Get ready for an enlightening journey through the realm of happiness, as we, your hosts, Denise Russo and Samantha Powell, dissect the insightful guide, "The How of Happiness". We promise that by the end of this episode, you'll have a clearer understanding of your happiness set points and the power you possess to enhance them. We delve into the science of happiness and dispel common misconceptions, emphasizing that happiness isn't an elusive treasure to be found but a state of being that exists within us.
What if your happiness could be measured and influenced by your actions and environment? We explore this fascinating concept, sharing insights from a movie that uncovers happiness in unexpected places and personal anecdotes about our own quests for joy. We also introduce a unique self-assessment tool that can help you discover your happiness set point. We challenge the belief that changing circumstances is the key to happiness, instead, we believe in the power of perspective and personal growth.
Finally, we discuss the topic of lasting happiness. We shed light on how to overcome genetic programming and introduce the concept of hedonic adaptation. The idea is to understand ourselves better and pursue activities that resonate with our interests, values, and needs, leading to genuine and sustained happiness. As a heartfelt thank you, we offer some exciting book recommendations for our listeners, and look forward to continuing the conversation next week! Be sure to subscribe and give us a rating to help us reach more happiness seekers just like you.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Get ready for an enlightening journey through the realm of happiness, as we, your hosts, Denise Russo and Samantha Powell, dissect the insightful guide, "The How of Happiness". We promise that by the end of this episode, you'll have a clearer understanding of your happiness set points and the power you possess to enhance them. We delve into the science of happiness and dispel common misconceptions, emphasizing that happiness isn't an elusive treasure to be found but a state of being that exists within us.
What if your happiness could be measured and influenced by your actions and environment? We explore this fascinating concept, sharing insights from a movie that uncovers happiness in unexpected places and personal anecdotes about our own quests for joy. We also introduce a unique self-assessment tool that can help you discover your happiness set point. We challenge the belief that changing circumstances is the key to happiness, instead, we believe in the power of perspective and personal growth.
Finally, we discuss the topic of lasting happiness. We shed light on how to overcome genetic programming and introduce the concept of hedonic adaptation. The idea is to understand ourselves better and pursue activities that resonate with our interests, values, and needs, leading to genuine and sustained happiness. As a heartfelt thank you, we offer some exciting book recommendations for our listeners, and look forward to continuing the conversation next week! Be sure to subscribe and give us a rating to help us reach more happiness seekers just like you.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Welcome to what's On your Bookshelf, with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell.
Speaker 2:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of what's On your Bookshelf. This is a life and leadership podcast where we are pursuing the pages of the books on our shelves and learning from them and sharing them with our listeners. My name is Denise Russo. I'm here today once again with my co-host, sam Powell. We are walking through a series on happiness in 2024, and the book that we are in is called the how of Happiness a new approach to getting the life that you want. Now, if you've missed any of the past episodes, you can go back and catch up on those, but you don't have to If you're just new to our podcast and you're jumping in.
Speaker 2:
The hope is that you'll get value from each of these, no matter where you are in your journey. But we are talking today about how happy are you and why. So, sam, I'm happy to be here with you. How are you doing today? I'm good. I'm happy to be here with you as well. I really am loving this book. I'm getting so much value and it is hard right. She said in the first chapter this is not going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it. And wow, she's so right. Like I feel my happiness. Muscles being exercised and stretched really quite a bit. And so I'm curious from chapter two now, maybe before we get into chapter two how was it for you going from chapter one to two? What were some of the things that stood out for you?
Speaker 1:
I think as I moved out of chapter one, I had a really good understanding of you know just how she's defining happiness. She uses happiness and well-being interchangeably as a term. But happiness is inherently something we don't need to find. We all know what that means for us and that it's very subjective, right Like there is no non-subjective measurement of happiness. It's really about who we are and I just the pie chart is stuck in my head and I'm struggling with the set point part of it, which we get into here in chapter two, because this is all about how happy are you and why, and one of the things that we walk through is really looking at your happiness set point. I think I'm struggling. It's the perfectionist in me that is struggling with this, because I'm not somebody who likes to get A's, I'm somebody that likes to get 100%.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
Like. That is the type of like work ethic that I got going on at all times in all aspects of my life. Like 100% is what I like, and so this idea that 50% of happiness is based on genetic set points is a real struggle for me, and through this chapter I had a really nice breakthrough and a different type of understanding as we walked through it. So as I transition I felt like I understood what happiness was, but there was a part in what she presented that I'm struggling with. But as we move into chapter two, I find good reconciliation on that.
