Episode 1209: What is Happiness?

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,209 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:06] Miriam Cobb: Hi, I'm

[00:00:07] Miriam Cobb. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to find your passionate calling is key.

[00:00:20] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

[00:00:28] Scott Maderer: Comfort in to objectively. Look at yourself as happy using that third level of happiness. So as you think about this, recognize that your happiness has a lot to do with both how you behave, how you act, your productivity, how you handle your money, all of these things. It's one of the reasons why. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:56] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you [00:01:00] to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, who will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence. So that. Can impact the world

[00:01:17] in today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about what happiness is. I share how happiness is related to nine categories. And there's three different levels of happiness that we really talk about. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and one of the best ways to do that is through books.

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[00:02:06] That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books. The same way you're listening to this podcast. Happiness is one of those words that we all use, but I don't think we always mean the same thing when we use it. We use it in different ways. We talk about happiness when really we mean something.

[00:02:30] The definition in Websters of happiness is the state of being happy. You gotta love a definition that uses the word happy as part of the definition of happiness. If you look up the word happy in the dictionary, it says feeling or showing pleasure or contentment, having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with a person or situation satisfied with the quality or standard [00:03:00] of I'm happy with that fortunate and convenient or inclined to use a specified thing excessively or at random.

[00:03:09] Like our Sue happy society, those sorts of things, again, not real helpful, but if you look at psychology and you look at psychiatry and you look at the study of the mind, you'll find a couple of different frames or ways that we talk about happiness. Psychologists, talk about. Kinds or levels of happiness.

[00:03:37] I'm gonna talk about two different frameworks or two different ways of looking at it. One of them involves looking at happiness in three different levels or descriptions or states. The first level is simply a balance between our emotions at a moment in time the transient emotions, both the positive ones.[00:04:00]

[00:04:00] Joy, that kind of thing, or the negative ones like anxiety or worry. The second level refers more to a cognitive state of happiness a cognitive judgment about life in general. It's a long term sense of where we're going and where we've been. It has a lot to do with how we understand both our life in the past and what our life should be or can be in the future.

[00:04:29] And the third level is more of a flourishing or finding the meaning in life kind of level. It's about really understanding and feeling like you understand why you've been put on the planet. The first is about emotions. The second is about a rational self-reflection of your life. And the third is about human potential and that kind of.

[00:04:56] If we could simply calculate or measure [00:05:00] someone's emotional state over time, then we could measure in a numerical way, their sort of happiness level. It's a objective measure of how often they feel positive emotions and how often they feel negative emotions. And sometimes when people are talking about happiness, that's really what they're talking about, that state of their emotional state at that moment in time, the second.

[00:05:26] Is also able to be measured, but it's different. It's more of a mathematical sum of good and bad experiences. It says, no, not that way. Instead, it's more of a general orientation or feeling around how your life is the stability of it, the structure of it's more about.

[00:05:53] How we feel ourselves about our life. So it's more [00:06:00] than just our feeling though. It's also cognitive and sort of measurable rational states about our life. Do we have enough to eat? Do we have a warm place to, to sleep at night? These sorts of things. If you think about something like a baseball game, if this person supports a particular team and.

[00:06:21] Team stays ahead by one run. But right at the last minute, the other team scores extra runs and beats them by one run right at the end of the ninth inning, whether or not that game makes you happy or not depends in part about whether you look at happy through type one or type two if you look at it through that type one and you just sample the positive and negative emotions at the end of every, in.

[00:06:50] Then this overall game is probably going to score as a happy game. You're going to have enjoyed the [00:07:00] experience because all of those transient states are happy until the very last moment. However, if you look at it from the second level where your judgment and your sort of cognitive levels come into place and what you feel about the situation, as well as what you can.

[00:07:18] Measure rationally about the situation that at that level, that game might not be nearly as fun. Now, the third level, when we get to that, it's a lot more complicated and less easy to define it. It's simply that sort of feeling of are you living the life you're supposed to live? and that kind of stuff brings us to the second kind of way of looking at happiness.

[00:07:49] You will often see happiness, not as something like a state that you feel, but rather happiness is when life kind of fulfills your needs, both [00:08:00] physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, all of these different levels are fulfill. which then of course brings the question. What are all those needs? What are the things that we need?

[00:08:13] And psychology looks at kind of nine different areas of your life that you need to feel comfortable in to be happy. One is wellbeing. This is the physical mind body kind of connection. Second is your environment. Things like safety, food, freedom, weather, beauty, these sorts of things. Pleasure, which is the temporary joyful experiences enjoying a trip or a good meal relationships.

[00:08:43] Do you have good connections with other people, your general outlook, how you approach the world and how you look at the world every day, whether or not your life has some level of meaning, are you involved with other things and [00:09:00] then whether or not you feel you are success? and then the last one is a elasticity or resilience level that if you looked at all of those and put 'em on a page, those nine things are the areas and the categories of life that you have to have some level of success or comfort in to objectively.

[00:09:23] Look at yourself as happy using that third level of happiness. So as you think about this, recognize that your happiness has a lot to do with both how you behave, how you act, your productivity, how you handle your money, all of these things. It's one of the reasons why the end of the day, your happiness feeds into those things and those things feed in to your happiness.

[00:09:52] Thanks for listening.

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