Journal your disappointment
“Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.”
― Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Arthur Brooks was born on May 21, 1964, he is an American author, public speaker, and academic.
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. I discover him while he was a guest for Oprah Winfrey when their book ”Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier” got launched and he was talking about introducing journaling to his students. That is a brilliant listen if you are interested I leave here the link.
So I google him some more and discovered this TEDx speech he is talking about the art and science of Happiness.
Here are 2 things that I noted down from his speech:
The equation of Happiness = Enjoyment + Purpose + Satisfaction, and also how we interpret happiness.
Satisfaction = Haves/Wants
It makes so much sense the way he explains how we should look and interpret happiness in order to make it serve our wellbeing and self-care.
Now returning to the journaling part that made me search for his work, he is mentioning journaling negative experience as a database of informations.
He is encouraging his students to write down about their bad feelings/emotions - to keep a failure and disappointment journal - like when they get a bad grade in an exam. And he is using this as a learning powerful tool.
Now the reason I am writing about this is that if you are trying to get your mind to work in serving you in a way that will push you forward - here is how you can use this for yourself.
Grab a notebook and a pen. The importance of writing this down is the way your brain activates neuronal paths when you are doing this rather than using a digital device.
Write down something that bothers you, that is stuck on your mind - might be a failure or something emotional draining. Just write down - download everything on the paper and leave some blank spaces after that.
Set a phone alarm to revisit after the 30 days and answer the question ”What did I learn about this thing in the past 30 days?”
Set another phone alarm to return after 6 months to the same topic and write about ”something good that happened because of that”.
There are no bad or good emotions there is just emotional information that can be used in learning more about ourselves and our resilience. So create your own database of information.
Arthur Brooks talks a lot about how we understand happiness, the importance of understanding one’s personality pattern when it comes to positive and negative emotions in order to better self-manage emotions, he also mentions the ”Four Pillars of Happiness: Faith, Family, Friends and Work that Serves”, as well as the power of metacognition in all of these. Love the way Oprah calls metacognition as “one of the biggest contributions to people getting happier.”
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
