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Happiness, 4.06 (V) Week 4 Video 5 - Taking Personal Responsibility for Happiness

[MUSIC] [SOUND] Vitayo my Ukrainian and other friends. In the last few videos, I discussed how being overly controlling of others and of outcomes lowers our happiness levels. I also had you fill out the desire for control and maximize of mindsets skills. Hopefully, this course that you got on the skills gave you a pretty good idea of your control-seeking tendency. I should let you know that even if you, in fact, scored high on those scales, that doesn't necessarily mean that your control-seeking tendency is going to make you unhappy. A lot depends on how much perceived control you have. If you're high in desire for control and you perceive to have a high degree of control, that would actually mean that you're okay. Likewise, just because you scored low on the controlled-seeking scale, doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory. Again, a lot depends on how much perceived control you have. If you have low levels of perceived control and you desire low levels of control, then you are likely to be okay. It's when there's a mismatch finding show that there's often a big problem. There's a separate scale that researchers use to assess people's perceived level of controls. But, in the interest of time, I'm not gonna have you fill that out. In the reference section for this week, I have listed a couple of papers that have perceived control scales. You can check out these papers if you're interested. What I want to focus on now is on this tendency to be overly control-seeking. That is you have a high desire for control, and you're sense of perceived control is comparatively relatively low. And what I wanna do is focus on a habit that I think has great potential to act as an antidote to this tendency to be overly control-seeking. What is this habit? This is the fourth habit, and I call it Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Own Happiness. Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness means never blaming others, or the external circumstances, for how you feel. It means having the ability to regulate how you feel inside of your head. It means wearing a t-shirt that says, no matter what the weather outside is, the weather in my head is always sunny. Coming to think of it, that seems like a really great idea for a t-shirt. If you end up taking up the idea and making a t-shirt, please don't forget to mail me one, okay? Now, before I tell you how to take personal responsiblity for your happiness, and how this can help you get rid of, or at least mitigate this tendency to be overly controlling, let me tell you a story. When I was younger, my mom, my sister and I would travel every summer to our hometown, called Tiruchi in South India. I really loved Tiruchi, which is this dusty little town in the middle of the South. And we would always get very excited by the prospect of spending my summers there. I would image all the fun that I would have, the cricket that I would play with my cousins, the songs that we would listen to on the radio while we dipped Parle-G biscuits into the tea in the afternoons, etc. I would get so excited by imagining the trip to Tiruchi, that I would often be unable to fall asleep. This would happen well before the summer vacations began, sometimes two months before it. Now here's the thing, my expected enjoyment of the trips to Tiruchi were always higher than my actual enjoyment of the trips. Why? Because when I was in Tiruchi, I would invariably get into a terrible fight with at least one of my cousins. Of course, it was never my fault. It was always their fault. Also, my cousins and I would be prevented from doing some of the really fun things that we wanted to do, like go and see movies on our own, or play cards. Because these activities were deemed, by our wise adults, as activities that children shouldn't engage in. If I had maintained a journal, I would have discovered that my expected enjoyment of a summer vacations in Tiruchi were always greater than my actual enjoyment from these vacations. And it turns out that I'm not unique in this regard. All of us end up over predicting the amount of enjoyment we expect to derive from vacations. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that our imaginations can have a very big influence on our emotions. In fact, our imaginations can have an even bigger impact on our emotions than reality can, which is why we often derive more enjoyment from imagining things than from actually doing them. There's even a quaint, British saying for this phenomenon. Hope to enjoy is more enjoyed than hope enjoyed, meaning, our imagination of how enjoyable something is gonna be is often greater than our actual enjoyment of that something. Researchers have long known that our imaginations, or more generally our thoughts, influence our feelings. One set of researchers looked at the typical set of thoughts that produce various types of emotional states. They asked a bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel angry. They asked another bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel sad. They asked a third bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel anxious and so on. They found that, universally, a certain set of thoughts tend to consistently precede each of these different emotional states. Anger, for example, is typically preceded by thought about an intruder or obstacle in your path. So you feel angry when you believe that someone, or something, is stopping you from achieving a cherished, desired goal. Sadness is usually preceded by the thought that something valuable is missing or lost. Likewise, anxiety is typically preceded by thoughts of being uncertain or out of control. On the positive side too, different thought patterns trigger different kinds of feelings. So pride, for example, is triggered when you attribute a successful outcome