Fine Tuning Happiness

In this podcast we explores the daily steps towards happiness. (Please note, this is lecture, not a guided meditation.)

Transcript

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare,

Where they're going to race?

And guess who wins?

Not the hare,

But the tortoise.

Then a few months ago on YouTube,

I saw a video about a tortoise and a hare having a real race.

It was a real tortoise and a real hare.

And sure enough,

The tortoise won.

It won because a rabbit was running all over the place,

Backwards,

Forwards,

And didn't go straight.

Or the tortoise just went straight at a much slower pace,

But it won.

Well,

Over the past 25 years of helping people improve their lives,

The one thing I've learned is tortoises really do win the race of life.

And what the tortoise does is the tortoise just plugs away.

It just keeps moving forward on the direction that it's headed,

And it makes course corrections when it needs to,

But it just keeps moving forward until it reaches its goal.

And I think life is like that in really almost all arenas.

Many years ago,

My sister's husband's parents were hardworking blue collar workers.

He had worked as a janitor throughout his life and saved his money and was able to buy a home,

Pay off his bills and did quite well given that he had a normal type job.

But when he retired,

They got the itch to do better,

To make more.

So they cashed in all their money,

Their house money and their retirement money and invested in a business.

And within six months,

After he had saved 40 years,

He lost it all.

It took him 40 years to save all this money and six months to lose it.

So I really do think in many ways tortoises win the race of life.

But let's refer today about happiness.

How do tortoises win the race of life in regards to happiness?

The first thing we have to do is we have to commit to being happy,

Because it is a lifetime process.

There's a lot of what I call fine tuning involved,

Learning about ourselves,

What works and doesn't work,

Discovering what are the aspects of happiness that are good for us and what are the things that are not good for us.

And as we learn these things,

We begin to improve,

Our lives begin to improve.

And it's a slow but steady process.

So what would the hair look like in regards to happiness?

Well,

It may mean turning to addictions,

Because addictions in the moment can make us feel really good.

Often you see this in young people.

They just want to have fun.

They're under a lot of stress to perform and do well.

Maybe they're in high school or college.

They're feeling that pressure and they don't like it.

So they want to leave that pressure right now,

Right away.

So they may do things that have consequences for the rest of their life,

Pregnancies,

Going to jail,

Dying.

There's many things that during those times that teenagers and young adults do that have life term consequences they don't take long to do,

But they can truly impact us for the rest of our lives.

But if we stay in course,

Either learning from other people or learning from our own mistakes,

What happens is with time we realize,

Oh,

I get it.

That isn't the path to go on.

That path leads to pain.

Instead,

I'm going to stay on the steady path towards being healthy,

Towards being happy.

And we learned with time what that is through refinement,

Through experimentation,

Through really watching our hearts and saying,

Okay,

What works for me right now?

And when I wake up tomorrow morning,

It still works for me.

Let me use an example to illustrate this.

Let's say for example,

We have a high stress job and at the end of the day,

We're tired.

We're just really exhausted and we want to come home and relax.

One thing we could do is come home,

Turn on the television,

Open up a bottle of wine and relax.

But probably the next day when we wake up,

We're not going to feel very well.

We're not going to feel very good inside.

Let's say instead we come home and we go for a long walk,

Maybe out in nature.

And then we sit and connect with our family and just maybe read a book or do some yoga,

Something that we really are able to just be still and be present.

We'll probably find the next day that we feel pretty good.

Then being the tortoise and we have this good thing in process.

We come home and spend a little time exercising our body so it can relax.

And then what we do is just say,

Okay,

I do have this high stress job.

The hare would quit,

But I'm not the hare.

I'm the tortoise.

So what I'm going to do is say,

Hmm,

Are there things that I could do at work to make my day not so stressful?

Maybe taking my full lunch,

Maybe connecting with people at work for a few minutes in between meetings,

Maybe just sitting and breathing periodically,

Maybe bringing pictures of my family to work with me,

Maybe taking my vacation time.

Again,

As a tortoise,

We begin to see how we can make improvements at work,

At home,

Everywhere in our lives.

We just keep improving.

Now it may with time lead to big changes.

In two years and six months,

We may change that job,

But it's probably going to be less traumatic and more steady,

Probably something we're moving into that's even better.

