Top 5 ways to find what makes you happy…

The blogosphere — the wisdom of our fellow travelers — offers a lot of good life advice. So much good life advice that it’s sometimes hard to process it all. Here are four great pieces of advice originating from blogs I read and one piece of advice from me that, taken together, provide a more-or-less complete instruction manual for how to find out what makes you happy — in work, in life, in all things.

Not that this advice is necessarily easy to follow. Much like meditation, you have to practice doing these things every day. Some days will be harder than others. You don’t just arrive at happiness, like the peak of a mountain after an arduous climb or the destination of a long train ride. Happiness has to be part of the trip itself. As with anything else, you get better with practice.

I’m submitting this article to ProBlogger’s Top 5 Group Writing Project, by the way. Cruise on over there to see a whole lot of variations on the “top 5″ theme.

1. Recognize lies that you are told. This was inspired by a post on Pick the Brain, “Why are we afraid of the Truth?” While that post focused on scaring kids into not doing drugs, the fact that we all get lied to starting when we are children is unavoidable. The trick is to figure out what the lies are and question all so-called “truths” rigorously. Do you really need all that stuff or that gigantic house or that expensive Lexus to prove you’re successful? Does doing a good job really require you to sacrifice 60, 80 or more hours of your time a week, or to compromise your ethics? What other “truths” are standing in the way of your happiness?
2. Tell your own story. The post, “Changing Our Story,” on growing changing learning creating started me thinking about how each of our lives is a story that we’re telling ourselves. Sometimes we get stuck living someone else’s story — our parents’ story of us, or our partner’s story – being who they think we should be. Sometimes we get caught in a story where we have no power, a victim story, a story where we are at the mercy of fate. Each of us needs to take control of our own story and make it a good one. By telling our story ourselves, we define who we are for ourselves.
3. Practice conscious incompetence. This idea comes from a post by the same name at Slow Leadership. To find what makes us happy, we have to try a lot of new things and take a lot of risks. But no one ever starts out being perfect — or usually even good — at a new thing. Still, we all work so hard to avoid failure and making mistakes that it limits us. By consciously giving ourselves permission to be bad at something, we allow ourselves to stretch, improvise, learn something new without the residual fears of messing up or looking like an idiot. We free ourselves to find what makes us happy.
4. Focus on the journey, not the result. This idea comes from the Bamboo Project Blog article, “Is Your Focus on the Shortcuts or the Journey?” While the article looks at this from the angle of nonprofit work, the question applies to everything we do. Life is the journey, after all. If you’re always focusing on the outcome you’re trying to achieve and looking for the shortest way to get there — the “get rich quick” scheme, the fastest way up the corporate ladder — you won’t enjoy the time you spend getting to that goal, which is really the point of it all. But if you do focus on enjoying your journey, then you’ll probably find that the results you want will come to you naturally and in the right time.
5. Go with your flow. This idea is nothing new, but it is really the secret to happiness. We are most happy when we are in flow. Flow is that magical space when you become unaware of time passing, when you are completely in the moment and when you are producing something wonderful. For me, flow happens when I’m writing, when I’m cooking, when I’m in my garden, when I’m coming up with a project plan, when I’m designing a system, when I’m in a good meeting collaborating with smart people. Be conscious when flow is happening, remember what you are doing at those times, and try to re-create that experience as much as possible by making conscious decisions about what you’re going to do. The more flow you have in your life, the happier you’ll be.