Authenticity is allowed to grow - and so is satisfaction!

Happiness or for the 'moderates' among my readers: Satisfaction can be learned by everyone. This insight is not based on 'crackpot' eso ideas, but it is based on the findings of science. It is almost a truism that research has demonstrated a centre in the brain for positive thoughts and feelings - a happiness area - that anyone can train. The results are astonishing. After just a few days of optimistic thinking, this area grows, and moments of happiness are experienced more frequently and more intensely. This means that daily happiness training has an immediate effect on the brain. This happiness training has nothing to do with conventional "positive thinking". The "positive thinking" that boomed in the 80s and is still chanted today at many a 'Chaka seminar' glosses over and ignores the bad. Because - attention critics, now you're getting to it - "deprive feelings" are essential to the human psyche. They even outnumber them when you look at human emotions as a whole. But why, really? Positive feelings are more desirable, but negative ones ensure survival. For example, they let us distinguish between friend and foe, right and wrong, and they enable us to recognize danger. That's why we shouldn't ignore unpleasant thoughts per se. It is important to integrate them into our lives and accept them. Therefore, happiness training is not about positive thinking alone, but about increasing the good feelings we have and decreasing the bad ones. Ultimately, it is purely an educational and developmental process for our neurons. What is crucial is the determination to change focus and want to be happier because only the effective learning and teaching process of thinking the "right thoughts", taking one's desires and needs seriously and finding the self-determined goal will bring us closer to this goal.

Just do it!

Those who exercise regularly strengthen their fitness—those who play the daily piano practice their pianistic skills. She periodically trains the personal satisfaction muscle, lets go of fears and develops his happiness consciousness. Who recognizes and promotes his own strengths, lives his potential. In this way, everyone can ultimately contribute to their personal happiness themselves and significantly. Good news for the top manager in you: strategic and rational thinking skills support you in strengthening your personal sense of joy. Let me describe an example from my coaching practice: A board member was confronted daily with his dissatisfaction, which he "acted out" on his employees - as he admitted to himself. He was ready to work on himself. The atmosphere in the company was charged. His goal was to bring about an improvement in the situation. To my question, "What would be a good outcome?" he responded with conviction, "I'm sure I'll never get rid of this dissatisfaction inside me - this grump who also blows up, that's just me." Otherwise, he said, he doesn't feel authentic.

Authenticity is allowed to grow.

"Authenticity is allowed to grow," I explain to him. Our personality is not made of concrete. On the contrary, we are constantly developing. Our abilities, our behaviour, etc. - our life is a constant development process. Indeed, an introvert and cooperative nerd rarely turns into a competition-loving rambunctious person. The further development of one's own personality, on the other hand, is a natural process. In a study, Margaret King and Jamie O'Boyle (Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis) proved that people reinvent themselves between the ages of 35 and 40 and then again between 55 and 60 - only this makes them authentic. The completed, final personality is, therefore, an illusion. Authenticity is allowed to grow! We can also be authentic if we change ourselves and our behaviour outwardly. The decisive factor is that we are ourselves in the word's original sense - from the Greek authentikós, "autos" means self and "ontos" means to be.

Grumpy adé

The idea of questioning or even letting go of his "grumpy personality" and, as a first step, focusing on his personal satisfaction did not initially convince my client. He was sure he would never get rid of this dissatisfaction, the 'restlessness', as he called it - feelings of satisfaction had become alien to him.

His explanation: his constant thirst for knowledge, his tireless rational approach to problems meant that his thoughts were constantly 'going round on a merry-go-round' and thus never stood still. He questioned himself and his work around the clock. He no longer knew satisfaction. In coaching, we investigated the cause: one of his main needs was to achieve significance. He satisfied his quest for significance - in addition to the successes he had to show in the company in purely numerical terms (which had already become the norm for him) - with a constant carousel of thoughts that questioned him and his environment. He always wanted to know more, about himself, about processes, about content, in short: about everything that surrounded him. "Being this 'omniscient' makes me happy," he noted. Except that this moment of happiness virtually never happened. When it became clear to him that this striving for meaning was a major cause of his dissatisfaction, he took the second step - toward contentment - almost by itself, and realized that he himself had the "power" over his thoughts and that it was now a matter of discipline to grasp the "right thoughts." He used his energy to "know it all" and to question, and settled into the new path: he trained to stop his stressful thought process and practised a new "rule of thumb" for his brain every day: "I value my brain - I let go of the thought carousel." He thus honoured his active thinking and, at the same time, put himself in a position to build contentment through the 'letting go' process. A positive side effect: He became more serene. He then radiated both - contentment and serenity - to the company and was able to record additional successes.

[Translate to English:] Shutterstock.com | airdone

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