How to become happy?

Perhaps the most extensive client request that a coach has to work with is: how to become happy. Often people ask for help in a situation where they do not feel satisfied with the things they have done, the work they have done, the goals they have achieved. Technically, everything is perfect, but my soul is not good — empty, there is no joy. It turns out that somewhere along the way to the realization of the goal, in the process of solving problems, a person has lost the main thing – a dream. The value of what you want may even remain, but it turns into an empty formality.

In the end, it turns out that this question is precisely about happiness and the client may be tasked with understanding whether he is ready to rationally and emotionally (but in quite distinguishable terms of describing his states) determine what happiness means to him. If so, what on the way to achieving it, receiving it, or experiencing it could “bring down the settings”.

How to work in this situation? It may be worth using questions to search for the phase of the process where “something went wrong.” This is important, because there is reason to believe that a big result is the sum of small results. The situation is similar with the feeling of satisfaction and the experience of happiness (although the second is larger and more complicated than the first). It’s hard to feel happy at the end of the journey if you weren’t happy on the way. And it is absolutely impossible to feel satisfaction if you have burned out in the process of achieving your goal.

Having discovered the moment of loss of a positive emotional background, it is necessary to analyze the causes of this loss. If possible, return to this moment, but not in the past, of course, but in the present. Go through or even simulate it, but already keeping its emotional component at a high level. Thus, it may even become clear whether it is time to reconsider your goal or the means to achieve it.