Prioritise growth, you’ll experience more happiness anyway

(Please note, as will be the case with many of my Medium posts, this blog acts as a ‘script’ for my podcast Thrive Education. It largely reads more like a typical article/essay, but this will explain why it sometimes reads as if I were speaking to you on radio).

Welcome back thriving friends, to episode five of Thrive Education. I maaaay yet change the name to ThriveMind, partly because it’s unique and it does convey the message well, partly because while I definitely do want to provide education, I don’t want you to feel like you’ve got to bring a pen and paper, aaand partly because ThriveMind is punchy and rolls nicely off the tongue, but we shall see.

I hope you enjoyed my chat with Pat Chirico in the previous episode, we’ve had some excellent feedback so far, which comes as no surprise as Pat is fascinating and FULL of wisdom, and has a lovely, patient speaking voice to reflect his nature. I found our conversation enriching, and I’m certain you’ll get a lot of value from it if you go back and give it a listen.

My name is unsurprisingly still Thomas Flynn, and I still hope that you’re healthy and growing. I emphasise growing, rather than happy, not because I don’t wish you happiness, but because growth is just arguably a more useful ideal to set our sights on. When we set ‘happiness’ as our ultimate goal, when we decide we’re going to pursue whatever makes us happy and prioritise our happiness, we ironically set up this paradigm where we’re now disappointed when we’re not experiencing happiness, less able to benefit from the immense value that the full emotional spectrum can provide us.

When we decide that happiness and other pleasant emotions are “good” and everything else is somewhere between an inconvenience and an obstacle, we deprive ourselves of the ability to maximally benefit from discomfort.

This is because we have the capacity to grow in (or from) any circumstances, whereas the never-ending fixation on happiness is, paradoxically, one of our greatest sources of suffering, and it limits our growth and potential, as it’s arguing with evolution. Emotions (which we do tend to experience more intensely during difficulty) serve a purpose, AND they’re meant to be transient, they exist to provide us feedback and once they’ve done their job, we can return to feeling pretty neutral, perhaps leaning to joyful IF we’ve honed our gratitude skills and found a deep sense of meaning.

Happiness therefore shouldn’t be a goal, as like all other emotions, it’s meant to be fleeting. Happiness acts as pleasant feedback along the growth journey, it tells us when we’re in the right area.

That’s what I want to explore, the relationship between growth and happiness. They’re symbiotic no doubt, it’s pretty clear that the life where we grow the most will also be our happiest life, there’s just some nuance in where we should place our focus. If we fixate on happiness, we limit our growth. Whereas if we emphasise growth, we can enhance our long-term happiness.

It may help to first conceptually wrap our heads around what happiness is. I want you to consider a wide range of any memories and circumstances that you personally associate with happiness. From that first sip of coffee in the morning, to nostalgic childhood holidays, beers with your mates, feelings of accomplishment and pride at work or any other endeavour, having a realisation that you’ve grown as a person, the sensation of a strong breeze on your skin, or your dog doing gleeful zoomies when you walk in the front door.

I want you to ponder, why is it that such a broad array of experiences, some of them intensely micro, and others rather macro-scale, are all associated with ‘happiness’ despite such vastly different contexts? What is it that your cherished memories with friends and family, your proudest accomplishments, and the most delightful mini moments of the mundan day to day, have in common?

It’s that when you’re happy, you aren’t wishing life was different. The formula per se is that happiness comes any time that reality is better than or equal to our desires and expectations.

I will record a separate podcast about expanding our emotional vocabulary and bandwidth, which is foundational to our emotional intelligence, as we do ourselves a disservice when we aren’t intentional with the language we use to describe the nuances of our emotions. In this instance, I mean that we shouldn’t just paint all “positive” experiences with a single broad brush as merely ‘happy’ ones, rather than getting granular and discerning them as joyful or pleasurable, rewarding or exciting or fulfilling; and, equally, it’s possible to hold a range of different emotions around an experience, but for now let’s just use the broad term happiness.

When you come home and your dog is ecstatic to see you, you’re not disgruntled that he or she is incapable of doing a backflip. You’re just in love with that beautiful moment, precisely as it is. Conversely, when we consider the various sources of distress or dissatisfaction in our lives, what do they have in common? It’s that there is something we want to change. Disappointment, comparison, shame, frustration. Unhappiness is when our attachment to how things ‘should’ be, doesn’t match up with the truth.

