How to Be Happier by Changing Your Mindset
Being happier is the product of how you manage the ups and downs in the journey of life with your mindset. From the time we are in grade school to the time we are adults, there are times when we feel like we’re on top of the world, then a few days later feel like the world is ending.
The hope is that we all can manage these ups and downs and make progress towards our unique definitions of success. The expectation is that as we make progress, our happiness improves, and these ups and downs are fewer and farther between. Over time as life improves, we then experience bigger ups on the good days, and smaller downs on the bad days. What’s interesting about this is that your happy and sad emotions will not get bigger and smaller but will continue to oscillate as they did in childhood.
This is because most people orient their mindset so their happiness is relative to the outcomes in their life. Indeed, the more ambitious one is, the more unhappy they are with their current circumstances. However, to be happier you don’t need to change your ambition, you simply need to change your mindset.
People who value happiness train their mind to primarily seek happiness from things they can control. People who are always unhappy train their mind to seek happiness from external sources. Case in point:
- You can control processes, but you can’t control outcomes.
- You can control how you treat people, but you can’t control how people treat you.
The Mindset You Need to be Happier
So, if you derive your happiness from process and how you treat people you can be as happy as you want when you want. This is a process mindset. On the other hand, if you derive your happiness from outcomes and how other people treat you then your happiness is destined to be a slave to the ups and downs of life. This is an outcome mindset.
To change from a process to an outcome mindset you must learn to manage the battle between unhappiness with the present and motivation for the future. Managing this battle is no small task, but there are two things you can do to win it.
- Create a plan that sets the process as the goal and the goal as the compass.
- Focus your ambitions by making intrinsic goals the priority and extrinsic goals the by-product.
In short, this means you must prioritize process and performance goals over outcome goals. Process goals are goals to improve how you prepare your mind and body. This includes healthy eating, strength training, endurance training, stretching, meditation, praying, strategizing, journaling, and reading. Performance goals are goals to make “improvements relative to one’s own past performance” (Michigan State psychology professor Daniel Gould). This includes improving performance metrics either at home, school, work, or in athletics.
When you focus your ambition on process and performance goals, the future becomes the present within days and weeks instead of the months and years it takes to reach outcome goals. Making this simple change in the goal setting process is how you manage your mindset to focus on the process and increase your overall happiness with the journey of life.