Speaker 2:
Oh, that sounds awesome. Well, maybe the way to look at it is she talks about in chapter one, friends, this 40% rule of sorts that the 40% is what you can actually control. So maybe the way we look at it, sam, is what's the 100% of the things that we can control, and only look at that part of the pie. That's the only part we can control. So this book, friends, is about how to become a happier person, not how to become a happy person. The expectation is you already have some level of happiness. In fact, you have 60% of yourself has some level of happiness. It also supplies a roadmap. A roadmap is an interesting thing to think about, because we may both want to go someplace, but we might both be coming from a different place. To get to that end place, we also both might like to take a different route. Maybe some people like to take a scenic route, maybe some people like to get somewhere faster, maybe some people like to fly or drive. So this is a roadmap. It's not the only map. It is a map and also, in this book, has tons of happiness, increasing strategies, which is all about what's going to happen in chapter three. So an episode after today, and those strategies will help us get from where we are to where we want to be, but remembering that it's not about the end result. It's about that journey that's along the way and what fits best for you. The book is also about reasons why the strategies are so successful.
Speaker 2:
One of the things I love about the book is it was written by a scientist and a psychologist with lots and lots of experience. So this is not just a feel good book written by somebody who, in their own chemistry makeup, became happy and now expects you to be happy the way they became happy. The other thing this book does is shows the meaning and the effects of being happier, and those effects aren't just for ourselves but for all the people that are around us, even at a society at large, which I think was really interesting. And the book also has the benefits and the consequences of being happy or not happy as well. So you were talking a little bit about this pie chart and this 40% is in our power to change how we act and think, and all of that resides in us. So, as we get started with chapter two, sam, what were some of the things that stood out for you in the beginning of this chapter?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So this is where she really transitions us over into that happiness is subjective and right. This is the where do you fit in and she moves us into her what she calls subjective happiness Scale and this is for you to figure out what your set point is. She's got it on her website. It's in the book. Definitely recommend you get the book because it's got a lot of like. You fill this out and this is becomes a personalized guide for you. So I really like that. We're getting into this personalization, we're getting into the subjectiveness. It's funny, as you were talking about the roadmap and you're talking about the destination, right, like we're both trying to get to happiness.
Speaker 1:
But I had this image that went through my head and it is actually from. You know me, I'm a big romance novel fan. One of the romance novels I read this year was a series about like I don't know people who were like. It was a like a paranormal type romance thing, but it was about like Love after people died, right, like finding you know these supernatural like loves and things like that. But there was this version of Heaven or the afterlife for like, when you were a good person to get right, that kind of a concept and the Visualization and the description that they give I just thought was really interesting and unique. But they said that, like every person got to go up and they had this like plot of land that became whatever was like nirvana For that person, right, so you could have like a sky high condo for one person. It's like where people, like, lived in their home base, but it was just like, piece by piece by piece, everybody's nirvana home base was Super personalized, based on them and what that looked like.
Speaker 1:
And, as you're talking about this roadmap, right, like we're all trying to get to happiness, you know, in this, in this analogy, right, I'll try to get to heaven or you know whatever and when we get there, it looks different for all of us. Right, it's very subjective and the life that we live that gets us there is very different, right, the happiness journey that I'm on is different than the happiness journey that you're on, and what I thought was so interesting about this chapter is that it sets up Figuring out what your Like, what your journey needs to look like, because it moves into chapter 3, which is, let's figure out what of the strategy she's gonna tell us in the rest of the book you know fit into you, but you know thinking about okay, well, what is my set point? Where is my default? You know, when all the systems are running on their default autopilot for this journey?
Speaker 1:
Where do I sit from a happiness standpoint, right? So it's just an interesting thought process of like yes, like you and I can still rate happiness on this subjective scale, but it's gonna still mean something different to the two of us. I try that fascinating and beautiful and I, like, I love that. It's one of my favorite things about people is like understanding all the different perspectives of happiness and joy and things like that, for you know, all the individuals.
