In this episode, we dive into the difference between happiness and resilience and how understanding this distinction can change our lives for the better. As a therapist and a mom, I discuss the importance of building resilience for ourselves and our children. We explore the concept of life being a fluid, non-linear journey, much like an infinity symbol, allowing us to accept the ups and downs as a natural part of life. By redefining our expectations of happiness and connecting with our values, we can build a more fulfilling life. We also discuss a powerful resilience-building exercise called the “what went well” practice, which can lead to increased feelings of hope, motivation, and connection. Join me as we learn how to embrace both happiness and resilience, gracefully navigating life’s inevitable challenges.
If you had to choose between being happy or being resilient, what would you pick?
This is a question worth thinking about and in today’s episode we’ll explore why knowing the difference between the two could seriously change your life for the better.
If you ask people what they hope for in life, most will tell you that they just want to be happy. We work pretty hard to avoid pain, loss and disappointment and when challenges come, we often think and feel like something is terribly wrong.
The expectations we hold about how life is SUPPOSED to be and how we are SUPPOSED to feel, actually have a huge impact on how “happy” we feel.
Happiness isn’t a destination that you arrive at and then get to stay. Happiness can be elusive.
That’s because it is an emotion- and emotions don’t stay in one place- they are always moving, shifting, building and changing.
If happiness is linked to getting what we want and NOT feeling sad, angry or afraid, we have really set a high bar. And this has caused us a lot of problems.
Because the reality of our human existence is that life brings things to us that we did not order.
What if I told you that happiness isn’t about feeling good all the time?
Life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs. It gives us real challenges that often conflict with our expectations and cause us pain and grief, not only from the actual challenging events in our life, but also from our dashed expectations
In this episode, we will talk about riding the ups and downs of life by using resilience.
You may not have a choice about what happens in your life but you do have a choice about HOW you respond to what happens by how you manage yourself.
Your response will determine how hard you take things, how long it takes you to recover and and what you take away from your difficult experience.
This, in fact is one of the foundational principles of resilience.
Resilience training teaches you to pay attention to the things that will help you get through hard things.
If life has happy moments, (which we all love!) then all the spaces between the happy times need to have a plan- like a bridge that helps us from falling into the depths of despair.
Developing the skill of resilience means that you don’t have to fear the gaps between happiness
and the hard times. So, join me as we look at the question Happy or Resilient.
I think you’ll be “happy” with the answer!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why happiness is unpredictable.
- How our expectations of what happy is supposed to look can actually make happiness harder to find.
- Focusing only on feeling good can cause us to want to numb out our disappointed and painful feelings when we have difficult times
- Adopting a new definition for happiness can give us a much better chance at being happy.
- All of our emotions need to be experienced in order to live a rich, full, and happy life and we need to know how to do it.
- Your brain has a negativity bias which means its wired to look for things that are going wrong.
- Resilience bridges the gaps between hard times and happy times
- Looking for 3 positive things each day can actually train your brain to become more resilient
Mentioned on the Show:
- What Went Well exercise for moms
- What Went Well exercise for kids
- Researcher Iris Mauss on seeking happiness
- Do positive psychology exercises work? A replication of Seligman et al. (2005) Myriam Mongrain 1, Tracy Anselmo-Matthews
Episode Transcript
Episode 2: Happy or resilient?
*This transcription below was provided for your convenience; please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.*
If you had to choose between being happy or being resilient, what would you pick?
This is a question worth thinking about and in today’s episode we’ll explore why knowing the difference between the two could seriously change your life for the better.
Welcome-
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our topic today- about happiness.
Some might say that I’m in the business of happiness- because that’s why people come to see me- namely because they aren’t happy.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the power to convert unhappiness to happiness, but I have learned how to walk with people through their unhappiness and get to the other side.
However, I’ve learned that It’s not always happiness waiting for them on the other side. Because…
Happiness isn’t a destination that you arrive at and then get to stay.
Happiness can be elusive
That’s because it is an emotion- and emotions don’t stay in one place- they are always moving, shifting, building and changing.
We think this is a pretty good idea when the feeling we have is painful and don’t want it stay.
But give me a taste of something sweet like happiness and man do I want that all the time!
You wouldn’t be human if you aren’t seeking happiness in one form of the other either happiness straight up or avoidance of things that don’t make you happy”
Our culture values happiness big time.
