Dr. Joel Wade

At a conference in Las Vegas a couple months ago, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Dr. Joel Wade, a psychotherapist who has dedicated his career to discovering what it means to live well.  As a life coach, his practice is about helping people create and embody a truly extraordinary life.

His lecture was “Mastering Happiness: Practical Skills and Ideas for Living Well.”  When Dr. Wade uses the word happiness, however, he isn’t talking about more parties, laughter or high times. He’s referring to something larger:  having a sense that you are flourishing, of feeling fully satisfied with your life.

This is something we all desire, consciously or unconsciously, and virtually anyone can move closer to this ideal.  Living a more satisfying life, Wade insists, is a skill that can be developed.  It is mostly about the attitudes you embody and the choices you make.  Like any skill, however, it requires time, attention and dedication.

When I was a young psychology student I was fortunate to find a mentor in Nathaniel Branden. One day I asked him, “What do you think is the single most important thing that you do with your clients, the one thing that forms the foundation for everything else?”

His answer was simple, but it had a tremendous impact on me. It resonated deeply with core beliefs and values that I held, but didn’t have the words for yet:

My son Jesse just asked me, “Dad, have you thought about writing a column about being done with something, and feeling good about being done with it?” Jesse had just completed his homework early, and was enjoying the feeling of both the burden lifted, and the joy of accomplishment.

Good idea, Jesse. So here goes.

(This is the text of a commencement speech I gave last week for a graduating 8th grade class. This private school in Santa Cruz, California goes from K-8; this graduating class happened to be all boys.)

First of all, I want to say congratulations. You are the graduating class from what I believe is the best school in Santa Cruz County.

What I love about this school is the combination of high expectations, along with a culture that encourages both a love of learning and good manners. All of these are important, as I will talk about this afternoon, not just because it helps you to become better people, better citizens, and better friends, but it is crucial for your own personal happiness as well.

Any move to improve your life, or anything else, must begin with a good understanding of what is true right now. Not how you would like it to be, but how it actually is.

Psychologically, this is called self-acceptance.

If you wish for your life to be different, whether in terms of action in the world, or in terms of internal emotional and psychological experience, you must first accept that you are as you are right now.

This is a step that people often try to skip, since what they want is not what is true right now, but an ideal that they hold for themselves, a vision of what they would like to be true.

Some of the research on happiness has shown that though more money above a certain level does not correlate much with more happiness, having more money than your neighbor does.

And having less money than your neighbor is correlated with lower happiness.

Most recently there is a study in the news by sociologists Glenn Firebaugh and Laura Tach, called “Relative Income and Happiness: Are Americans on a Hedonic Treadmill?”

They found that physical health was the most important factor in the happiness of their subjects, but their relative income was second most important.

If you want to master anything, you have to practice it, think about it, dream about it, talk about it, and do all of this at a pace and a level of involvement that you can maintain over time. This is true if you want to become a competent businessperson, doctor, writer, artist, or scientist. It is true if you want to develop satisfying relationships. It is true if you want to become a good fisherman.

The same holds true if you want to live a happy and gratifying life.

I could tell you lots of ways that you could do short sprints that would be fun in the moment. That may be worth doing, as long as it is in the context of your values and responsibilities. But doing this alone is like eating fruits and vegetables one day, when your overall diet is regularly full of fats and too much meat. Or doing a good deed once in a while, when you normally are guided by a harmful morality.

Anger is a response to trespass. It’s a response to an incident that you feel violates some boundary or value that you hold. When you feel hurt, when you feel wronged, when you’ve been disrespected or humiliated or shamed, it’s easy to hold on to that anger. Sometimes for a long, long time.

I want to suggest that you don’t.

I had some Great Aunts who, well into their 70’s, would occasionally bring up some incident or other involving one of the sisters. They were still angry about whatever the transgression was, still pushed out of shape by it, still holding onto a grudge from something that happened more than 50 years earlier!

In his book Becoming Adult, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and co-author Barbara Schneider look at the differences between teenagers on their way to becoming grown-ups who are either more happy and successful, or more unhappy, complacent, and disengaged.

The central ingredient is the amount of time that teenagers spend in play or work, or both, or neither.

Play in this regard is defined as engagement in activities that are enjoyable in the moment; work is defined as activities that may or may not be enjoyable in the moment, but that serve to build skills or resources for future gratification.