The feeling of math being hard is the feeling of your brain growing.”
In Denmark, mattering is part of the school curriculum. During a weekly hour called Klassen Time, students come together to discuss problems and help one another. Danish children do this every week from age six until they graduate from high school. To sweeten the deal, each week a different student brings cake. When children present their own problems, they feel listened to, and when their classmates seek guidance, they feel they can make a difference. The children learn empathy by hearing others’ perspectives and reflecting on how their behavior affects those around them. They are taught to
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Girls First
Helping children identify strengths can be critical after traumatic events.
Remarkably, Kayvon was able to persevere. “Although I lost my mother,” Kayvon says, “I never lost her faith in me.”
With the right support, beliefs can fuel action and become self-fulfilling. Believe you can learn from failure and you become less defensive and more open. Believe you matter and you spend more time helping others, which helps you matter even more. Believe you have strengths and you start seeing opportunities to use them.
They have shorter “feeling spans”; their grief comes more in bursts than in sustained periods. Kids also sometimes express their grief through behavior changes and play rather than in words.
The year before, my daughter and I had attended a Girls Leadership workshop and learned about “fast
double-sorries”—when two people hurt each other’s feelings, you both apologize quickly so that you forgive each other and yourselves. Feeling deep grief and anger meant we all got upset much more easily, so we relied on this strategy a lot. When we lost control of our emotions, we would say we were sorry right away. Then we would “mirror” each other: the first person would explain what was upsetting, and the second person would repeat it back and apologize. We were trying to show that the other person’s feelings mattered to us.
The family rules still hang above the kids’ cubbies, but only recently did I notice that asking for help is in all four categories. Now I see that this is at the heart of building resilience. When children feel comfortable asking for help, they know they matter. They see that others care and want to be there for them. They understand that they are not alone and can gain some control by reaching out for support. They realize that pain is not permanent; things can get better.
could walk alongside them and listen—what she called “companioning”—I would be helping them.
Talking openly about positive and even difficult memories can help develop resilience. It’s especially powerful to share stories about how the family sticks together through good times and bad, which allows kids to feel that they are connected to something larger than themselves.
Photos are important because happiness is remembered, not just experienced.
He held my hand and said, “You should just go. And it’s okay if you’re crying. Everyone knows what happened to us.” Then he added, “Mom, they probably have things they cry about too, so you should just be yourself.”
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
We normally think of hope as something individuals hold in their heads and in their hearts. But people can build hope together. By creating a shared identity, individuals can form a group that has a past and a brighter future.
Researchers find that hope springs up and persists when “communities of people generate new images of possibility.” Believing in new possibilities helps people fight back against the idea of permanence and propels them to seek out new options; they find the will and the way to move forward. Psychologists call this “grounded hope”—the understanding that if you take action you can make things better.
Collective resilience requires more than just shared hope—it is also fueled by shared experiences, shared narratives, and shared power.
I realize now that part of why Circles help women reach for their individual goals is because they build collective resilience.
“Moral elevation” describes the feeling of being uplifted by an act of uncommon goodness. Elevation brings out what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
Even in the face of atrocity, elevation leads us to look at our similarities instead of our differences. We see the potential for good in others and gain hope that we can survive and rebuild. We become inspired to express compassion and battle injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
“We all have our own personal
Andes,” Nando Parrado wrote long after the expedition with Roberto Canessa that led to their rescue. Canessa added, “One of the things that was destroyed when we crashed into the mountain was our connection to society. But our ties to one another grew stronger every day.”
The more times a government or company had failed, the more likely they were to put a rocket into orbit successfully on the next try. Also, their chances of success increased after a rocket exploded compared to a smaller failure.
Of the hundreds of answers, most had one thing in common: the majority of regrets were about failures to act, not actions that failed.
Kim Malone Scott, who worked with me at Google, used to bring a stuffed monkey named Whoops to her team’s weekly meetings.
When it was time for Adam to enter the classroom, he ditched the Speedo but kept the strategy. He turned his students into his coaches.
you should “give yourself a ‘second score’ based on how you handle the first score….Even when you get an F for the situation itself, you can still earn an A+ for how you deal with it.”
Byron had a calmness that allowed him to see feedback as, in his words, “purely anthropological.” He later told me that this attitude
To help the conversations go well, I reminded everyone that feedback should always go both ways. I talked about how a single sentence can make people more open to negative feedback: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
“I wanted to be a role model in that perfect ‘put together’ sense. Instead, I told them I had cancer and would need their support.”
“You’d think sharing would slow you down, but it takes time and energy to hide things,” Caryn
“Singles are stereotyped, stigmatized, and ignored,” psychologist Bella DePaulo finds, “and still live happily ever after.”
Mel Brooks said he made fun of Hitler and the Nazis because “if you can reduce them to ridicule then you’re way ahead.” For centuries, jesters were the only people who could speak truth to power and had permission to challenge a king or queen. Today in the United States, late-night TV comedians play this role.
Playwright Robert Woodruff Anderson captured it perfectly: “Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship.
When a partner makes a bid, the other partner has two choices: to turn away or turn toward. Turning away means dismissing or ignoring the bid.
