What Do You Want Most?
Happiness is not a goal…
― Eleanor Roosevelt
It’s a by-product of a life well-lived.
What do you want most in your life? Often people answer this question by listing the things that they think may make them happy. But what is happiness and what are the things that will make you happy?
Since positive psychology is the science of happiness and what makes life worth living, it may help us answer these questions for ourselves. First, happiness is not just about avoiding stress and the bad things that can happen to us because “stress happens” and will continue to happen. Positive psychology has shown that happiness is also about discovering and filling our lives with the good things that bring us pleasure, joy, meaning, and fulfillment. In the past, psychology focused primarily on avoiding negative things and emotions like anger, fear, and sadness; whereas positive psychology has focused much more on positive things and discovered the value of positive emotions like joy, love, interest, and contentment.
Second, the things that I think may make us happy may not always be the things that actually make us happy. Positive psychology has shown us that things like money, physical attractiveness, age, income, and IQ may not be as important as we thought and that things like time, optimism, self-esteem, having good friends, and meaningful ways to spend our time may be a lot more important than we thought. In fact, in her book The Myths of Happiness, Sonja Lyubormirsky presents the evidence that it is possible to be happy when we may not have thought it possible – like when are single, older, without a lot of money, have serious health problems, or have experienced trauma or abuse.
Third, positive psychology has helped us discover a critical difference between the kind of good feeling or pleasure we may experience when we taste our favourite chocolate, on the one hand, and the lasting gratification we may get from being true to ourselves or trying to make the world a better place, on the other. The bottom line is that the things that we think may make us happy may not always do so and that the kind of happiness and well-being that we come to value the most may often involve more than just fleeting pleasure or the avoidance of negative emotions.
One of the most important theories in positive psychology is the one developed by its founder, Martin Seligman, about the things that may bring us lasting happiness and well- being. Seligman used the acronym PERMA where each of the five letters signify the five different things that we may seek for their own sake and that may us happy about our lives.
These five elements – along with negative emotions – were asked about in the survey that you were asked to complete in the first chapter of this workbook.
As I go through each of the five elements of PERMA, I want you to think about which are most important to you and which you would most like to work on in this programme.
The P stands for positive emotions – like joy, interest, love, and contentment – and includes the pleasure that we often associate with happiness. Positive psychology has made many life- changing discoveries about the value of positive emotions. Barbara Fredrickson has shown that one of the reasons we have positive emotions is to enable us to broaden and build the strengths and resources we need in facing the challenges of life and better coping with stress. Jonathan Haidt has identified a positive emotion that he called “elevation,” which is goodness, the warm, uplifting feeling we experience when we see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, or compassion and which can motivate us to act in the same way.
The E in PERMA stands for engagement – which refers to being absorbed, interested, and involved in an activity or the world itself. This kind of engagement involves the experience of flow – which was identified by one of the founders of the positive psychology movement – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – who has one of the hardest names to pronounce or spell that I know! We experience flow when we are so absorbed in something that we love to do, that we lose track of time and can do it for hours. Michael Jordan and LeBron James get into flow when they play basketball. For me it might be when I am teaching and for you it might be something else – like a sport, hobby, or some aspect of your work. But if we can find and continue to do things that put us into flow, then we will increase the element of engagement and find ourselves feeling fulfilled and wanting to do it again and again.
The R in PERMA stands for relationships and refers to feeling loved, supported, and valued by others. Even if relationships aren’t always pleasurable, we often seek them for their own sake. There are many popular songs about the pain we sometimes experience in our close relationships. There are many days when being a parent may not be pleasurable but we do it because we value our children and our relationships with them. Our brains and our intelligence did not evolve to do calculus, read Shakespeare, or pass exams; but to understand and get along with other people – because they can be that important to us! One of the founders of positive psychology, Chris Peterson, summed it up in these three simple words, “Other people matter!”
The fourth letter in PERMA is M, which stands for meaning. This is having a sense of purpose and direction about where our life is going and the feeling that it is meaningful and worthwhile. It often includes being connected with something greater than ourselves, which could be spirituality or religion but could also be a movement, cause, nature, or the universe. Martin Seligman chose meaning for this theory because of the work of people like Viktor Frankl, who wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. In this book, Frankl talks about his experience in concentration camps in Nazi Germany during World War II. He believed that having a sense of meaning was the thing that enabled him to survive when so many around him were dying. There are many situations where a sense of meaning may be more important than pleasure, such as when we give ourselves to a cause that involves giving up some things we enjoy, or working hard in a challenging profession where the greatest rewards are in helping other people or improving the community.
The fifth and final letter in the acronym PERMA is A which stands for accomplishment – which involves achieving something and a sense of mastery. Sometimes we may do something for no other reason than that it brings us a sense of accomplishment and achievement. This could be getting the black belt that we may never need to use, finally getting that degree after years of being away from school, mastering that video game that no one else that we know understands, or climbing that mountain just because it is there.
These are the five kinds of things that we may seek for their own sake, for the satisfaction, gratification, reward, and – whether or not we understand why – just because we really want to! Remember the acronym PERMA – which stands for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.
Which of these are most important to you?
Which would you most like to work on and increase in their programme?
Workbook Tasks for the Chapter
The tasks for chapter will help you answer these questions and begin a practice that can help you see and appreciate more of the good things that happen all around you.
First, there a link for a special video by Alan Watts where he ask the question “What do you desire?” This is another way of asking Mary Oliver’s question about what you plan to do with your “one wild and precious life.” After watching the video, think about what it is that you most desire and want for your life.
Second, there is a variation of the three good things activity that you did in the last chapter and will help you continue to see more of the positive and good things in your life. But this time I want you to review your list at the end of the day and reflect on the three things you identified before you go to bed. This will help you remember and recall them so they might be more present to you during different times of the day in the future.
Third, there are 10 questions that will help you determine what may bring you the greatest happiness and may be most important for you to focus on in this programme. These questions are based on a variety of valuable exercises used to enable people to determine what may be the best goals for them to work towards.
Fourth, there are questions for you to reflect on and answer to help you decide which of the five elements of PERMA that we talked about in this chapter are most important to you and which ones you may most want to work on.