Habits of Happiness: Daily Disciplines for a Truly Prosperous Life
It’s probably fair to assume that you aspire to a life of happiness: a sense of satisfaction and the kind of long-term stability that can liberate you to pursue the things you wish for. Whether it’s creating abundance for the ones we love or the financial freedom to pursue our interests and hobbies, this tends to be something that we all share. Frustratingly, we often find ourselves feeling that despite our desires, we aren’t quite reaching the potential we feel that we hold within us!
You may well have heard of the concept of visualising the future you dream of, and while visualisations certainly have their uses, they only really tell us half the story. Cultivating the discipline to master our habits and find true value in delayed gratification for reaching our long-term goals are the magic ingredients that allow us to manifest our vision, rather than just imagine it. So, how do we begin?
First, A Moment For Marshmallows
Starting back in the late 1960s, the now infamous Stanford marshmallow experiment used sweet treats to try to discern whether our capacity for delayed gratification had real implications for our general prosperity. Children were given the choice to either eat one sweet treat now or, if they could resist temptation for 15 minutes, double their bounty with a second treat. In the years following the experiment, keeping tabs on the children revealed that the children who were able to hold out tended to achieve greater prosperity.
A correlation was also noted between the prosperity of the families of the children studied, and the children’s own inclination to capitalise on self-discipline. It was proposed that this could be a result of the children’s circumstances leading them to an abundance mind-set, versus a scarcity mind-set. In this sense, when we perceive abundance we feel confident that good things will be available to us in the future, while when we perceive scarcity, we are more likely to opt for instant gratification as there might not be bounty to be had tomorrow.
The Power To Change Your Habits
Knowing that our capacity for delayed gratification runs in line with our potential for long term satisfaction is helpful, because while some of us find self-discipline more of a challenge, the art of actively and effectively pursuing long term goals is something that we can cultivate in ourselves — as is a mind-set of abundance!
Around 40% of our actions each day come in the form of habits. While some habits are good, and some are certainly bad, our capacity to form them is a pretty handy super-power. The habit-defining neural pathways forged in our brain allow us to make our morning coffee on autopilot while planning out our day, or feel confident that we put the handbrake on when we leave our car parked in a hilly city. It becomes easier to change habits when we imagine these neural pathways as water courses through our minds.
As we see in nature, when water flows repeatedly over a surface — even rock — it begins to carve a path. Changing the course of the water is difficult unless we commit to diverting the flow until a new path is created. In this way, being dedicated to skipping a less desirable habit, and repeating what we intend to be our new one, until those new neural pathways are deeply carved is something that we can all achieve.
Building An Abundance Mindset
The discipline required to forge a life of satisfaction requires mental energy, so taking steps to eliminate what zaps our reserves will clear the way for positive action. The simple practices of gratitude and self-awareness combine to re-frame our relationship with the world around us. If you consider what emotions and thought patterns may be holding you back, how you might transform them?
In place of anger, we can look for lessons learned from a bad experience that we can be grateful for. In appreciating what we have, rather than focusing on what we don’t, we can cultivate that valuable abundance mind-set that supports our ability to work towards longer term goals, rather than choosing an easy path that will likely take us in the wrong direction. Be aware of the cues that trigger your bad habits, and the less worthy rewards that motivate them. By checking and clearing out negative and unhelpful mental clutter in this way, we can clean our mental canvas ready to begin painting the vision of life that we desire.
Big Goals Via Small Milestones
Entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn told us that “discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” With a sharp and colourful picture of your intended accomplishment in mind, a game-plan is the next action on your agenda. Just as a sports team won’t get far without a plan of attack, neither will you!
This means making a full inventory of your current situation, and the daily habits that need to be altered to get where you’re going. Perhaps you keep finding yourself overspending by the end of the month, or are losing too much time going down the social media rabbit hole? With an honest assessment of where you are, and an end point in mind, you can begin breaking the path ahead into specific goals, and smaller milestones along the way.
Whereas before you may have been primed to let your long term desires slide in favour of short term comfort — and the associated dopamine hit that immediate reward releases — through instilling the habit of forging forwards you will begin to discover that each step achieved delivers its own far deeper satisfaction, with its own feel-good brain chemicals to boot. Whether your aim is getting fit, progressing professionally, wealth creation, or all of the above, this improved time management will allow you to progress towards you goals. With each step forwards, your aspirations will feel more tangible.
Making Wise Investments
Both how you choose to spend our time, and how you choose to spend or invest your money, can be seen as investments in your future self. Both resources are finite and precious, so making quality choices is key. Being busy from dawn until dusk does not guarantee long-term stability, but rather effective use of time and resources — achieved through self-awareness — facilitates a balance of achievement and life satisfaction: the happiness we seek.
In this vein, make regular reassessments of whether your current milestones are effectively moving you towards your goal, and what resources you could use to maximise their effectiveness. Make the most of online tools or Apps that can help you track your progress and manage your time. If your intention is wealth creation, take advantage of new technology to expand your increasing capital without eating into your time. For example, our exciting App called GRAYLL launching this year will allow it’s users to make digital investments of any amount, large or small, and puts the work of deciding where to invest and for how long in the hands of state of the art Artificial Intelligence, that navigates the markets as adeptly as the best fund managers! Touted as being as easy to use as Instagram or Snapchat, the App marks the beginning of a revolution in money management, as the fast-expanding world of cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies become affordable and accessible to everyone.
Supporting Your Efforts For Long Term Success
True prosperity and long-term stability are founded upon a base of choosing to shed the niggling things that hold us back, and tapping into our own strength by creating rock solid healthy habits. You can support your reinvention by practising self-care, and leaving no stone unturned when it comes to self-reflection. Creating a healthy environment by cleaning out that closet that eats into your time each day as you struggle to find what you wanted to wear, or delving into that drawer where all the things that don’t have a home get shoved will work wonders for your mental focus.
Regular exercise offers its own double bounty, as feeling and seeing your body transform reinforces perfectly the concept that delayed gratification leads to long-term success. In fact, each good habit formed, whether it’s maintaining a sensible sleep schedule, sticking to a strategic financial budget, or eating healthful and brain supporting foods, will not only bring a direct reward, but add layer upon layer to your core understanding that discipline today means happiness tomorrow.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle left us with the wisdom that “we are what we repeatedly do,” and so it stands that enacting daily disciplines, and committing to their repetition is a powerful pursuit. Before you know it your transformation will be complete, and you’ll be eyeing the horizon for your next aspiration!