In fact, we are pretty much obsessed with it.
We define happiness in many ways-
in general happiness is linked to the absence of other emotions like fear or sadness.
We link happiness to winning or the opposite of losing.
We link it to having our expectations met- to getting what we want.
Are you starting to see storm clouds brewing on the horizon here?
If happiness is linked to:
Getting what we want and NOT feeling sad, angry or afraid, we have really set a high bar.
And this has caused us a lot of problems.
Because the reality of our human existence is that life brings things to us that we did not order.
I think of my 2 little grandsons who are both 6 years old. They were here with me last week and it was so awesome to get time with them. When they come I always have a surprise for them- Mimi surprise.
Toy that brought big smiles and within 5 minutes, big tears.
Not only did the toy break- but the whole feeling of the surprise was ruined. It was a dud present and happy turned to sad pretty quickly.
This is normal for a child- they’re still figuring out how to work with disappointment and not getting what you want…
But I’ll tell you it was also really hard for me.
I was also expecting to make them happy- in fact, that’s why I wandered Target for an hour trying to find little things I thought would delight them, bring them happiness and bring ME happiness because they’d be so happy with me!
We do a lot to bring happiness to our kids- to others and ourselves- and that is all good- not anything wrong with that at all.
It’s just unpredictable.
And when it works like you want it to- its awesome and when it doesn’t its really hard.
I found myself looking at their disappointed faces and wanting to run right out and buy them something else- something better. Something that would bring the smiles back to their faces and make them happy- and make me happy!
Ugh- I think it is very good that it was close to dinner time and I had an army to feed and there was no time to go target.
Because it was a learning moment. It was a moment for resilience.
Resilience is the ability to stretch and adapt and adjust — to challenges that happen externally in our lives, but also to the challenges we experience inside of us- in our expectations and even in just dealing with our feelings.
So I took a deep breath and practiced some of my resilience training on myself- and on the kids. I validated, empathized, and honored the fact they were sad and even a little mad.
And I kept myself from digging in my closet for a leftover ‘present” to try and manufacture a little happiness. Because I not only want to make them happy- but I also want to help them build the skills that are going to help them get through the challenges in life.
I guess I really want to give them the ability to have joy amidst the challenges. I tried to help them see the big picture- their parents chimed in and reminded them of how much they had and how lucky they were that they even got a present- I wish I could say that it all worked and they happily skipped away. Nope. They stayed sad for a few minutes and
so did I.
If you ask people what they hope for in life, most will tell you that they just want to be happy. We work pretty hard to avoid pain, loss and disappointment and when challenges come, we often think and feel like something is terribly wrong.
The expectations we hold about how life is SUPPOSED to be and how we are SUPPOSED to feel, actually have a huge impact on how “happy” we feel.
Some people call this the “Happiness Myth”
and it can really set us up to feel like we are doing it wrong if we have bad days, painful feelings and difficult times. Because we all do- we all have tough times and we deal with challenges with our kids and spouses, losses, stress, jobs, traffic, sickness…the list goes on.
If happiness is the absence of painful feelings, then we are all in big trouble, because life just isn’t perfect that way.
What if I told you that happiness isn’t about feeling good all the time?
Life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs. It gives us real challenges that often conflict with our expectations and cause us pain and grief, not only from the actual challenging events in our life, but also from our dashed expectations
I learned this really great lesson from a very wise woman at a time in my life when I was feeling pretty low. Id had a several months with a very painful condition that just wasn’t getting better. Id been to my doctor who finally suggested I go see an acupuncturist.
The moment I met Ann, I literally started a new kind of healing journey. Not just my physical condition, but my mental and emotional pain also.
She was a child in Vietnam during the war in the 70’s. As the country was falling into communism, her family fled by escaping by raft in the ocean. There were several families crowded onto an open air raft, hoping to get to a country where they would be safe. It was a harrowing journey- they got lost at sea, traveling without a navigator. They experienced hunger and dehydration. But she said it gave her a foundation in her life that helped her flow with the ups and downs.
I was very discouraged when I went ot see her. Id felt kind of beaten down by this painful condition and I think I cried a few tears in her office. She told me that life is not linear- it is fluid, much like an infinity symbol. ∞
We all experience joy and suffering, health and sickness, celebrations and sadness, and success and failures. Without the hard there is no ease. Without the bitter there is no sweet.