Will Smith has a great quote, where he said “happiness is peace, it’s not pleasure”

So now that we’ve conceptualised happiness as largely being about peace and an appreciation of what IS; as a match up between our expectations, desires and reality; what does this have to do with pursuing growth?

It’s that having a value on growth is precisely what allows us to feel gratitude, and potentially even some happiness, for all of the experiences in life that we would typically be unhappy about.

I’m going to repeat that. Having a value on growth….

To give you an example. When someone deeply angers us, our initial reaction is of course an unhappy one. However if you’ve decided you’re someone who has a high value on personal growth, and you’ve worked on your gratitude and mindfulness skills, you can actually now view that anger as an opportunity to:

improve your patience and communication, your compassion and understanding of someone else’s perspective, which also helps us be less critical of ourselves; it’s an opportunity to become more self-aware (because 99% of the time we‘re just triggered because we’ve recognised ourselves in the other person’s behaviour); anger or annoyance with another person prompts us to get better at boundaries and standing up for ourselves. It can actually serve to improve your relationship with that person AND yourself.

The range of ways that we can benefit from any stereotypically unhappy circumstance is only limited by your imagination really.

It’s just like playing a video game. If you want to level up your character, you actively look forward to encountering enemies and difficulty. Life can become the same IF you first set growth as a high priority.

One of the terrible ironies of Western culture in particular is that, because we’re so fixated on this idealised notion of happiness and positive emotions, we actually create additional suffering for ourselves because we have greater expectations, we expand the gap between how things are and how we’d like or expect them to be.

Buddhism had it figured out a long time ago, when they said that, one, life is suffering, and two, ‘attachment is the root of all that suffering’ which simply means, we suffer when we wish things were any different from how they are. So when we are attached to the pursuit of happiness, we actually fabricate more suffering for ourselves, any time we’re not experiencing happiness or positive emotions, because of this desire, this pressure on ourselves to feel any differently than we do. It’s negotiating with reality.

We’ve got the actual, quote, “negative” emotion or experience, (and ‘negative’ is just a label and a perception) but then on top of that we add more suffering by resenting how we’re feeling!

This obsession with happiness has driven us to try to avoid or eliminate uncomfortable emotions at all costs, rather than see their transient nature and innate value. This is a huge factor in poor physical and mental health as this refusal to sit with and even embrace uncomfortable thoughts and emotions is what drives many of our addictive numbing behaviours like excess drinking or eating, social media, whatever your poison that you use for avoidance or self-soothing.

Social media has definitely been my personal greatest challenge in this regard, although there was a time when I actually used training in the gym as my avoidance mechanism. That’s something a lot of fitness enthusiasts or professionals won’t tell you; that they’re not especially healthy. There is a distinction between fitness and health, and a lot of fit people aren’t all that healthy.

Over the podcasting journey I’ll frequently speak about mental health and in particular my immense frustrations with the way it’s broadly approached and perceived. We still as a society frame poor mental or emotional health as the problem, which perpetuates the fallacy that they’re a malfunction.

They are NOT the problem, they’re our brain and body doing PRECISELY what they’re meant to, to signal to us that something needs to change in the way that we’re living and thinking. Poor mental health is the SYMPTOM of the problem, and symptoms are IMMENSELY VALUABLE. They’re our powerful brains and bodies signalling to us that something is awry.

I won’t expand further on that now, that’s for another episode, however that’s another example of my point about this obsession with happiness and positive emotions, having driven us to perceive the ‘negative’ ones as a malfunction, as a problem to be beaten into submission, rather than our bodies and brains screaming at us to listen to them.

We have this absurd notion in Western culture that the emotions that feel nice (like joy, pride, satisfaction) are ‘good’ emotions and the ones that are uncomfortable (anxiety, anger, envy) are ‘bad’ emotions. While of course we want to strive towards building a life with plenty of the quote ‘good’ emotions, and ideally they will make up a greater portion of our experience, this grouping of good and bad has driven us to neglect the value of the uncomfortable emotions. They don’t exist to make us suffer, they’re millions of years of evolution helping us to solve problems.

Anger can be alerting us when our boundaries have been crossed. Anger holds immense energy to drive us into action! Envy shows us precisely what we want in life and is an opportunity for growth; anxiety and overwhelm are not malfunctions or a terrible curse that get inflicted upon us (as much as they can feel that way!), anxiety and/or overwhelm are our nervous system screaming at us to pay attention to something, often times just our own conscience.