And we just keep moving forward because we're committed to being happy.

And happiness takes a lot of fine tuning.

We really have to listen to our hearts and say,

Okay,

Things aren't going the way that I like.

And I don't want to turn towards addictions.

I don't want to numb myself with alcohol or prescription drugs.

I want to keep getting better.

So how am I going to do that?

What works for me?

Maybe I'll begin to meditate.

Maybe I'll begin to spend a lot more time in nature.

Maybe I'll connect with friends more on the weekend.

Maybe I'll fill in the blank.

We begin to find what works for our hearts.

And we realize each of our hearts are different.

But because we're aware,

Because we're paying attention,

And because we keep fine tuning things,

Life just keeps getting better.

Now,

If you listened to last week's podcast,

I talked about how to deal with people that cause us stress that aren't happy as we are.

And one of the ways this could be implemented being the hair in regards to people that aren't happy is where I talked about just leaving,

Not putting up with the things that they do as much.

And perhaps with time,

You'll spend less and less time with those people that cause you pain and suffering,

And more and more time with people that put a smile on your face and make you happy.

Now,

Mind you,

It may with time have pretty radical changes.

You may not stay married.

You may move to a different town.

You may start a new relationship.

You may have very different friends.

But I do recommend doing it slowly.

It doesn't mean we have to put up with people treating us poorly.

Of course not.

But what we can do is say,

I'm not going to put up with you treating me poorly now.

So I'm leaving like I talked about in last week's podcast.

And then when they do it again,

We leave.

And then they do it again,

We leave.

And at some point we just may not come back.

But the good thing about doing it this way is one is we're not hurting others in the sense of we're not lashing back.

Cause I do think that's the road of pain.

Hopefully we'll all learn that as we fine tune our skills to happiness.

Cause I so often talk about being kind.

I really believe it's one of the key ingredients of happiness is being kind.

But kindness doesn't mean we're going to stay.

Kindness means we're not going to let other people hurt us cause it hurts them more in many ways than it hurts us.

So with time we may withdraw ourselves from people that aren't kind as a way of being kind towards ourselves and in many ways them.

And it may mean we don't see them much.

We may at some point really cut off our connections with them.

But because we're the tortoise,

New people are going to come into our lives.

People that we can spend time with that are kind,

That are positive,

That are on the same course that we're on.

And if they're not,

And we point that out to them,

They correct because they want to be with us and they are kind.

So it's so much about fine tuning,

Not rushing and saying,

I need to be happy now Dr.

Puff.

That's not going to work.

We have so many things in place from our past that make us unhappy.

We have to change them.

Change works so much better when we just make slow changes though regular changes.

I often compare psychological happiness with physical happiness.

I mean,

Could you imagine if you were a 300 pound couch potato or a very unhappy person and you wanted to be a physically fit person or a happy person,

Would you go out and run a marathon?

Would you all of a sudden just be happy all the time?

Of course not.

In both those instances,

You would need to slowly make changes,

Like start walking around the block and then going to the gym and then eating less and eating better.

And with time,

Your body can get in great shape.

It's the same way with happiness.

It does take time.

There's a lot of reconditioning that needs to go on.

And then what we'll find is once we recondition ourself to be more happy,

Then we have to maintain it.

Just like physical health,

We have to keep doing those things that we did before.

There's going to be things in the way that keep us from being happy.

Things that just prop up that say,

Nah,

This isn't going to work.

We need to go back to the old ways.

Things like boredom,

Things like,

Oh,

This is not exciting anymore.

Things like,

Well,

This isn't working.

I mean,

Our minds are going to fight this.

But if we keep moving forward,

Keep committing,

Keep fine tuning like the tortoise,

We are going to win the race of happiness.

And every day is going to get better,

Slowly,

But better.

I don't know if you remember it.

It was quite a while ago,

But a book came out called The Millionaire Next Door.

And its premise was that there are a lot of wealthy people here in the US that you never know it because they still live in their modest home.

What they've done is they've just paid off their home and saved.

And over time,

They created quite a nest egg and now they're a millionaire.

And I think it's much like that.

We're not going to impress people by being happy.

That isn't what happiness is about,

Impressing others.