to your own actions or your skills. On the other hand, when you attribute a success to someone else's doing, or to luck, you feel grateful. Think about what this means. The fact that different emotions are preceded by different sets of thought means that you can change, or control or regulate, your feelings by controlling your thoughts. So, for example, rather than feeling angry at your boss for failing to give you a raise, you could actually feel grateful towards him for not firing you. Right? In other words, as human beings, we have this unique ability, or gift, if you want to call it that, of regulating our emotions. Of course, you may not always want to regulate your feelings. Sometimes, you may wanna feel angry at your boss. Or you may want to feel sad, because your good friend is going through a breakup. But if you're like me, I'm sure there are many instances when you would like to feel differently from how you are currently feeling. For example, you may be in a hotel room in a totally unfamiliar city. And you may have a very important client meeting coming up the next day. And you may not be able to fall asleep, because you are anxious about the meeting. You may actually be tired, and you may want to fall asleep, but your mind won't let you. Or imagine that you've broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and it happened a while back. And that you now need to move on with your life. And yet, you may not be able to shake off the depression from this break up. In these types of situations, I think it would be really useful to be able to take control of our feelings and thoughts. That's where Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness comes in. It has to do with developing the skills required to regulate your emotions, and to take control of your feelings. How do you achieve this ability to control your feelings? That's the question to which I want to turn in the next video. But before I do that, let me quickly point out that Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness, that is taking control over your feelings, is not the same thing as trying to control others or trying to control outcomes. In fact, in many ways, it is exactly the opposite of it. When you're overly controlling of other people or outcomes, you're trying to control the external environment. When you take control of your own thoughts and feelings, you're doing the opposite. You're taking control of your internal environment. When you're trying to control the external environment, you're essentially handing the keys to your happiness to the external environment, to other people or to outcomes. You're acknowledging that you can't be happy, unless the external environment, that is other people or outcomes, cooperate. When you take control of the internal environment, you're doing the opposite. You're attempting to retain the keys to your happiness in your own two hands. And that, my friend, makes all the difference, as we will see in future videos. [FOREIGN]. And see you in the next video. [MUSIC]


[MUSIC] [SOUND] Vitayo my Ukrainian and other friends. In the last few videos, I discussed how being overly controlling of others and of outcomes lowers our happiness levels. I also had you fill out the desire for control and maximize of mindsets skills. Hopefully, this course that you got on the skills gave you a pretty good idea of your control-seeking tendency. I should let you know that even if you, in fact, scored high on those scales, that doesn't necessarily mean that your control-seeking tendency is going to make you unhappy. A lot depends on how much perceived control you have. If you're high in desire for control and you perceive to have a high degree of control, that would actually mean that you're okay. Likewise, just because you scored low on the controlled-seeking scale, doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory. Again, a lot depends on how much perceived control you have. If you have low levels of perceived control and you desire low levels of control, then you are likely to be okay. It's when there's a mismatch finding show that there's often a big problem. There's a separate scale that researchers use to assess people's perceived level of controls. But, in the interest of time, I'm not gonna have you fill that out. In the reference section for this week, I have listed a couple of papers that have perceived control scales. You can check out these papers if you're interested. What I want to focus on now is on this tendency to be overly control-seeking. That is you have a high desire for control, and you're sense of perceived control is comparatively relatively low. And what I wanna do is focus on a habit that I think has great potential to act as an antidote to this tendency to be overly control-seeking. What is this habit? This is the fourth habit, and I call it Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Own Happiness. Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness means never blaming others, or the external circumstances, for how you feel. It means having the ability to regulate how you feel inside of your head. It means wearing a t-shirt that says, no matter what the weather outside is, the weather in my head is always sunny. Coming to think of it, that seems like a really great idea for a t-shirt. If you end up taking up the idea and making a t-shirt, please don't forget to mail me one, okay? Now, before I tell you how to take personal responsiblity for your happiness, and how this can help you get rid of, or at least mitigate this tendency to be overly controlling, let me tell you a story. When I was younger, my mom, my sister and I would travel every summer to our hometown, called Tiruchi in South India. I really loved Tiruchi, which is this dusty little town in the middle of the South. And we would always get very excited by the prospect of spending my summers there. I would image all the fun that I would have, the cricket that