There‘s one more key point I’d like to note about the notion of happiness not being the best target to aim for.

• Life is suffering, and our brains are NOT hardwired to default to happiness. Just like all animals, our brains are hardwired for anything that ensures the survival, health and growth of the species. All of the chemicals in our brains which feel like versions of ‘happiness’ (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins; there are several others) are just driving us towards and rewarding us for connection, belonging, for becoming valuable to the tribe through CONTRIBUTION, developing our strengths, and EXPLORATION. Because once the tribe is relatively safe and healthy, it’s then time to explore, to see what’s over the horizon and how we can continute to thrive. Growth is written into our DNA. Our brains serve the purpose of solving problems, not happiness, and growth helps us solve problems. Happiness just informs us that we’re doing something right, that we’re in the right spot.

So now we come back to my primary proposal, in regards to prioritising growth over happiness because it ironically yields more happiness anyway. When you highly value growth, when you want to become the most aware and developed person possible, (you could view it as treating life like a Role-Playing-Game similar to Elder Scrolls’ Skyrim, where you’re trying to uplevel all of the different life skills), it allows you to alter your perception of any experience or circumstance or emotion in life as an opportunity to grow. So what we’re doing now is taking that happiness rule I explained (about a match-up between how things are and how we’d like them to be) and we’re applying gratitude to challenge and pain. We’re embracing the fact that life will never play out exactly as we would like it to, we’re always going to have painful emotions because we are MEANT to, they serve us positively, and then we’re balancing our perceptions so we can ultimately be thankful for what we previously would have been annoyed about.

We have much more control over growth than happiness. Just the mere act of pursuing growth in itself ensures we’re growing, whereas we can’t guarantee happiness just by pursuing it. Rather, when we focus too heavily on happiness it can tend to elude us, like clutching too hard at a leaf that’s floating in water. The serene metaphor (which I am quite proud of), is that the leaf (happiness) will settle gently into our hand when we just slow down and let it come to us, when we don’t force life and instead work and flow with what is. That intention to slow down is in itself a form of growth.

I’m not in any way suggesting that it needs to be an either/or decision, rather, when we grow as individuals, happiness tends to just, come along for the ride. Happiness and growth are intertwined. We can’t have happiness without growth, and equally if something made you less happy and fulfilled, then growth happens in moving away from that.

Now, this notion that growing is something we can do all of the time and that it correlates with happiness, might sound incredibly type-A. If you’re unfamiliar, a Type A personality is just someone who’s highly driven, goal-oriented, competitive….. focused on achievement and progress and ambition and yes, growth. While growth can encapsulate these, it’s so much more and often times, especially for driven people, growth can in fact mean the exact opposite. I’m nowhere near as type-A as I might sound, at least not in the traditional sense. All of that sounds exhausting to me at times. Rather, you might say that I apply some type-A principles to fulfillment and peace of mind, just as much as typical ‘success’ goals.

To me, growth can be about becoming MORE, it’s more wealth, muscle and strength, confidence, career progress, recognition and reputation, and all of the internal shifts that come with or create those, HOWEVER growth is also about self-awareness, it’s mindfulness and slowing down, it’s an improved ability to be content and calm with less, regardless of the external circumstances. I love the term ‘equanimity’ which Craig Harper phrases as meaning ‘the calm in the chaos’. Craig hosts The You Project podcast which I highly recommend.

I did some reading up and in Buddhism, equanimity is described as one of the four “sublime attitudes” and is considered: Neither a thought nor an emotion, it is rather the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience. It is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love.

I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty good to me, and there’s a lot of growth involved in experiencing equanimity.

Because growth can be needing less just as much as it is having or BEing ‘more’, it’s a stable sense of self-esteem that comes from BEing rather than doing and achieving. Sometimes it is the ambitious, goal-oriented choice that requires sacrifice and grit, HOWEVER just as often, if not more so, growth is actually about the fulfilling choice and listening to your gut.

While choosing to commit wholeheartedly to a project/career/endeavour is the growth-option sometimes, when the ‘happiness’ option might have been to socialise/etc, often times the ‘growth’ option is just the one where you realise you don’t need to strive and DO and accomplish for contentment. So in that case, the socialising option was both happiness AND growth. Your gut will always tell you after you make a decision. You’ll feel hollow when you’ve made the wrong decision, whereas feeling ‘fulfilled’ really does feel like we’ve got a sense of fullness and contentment with our actions.

