Happiness is a Skill Worth Developing

Dated: date August 25, 2011 – 12:54 pm
Happiness is not only good for your health, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but apparently it’s good for business too.  In his Harvard Business Review article, Shawn Achor sites that happy doctors diagnose 19% faster and happy sales people increase sales by 37%.  He goes on to say, “Happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy.”Over the last 17 years, I’ve seen dramatic business turn-around’s occur in as little as a week.  The only change being an increase in a persons happiness.  The results I’ve witnessed have been dramatic.  My clients on Wall Street made better trades, CEO’s made more profitable decisions and sales people made more sales all with a shift in their mindset, which lead to greater well-being.  Having been trained that correct business systems trumped all human factors, the outcomes that occurred from “enhancing one’s mood” were shocking.As a result, in the late 90s I decided to focus my career on the pursuit of happiness and fully investigate its impact on the success process.  Over a ten year period I found that happiness was a skill that anyone could learn and that happiness was a hidden determinant in success.  Bottom line; when entrepreneurs learn the skills to be happy, they have unexplainable increases in their results.

4 Happiness Skills Anyone Can Learn

There are a set of specific, actionable skills & tools that will cause a person to be happy regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in.  The following is the short list that I suggest to all new clients.

1.  Give up being right.

Most people are addicted to being right and they don’t even know it.  This leads to endless amounts of argument and strife.  To be happy, you must let go of this ineffective habit of thought.
Try this:  Notice that The Drunk Monkey(my nickname for the chatter in your mind) has an opinion on everything including things it knows nothing about.  Opinions are vanities and are always from your perspective.  Your perspective my be right for you, but certainly not for everyone and everything.  And yet, when you pay attention to The Drunk Monkey you see that it actually believes that it is right about almost everything.The desire to be right often puts you into a resistant state which does not lead to happiness.  When you are in a resistant state of mind – trying to prove your opinion is right – you will not be as effective as when you are open to all possibilities.To give up being right, put yourself in the other persons shoes.  Look at the world from their perspective and acknowledge that there are multiple ways to view the situation.  In short, have compassion for others.

2.  Accept the situation as it is and then take action.  

A client of mine found himself in an unpleasant situation.  His company was merging with another company and he was informed that he would be losing his coveted office with the sun shining into the windows that he was accustomed to.  This may sound trivial.  For him, this was the end of a 10 year era and he was very attached to what the office represented in his life.  He had been angry for a week when we finally spoke.  The merger had not yet happened.  Yet, his anger was creating dysfunction in has ability to produce sales results today.  He was suddenly procrastinating on things that were important.  His sales were suffering.In a short period of time I helped him to realize that he was moving no matter how angry he got.  Ultimately he accepted this as the case and promised to stop complaining simply because it was not making him feel good.  Next I asked him a question I want you to ask yourself when faced with adversity, “What are you committed to?”  We shifted his focus to defining what he wanted to create out of the merger.  He described his best case scenario.  As he did, new options began to be illuminated, his mood changed and his energy went up.  Getting happy allowed him to get out of his resentment, see new possibilities and get creative.In the following weeks his sales results returned and he discovered a compromise that would work for his new working environment.  If you don’t accept the situation as it is, you become frustrated, and unhappy, which makes you feel stuck and you can’t move forward.  You literally get blinded to all your available options.

3.  Quit pretending you are a psychic who can tell the future.

Just the idea of a change to his office environment caused him to hallucinate about a future he didn’t like.  Problem is, he’s not psychic so he doesn’t know what the future will hold.  Yet he was suffering, right now, as if the negative future hadalready occurred.  This is a trick The Drunk Monkey plays on people to strip them of their happiness.The Drunk Monkey in your head is not your friend.  As a biological survival mechanism one of its functions is to predict potentially negative situations and then mobilize the body to avoid them.  Problem is, most of your life is not dangerous.  The salesman moving into a new office is not dangerous and yet, The Drunk Monkey invented futures that caused his body to be filled with chemicals that created great stress.  Nothing had happened and yet his life experience had been degraded by a figment of his imagination.Today just remind yourself that you are not psychic and that you can not predict the future.  Work to see the situation with exacting clarity by removing your fear and your opinions.  Next identify what you want to have happen.  Only then will new and interesting possibilities arise.

4.  Stop protecting yourself from people who aren’t attacking you.

A Wall Street executive was managing billions of dollars in assets and yet he felt like nobody listened to him and that he wasn’t important.  This perspective had him feel repressed and defeated.  His positive results didn’t seem to match his

Monkey's got your back

unhappy mindset.  He was making money for his firm and the firm was doing well as a whole.  With further investigation it turns out that he felt like other people in the firm didn’t think what he had to say was important and therefore he was an outsider and not involved in making critical decisions.  He realized that taking on more responsibility was important but felt powerless to do so.