Speaker 2:
What I love about that is that you were talking earlier about how this is a scale as a continuum, and when you were describing your story. I so have to check out your book because it reminded me of one of my favorite Pixar movies that's recently out, called soul. Have you seen this movie? So, so in this movie, this, there's this guy. I won't give all the spoilers, because you should all watch all of these great movies. There's so many life lessons in them.
Speaker 2:
But there's a guy in the movie and he is in kind of like a Job that he thought would give him happiness, because he was a music teacher, but he wasn't really getting joy necessarily teaching music. He got joy out of playing music and then throughout the story, some things happen that his life changes dramatically and the thing that he thought was giving him happiness was taken away from him. So he's in this quest to go back to get that thing that brought him happiness, and what he ends up finding throughout the movie is that it wasn't necessarily that one thing, that there could be other things in his life that also could bring him joy and happiness as well. And that movie really is very profound for me personally, because I grew up my whole life thinking I was gonna be a music teacher and I don't know if it was programmed into me that you will be happy if you're a music teacher because you are a good Clarinet player, and you're a good clarinet player because you learned it when you were eight years old, because your aunt played the clarinet, and that's the instrument we picked out for you to play and that's what we chose for you. We chose your happiness path.
Speaker 2:
So I got to high school and it was like that was all I knew. That was my surrounding. I was in the band and my band was awesome where I went to school James Town High school in New York one of the top bands in the country. So that was my time of happiness. I thought that's what gave me happiness, and so I was programmed to think okay, if I get a degree in music and I now teach music, I will be happy. Went to college, loved my teachers, loved my classes, loved my classmates, decided I wasn't going to love teaching.
Speaker 1:
Hmm.
Speaker 2:
I decided that six months before I graduated. That did not make my parents happy, and yet I needed to follow this other path. And so when I did this assessment that is on in the book and Scott will put a link to that in the show notes as well I started thinking about how, how could your results change? Like you said last week, sam, about how this, this 10% issue on the scale, which is the circumstances parts of your life Could this scale change based on your circumstance? And I think that this, this assessment it's a self assessment is Standard baseline enough that, no matter where you are in your journey, no matter how old you are or where you are in your career, that there's still this baseline of your level of happiness.
Speaker 2:
And again, this book is about is it possible to become happy, or not just happy but happy, or we all have the potential to be happy, but each in our own way? So I wonder if we maybe just walk through a little bit about this scale, because, for those that might be taking this on their own, you could, you'll be able to download it. I would really recommend you get the book and dive deeper, because we know from one of our early episodes last year from John Wooden. Coach Wooden, drinking deeply from good books will give you more value, and that's what we hope to do with these episodes as well. So when you looked at this assessment, sam, and measuring the degree of which you are happy or unhappy, or this thermometer of sorts, what did you get about this, or what do you think we could share with our listeners on the subjective happiness scale?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So this is I would really recommend everybody does either go to her website or do it in the book. But the point of this is it's a four question Quiz about yourself. You're rating yourself Against four statements on a scale of one to seven and then you're doing a quick like average To figure out what it is. And basically what she's saying is that you do this rating for yourself over time. Right, you do it five times over five months, or you do it you know so often, and then the average of what that is for you is your set point right. So obviously, the more data points, the better your average will get out. But essentially you are just quickly assessing, or quick you know for statements About where you are, and this is helping you determine what your set point is right.
Speaker 1:
This is the 50% of what you cannot control Essentially about yourself. Like, so, when all the autopilot starts and your you know all the other systems shut down, where do you return to all of the time? And it is an important thing to know right and this is, I always stress this in coaching and personal growth and Leadership especially you have to know yourself to grow yourself, and so you have to if you're going to be someone who was on this journey with us and wants to take happiness, you know, in control, under rain, you know. You know that you're really doing something about being happy. You have to understand what your default settings are, and she does, and this is the thing that.
Speaker 1:
I struggled with right.
Speaker 1:
This was the big thing for me that I was like, oh, what do you mean? I need to get to 100%. But the thing that she gets to eventually in this chapter and we probably won't touch on it again, but it's just that. You know, we just tend to revert to this genetically determined set point. But just because you're happiness set point can't be changed doesn't mean that your happiness level Can not be changed, right? So it's just like, you know, dealing with any other, you know, you might have a tendency to have higher cholesterol, but that doesn't mean you have high cholesterol. You might have a tendency to be less happy or more happy.