In essence, optimal mental health IS the ultimate success, and so to me, growth is anything that moves us towards that, and/or aids us in sustaining it. Sometimes that WILL involve and require achievement and ambition. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves. It’s very common for people who are low in self-esteem to just renounce goals and ambition altogether, because that feels less painful than having aspirations you don’t feel capable of.

You may have heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy. It has its flaws, and has since been adapted and improved upon as a model, but Abraham Maslow was a pioneering psychologist who developed a theory that humans need to have our basic needs met, like food and shelter; then we need strong social connections; and beyond that, we need to maximise self-esteem and self-actualisation. As he phrased it, “what one can be, one must be!” So we can’t separate growth and ambition from happiness and fulfillment.

Having explored this relationship between growth, happiness and fulfillment, let’s give personal growth some more clarity. What is it? How do we ‘measure’ it, how would we know that we’ve grown (or are growing) in some capacity?

A few indicators that came to mind when writing this, I’ll just rattle them off:

Increased sense of calm, inner peace, confidence and self-esteem, courage, awareness of and belief in our personal strengths, an ability to take action on our desires and goals, improved empathy and compassion for others AND ourselves,

being less defined by any particular pursuit or character trait (so a more robust, flexible and anti-fragile identity).

Growth can be improved self-awareness and level of consciousness & mindfulness, an ability to observe life with more objectivity and humour, reflective awareness, a willingness to ask for help,

integrity and alignment with our values,

self-assuredness (which is built on self-trust, compassion, and self-efficacy), increased sense of purpose and direction, having impact on others and a desire for service and contribution, a feeling of fulfillment,

Growth can look like being honest with ourselves, a willingness to trust our gut and not suppress or ignore emotions (so emotional intelligence), independence (rather than co-dependence), personal power (which is a belief that we have the ability to make outcomes happen and influence the world around us),

Growth can look like a unique and defined identity, a confidence in and willingness to be WHO you are and not filter or hide parts of yourself for approval, which also means an ability to have difficult conversations.

You can see in that list the relationship between happiness and growth; everything I just mentioned is a form of growing, and there’s no doubt that we would feel happiest when we have those going for us.

Now, having given growth some structure, some definition, how do we facilitate this growth?

That’s what I’ll explore in the next episode, although realistically every podcast I ever publish, in both solo form and the Candid Conversations interviews, will in some way be oriented towards exploring personal growth.

My aspiration is to thrive in every area of life and assist you to do the same, and Growing and Thriving are symbiotic, you could almost argue they’re just synonyms. The Cambridge dictionary’s definition of ‘thrive’ is “to grow, develop or be successful”, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary quite literally defines thriving as “to grow vigorously, to FLOURISH (which again, is defined as to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way), and to progress towards or realise a goal despite or because of circumstances — an example being to thrive under pressure”. I think it’s reasonable to say we all ultimately want to thrive in life, which is perhaps simpler and less elusive than we make it feel. It’s largely just ending the day feeling like you’ve grown as a person, and there are a million ways to accomplish that.

I hope that you’ve come away from this podcast with a spring in your step. If you’ve been going very well of late, then I would encourage you to consider how much that has correlated with a perception that you’ve grown in some form. If you’ve been on struggle street, then I hope that you’re feeling a little more tranquility within that emotional pain, because maybe you can come away from this podcast and say well, striving for happiness feels exhausting, so a complete turnaround from struggle to elation might not be realistic for me right now, however growth is certainly achievable, it can be as small as you feel appropriate. Growth happens best during struggle, if you’re prepared to be introspective and look into the pain with curiosity, so that’s an incredibly useful realisation to help find gratitude for the discomfort.

If you’ve made it this far, once again I’m deeply grateful for you investing with me your most precious resource, which is your time and attention, and I hope you’ve received some value in return. You know the drill, if there’s anyone you know who would benefit from listening to this, I would greatly appreciate you sharing it with them or to your Instagram stories, and hitting the ‘follow’ button on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, along with a 5-star review, goes a long way in supporting the podcast and ensuring as many people as possible can Thrive, whatever that looks like for them.

Have a great week, happy Thriving to you, bye for now.