Do You Want a Path to Happiness? Here is the Most Important PowerPoint Slide You Will Ever See!

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Exercise, gratitude, happiness, journaling, meditation, positive psychology, random acts of kindness, Shawn Achor, the happiness advantage

 

To start, I must give credit where credit is due.  I didn’t create this slide.  The slide was created by Shawn Achor, who has a PhD from Harvard where he teaches positive psychology concepts.  He is also author of the book “The Happiness Advantage.”  His TED Talk: The Happy Secret to Better Work is one of the most entertaining and insightful talks I have ever seen.

While most of the bullet points on the slide are self-explanatory, I will give a brief description of each below.  They are, essentially, actions you should take to increase happiness.

• 3 Gratitudes – Write down every day three things you are grateful for.
• Journaling – Start a journal and write down on a regular basis your thoughts or feelings.
• Exercise – Get moving… Period!
• Meditation – Proven to decrease stress, this is a good one.  There are many helpful apps out there that provide guided meditation exercises, but this can be as simple as sitting and paying attention to your breaths for 5 to 15 minutes a day.
• Random Acts of Kindness – Look for ways to do kind things.  Preferably ,spur of the moment things.  If you have never bought coffee for the person behind you at the Starbucks drive though.  Try it sometme.  You will be shocked at how good you feel the rest of the day.

The best part about the 5 items above, there is actually research to back them up.  So these are not just ideas, they are proven steps for increasing happiness.  Try them out for a few days and leave a comment about your experience.

This could be the clear path to Smiling Big and Dreaming Bigger.

Running Down a Dream – A Quick Exercise

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Down, dream, Exercise, Grid, Running

If you are like me, you have so many dreams and aspirations that you sometimes don’t know where to start. Sometimes the hardest step is the first one. Well I believe I have devised a quick exercise that will help you focus your energy on which dream to start going after first. If you only have one main dream you are shooting for, then you don’t need this exercise and should probably stop reading and start doing. Take that one step closer to that you dream you are going after. For the rest of you who do need some help, here are the instructions:

1. Take 5 minutes to write down everything you dream of accomplishing. This is a no holds barred, free form stream of thought. Just let it all out, every dream you wish you could achieve. No dream is too small and no dream is too big. It can be something as simple and vague as being a better mother, to something concrete and difficult such as becoming an Olympic Champion Gymnast. Make sure you only use 5 minutes as that will capture your key dreams and your list won’t be so broad that you are overwhelmed. Do this step NOW! Do it before moving to step two of the exercise. If you look at the rest of the steps before finishing step one, the exercise won’t be as valuable.

2. Ok, now that you have your list, make three columns next to the items. In the first column, rate each item on an importance scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not that important and 10 being extremely important. You can use a number more than once since you most likely have more than 10 items. In other words, there may be multiple sixes or multiple fours, etc.

3. In the second column, rate each item on an achievability scale, with 1 being extremely difficult to achieve and 10 being extremely easy to achieve.

Note: You may want to create a 1 to 20 scale for step two and three depending on the number of dreams you have listed. The largest the list, the better off you will be with this larger scale.

4. Add each row and use the third column as a total for each dream. For example, one dream may have received a 4 on the importance scale and a 6 on the achievability scale. So the total score for that dream would be 10.

5. Once you have a total for each dream, order them from the highest score to the lowest score. If you happen to have two that received the same score, then review the two and decide which is most important to you.

You may want to put your final version on a spreadsheet especially if you lean towards being analytical. Below is a sample spreadsheet of my own finalized version:

Some of you may scoff at this idea and think it is too systematic. I totally understand and this exercise is not for everyone. This exercise may not even help you decide which dream to tackle first. The exercise should help you focus your energy if you get stuck or are not sure which dream to start with and which initial actions to take. Of course I have a lot of ideas for creating a road map for each dream but I will reserve those ideas for another time.

Until then… Smile Big and Dream Bigger!