Summary

1. Contentment 
2. Understand Emotion 
3. Stillness
4. Me Time – Circuit Breakers
5. Helicopter Mindset
6. Expunge Doubt
7. Real Expectations – No Surprises
8. Meditation and Concentration
9. Clear Your Worries
10. Peace of Mind – Nature

Contentment

Most Western life is based on the premise that something is missing, and with work, effort, seduction and accumulation that missingness will go away. Hence, for most of us life is based on the premiss of doing things in order get things which in the future will cause us happiness. 

Based on this premise our consumer society, democracy, relationships, religions and most ambition drives us from birth to the grave, and for this there are both benefits and drawbacks. 

The benefits we’ll utilise in the BETTERMENT area of this Happy, Better, Faster program for now, in Happiness, we can see that always wanting can create a sense of never content, which, underpins a huge amount of human discontent, illness, violence, self-sabotage and communication problems. A needy person has this “discontent” mastered and as such, can be repelling no matter how enthusiastic they try to achieve.

Underpinning the success of most great people is a deep awareness of contentment, that everything is going to be all-right, even if they fail.

The cause of discontent is separation. Separation from nature, from other human beings (competition), separation from our Innerwealth. A separation that comes from thinking without feeling. Separation of mind, intellect, emotion from Reality.

Understanding the REAL nature of things will help you find contentment and relax into your ambitions. It will help you communicate with others better, and turn up more in a better space as a leader. Remember, a needy leader is really just a follower.

Understand Emotion

Emotion is the most pleasurable and most painful of all the faculties of life. It cannot be one without the other. Emotion can vary form the most tender and absorbing love, to the most violent hatred. These two can be directed successively to one and the same object.

Emotion is the most dangerous of all the faculties – overworked it can lead to a great motivator or actor or a patient in an insane asylum.

Emotion is the chief faculty by which you move the minds of other people. Insofar as they realise your Emotion within themselves, they will respond to your use of it.

Emotions should always be definitely coupled together in your mind with the ACT you wish the other person or persons to perform. In order to know what emotion you need to feel within yourself you must know WHAT you want them to DO.

When you know WHAT you want done, by one or a crowd, you can study what Emotion to use to get that thing done. Thus, emotions carry you to the heights of fame or success,

Every famous person has become so by reason of the Emotion they were able to arouse in the heart of the general public.

Now you can see the influences that also act on you. Those that lead you also spread their emotion out to you, and sometime this is not well thought out. In an ideal world you would choose those you hang out with to harmonise with your chosen emotion, but this is not possible. Clients, friends, followers, leaders are not always conscious of their impact on others.

Hence, for happiness we must take charge of our emotional state. Firstly by choosing the appropriate emotions we wish to have and secondly by being aware of, and not reacting to others. This skill I will share with you in your program.

Stillness

A key ingredient in personal happiness is the ability to cut through the fog and be still.

Behind all the spin, the physical aches and pains, the mental turmoil of life, the need to be responsible and pay your bills, provide for others and meet budget, behind the TV shows, theatre, sports and ambitions, there’s a you that just wants peace and quiet. It’s called the listener. The Spirit.

This is a pretty important part of life that we sometimes ignore or hand over to others to care about, mostly because we perceive that it has no “value” in achieving what we want. But it does, it can, if we connect to it, guide us well.

Stillness is an opportunity to experience that connection to our Happiness independent of our circumstance. Nelson Mandela might be a good example of this gift in practical application, the Dali Lama another.

Me Time – Circuit Breakers

You’ll meet people, and maybe do this yourself, where their day, from wake to sleep is one continuous thread of worries and thinking, punctuated with driving, during which the thinking continues, and time with family, during which thinking continues, and then a few glasses of wine during which thinking becomes blurred and then sleep. 

We think, but really, most of the time we only think that we think. Giving yourself circuit breaking moments between meetings, between work and home, between email and conversation might just be the difference between healthy communication and not. It may also be the difference between burn out and sustainable work and, last but not least, it could be the difference between self-respect and head spinning self-sabotage. 

I’ll share some circuit breaking techniques in your program, but the awareness is 90% of the solution.

