6 Long-Term Strategies for a Happier Life
This week on Inspired Evolution, we’re joined by Kristina Mand-Lakhiani, a serial entrepreneur, international speaker, and artist. She is also the co-founder and head of the Russian Language sector at Mindvalley, a global educational organization offering top training for peak human performance.
Kristina has been a part of the personal growth and transformation industry for the past 15 years. She has held numerous lectures on many different themes including self-improvement and relationship crafting, some even available on YouTube. In one particularly popular video, Kristina educates on how to build a customer relationship in 100 days.
Her personal life is as rich and plentiful, if not more, as her professional life. Whether it’s singing her two children to sleep, playing the harp or immersing herself into classical literature, Kristina is set on taking in every moment and invites us to do the same.
The Many Upsets of Perfectionism
Kristina goes over her days of attending school and draws from personal experience in order to prove that perfectionism will, in fact, do you more harm than good. The idea of achieving perfection is a cumbersome notion to bear when considering your goals and values. It pushes us into the realm of unrealistic expectations, all the while having to endure the unnatural levels of stress it is inevitably causing. For Kristina, perfectionism is the thing which prevents us from being truly happy.
What Does It Mean to Be Happy?
Happiness can mean one thing for us, but it can also mean something completely different to someone else. It is a subjective concept, as Kristina puts it, one even scientists seek to avoid in their research. There is still plenty we can do in terms of utilizing the idea of happiness and trying to understand it better so that we could make it an essential part of our lives. For starters, we could make a clear distinction between happiness and other similar, but significantly different terms.
“We should not confuse happiness, joy and fun, which seem like very similar things.” – Kristina Mand-Lakhiani
In the context of life, fun and joy are usually restricted to short burst and periods of time, while happiness is more of a long-term thing. Happiness is a marathon, and the ways in which we try to attain it, need to correspond well with its long-lasting nature.
Long-term Strategies Which Will Help Us Find Happiness
Kristina offers 6 long-term strategies that will help you on your path to finding happiness in your everyday life. These techniques include gratitude, consciousness, the quality of our relationships, forgiveness, self-love, and the ability to deal with negative emotions.
Gratitude is a great example of why these techniques have an effect when considered long-term. Having and expressing gratitude is not a quick fix. It will not give you an immediate sense of calm, joy or any other brief emotional state you’re striving for. But when applied continuously, throughout our lives, gratitude will give us a more holistic perspective, it will make us see the bigger picture and ultimately will lead to us feeling happy.
Kristina compares consciousness to a pulse-check. She emphasizes the take-a-step-back effect it has on us when we are dealing with difficult and negative emotional states. Another benefit of knowing how to be in the present is that it will allow us to avoid all of the negativity that appears from either our past (like regret or not being able to let go) or from our future (like anxiety that arises from uncertainty).
Many studies have shown in the past that happiness correlates with the quality of our relationships with others. Family, friends, coworkers… Having a solid and strong connection with people that enrich our lives is a very important aspect of happiness, which is quite rational when you consider the other side of the coin. If we do not have good relationships with people we interact with on a daily basis, and especially with the people we are closest to emotionally, our days would be filled with stress, angst, and sadness. Having quality relationships protects us from those emotional states.
Other important techniques are forgiveness, self-love and the ability to deal with negative emotions. Forgiveness will allow us to let go and not dwell on the things we can’t change. Self-love is all about having a positive relationship with yourself. To know how to give yourself credit, and to not beat yourself up. And finally, dealing with negativity. Life will inevitably have its lows, difficult moments that test us. But the important thing is not to ignore or avoid them, but to learn how to find strength from within and use these unfortunate situations as an opportunity for personal growth.