Clearing the Last Hurdle to Happiness (and it’s a Doozy)

I’ve been thinking about happiness a lot lately, because I’ve been talking about it a lot in a business context while I’ve been on the road (see my post “On the Road With Don Quixote“).

I wonder how many people in this world are truly happy, and I find it hard to really come up with a good estimate. It’s hard to tell just by observing all the people who cross my path every day, and time doesn’t allow me to step up to every one of them and ask “hey, are you happy?” (imagine if a stranger walked up to you and asked that question - would you answer?).

But my gut tells me that there are less than there should be, and that feeling comes from my own experience. There are some statistics out there that tend to support this - for example, I recently read about a survey done by Best Life Magazine where they asked 1,026 men ages 30-54 if they were “happy and very successful” , and only 10 percent said they fit this category.

Now that doesn’t mean that the other 90 percent were miserable - I bet a lot of them just didn’t get over the last hurdle.

And it’s a real doozy.

It’s such a tough one because it involves much courage and moxie.

What is it?

The simple act of accepting you are happy.

Think about that one. I believe so many of us are hardwired to approach real happiness warily, like we’re in fear of it. We can experience great moments of bliss, but then some kind of reality mechanism sets in. I wrote about this last December, describing my efforts to stay in what I called the “Happy Place” after a keynote presentation I made at a management meeting.

It’s like happiness is subject to the laws of gravity - the higher we go, the harder we’re going to fall. Bad stuff is going to happen - so we’d rather not be in such a “high” place. We’ll stick to a comfortable equilibrium, not quite so high off the ground, so when the hard stuff comes it won’t be a crash landing.

We do all the very, very hard work of paving our way to happiness, but we just can’t cross the threshold. We can’t just say to ourselves, “I’m happy consciously, constantly, and completely.”

Instead, we often end up saying we don’t “deserve” it, and we back away.

I’m trying to be much more conscious of these times when I’m approaching real happiness - so I can face those fears and leap into that ultimate state of being.

And look back down with a smile, finally knowing that I’m not going to fall.