Helicopter Mindset

Managers work down in the emotion of everyday life while leaders need to rise above it. 

There’s a word we’re often afraid to use in our modern era of compassion and human rights, understandably is superiority, however, if you are not superior to a circumstance you are left to manage it for minimum damage and maximum comfort. 

To be superior to a circumstance is to understand that circumstance from a helicopter mindset, to see order in chaos. 

The person at the top of any team group or country understands the greatest order.

The child understands order in pleasure and avoiding pain. The youth might understand order in their own body and consequences of food, rest, abuse like over exertion and over-study. Adult might understand family dynamics. The locally successful adult will understand the order in the chaos of their chosen field – sport – business. The national champion understands regional matters and can see the order in it. The international champion can see order in national events. In other words as we rise in leadership and success we rise in the capacity to be superior (see the order in) to the dynamics of the level at which we’re leading. Global leaders need a universal viewpoint otherwise they lead by force and haphazard control. (in business this is called fraud).

Expunge Doubt

A child is encouraged to ask why, why, why? And we are motivated to answer this question because we wish to expunge doubt in the child’s mind, give clarity.

Doubt is the enemy of happiness. 

Doubt leads to lost courage and lost courage leads to complacency (settle for less) and settling for less leads to boredom and boredom is the opposite to happiness.

For many people activity is the antidote to boredom. “Aholisms”, such as work-”aholism”, alc-”aholism”, food-”aholism” and sex-”aholism” victim – “aholism” and blame-”aholism” are just a few ways people escape boredom and it’s friend, unhappiness.

But action is not the solution to boredom, just as kissing is not the solution to lost  intimacy. 

Inspiration lives beside happiness in the human heart and this is what can be blocked and cause doubts to rise. 

In the program I’ll share the skills to unlock inspiration and therefore expunge doubt.

Real Expectations – No Surprises

There is cause and there is effect in every circumstance. Sometimes, we forget to link those two and get a surprise about the effect, or result. 

One glaring example of this is treating our values as hierarchical, and therefore setting priorities for goals. This modern mess is the ideal way to bring about great disappointment. For example: working hard and finding your relationship failed. Or getting healthy and finding your finances in a mess. 

Balance is a vital key to happiness because the pain of regret always outweighs the pain of discipline. The future is predictable, what we do, think, eat, don’t do, today, causes tomorrow.

We’ll spend time examining how you can cause what you want in the future through disciplines today, habits, that guarantee it.

Meditation and Concentration

Concentration – meditation is an act which must have the cooperation of all five senses.

But concentration is never developed by the practice of concentration. Concentration can only be developed by the intensity and extent of your interest in whatever you are doing.

Real concentration/meditation on a useful subject never occurs while you are busy learning to concentrate or meditate.

When you concentrate on concentration, you are not concentrating. When you meditate on meditation you are not meditating.

Concentration requires a subject worthy of your full and undivided attention.

Delinquency, uncontrolled emotion and negativity is caused not by the lack of concentration but by the lack of a subject worthy of it.

Two people might meet each other and become engaged in courtship. They concentrate on each other, but after a time, nothing is new and that concentration may diminish. Those people might go to counselling and do all sorts of concentration training but this is not helpful at the root. It would appear, that it is what we don’t know about a person that keeps us focussed and concentrating rather than what we do know.

This is the responsibility of a leader, to keep the intensity of work interesting enough to absorb the concentration of the individual, and to see the warning signs when a person can do their job with their hand tied behind their back and either promote them to greater challenge or move them to another occupation. The idle mind is the soil of trouble.

But we are our own leaders too. So, we must ensure that our life is not blamed on others to present to us things and projects of interest in order to stimulate our concentration. The real success, the real lover, the real inspired individual will always drum up a new exploration, they will not be the victim of an overly compassionate and sleepy leader.

Clear Your Worries

My father died from worry and stress, and in his years before finally passing he’d say, “most of what I worried about, never happened” Happiness and worry cannot cohabit. I’ll share a process to help you defeat worry during your program.

Peace of Mind – Nature

Love Nature – Love Life.