PERSONAL SPECIAL............... Setbacks Can Set You Up For Success

Setbacks Can Set You Up For Success

The pesky Gregorian calendar! Its only job is to bang the rhythm of time. But with each stroke it torments us: You still didn't do that thing...Another year gone... When's it going to happen? When? When? When? I'm as much a slave to the Gregorian calendar as anyone else. Particularly at the end of the   year. That's because the end of a calendar year is a natural marker –  in business... in our personal relationships... and in life. What did I achieve? What did I not achieve? What will I resolve to do next year? You can get all worked up over the passing of another annual milestone. And we do. But the really cool thing about the Gregorian calendar is that  there'll be another one along just like it in approximately two weeks' time. It resets to the beginning, like magic. The only thing that's different is the four-digit number at the top. But that can cause complacency. There's always more time. There's a  whole lot more road ahead. You can keep kicking that can along until you kick the bucket - if you like. Complacency is one of the biggest causes of inertia when it comes to enacting your escape plan. But it isn't the biggest. The biggest is fear. Fear of failure. Fear of being broke. Fear of making an ass of yourself. Fear of letting your family down. Fear of leaving an unhappy life... and ending up in an even more unhappy life. You can never see the outcome with crystal clarity when you roll the dice. Although you can mitigate the risk. But it's that fear of the unknown that stops you from doing the thing you sense will make you happier than you've ever been in your life. What's amazing to me is that the reward on offer - true happiness... freedom... escape... somehow doesn't seem worth the risk. Even when every fibre in your body screams "DO IT!!" you boot the can into next year instead. Why? Because the risk of ending up even more unhappy trumps everything else But what if I told you that you'd end up happy even if your escape plan failed? Even if the worst thing happened...you screwed it all up...ended up poor ...and became the butt of every family joke - you end up happy...  If you knew you'd be happy no matter what, suddenly the biggest obstacle to getting started would disappear, right? You wouldn't be fearful of ending up unhappy...so you could plough ahead with confidence. Crazy talk, right? Not necessarily. Dan Gilbert is professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He's the author of a really interesting book called: Stumbling on Happiness. Professor Gilbert's core belief is the idea that happiness is ‘synthesised'. Put another way, humans have the ability to create happiness from any given situation. That you have within you (Dan's words) a ‘remarkable machinery' that works to change your view of the world,‘so you can feel  better about the world in which you find yourself'. We all believe that happiness can be found. So we go looking for it. We pursue it. But Dan Gilbert believes the opposite. That happiness is not something to be found: happiness is something we create. For what it's worth, I agree. What's more, happiness is something of a default - or ‘mean' state. Your brain wants you to be happy. It will always try to frame your world accordingly - whatever happens in it. In a recent TED Talk, Dan gave the following example:  "From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me - a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness." Read that last bit of Dan's quote again. I find this idea really exciting. Not to mention motivating. He's suggesting  that, just three months after a traumatic event (with a few exceptions) your brain reverts to the same level of happiness it was in before the trauma. Why? Because we create happiness We're conditioned to believe we'll be unhappy if we don't achieve success. Primarily because that very aspiration drives our economy. Advertisers wouldn't make any money if they promoted the idea that you can be just as happy notgetting what you want as getting it. But the brain knows differently. Dan looked at US lottery jackpot winners and paraplegics. One group won an average of $314 million. The other group lost the use of their legs. A year after both of these momentous events, lottery winners and paraplegics were found to be equally happy with their lives. Insane, right? But not when you consider Dan's main point: that your brain has the ability to change your view of the world so you can feel better about any situation you find yourself in. Dan concludes:  "Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience." In other words: when you're thinking about what you want to get done next year, take heart. Even if it all goes horribly wrong, it's not going to make you unhappy. By Simon Munton