I’ll be Happy when
So many of us suffer from the “I’ll be happy when” syndrome because the way in which we have all been taught to think about success in ingrained in us deeply. It is so second nature to us, that we don’t even realize that the path we have been using for our whole lives is:
If we worked hard and climbed our company ladder, we would eventually achieve career and material success—better titles, more power, and the accompanying financial rewards. That success was supposed to lead to happiness, and happiness was in turn supposed to lead to a sense of fulfillment in life.
What this has led to has been a “check-list” life. In other words, happiness and fulfillment come only after we’ve checked off all the things on our check-list in order to get to happy. I’ll be happy when I get my dream job. When I get married. When I lose weight. When I buy my first house. And on, and on it goes. We spend our lives creating all the lists of things to do, things we need to accomplish, things we need to buy, milestones we need to reach, because we have all been seduced into believing that there is a magical destination of happy and fulfillment at the end. And even more, once we get there, it will justify all the pain and sacrifice, and not living that it required along the way.
The truth is, it won’t.
We can’t view happiness as something that comes only after this endless checklist life. Instead, it must be the lifestyle we’re living right now. How well we are blending how we work, live and play.
What Should We Do Instead?
We need to create a lifestyle in the here and now that includes both our bigger, longer term goals that we are striving for, and our right now goals that include what brings us joy, happiness and increase our overall sense of well-being. Our integrated lifestyle must reflect what it means to live and feel at our best and highest. It takes deliberate effort; we can’t just hope to arrive one day.
Decide What Matters Most
Knowing your lifestyle language, vs. just striving for work-life balance, helps you prioritize the areas of your life in such a way that you can optimize what you want to do and how you want to feel. This means knowing what life priorities really matter to you right now. For example, is having a greater sense of community and connection to others a priority for you? Is it your career and financial goals, is it your ways that you love to creatively express yourself, how about wanting to have a greater and make a difference in the world? Knowing this about yourself, right now, is critical.
Set Your Priorities
Your list of to-dos’ should also be a list of must-do’s that include these priorities in your life, both short run and long run that are important to your overall sense of meaning and fulfillment and well-being, and not just the things that are on the check-list that must happen, but do not inspire us in any way.
Once you know what things are priority really a priority for you, you need to make it harder for these priorities to get squeezed out of your life. You need to build in accountability for what is important to you. To do that, look for or create support systems for different aspects of your lifestyle language so you don’t continue to crowd out the things that are important to you. Are there groups, communities, or circles of people, that you know or that you can join that share your motivations and direction for example?
