Happiness

I love a great debate but most importantly I love effective communicators. Those speakers who know just when to tug on our heart strings and just when to use grit and common sense vs. sophisticated vocabulary. There can be a clear difference between effective and eloquent communicators and the two can be mutually exclusive. I bring this up because of the enraged emotions Sarah Palin’s nomination has sparked with so many women. This heated up as a result of her effective acceptance speech. I have somehow become the sounding board of these angry, aggressive women who to this historical moment in time seemed to be quite docile and passive. I am actually grateful something jolted them back into life but BALANCE must be suggested or they may self induce heart failure. Don’t get me wrong; it’s great to be passionate about something but diplomatic grace will sway more people to your way of thinking and passion can be expressed without anger and negativity.

So today I divert my blog discussion to happiness. Good old fashioned happiness. If you Google “happiness,” you will get 87,000,000 results. That’s 87 MILLION!

In this lecture, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97

He says our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness even when things don't go as planned. He goes on to explain that we are able to “synthesize” happiness. He defines “natural happiness” as being what we get when we get what we want, and “synthetic happiness” is what we make when we don’t get what we want.

All of us, he says, have this capacity for synthesizing happiness, but some of us do it better than others. He urges us to cultivate that ability. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn't have preferences in life. But we should keep our preferences bounded. When our ambition is bounded it leads us to work joyfully.

Tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
- Shakespeare