Speaker 1:
That doesn't mean that you're less happy or more happy. Right, it is your actions, it is what you do, that really make the difference. Right, it's your, it's your environmental factors and how you respond to your environment that make all the difference. But to understand that and to understand what, what mountain you're climbing or what slope you're sliding, it's important to understand your set point, and so that's why this is, that's where this is at. This is at the beginning of this chapter, so that you then go through and listen to the rest of it, really understand that. So I really encourage people to go. You know, click the link, read the book. But you know, do this Exercise for yourself to understand where you're at.
Speaker 2:
I want to encourage everyone when you get the link or read the book and get this assessment from the book, keep it handy, because in the book she describes that you do this and administer it three times.
Speaker 2:
Now she doesn't really go into exact detail about, well, at what frequency. My suggestion for us throughout this podcast is we're gonna be together for the next couple of weeks, living together through months, through this. So you take this assessment it's a self assessment. You don't have to share it with anybody. You're sharing with yourself, the most important person to you and then take it maybe midway through and then maybe take it at the end and see if anything has changed. Because one thing she does talk about is that once you get your your number the first time through, she will share based on research remember, she's a scientist and has lots of research that backs this up on whether or not you are more or less happy than the average person, because that will show you. You know, if you want to be happier, then keep reading the book. If you're happier than most average people, that's awesome, but you're probably not at the happiest state, because she even goes on to say that it's unlikely that anybody will ever achieve that ultimate. I think, euphoria, or what you called it before. So I would say, keep that handy. Now I will say this as well last year, 2020, it was a really challenging year, and yet we said the same thing about 2020. We probably said it the same thing about some other year. It could very well be that 2024 has its challenges for you as well, but when I think about 2023 and we think about happiness, there may have been things that happened to and through and around you that altered your perception of happiness. Here we are at the beginning of a new year. This is, you've turned to the page, to a new year, to a new chapter, to a new book, to this new series. Yet we don't want to also diminish that there could have been things that you experienced last year that caused you to become less happy.
Speaker 2:
She walks through some of that in this book, but we are not doctors so we are not going to go into detail on some of this stuff. But she talks about what happens if you are somebody who perhaps has clinical depression, maybe you're someone who is clinically determined as being burnt out, or you have so much stress from either your life or work that it is unattainable for you to seek the purest levels of happiness. But I want to encourage you that if that's the case for you and you've scored yourself and that becomes what you have as a score, that you seek professional guidance, because this book is not a replacement for that. In fact, she even goes on to say that the book truly, if you are somebody who maybe already is clinically diagnosed with depression or something, or maybe you're taking certain types of medication, do not use this podcast or this book as a replacement for that. This is a supplement or a compliment to those things, but not a replacement for those things.
Speaker 2:
I wanted to be very clear about that that these are guides. They are not pure answers. It's important for us to recognize that in whatever you are experiencing in your own journey. I wanted to just pause on that, sam, before we go into the happiness myths section.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's a great call out because, as we think about genetics and you think about this at point and you think about where you're at, that's a part of it People are genetically predisposed to things like depression and anxiety and all of that, and so definitely take care of yourself, get the help that you need and then, when you're healthy, let's talk about happiness. Let's figure this out together. But, yeah, these myths so these are the happiness myths. No matter where you fall on the scales, no matter if you're rarely happy, occasionally happy or fairly happy, you really have to learn how to apply your own strengths and weaknesses that we go through. But before you can really start to incorporate these strategies that she talks about, you have to get past some of this pre-programming that we have. Right, we do this with.
Speaker 1:
This is actually I'm a certified happiness coach and this is the first thing that we start with. Is all of the programming right? The outside influences it. What is the world telling you about happiness and how do you get down to the core of what it really really is? These myths are great. I loved reading them. I was like, yep, 100 percent, right on board with it. The first one is happiness must be found. What did you think about that, denise?
Speaker 2:
When I first read that, I thought, okay, in my limited thinking, if I am trying to search for something, I don't want it to feel like a scavenger hunt, unless it's Easter and we're searching for eggs and candy. So happiness being found sounded like to me that this thing that is hard to find, that it is hidden from us, that it is somehow somebody makes it elusive and that you just can't get it, or that it's based on your good fortune, or something like that. So when I thought about this very first myth, that it must be found, one of the things that she talked about is that finding happiness in things is the myth that you'll be happier if you have that title. You'll be happier if you have a certain job. You'll be happier if your kids are grown up and moved away. You'll be happier if you have a bigger house. You'll be happier if you have things instead of relationships or whatever.
