What Are Your Happiness Metrics?
Posted on February 19, 2014 by Jay Rooke, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
How you measure your happiness might be impacting your ability to feel it--two simple tweaks to nudge you towards feeling better in the present.
In the business world, one of the most overused mantras is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” however, this practice of behavior analysis is rarely utilized in our personal lives. Many of us think that happiness is a byproduct of our actions, and in many ways it is, but it is also a byproduct of our measurements. If you are not managing and monitoring your happiness with the same discipline with which you manage and track your bank account, you might be coming up with “insufficient funds.” Here’s a simple happiness management exercise that yields big results and keeps you feeling like your cup is half full.
One simple way to shift your attitude to a state where you feel like you’re winning at life is to track your successes. Here’s how: 1.) create a subfolder in your email titled “Happy Metrics,” 2.) Develop a habit of shooting yourself a one line email when you notice things that make you happy. You get to choose what those events are; they can be major events and experiences (for example, “I hit my sales goal”) or seemingly be less significant events (“my family said I cooked a delicious meal on Tuesday”). 3. ) block off a calendar invite for 10 minutes on your schedule (recurring on a weekly basis), and title that meeting something fun for you (e.g., “Happiness Review,” “Awesomeness Check-In,” etc.). When you have your weekly meeting, spend of couple of minutes reading the emails in your Happy Metrics folder. It doesn’t need to be for long—I think you’ll be shocked at how few emails you need to read before you notice a positive shift in attitude.
An important reason to track your happiness is that it frames how you approach your day-to-day life. Think about it: how do you act when you feel like you’re winning the game of life? Most likely, you behave in a more confident manner, you are not easily derailed by setbacks and people want to be around your energy. When you feel like you’re losing at the game of life everything seems heavy, your confidence diminishes, and you avoid challenges, versus overcoming them.
The act of paying attention and celebrating the things that make you happy ensures that you pay a little bit of time paying attention to what is going right in your life. Anytime you don’t feel as happy as you want to, these brief meetings not only remind you how awesome you are, but they also provide a roadmap back to activities and events that make you happy.