I asked him how he knew this was true.  He told me about incidents that had occurred the year before.  I asked him to give me something that happened this week.  He couldn’t even think of something that had happened in the last six months.  The Drunk Monkey was at it again.

The Drunk Monkey creates generalizations.  Example; you walk over, pet a dog and it bites you.  The next time you see a dog, it shoots your body full of chemicals that put you on the alert.  Do all dogs bite?  No!  But the survival mechanism will steer you clear of anything today that might have seemed dangerous in the past.

This system is great for making sure kids don’t touch the hot stove more then once but it’s terrible for everyday life.  A couple incidents that occurred a year ago that made him feel angry and unappreciated.  Since then, he’s been protecting himself against a whole bunch of people who aren’t attacking him and frankly, don’t even remember what happened.

I asked him to consider that he had changed, they had changed, times had changed, and the world had changed since then.  I asked him if he would be willing to run an experiment to put The Drunk Monkey into place so he could return to happy, fulfilled and satisfied with work.  He agreed.  Here’s what I told him to do.

Instead of trying to keep his ideas safe, instead of wondering how he could move his objectives forward; for the next week, find out what other people were committed to.  See what the other people in the company were working on and discover ways to contribute to each of the people in the company.  Make it a game.  See if you can contribute something to someone everyday for the next seven days.  An idea, a contact, a resource or even just an encouraging word.

Through this process, he shifted from protecting himself from all the people who weren’t attacking him, to being supportive and giving.  Within the year he became one of the most celebrated people in his company.  Everyone wanted to get him involved in their projects.  He was suddenly important.  The next year he was recruited away by a superstar in his industry and made a partner in the firm.  This was a five year dream that came true in one.  The trick was simple, he needed to be the change he wanted to see in the world, just like Gandhi said.

When you are happy, you are creative, approachable, flexible and easy to be with.  Add those characteristics to your skill set and you will see an immediate positive benefit.

Most people believe that happiness is something that occurs when the conditions of life are favorable.  But the truth is, happiness is the skill navigating challenging situations without getting reactive.  If you wait for happiness to find you, you’ll be waiting a long time.  Happiness is an inside job.

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Just Say Yes

Dated: date March 3, 2011 – 10:33 am

Today I’ve got a Perfect Game update for you. I don’t know if you play the Perfect Game or not, but it’s something that I promote as a way of being in the flow and letting amazing and extraordinary opportunities come to you.

The way you play is simple. Whatever is offered, you take it. Whatever is suggested, you do it. Whatever happens, you declare it perfect. A lot of people get freaky about that. “Whatever’s offered? Matthew, what if people offer you drugs?” Come on, you’ve got to use discernment here, okay?

Usually someone is offering you things because you’ve been talking and they see that there’s some connection and they’re hooking you up. People suggest things because of what you’ve been saying. I’m not talking about people trying to sell you something, because that isn’t a suggestion.

So whatever is offered, you take it. Whatever is suggested, you do it. Whatever happens, you laugh and you declare it perfect. Open yourself up and say yes.

I look for sort of random, unusual opportunities or things that just come up. A buddy of mine, Phil Tyrone, I think you know him from, his website is 720CreditScore.com. Good friend of mine, known him for a long time, coached with me and he and I have become buddies since.

Phil calls me up out of the blue and says, “A good friend of mine is coming into town. He’s going to a LA Kings game, and he invited me to come, but I couldn’t go.” And he said, “Do you want to go to the Kings game? They’re going to have dinner beforehand. You can meet and hang out.” and I said, “Okay, cool.”

So I just say yes. It was an unusual opportunity, and I said yes. I have no agenda. So, I come walking into this room. We’re meeting in a restaurant beforehand, and I’m overwhelmed. You know, there’s about 19 people at this table. And it’s not just 19 normal people, it’s 19 of the movers and the shakers in my industry. So I’m thinking, “Whoa, wow!”. I sit down and I immediately start connecting with people. I’m asking about them and what they’re up to and what are their goals, dreams and where are they going and what are they doing, etc.

I connect with this one man in particular named Adam. Adam had just finished making a movie, and I was like, “Oh my god, how amazing.” So I’m just finding about this and immediately he’s reciprocating and wants to find out what I’m doing. Well, I’m in the middle of a little side project that I’m doing, is I’m creating a movie codenamed What the Floyd, that is about this 42-year-old man who is having a major crisis and breakdown in his life. And he gets in a car accident and he’s killed. And he has a near death experience and comes back and sees his life in a whole new way. And the whole thing is told with songs that I’m writing with my buddy David Keesee.