The circle rises and falls in a round that carries us through the growth stages and cycles of our life. She shared with me her own health challenge – a congenital condition that was far more severe than my own, and how she handled it.
Opening to the idea that she didn’t have to be challenge free to feel joy and appreciation for her body.
She told me this story as she asked me about my life, my condition and gently encouraged me to keep hoping for healing and accepting the times that my body was having a hard time. She talked with me a lot about how fortunate I was to have a beautiful family and a faith in God that could carry me through my challenges. She helped me shift my expectations and accept that I was experiencing my current situation at the base of the infinity symbol- feeling the hard things in life, and that I would be making the climb back up where I was going to be appreciating the healing. I could not appreciate the joys in my life without the pain, she said. We hold you through the pain and then you rise with greater joy.
I feel very fortunate that I was able to work with Ann. I literally drove 45 minutes 2-3 times a week to see her because of the truths she taught. She put my challenges into perspective and stayed with me while my body healed and she showed me how to look at happiness in a more realistic way.
This my friends, is resilience.
Resilience is officially defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; having emotional and physical toughness or bouncing back after something hard.
Though I don’t look for hard things or wish them upon you- I appreciate the shift in perspective. It is a powerful shift. Its one that we all need to make. It has reset my happiness definition and since then, I can honestly say that I have been a – more joyful person since I gained this understanding.
I also have taken this way of thinking into my work with women who are suffering or struggling with the goal of holding them through the pain so they can rise with greater joy.
It’s amazing what happens when we accept that there will be challenges– we don’t get surprised and usually we spend less time fighting the reality and get down to adapting
Now I know this sounds like we have to just accept that we’re not going to be happy all the time!
But this isn’t about just shutting up and gritting our teeth through hard times. It’s about recognizing that life is supposed to have hard times and we can decide to focus our energy on how we want to handle it rather than fighting against it.
For instance, as a mother, we want things to go smoothly- but in reality, they rarely do! We have children with their own little minds and struggles and we have traffic and deadlines and then someone gets a cold and no sleep that night! So, what to do?
Resilience involves getting a broader perspective about life, trusting that these hard times are normal and even expected. And then- looking to the things that matter to us the most to help us cope through the challenges.
We call these things that matter to us, our values, and they are worth taking a look at because they hold the compass to finding our way to meaningful and purpose driven life. In other words, real happiness.
Being connected to our values help us cope with the storms of life, whether they are big life events or daily irritations and frustrations.
Focusing only on being happy means we get sidetracked from the whole life experience- focusing on feeling good and then being utterly unprepared when we have difficult times. Rather than dealing with difficult and painful feelings we often reach for anything that will help us numb out. Think for a minute what helps people numb or avoid – not feel- their feelings.
Food, alcohol or substance, porn, working, cleaning, sleeping, spending money, social media scrolling, and the list goes on.
Groundbreaking work by the researcher Iris Mauss has recently offered the idea that striving for happiness may actually cause more harm than good. In fact, at times, the more people pursue happiness the less they seem able to obtain it. She suggests that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they will be to set a high standard for happiness—then be disappointed when that standard is not met.
This speaks a lot to expectations. When we expect that we should be happy all the time, we really notice the times that we are NOT.
My research and study combined with my own painful life experiences have actually helped me change the definition of happiness:
“Happiness doesn’t happen because of perfect circumstances and perfect feelings.
“Happiness comes from living a life of meaning, values and purpose and involves ALL the emotions that humans can feel, including happiness, excitement, sadness, fear and anger.”
Happiness has a time and a place. And so do all of our other emotions.
This is important because to experience true and deep fulfillment in life, we need to be able to feel all of our emotions.
Happiness is not well suited for every situation. It’s not reasonable that my boys should feel happy about their broken toy, or that I should be happy when my beloved dog passes away. I think we need to give ourselves room to feel disappointed, sad, angry and even afraid. In fact, that is the whole purpose of being resilient.
Resilience is the ability to work with your circumstance, whether that be a broken toy or a broken promise from someone you love or a myriad of other challenging situations , Resilience is focused on having a choice about how you respond.
You may not have a choice about what happens in your life but you do have a choice about HOW you respond to what happens by how you manage yourself.
This, in fact is one of the foundational principles of resilience.
