These Two Things Help With Happiness

In our last podcast, we talked about two things that we noticed prudent people have pretty consistently. I have been thinking about it and I don’t think it is just a reflection of prudence, but also a source of happiness.

The first one is self-awareness. Knowing what is going on inside our own head is crucial to finding happiness. I lived most of my life completely unaware that my thought process was limiting me. I was the reason I couldn’t find happiness. Humanity is always looking for something outside of ourselves that we can bring into ourselves to fill the whole inside of us. The reality is that we cannot take anything outside of ourselves and put it in our mind. Our mind is self-contained and only accessed by us. Which means if we don’t do take the time to analyze what is happening and fix problems, our minds will work against us. An inner turmoil is deep well of unhappiness.

I would challenge you to talk with that person you know to be the most happy and ask them about self-awareness. I have a friend who is an only child and she told me about how she spent so much time playing by herself as a child that she was very familiar with who she was and how she operated. This gave her a great deal of peace.

The second one is emotional intelligence. I see this as the external version of self-awareness. This is social awareness. This is the ability to tune into the emotions of others and respond accordingly. Our fallen human nature is selfish. If we do not do the hard work of self-awareness, we will continue in and even strengthen our selfishness. Once we become self-aware, we see that we are not a singularity. We are part of a community, which means what we do effects others and others effect us. Because of this need for the community to thrive, helping others is built into our genes.

I challenge you to speak with that happy person about helping others and how they know what to do. I think, most likely, that person does it quite naturally. They have practiced seeing it themselves that they can easily see it others. At that point, the gold rule applies. If a kind word helped you when you were down, then offering a kind word to another will most likely help them as well.

The more I work on bettering myself and work towards our goals for InkleDeux, the more I believe that the key to success is self-awareness and emotional intelligence.