According to Dr. Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas, Austin, the level of happiness in people can be influenced by certain habits. Therefore, if you are not feeling as happy as you would like to be, it is possible to improve the situation by adopting certain behaviors on a daily basis.
Markman is the founding director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He is also known to be the author of Smart Thinking and Habits of Leadership, Smart Change, Brain Briefs and Bring Your Brain to Work. To find happiness, Markman suggests that you follow these three tips.
Set the right kind of goals
According to Markman, there is a connection between the goals people pursue and their long-term happiness. It seems that we are happier when our goals bind us to other people. For example, helping a co-worker can provide much more career satisfaction and increase feelings of overall well-being.
It is important to distinguish competitive / comparative goals from cooperative goals. When a person sets a comparative goal, they absolutely want to do better than the people they compare themselves to. A cooperative objective, on the other hand, allows him to help those around him, whether it is his family, his friends or his colleagues, so that everyone comes out victorious.
Happier people tend to set more cooperative than comparative goals because they like to celebrate both their own success and that of those around them.
Focus on the positive side of things
Markman said that in general, nothing could be completely good or completely bad. Things almost always have positive and negative elements. For happy people, only the positive side of things deserves attention, with the negative side taking a back seat.
Focusing on the positive has two main advantages. First of all, it makes a particular event more enjoyable at the time since attention is focused on the good side of things and not on the undesirable side. It also allows you to keep in mind only the positive points. When we try to remember the event later, we will better remember the positive points, and this memory will also contribute to happiness.
Forgive others
In our lifetime, we can meet all kinds of people, from the most wonderful to the worst. It is therefore quite possible that people will harm us. It may not be easy to do, but to be happy it is important to know how to forgive others. This allows us to forget the details that upset us. Thus, we will not remember these negative points when we go to see the person who hurt us later.
On the other hand, when we don’t forgive and keep hanging on to the details of the bad things people have done to us, we can experience a sense of anger, shame or embarrassment just by doing it. rethinking. Unlike physical pain, social pain can stay in the mind much longer.
In other words, forgiveness is a way to overcome bad interactions that we have had with a person, without harboring negative feelings that could put us in a bad mood and make us less satisfied with life. This does not mean, however, that it is easy to trust the future easily because there are people who do not want to change but remain selfish, mean and unreliable.
I am a technology author with 8 years of experience in journalism. My writing covers the latest technology advancements and trends, drawing on my expertise in news journalism and social media platforms. I have contributed to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