Your response will determine how hard you take things, how long it takes you to recover and and what you take away from your difficult experience.
Resilience training teaches you to pay attention to the things that will help you get through hard things.
If life has happy moments, (which we all love!) then all the spaces between the happy times need to have a plan- like a bridge that helps us from falling into the depths of despair.
That’s kind of dramatic, but think of evening out your life with happy times and resilient times. This is how happiness and resilience can work to gether.
There is a lot of research on resilience. Its just the coolest thing. Ive got an advanced certification in positive psychology where I spent a year studying the principles of resilience.
This isn’t just woo woo stuff.
Its solid science backed findings on how we can understand how our bodies and brains work in order to be more in charge of our responses and healing in life.
For instance-
Brain has a negativity bias WHICH MEANS THAT IT IS WIRED TO LOOK FOR THINGS THAT ARE WRONG, OR THAT MIGHT BECOME A PROBLEM. Its like if I told you youd get a big reward that would make you feel really good- if you would go through the day counting how many ttimes you saw the color red and come back and report. You’d spend the whole day looking for red- noticing red cars, red lights, red stop signs, red hats…. And then at the end of the day youd come back to report all the red things you found – but what if I changed the game and asked you instead, how many green things you counted ?
What? That’s a terrible trick. You went through the whole day counting red things- not noticing the green- though they were surely there. There are green traffic lights right next to the red ones- but you weren’t counting the green. You barely noticed all the grass, all the bushes and the trees. The green in the world kind of disappeared into the background because your focus was on the red.
But that’s what our brains do.
Resilience training teaches us to be aware of what we are noticing and how to direct our focus on the things that will help us feel some of that deep and meaningful happiness we just redefined.
Gratitude exercise example
Put this in the show notes.
Having an intention to broaden your perspective and notice the things that feel good is a resilience skill.
We’re going to study more about resilience in our time together. In fact I have a whole roadmap to take us through the most important resilience skills.
And I’m excited to share it with you.
Back to the question of happy or resilient?
I don’t know about you, but I want to have both.
Developing the skill of resilience means that you don’t have to fear the gaps between happiness, you don’t have to fear the way you might feel if you make a mistake or get disappointed or life hands you a broken toy.
If you had to choose one or the other- I’d choose resilience hands down! Because
be happy, you have to first learn how to be strong; to help yourself up after a fall and the will to go on when you are hurting.
resilience gives you power to appreciate everything- the happy is linked to things that matter- the things that bring you the deepest joy and then just like my friend Ann taught me resilience “holds you” when you are facing challenges-, until you rise back up.
You don’t have to choose. You get to have both. In fact- you can learn to deepen your happy times and savor them
AND
Use resilience skills when life brings the inevitable ups and downs, when the toy breaks, or the kiddo gets sick or you have a financial setback or any of a million hard things that will happen in your life time,
Hopefully I’ve sold you on the idea of how important and amazing resilience is.
Now- how to get it!
Over the next few episodes we’re going to look at the specific resilience skills that can be learned and strengthened in 5 areas. Self awareness, Self Talk, Self Compassion, Self Care, Self Protection.
But for now, take the “What went well” challenge that you can find in the show notes.
Want to know how to share these ideas with your kids?
There’s a what went well activity adapted for little ones to begin to help them understand the power of directing their focus.
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This podcast is not intended to provide mental health treatment. Leigh Germann is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and not a doctor, psychiatrist or psychologist. She does not provide diagnosis nor offer therapy through the TakeCareofMom and Leadership Parenting websites or in the information offered on the websites. It is important that you do not disregard professional medical or mental health advice or delay seeking professional medical or mental health treatment because of any information on the TakeCareofMom and Leadership Parenting website including but not limited to blogs, newsletter, videos, podcasts, e-books, programs, webinars, courses and other services. TakeCareofMom, and Leadership Parenting and Leigh Germann are not providing legal or financial advice, business advice, psychotherapy, supervision, religious advice, or medical advice. The information contained on these Websites have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
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KEY PHRASES: Happiness, Resilience, Life Challenges, Therapist, Parenting, Emotions, Personal Growth, Values, Meaning, Purpose, Coping Skills, Mental Health, Joy, Fulfillment, Negativity Bias, Resilience Training, What Went Well Exercise, Hope, Motivation, Connection