So I’m immediately intrigued by the fact that he just finished a film. He did it totally independent. He did it the way that I wanted to do my film. We got to talking, and he says, “Oh my god, I can help.” I was contributing to him, but then he turned around and started contributing to me. I went from confidence level two, that I was going to be able to do this movie the way that I wanted to do it, to now confidence level nine just in a moment!

I was not really out there in the world seeking out people who were going to help me with this. It just fell into my lap. It’s been a side project, background intention. I’ve been writing the songs and things like that, but not really focusing on how we’re going to actually do the production. But it’s an intention. It’s still there. It’s written down that I want to do that.

So the Perfect Game led me straight to it. And the Perfect Game will lead you straight to the things that you want as well. I recommend that whatever’s offered, you take it; whatever’s suggested, you do it; and whatever happens, you laugh and you declare it perfect. Remember to use discernment.

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Happiness is Not a Choice

Dated: date February 14, 2011 – 3:04 pm

Happiness is not a choice, it’s a skill. Recently, I read an article that said that happiness is a choice, and I completely disagree. When you’re unhappy, it’s a reaction. The way I see it, happiness is not a choice, it’s a conditioned response. Unhappiness is not a choice either, it’s a conditioned response. You need to start to see that you’re reacting to things, and that reaction is either happiness or something else.

If you don’t acknowledge your conditioning, then happiness will not be your response to many, things. So the question is, how do you begin to condition yourself to make happiness your response? I think the easiest way to do that is to practice asking yourself questions that will get you back to a place that you want to be. I like to ask these questions: “How am I creating this? What good can come of this situation? What would be a more effective response? What do I want?”

See, when I ask questions like that, it pulls me back to what I’m doing rather than me reacting to what’s out there in the world. And I say happiness is not a choice. It’s a skill and you have to practice it.

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Other People Do Not Cause Your Suffering

Dated: date January 14, 2011 – 4:15 pm

There are no jerks in the world until you show up. Do you get that? People aren’t anything until you label them and give your opinion about what they are. What we don’t like in people is what we’re unwilling to accept about ourselves.

So every time I work with someone, and they start to talk like, “Well, I don’t like this, and I don’t like that. He’s a jerk…” I ask them to start to examine themselves – who they are. Who is the person that is making the complaints? We find out that the person making the complaints actually has those same complaints, in some way, about themselves.

It’s usually an issue about themselves, but they’re unwilling to admit it. There are no jerks in the world until you show up. You’re the one that declares them a jerk, and you can declare them anything you want. Your resistance is what causes you to suffer, and your suffering is caused, ultimately, by your opinion. So why not change your opinion so that you can feel good? You change your opinion, you change your life.

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Being Grateful is Good for Your Health

Dated: date January 11, 2011 – 12:20 pm

So it turns out that giving thanks is actually good for your health. According to Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis, adults who frequently feel grateful have more energy, more optimism, more social connections, and more happiness than those who do not, according to studies conducted over the past decade.

What are you waiting for? I recommend that you do two things. One, do the ten-ten visualization. I like to, every day, spend a moment visualizing 10 things that I’m grateful for. And then, 10 of my goals and dreams. I just visualize. I just close my eyes, think about all the things I’m grateful for, and instantly, I start to feel happy.

And then, I take that happiness, and I put it into my goals and dreams, and it accelerates the accomplishment of my goals and dreams, which makes me more optimistic. I am operating optimally. Do you get that? Gratitude is a great thing. Another thing I like to do is just make a little, short gratitude list. I like to have a group of people that I send my gratitude list to. I have a little e-mail chain, and we all send our gratitude to each other. You know, it’s just, “I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for this.” And I make a list of just three or four things every single day. Try it, and notice how much more optimistic, powerful, and resourceful you become.

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Are You Ready to Take Massive Action?

Dated: date October 28, 2010 – 1:01 pm

I want to help you take massive action towards your goals! So often, people take action out of fear. I call that, forceful action. It’s not every effective, and it doesn’t really feel good. And bottom line, it’s not sustainable.

I want to help you get into Inspired Action. When you’re in inspired action, work doesn’t feel like work, you’re on a roll. You can get there!

I’m offering my free video training program called Massive Action. I’ve put together 3 video sessions that are from my Inspired Action Weekly coaching program.

Please check out this powerful training program, and get on your way to achieving massive action!

Click here to take Massive Action!

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