What You Want: To be more engaged and joyful about what you're doing
What to Try: A happiness graph
Meaning is what makes us happier (and usually more successful) in our
professional and personal lives. And yet we don't always immediately
recognize what is most meaningful to us—which is why Harvard researcher
Shawn Achor's designed an experiment called the "happiness graph. How to
do it: Think about the last year, then sketch a line graph with two
axes, the vertical one for happiness and the horizontal one for time.
"So, if you got a promotion in January, and that made you happy, that
should be a high point on the graph," he writes in Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change.
"Or, if you were miserable in January but then in early February your
football team won the Super Bowl, you'd draw a spike," and so on, all
the way through December. Then, label the events that determined your
highs and lows.
"The events you include can uncover important yet hidden nodes of
meaning in your life," writes Achor. Some people's happiness fluctuates
around family events, others around world events, still others around
work events. "Whatever our individual graphs look like, they help us
understand what parts of our lives our happiness (or conversely, our
unhappiness) depends on." The question then becomes: Are you spending
your time on your points of highest meaning? And if not, how can you
change things in your life to let you focus more on those?
Choose Happiness with Shawn Achor's new two-part online course!
— Leigh Newman
