Want to Improve Your Life Satisfaction and Wellbeing?
Life satisfaction and wellbeing are active processes.
To jumpstart your improvement on these two states, start by answering three questions:
What is a SINGULAR goal that I want to pursue? How can I clearly DEFINEit?
Why and how is that goal MEANINGFUL to me? (Note:if you can’t honestly answer this question, go back and redo the first question.)
Is this goal at the EDGE of my ABILITIES? (Note: if it isn’t, again, go back and redo the first question.)
Why are these questions important?
Based on research done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi(pronounced cheek-sent-me-high-ee), these are three core components that are necessary to achieve a FLOW state:
a state that occurs when you are so engaged and absorbed in an activity that you feel an energized focus and enjoyment, lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to slip away.
And, why is FLOW important?
According to Csikszentmihalyi,
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… the best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it. We also need a positive goal: otherwise why keep going?”
So, if you want to find satisfaction and wellbeing in your life — if you want the good life — take the time to:
1) Identify a Clearly Defined Goal. Then, resolve to SINGULARLY pursue that ONE goal. It’s easy to have a host of goals; however, to achieve FLOW, it’s crucial to set aside your other goals. According to Csikszentmihalyi, FLOW can only be achieved when you are monotasking. Multitasking — in other words, distraction — kills FLOW.
2) Make Sure Your Goal is Meaningful to You. FLOW is all about attention. Trying to pay attention to something that isn’t meaningful to you makes that task unnecessarily hard. Attention wanes and eventually slips away. Make things easier on yourself: choose something meaningful that inherently keeps your attention.
3) Choose Something at the Edge of Your Abilities. If your goal is too easy, you quickly enter coast-mode. On the other end, if you goal is too hard, you’ll create conditions to feel overwhelmed and anxious. Both create states that run counter to achieving a FLOW state. To find FLOW, it’s important to stretch your comfort zones — just know your realistic boundaries.
Life satisfaction and wellbeing is an active process.
Start today by answering the three questions.
Then, start doing!