166: The True Source of Your Happiness
SHOW DESCRIPTION
When 4 men sit in a hot room to talk about happiness, you really don’t know what to expect. While we sate in this hot recording studio, we explored why certain things or activities bring us happiness and who the real stakeholders in your happiness are. This is important to understand where our happiness comes from and whether it is healthy or not for us.
Stakeholders are just the people that are either reliant or integral to causing our happiness. In healthy relationships, you will always here from the individuals that what is important is the other member’s happiness. A husband cares about the happiness of his wife. The wife cares about the happiness of the husband. This is a great way to maintain a healthy relationship with your significant other. However, it may just be detrimental to your own happiness.
When people are so devoted to the other person in their relationship, they might lose sight of things that make themselves happy in favor of things that make the other person happy. I see this a lot in my parents. My Mom is one of the most loving people in the world to me and she goes out of her way to make us happy. However, she does everything in her power to make us happy, but anytime her happiness comes up she can’t express herself. She will go to movies with my family that she wouldn’t necessarily like, but when we ask her if there is something she would like to see, she will deflect and say, “well, what do you want to see?” This happens in many relationships and it can end up causing resentment from one or the other.
There are also times that we know what makes us happy and we want to share that experience with someone we love. We believe that what makes us happy will also make them happy and we set an expectation. Our expectations can lead to disappointment when the other party isn’t as enthralled as we are. Kyle talks about liking ski, but his other doesn’t. If he put his happiness investment in how the other party feels, he loses some of the experience he could be having while he is there.
We should actively seek to make sure our friends and family are happy. However, if we fail to make sure we are also happy, we build up resentment and negativity. Conversely, if all we do is focus on our own happiness, we cause negativity and resentment to build in our relationships. Balance is important for healthy emotional growth.
