MIND newsletter: A declaration of satisfaction
Happy Saturday everyone! As the year is coming to its end, how do you feel? Are you satisfied with the year 2022?
1. M (Challenge your mindset)
There is a quote about happiness that got stuck with me for so long. It’s from the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by the father of logotherapy Viktor Frankl.
Our current mental hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy… such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy… - the person is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.
If you look deeper into our insatiable world today, being unsatisfied carries as much burden as that unavoidable unhappiness. Unrealistic positivity expects people to be grateful and satisfied while social factors constantly influence our cognitive assessment and declaration of life satisfaction. In many families, the not-enough story is always present. In many organizations, marginalized employees don’t feel safe enough to stay satisfied as they “have actually been culturally conditioned to be hard workers and have built reputations of going above and beyond”, at the cost of never being satisfied with their performance.
Perhaps it is no longer a question of whether you are satisfied or not, but whether you give yourself permission to build your own measure – a set of variables that you find personally important in your life. Researchers haven’t yet succeeded in measuring satisfaction since it’s so subjective. So why would we let anyone else decide for us?
2. I (I’m my own coach)
Though there’s no one size fits all scale for satisfaction, a definition from Dr.Ed Diener might be a good reference if you’re stuck in defining yours.
Psychological wealth includes life satisfaction, the feeling that life is full of meaning, a sense of engagement in interesting activities, the pursuit of important goals, the experience of positive emotional feelings, and a sense of spirituality that connects people to things larger than themselves.
3. N (The power of Now)
Looking back to this year, do you like how your life/work turned out?
4. D (Do)
If the answer to question 3 is No, and if you could live this year over, what would be one thing you would change?