I would play with my cousins, the songs that we would listen to on the radio while we dipped Parle-G biscuits into the tea in the afternoons, etc. I would get so excited by imagining the trip to Tiruchi, that I would often be unable to fall asleep. This would happen well before the summer vacations began, sometimes two months before it. Now here's the thing, my expected enjoyment of the trips to Tiruchi were always higher than my actual enjoyment of the trips. Why? Because when I was in Tiruchi, I would invariably get into a terrible fight with at least one of my cousins. Of course, it was never my fault. It was always their fault. Also, my cousins and I would be prevented from doing some of the really fun things that we wanted to do, like go and see movies on our own, or play cards. Because these activities were deemed, by our wise adults, as activities that children shouldn't engage in. If I had maintained a journal, I would have discovered that my expected enjoyment of a summer vacations in Tiruchi were always greater than my actual enjoyment from these vacations. And it turns out that I'm not unique in this regard. All of us end up over predicting the amount of enjoyment we expect to derive from vacations. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that our imaginations can have a very big influence on our emotions. In fact, our imaginations can have an even bigger impact on our emotions than reality can, which is why we often derive more enjoyment from imagining things than from actually doing them. There's even a quaint, British saying for this phenomenon. Hope to enjoy is more enjoyed than hope enjoyed, meaning, our imagination of how enjoyable something is gonna be is often greater than our actual enjoyment of that something. Researchers have long known that our imaginations, or more generally our thoughts, influence our feelings. One set of researchers looked at the typical set of thoughts that produce various types of emotional states. They asked a bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel angry. They asked another bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel sad. They asked a third bunch of participants to write about an event that made them feel anxious and so on. They found that, universally, a certain set of thoughts tend to consistently precede each of these different emotional states. Anger, for example, is typically preceded by thought about an intruder or obstacle in your path. So you feel angry when you believe that someone, or something, is stopping you from achieving a cherished, desired goal. Sadness is usually preceded by the thought that something valuable is missing or lost. Likewise, anxiety is typically preceded by thoughts of being uncertain or out of control. On the positive side too, different thought patterns trigger different kinds of feelings. So pride, for example, is triggered when you attribute a successful outcome to your own actions or your skills. On the other hand, when you attribute a success to someone else's doing, or to luck, you feel grateful. Think about what this means. The fact that different emotions are preceded by different sets of thought means that you can change, or control or regulate, your feelings by controlling your thoughts. So, for example, rather than feeling angry at your boss for failing to give you a raise, you could actually feel grateful towards him for not firing you. Right? In other words, as human beings, we have this unique ability, or gift, if you want to call it that, of regulating our emotions. Of course, you may not always want to regulate your feelings. Sometimes, you may wanna feel angry at your boss. Or you may want to feel sad, because your good friend is going through a breakup. But if you're like me, I'm sure there are many instances when you would like to feel differently from how you are currently feeling. For example, you may be in a hotel room in a totally unfamiliar city. And you may have a very important client meeting coming up the next day. And you may not be able to fall asleep, because you are anxious about the meeting. You may actually be tired, and you may want to fall asleep, but your mind won't let you. Or imagine that you've broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and it happened a while back. And that you now need to move on with your life. And yet, you may not be able to shake off the depression from this break up. In these types of situations, I think it would be really useful to be able to take control of our feelings and thoughts. That's where Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness comes in. It has to do with developing the skills required to regulate your emotions, and to take control of your feelings. How do you achieve this ability to control your feelings? That's the question to which I want to turn in the next video. But before I do that, let me quickly point out that Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Happiness, that is taking control over your feelings, is not the same thing as trying to control others or trying to control outcomes. In fact, in many ways, it is exactly the opposite of it. When you're overly controlling of other people or outcomes, you're trying to control the external environment. When you take control of your own thoughts and feelings, you're doing the opposite. You're taking control of your internal environment. When you're trying to control the external environment, you're essentially handing the keys to your happiness to the external environment, to other people or to outcomes. You're acknowledging that you can't be happy, unless the external environment, that is other people or outcomes, cooperate. When you take control of the internal environment, you're doing the opposite. You're attempting to retain the keys to your happiness in your own two hands. And that, my friend, makes all the difference, as we will see in future videos. [FOREIGN]. And see you in the next video. [MUSIC]