Does relationship create happiness? I think it does, actually. And as I look at the thousands of clients that I’ve coached over the years, the ones who have been the happiest were the ones who had effective relationships.
What is your life anyway? I say it’s relationships. The relationship you have with yourself has a dramatic effect on your happiness. Your relationship to the situations you find yourself in impacts your happiness. Of course, the big one is your relationship to other people. The more relationships you have, the more possibilities for enriching conversations and connections. Opportunities to be so service, make a difference and be of value to the world all seem to come from the people you know. All the stuff that makes life great stems from your relationships.
Relationship: time spent relating. Most people think that they have relationships with people, but they don’t spend any time with them. The relationship they have is their head. We’ve got to get out of our head. We’ve got to get into the actual interaction and the connection with people.
So two studies point that one of the most important keys to happiness is relationship, so in a study done by a firm called Saplow, I think I’m pronouncing that right, in Sweden, the company looked at which words appeared most often together with the word happiness in articles in the Swedish press in 2010. So Saplow’s technology can read and understand any block of text. Now, the study is based on 1.5 million words of articles published in the Swedish daily newspapers in 2010, and the technology examined which words were most common, all right, in the articles containing happiness compared to articles that did not contain this word.
Now here’s the insane thing. Almost all personal pronouns were linked to happiness. You and me were at the top of the associations with happiness. You know, probably more progressive my and your, those were also very at the top, very high. Then after that you had she, he, us and them. They were all popular. So what does that say? Basically, when we think about happiness, we think about in relationship to others, in relationship to ourselves.
In another study, done by the Pew Research Center, after surveying 44 countries it was found that the biggest source of happiness is family.
Now, my friend, if you want to increase your happiness, you want to begin to take on the skills of happiness. And I request that you watch some of my other videos, and I’ll give you some of those skills. But today, one of the easiest things that you can do is to get back into connection, into communication with those people in your life that are important to you, your friends, your family members, the colleagues at work that you enjoy. Those connections create incredible positive meaning in our life. I request that you do some of that today.
Author
Matthew Ferry