In today’s world, there is a lot of pressure to be happy
Dr. Jennifer Guttman is very passionate about helping people find enduring satisfaction, not just achieve fleeting happiness. During our Wellness Wednesday session, Dr. Guttman shared her Sustainable Life Satisfaction® program. She dived into how she paved a roadmap on how to move beyond happiness, to achieve authentic life satisfaction by becoming more confident, self-empowered, self-reliant, and resilient.
“Society instills in us that being happy is binary. But happiness isn’t a mindset—it’s a feeling, and like any other emotion, it comes and goes.”
While her specialty is traditional cognitive behavior therapy, she has fused this with some of her own core techniques developed and refined over twenty-five years of personal interaction with her clients.
You’re not chasing being happy. You’re chasing satisfaction
Dr. Guttman explains that she started developing the concept after realizing a lot of her clients were saying they felt like they were failing at being happy.
“How can you fail at an emotion?” she asked herself. So she went into the dictionary for a better definition. The definition of the word ‘happy’ is satisfaction. Its synonyms are joy, buoyancy, and effervescent.” The thing is, she says, “we can have satisfaction without feeling joy, buoyant or effervescent. In other words, people aren’t failing at an emotion, they just don’t feel all the different fleeing aspects of it.”
“The problem is that when we tell our brains that we’re chasing something like happiness. Only, we’ve bastardised it into being a synonym. So now our brains think ‘Oh, I am chasing joy. I’m chasing buoyancy. I’m chasing effervescence.’ But now, our brains think we’re chasing something that’s fleeting. If we told our brains, we were chasing satisfaction, then we change the vernacular. [Now], our brains think we’re chasing something else that’s sustainable.”
In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Guttman explains that throughout the pandemic, it was necessary for people to redefine what happiness and satisfaction meant in their lives, respectively. Some described moments of happiness as a ‘drive-by’ from a family member. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is being able to live and bond with extended family in a way that had been unplanned.
Happiness is a dopamine burst. Satisfaction is lasting
In order to strengthen your sense of satisfaction, Dr. Guttman recommends that you shift your focus to the following areas of your life that closely relate to satisfaction:
- How can you find better satisfaction in your employment? The pandemic shifted so many elements in the workplace that you may have the chance to do something you have always dreamed about.
- Embrace what feels authentic and find personal satisfaction in the time you choose to spend with loved ones.
- Focus on developing a health and wellness regimen that will enable you to sustain ongoing self-care and lasting well-being.
Define resilience and a hopeful outlook
In her debut audible book, Beyond Happiness: The 6 Secrets to Lifetime Satisfaction, she provides a set of techniques that lead to an empowering self-concept. The purpose of these techniques also has to do with dealing with adversity. She calls it ‘define resilience’.
Dr. Guttman was concerned about helping her clients develop a better way to bounce back from difficult challenges. With this in mind, defining resilience works to build a higher sense of resilience and an improved overall sense of well-being.
That way, when someone hits a point in their life that is fueled with adversity, they are better able to bounce back from the challenge and come out on the other side with hopefulness, not hopelessness.
Here are a few ideas on how to master mental resilience.
The power of hope lies in the original Greek and Hebrew roots of the word.
It is not passive or wishful, the way it often feels in English. Rather, it is a way of thinking that calls for nurturing and refers to confident expectations. It also walks hand-in-hand with self-confidence that allows you to move through life’s road curves more deliberately.
Hope is an effective tool to face adversity or something as dramatic and ominous as a pandemic. Hope is intended to give a sense of moving forward in a different direction. Once you’re armed with a more hopeful outlook, you’re capable to assess problems more organically and proactively.
Someone who is hopeful in nature shifts their focus from the problem to how to get to the solution. They have gratitude while continuing to seek improvement. Their dreams turn into concrete goals and later, results. They are open-minded and optimistic, even in the face of failure. Most of all, they live in the moment.
