Irrevocable Happiness – What’s in it for You?
In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy urged Americans to think about how we measure what makes a country great in new ways. He said the Gross National Product doesn’t measure the health of our children, the beauty of our poetry, our courage, our wisdom, or our compassion.
“It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
In much metaphysical thinking there is a common phrase that “we become what we pay attention to.” In the modern world, many of us are paying attention to frenzy and the more that we live there, the more frenzied we become.
I was on a radio show where the host accused me of coming from “laid-back Los Angeles.”
I laughed, “The only laid-back people in Los Angeles are waiting for their autopsy. They’ve got toe tags!”
We are running off to our meetings, getting through traffic so dense that it is wise to bring a picnic lunch and a catheter. People elbow each other aside in line because God forbid they miss something. We are speeding towards auditions, getting our kids into the right schools, rushing to a meeting with the decision maker who will move us one more notch up the game of life and you know what?
Many of us are simply too busy to be happy.
Many of us are too frenzied to even define what that means.
People are so busy they run in the doors of our programs proclaiming,
“I will be the one person who doesn’t get it.”
“I’ve been working on the question of what would make me happy for so long. Why would it happen here?”
The fact is, most of us are so busy running through a trance created by frenzy, checking out on TVs / smartphones / and soon to be Virtual Reality that we have lost touch with ourselves.
I have client companies that give life changing programs to their employees who walk in the door resentful because we are intruding on their busy and frantic schedules. Many of them realize their calendar is filled with quite a bit of meaningless stuff.
Where does it end?
Here.
Stop.
Inquire.
Personal engagement, employee engagement, success with change and reinvention begins with self-inquiry. Without a clear sense of mission, vision and purpose, we live in aimlessness and frenzy will keep us occupied.
In 1990, I found myself sitting on the beach in front of my home in Malibu with a journal loosely titled, “My Miserable Life.” I went down to that beach every morning with a commitment of finding my way out of the malaise I had created by believing if I had enough things, lived in the right place, wore the right clothes and hung out with the right people that I would find some form of nirvana. For years I had run businesses that helped people move from one job to the next. We didn’t bring them nirvana, we brought them new jobs, in many cases, just like the ones they hated.
But, I knew that if I kept running through life looking for the next “deal” that nothing would change and I had enough good sense to sit down and write questions. In the game of jobs I had realized that most of us were conditioned, by a three hundred year event known as the industrial revolution, to pursue predictability and survival over ever other possible standard in our work. Many of us fell into what we were doing and we settled there forever because it gave us predictability and survival. But, the work had little, if anything to do with what our souls wanted and craved.
One morning I thought, “If we were sold this predictability and survival thing, what would be an antidote?”
Two words popped into my head as I dug my toes into the sand:
“Irrevocable Happiness.”
For a few minutes I was afraid thinking that if I defined those words for myself I would be well down the path towards wearing a saffron robe and hitting a gong.
But, I realized that if I was actually sentenced to happiness, I would be living life on my terms, with my values, with what my heart and soul craved versus being caught up in the survival and predictability game.
Today, I will share but one definition from that inquiry:
“If I were happy all of the time, I would only work with brilliant and loving people.”
Last week, I was working with a group of CEOs in Canada. During the discussion following my presentation, the leader of the group said,
“David brought up something that I have never heard in my entire life and I bet no one else has told us.”
He brought up that one standard and the implications it could have on the life of a CEO.
I responded,
“That was my standard. I don’t bring up personal standards with the implication that everyone adopt what I want.”
I can say that one standard has changed my life and has become part of the foundation of happiness that leads my life today. But, that one definition was one of many.
So, if you lived in uninterrupted happiness, what would that look like?
Go ahead, take a few valuable minutes to describe that state.
And, we would love to hear from you.
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The Inspired Work Program
Saturday & Sunday, June 25 & 26 (Los Angeles)
Change Your World – Change Your Life
For the vast majority of us, work is the biggest relationship that we have.
If you have outgrown your professional life, if you want to get your business into an entirely higher gear, if you want to learn how to change and reinvent yourself on a dime, join us at the beautiful Luxe Summit Hotel.
Over the course of 26 years, Inspired Work has led over 40,000 professionals into redefining their work around fulfillment, joy and success. Make no mistake about it, the outcome of this program is so personal that is will change your life and change how you view your work and your accomplishments.
The first half of The Inspired Work Program is a profound design process. Using our unique Socratic (question-driven) curriculum, you define what you most want out of your professional life. The power of the program is in the quality of the questions we ask and your answers, which will surprise you and capture your imagination. The magic of it is in the way every definition and every sentence fits together like a puzzle. Suddenly, a new clarity emerges. While this is exciting for virtually everyone, expect more. The second half of the program is where you define how to bring this new vision to life. The results are spiritual, emotional, intellectual and practical.
We are here to get the world to help you.
This is why The Inspired Work Program is life-changing.
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