Speaker 2:
So if happiness is so attainable, the question is, why are we so bad at it or constantly in the pursuit of it? That's what this myth said to me. Is that are you not happy because you're seeking something that you think you can't find, or is the thing that could make you happy, already right around you. It's the same principles of Ikigai, so we talk about this quite a bit. I've written a lot of articles about Ikigai, but it's about finding the center of your purpose, and some scholars say that you have to find it. Other people say that it's already within you. You have to just embrace it. Not seek it, but embrace it because it's already there. So that's what I thought about this first one is that it's not there for us to find. It's inside of us, and that's the same principles that we find in Ikigai.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and she says very plainly that happiness, more than anything, is a state of mind, a way of perceiving and approaching ourselves in the world in which we made. This goes back to that happiness is the journey. It is it's you on the journey being happy from within. Happiness is an internal thing and our circumstances come along with us as we go. And then you, you touched on myth number two. Right, happiness lies in changing our circumstances. I would be happy if I will be happy when and that is a myth Happiness does not, does not come from getting to that destination and getting to that place. Right, there's so many stories in the world about I'll be like all these people who wanted fame, wanted money, wanted recognition, and they got there. They looked around and they're like well, now, what? Right, you know that's, I'm not, I'm still not happy.
Speaker 2:
I have worked over the years with many very senior level executives, celebrities, government officials that seem to be continuously seeking and haven't found. They got tons of money, power, prestige, titles, fame, but they're not happy. And in fact so Dr Sonia, she did. She talked about I don't know if she did this exercise or if she just researched it but she talks about an exercise that was conducted with severely depressed people and they did a really simple thing and I was wondering maybe, sam, if we do this, maybe we even take time to do it while we're together so that our listeners can try it as well.
Speaker 2:
And this exercise took these people that were extremely not happy and they had to write down three good things that happened to them that day, and they did it every day. Now they did this over 15 days. They actually did it longer than 15 days, but within the first 15 days they're on their scale because they were researching these people. Their depression lifted from severely depressed to mildly or moderately depressed and 94% of the participants that went through this exercise experienced some level of relief. Now she said you have to do it every day. So that harkens back again to the book of last year.
Speaker 2:
There's a reason why these books are coming in this sequence on our podcast. It's about creating tiny habits that, over time, give us these remarkable results. So if you just did this exercise of writing down three good things that happened that day, and you do it for every day, I wonder how, if you are already at a set point of happiness because we're not in a severely depressed state if you're listening to the show most likely how much happier will we be? And so it's not in your circumstance. I will be happier if this happens, or I'll be happier if that happened. What if we write down I'm grateful and happy because of this thing that already did happen.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. My friend gave me this journal. It was one of my favorite gifts after my son passed away and it's from the Happiness Project which is on our list. But it's a journal and you record one sentence a day about something that made you happy that day and it's a five year journal so like you can look back to every I don't know January 3rd and see what you did, like what made you happy for five years in a row. But just that act of writing down happiness and somebody gave that to me right and in the most extreme grief that I've ever been in, and I just it was one of those gifts that like I can get back to happiness. I can do this and it really did help right. Writing one thing a day that made me happy like really was a huge benefit. I've seen this work in my own life and that wasn't even three things, I was just one every single day.
Speaker 2:
I love that I have a journal.
Speaker 2:
I think I shared this with you either on another episode or just in general, with us sharing time with one another.
Speaker 2:
I don't have a journal, that's an everyday one sentence thing, but I gifted my mom and I bought one for myself as well A five year happiness journal. I guess you could call it for Christmas, and so what you would do for five years is, from December 1st to Christmas Day, you journal something that is about gratitude, thankfulness, christmas time, and you do it for five years, and last year we finished the five years, and so what we did at the end of last year at the holiday time was just looked at our books together and it actually elevated our happiness even more because we were reflecting on great memories and so sometimes those things that if you jot them down, it's better to recall those in your, in your memory banks than to only be able to quickly recall things that are in our memory banks that that maybe don't bring them, that maybe don't bring us happiness, and what a gift that your friend gave you during a time that you were not experiencing happiness.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
And yeah, that's myth. Three, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:
That's myth three. You either have it or you don't. Some people think that you're either happy or you're unhappy. That's just who you are, right? You're a grump, you're. You know you're Oscar the Grouch. Right, that's just who you are. And she said that's just not true, right, and my lot? My favorite line from this section was growing research demonstrates persuasively that we can overcome our genetic programming, right.