In this link, Dr. Guttman provides some techniques on how to become a more hopeful person.
6 Secrets to Lifetime Satisfaction
In her book, she outlines these six elements as follows:
1. Avoid assumptions
Base your actions on facts, not assumptions. Don’t try to assume what other people think or feel about you. Avoid making speculative catastrophic predictions that inevitably can reduce hope for your personal future, career, marriage, children, and the planet.
It’s essential that you focus your thinking process on the present to avoid negative forecasting, which frequently fuels assumption-making. Once you’ve worked on these areas, your self-confidence and hopefulness will measurably improve.
2. Reduce people-pleasing behavior
Avoid situations of co-dependency and enmeshment. Learn to live an authentic life without living in the “service” of others. Valuing others more than oneself delegates reinforcement of one’s worth to the outside world. People pleasers tend to be over-observant of micro-expressions and verbal nuances in others. To avoid people-pleasing at work, one can stop overcompensating and feeling responsible for mistakes made by coworkers.
3. Facing fears
Do not be afraid to be afraid. When we face our fears, the brain is reminded of how it can move through imposter syndrome to the next level of the person’s development. Talk about your concerns as they arise, don’t wait and allow resentment to build. Use your fear as a positive motivation to propel and compel you to move forward. Instead of giving in to fear, use your adaptation skills to alter goals as needed.
4. Decision-making
Research from Cornell University indicates that we make 226.7 decisions on food alone each day. According to an assessment by TalentSmart, however, only 36% of people can accurately identify their emotions as they happen. In order to help you evaluate the authenticity of your decisions, carry out this exercise about how you make decisions at home. You can also adjust the questions to life areas like your career, your health, and your relationships.
You’ll need a couple of pieces of notebook paper to do it.
Imagine your dream scenario for satisfaction and that you must piece together a puzzle to realize it. Maintain open and transparent conversations about why certain changes must occur. Keep in mind that your decisions will impact other family members, and it may take multiple discussions to reach an acceptable compromise.
Answer five questions that look at how you see things now and your ideas for a more optimum situation.
- How can I balance my career and family obligations so I don’t feel ineffective at both? Conducting transparent conversations with family members and work advisors can help you improve.
- How can I make life choices that allow me to maintain more focus on my self-care rather than prioritizing what other family members want? Decide on a self-care method you can activate in your daily schedule. Adjust as necessary.
- How can I improve the way I prioritize and complete my tasks at home so I don’t feel overwhelmed and always behind? Be adept at saying “no.”
- How can I maintain a healthy balance between my friend and family obligations without feeling like I’m paralyzed? Focus on developing a comfortable cadence. It should meet your needs and not the expectations of others.
- How can I separate and focus on what’s important to me from what others expect from me—and keep my mindset and decision-making distinct? Create mental space to reduce outside noise.
Once you have completed the exercise, review it in a week. Assess whether your decision-making process has improved. Adjust wherever applicable to accomplish your desired goals.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
5. Closing
According to the results of a study conducted by Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, subjects had a far greater recall for tasks in which they were interrupted and therefore couldn’t finish than for the tasks they were able to complete.
When we don’t close the tasks we set out on completing, our self-concept suffers tremendously. So do our levels of satisfaction. Make closing easier for yourself by working with these methods:
- Stay in the moment and focus on the positive aspects of each success
- Break the task down into manageable parts
- Execute and close each part before moving on to the next
- Don’t allow yourself to succumb to immobilization
6. Active self-reinforcement
Provide tangible self-reinforcement for “closing” or a job well done. Make a cognitive shift from aspiring and needing reinforcement and praise from others to being willing to accept self-praise.
Don’t seek approval or appreciation from the outside world. Whether it’s in the form of monetary rewards or gifts. Choose reinforcements that bring you joy. Remind yourself that you worked hard to earn them.
You can find her book here and her website on this link.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW
For more details on the topic and to view the conversation, watch the full interview. Click on the link below.
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