“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Living life every day is all about trade-offs. The more we live life, the more opportunities we have to understand which choices give us a minute of anger and frustration, or 60 seconds of joy and happiness. However, this requires us to be intrinsically aware of what we’re thinking and doing, and then link it to how that makes us feel.
For you to be happier, you need to understand what trade-offs you’re currently making and which ones you’d like to change. If you’re already happy, and you feel like conversations and expectations are threatening your happiness, perhaps it would be helpful to revisit your trade-offs and remind yourself of why you’ve made them.
For instance, the car(s), jewellery, tech gadgets, designer clothes or food you love to eat. What are you trading to enjoy this lifestyle? Often, it’s a choice about how many hours we are willing to work in order to pay for the things that are important to us. It’s not about a right or wrong trade – it’s about what you perceive to be valuable.
Anger and frustration can easily creep in when our choices are challenged and we may feel like we’ve made the wrong choice. It’s a challenge to move past (or through) that anger and allow it to either affirm our choices or help us shape our lives and choices differently. We can be challenged by others, or by ourselves when life is no longer making us happy.
This is when we have to ask ourselves: What am I willing to trade?
When you’ve been challenged in your decisions, you’re able to remind yourself of why you make these trade-offs and stand firmly by your decisions. This means that your 60 seconds of happiness won’t be easily derailed by a minute of anger.
You might be happy to travel away from your family in order to afford a safe home, private education, top healthcare or annual meditteranean cruises. Or – you may be happy to bring home a smaller paycheck in order to spend more time with your family, more hours at the gym or exploring new hobbies.
This is why every person’s plan is different, and it’s why happiness doesn’t look the same either. Our goal is to help you understand what yours needs to look like to help you thrive in happiness. It’s not about what we think is right or wrong, it’s about the trade-offs that make sense to you.