Speaker 1:
So we might have this set point. We might have right, we. Maybe we do default down to a two on a seven scale, right? Maybe that is where we go, but that does not mean we have it or we don't. We can always get into happy regardless, just like you can always get to good cholesterol if you have bad cholesterol. Like right, like that is possible and we are able to do that. The science is crazy in that research space about really supporting that. Yeah, we can Right it's, our circumstances are reactions to those things. So it's not a you have it or you don't, right, it's not. It's not that it's, it is something controllable.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and if you don't have it, going back to one of those myths. It's not something you find, like she says in the book. This is not something you find like a lost wallet. It's not something you chase after and that you never catch. This is about how happy are you and why is that? And let's change our thinking. And by changing our thinking, we're going to shift our beliefs. Shifting our beliefs is going to change our actions. Changing our actions is going to change the results we have in our life. So if you are generally on the first time you took the assessment on the lower side of happiness Well, what do we need to do to bring us up past the midpoint of that? And our limits aren't on our life's circumstances. So she goes through tons of this in this second chapter just about the limits we put on ourselves based on circumstances in life.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so we're getting close to the end of our time here, so what's this chapter has so much impact in? It was one thing we didn't get to talk about here that you want the listeners to know.
Speaker 2:
Oh, um. I think the one thing I would say that I'd really want the listeners to be able to take away from this is that this book is about learning strategies and creating habits that you can sustain with, and there is tons of content in here that walk you through how this fits for you personally. It's not the prescription of Sam. It's not the prescription of Denise.
Speaker 2:
We also share in the show notes lots of different types of links, and there's links to Dr Sonia's content that is beyond the book, and so if there was one thing I could share that we didn't really get to go through is she has great stories from people that she researched and talked to, but there's also these exercises that could really help you. But there's also reflective thinking in here that may impact you in different ways and it did to us, like we've pointed out today the stories or the parts of the book that really impact us. But reading the book and drinking deeply from the pages yourself may give you even a deeper level of understanding of these happiness activities and the way to find out how happy you are and why. So that's what I would say. What about for you, sam?
Speaker 1:
I think the one thing we didn't touch on that is an interest. That was really interesting concept for me was the hedonic at adaptation. So it's this concept that human beings are. Well, I guess it's not a concept, it is a fact that human beings are exceptionally adaptive. We get used to things really quickly, like you can think about that when you walk in from the cold or walk in from the heat into an air conditioning room or a heated room, right, like, eventually you just adjust to that feeling. And so that's one of the things right.
Speaker 1:
When you think about these life circumstances, when you think about all those myths and things that you're pursuing for happiness, and then you're wondering why you're not happy. It's because you're looking externally and and the reason that happens is that we as humans are so adaptive that we get used to this new level, right. So when we make, you know, a ton more money than we were making, we quickly adjust, and so now that's not the thing, right, that we get a small burst of happiness in that moment, but it levels out because we're so adaptive and so really knowing that, like those environmental factors don't do anything for you long term is really important, because I think, as we move forward and we think about the activities as we go into chapter three. That's where you're going to find that lasting, sustained happiness, not from those external factors but from really understanding who you are, what works for you, and then going and pursuing those activities that build that genuine happiness for yourself.
Speaker 2:
So good. We could have done a whole episode on just that, because people are all in different stages of life whether it's you personally or professionally really important to think about this, and that these changes that happen in your life Don't necessarily deliver you the long term happiness or unhappiness. If you think about where you are today whether it's in your career, your personal life where you are today is not where you were in your past and it's likely not where you will be in your future. But you again have the control in your own hands to dictate how you want to progress, and all that comes from starting with your thinking. So next week we're going to talk about how to find happiness through some activities that fit your interest, values and needs, and we'll round out this first section of this great book on the how of happiness, the new approach to getting the life you want.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, friends, for listening, for sharing, for subscribing. We also value you being able to take whatever format. You listen to this podcast and give us a rating. That helps us to be able to get more listeners that perhaps we don't yet know that are also on a quest to see happiness. We'll be back again next week. Thanks for joining us this week on another episode of what's on your bookshelf.