The Happiness Gauntlet
Episode #4 of the course How to be happy now … not “then” by Colin Triplett
Welcome back!
You may not realize it, but by just being aware of your ego and your mind, you are already on the path to happiness.
I bet that you’ve even caught [insert the name you gave your mind] starting to chatter over the last few days and thought, “Hmmm, that’s not me!” If so, great! If not, don’t worry. You will be there soon.
As for today, I want to help clarify an important concept:
Your current approach to happiness will fail.
Why?
Because if you are like most people, your current approach requires that something (many things!) about your life will need to be different.
The Happiness Gauntlet
I developed this idea because it helps people understand just how impossible the task is that we have given ourselves (and our brains) to achieve happiness.
A gauntlet implies a series of challenges that you must survive to get to the other side.
When it comes to happiness, the “challenges” that we have given our mind are as follows: “Give me everything I want,” and, “Avoid everything I don’t want.”
See the problem?
To take this one step further, let’s look at a few daily examples.
Here is a list of things that I think most of us can agree that we would or would not typically want:
These are just a few examples but I want you to consider this. How likely is it that all of these will go your way in a given day/week/month?
That’s the problem. These are just a few things, but there are so many more ideas in your head of what you want/don’t want or like/don’t like that it makes it nearly impossible to ever get everything.
Here is the real kicker. Even if everything does go your way, it will not be long before a new problem pops up. This quote says it all:
“The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.” —Eckhart Tolle
We all know this, right?
We all have had the experience of getting what we want and not being as happy as we thought we would be.
Or, we are super happy, but then a new “need” comes up, and we totally forget about what we were happy about before.
Yet, we can’t seem to let go of this idea that if we just had this or that or if things were just a little different, then we would be happy.
It’s a recipe for disaster.
Tomorrow, it will finally be time to talk about how to approach happiness from a different perspective, one that actually works.
To Your Happiness,
Colin
Recommended book
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Share with friends