But what's going to happen is each day is going to get a little bit better and a little bit better.

And with time,

Our lives are going to be truly beautiful but other people may not even notice and they definitely may not be impressed.

They may say,

Wow,

I wish it were you,

But they're not going to understand it.

When we spend time in nature,

When we sit and meditate,

When we go for long walks,

When we just quietly,

Calmly go through life and don't fight life so much and stay in that peaceful,

Happy place,

It's not going to make sense to people.

They like the thrills.

They like the excitement.

So they may not be impressed by us,

But that doesn't matter.

That doesn't lead to happiness.

What leads to happiness is our hearts.

When our hearts truly are more content with whatever is going on,

Then we will find happiness.

And of course,

The hardest thing to do is how I end this podcast every week is where I say with happiness,

We learn to accept what it is and with time we learn to love what it is.

Yes,

It is hard to do that and it can take years to really have that sink in.

But if we invest in those years and we keep plugging away at it,

What we'll find is we're going to keep getting better and our lives are going to improve and we're going to find that happiness like the tortoise is there all along the way.

And at the end,

We win because we win the life that's happy.

Not one that impresses people,

Not one that is successful,

But one where all along the way we enjoyed the journey of life one day,

One breath at a time.

And that led to a beautiful life.

So let's keep fine tuning our happiness.

Let's be the tortoise and keep plugging away on things and let's never give up on our happiness.

Realize that in each and every day we can make it a little bit better.

And those little bit of improvements lead to a beautiful,

Happy,

Peaceful life.

Thank you for joining me on the happiness podcast.

If you are finding these episodes helpful,

I would love for you to share your experience with others.

The easiest way for new people to listen to this podcast is just refer them to www.

Happinesspodcast.

Org.

That's happinesspodcast.

Org.

Or if you want to do more and leave a review on that site,

You'll find a Yelp link,

A Google plus link,

A testimonial link,

Or perhaps even the site you're listening to this podcast on.

Often you can leave reviews there too.

The reviews are an awesome way to encourage people to start listening to the happiness podcast.

And until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.

Reviews

I need to be more tortoise, sometimes my inner hare gets too excited by the things around me.

Thank you for sharing your happiness insights. So true and valuable! Namaste 🙏

Good to go back to - a great reminder. Thank you ❤️

Really enjoyed this! His kind and soft voice, and the analogy of the turtle and the hare...really good medicine

Thank you. Just what i needed. Perfect timing. I love the analogy with the fable of the tortoise and the hare.

It’s tough being the tortoise but it makes so much sense. Thanks for the reminder

Uplifting, straightforward. Thank you

I enjoy the Happiness Podcast. It makes me happy. ;)

This podcast is super! I always tell myself when I feel like I'm anxious and I need to do something right away that slow and steady wins the race. Even though I don't need to win any races but.. I so agree with your theory here . thank you

This is the first time I’m listening to this podcast and it’s meant to be! Earlier today I was having a coffee with my husband saying how I want to be happy but don’t know how. I’m sat in the garden on my swing (a happy place of mine) watching the sprinkler do it’s thing while hubby watches some sports. I thought it’s a good time to fill my batteries up by meditation and saw this podcast. I have always been the hare until about a year ago but I can now see how the tortoise is better and I just want steady and plodding happy. I have to mull over letting people go / walking away from those who are not kind in order to be kind to yourself. That is true but not just something to listen to. It’s something to try absorb. Also by leaving at a good time no nasty things are said. Kind = happy. Nasty = not happy. Thank you for this. I have found the webpage as well and will share. 🙏 namaste

Thanks! Wonderful talk, very logical and so different from what we hear and see in media and our environment.

What a gentle reminder that happiness isn’t a race to be won by the richest, the strongest, or the fastest. It is available to everyone through dedication, presence, and gratitude for what is. I encourage everyone to listen to this podcast, especially those who measure their lives by comparison.

Just what I needed to hear. Thank you!

This is exactly what I needed today. Thank you.🙏

I say that wisdom is being able to say “It is what it is!” with a smile on your face. I believe you could substitute the word “happiness”! Thank you 🙏🏼

Thank you for these wise words. Simple yet so relevant for today.

Very helpful and motivating to stay patient and keep pursuing growth. Thank you 🌻