6 Steps to Starting Your Happiness Journey

You grow your happiness by building “happiness skills”. And any time we are building skills, we do better when we have a plan to guide us. So here’s how you create a “plan to be happy” and achieve your goal of happiness.

You wouldn’t bake a cake without a recipe. You wouldn’t go to a place you’ve never been without a map. And you shouldn’t try to build happiness without a plan either. Creating a good happiness plan is what takes you from where you are now to where you want to be.

You build happiness the same exact same way. Someone with expertise tells you what skills you need to learn and how to learn these skills.

Most self-help books, courses, and apps do teach you what skills lead to happiness. But they fail to teach you how to build these skills. 

Lets go back to the math example to explain. If you were just starting to learn math, a teacher would never have you first try some long division, then try some addition, and then find the circumference of a circle. But this is exactly what people do when trying to teach you happiness.

You’ll often get a bit of mindfulness, then some kindness, then some gratitude. No method to the madness.

Well, it turns out that mindfulness is the equivalent of calculus and kindness is the equivalent of long division? This is why, to successfully increase your happiness, you have to follow the right steps, and practice the right skills, in the right order. It helps to create a plan to be happy.

We are far more likely to do something when we know why we’re doing it. To create greater motivation to increase our own happiness, it’s helpful to clarify for ourself why we are even bothering with this darn happiness thing.

​When clarifying your “why“, be specific. Note all the reasons why building your happiness is an important goal for you and why you are willing to put in the effort to do it.

If you wanted to speak a new language, play a new instrument, or learn any other new skills, you would have to set aside time to practice these skills. The same thing is true for building your happiness skills. ​

Over the last few years, I’ve been researching happiness, and I’ve explored the benefit of a lot of different happiness skills. Based on this research, these are key skills I believe to be most important to human happiness.

• Happiness Planning
• Positive Thinking
• Healthy Relationships
• Kindness
• Personal Development
• Emotional Resilience
• Self-Confidence
• Life Purpose
• Work-Life Balance
• Self-Awareness

If you haven’t already, you can take our Happiness Quiz to see how strong you are at these 10 skills. And start building these skills with our Happiness Program.

It sounds obvious, but if your plan is to increase your happiness, you should build the skills that actually have a big impact on your happiness. And not all skills are created equal. 

As you can see in the figure below, each of the ten top skills is correlated with happiness—but some skills are more strongly correlated with happiness than others. The skills on the left side of the chart are more strongly correlated with happiness. As you move to the right, the skills are less strongly correlated with (i.e., related to) happiness.

This research suggests that, if you only have time and energy for building one skill, you might get the greatest boost in happiness from building self-confidence.

But, you have to be careful with how you interpret this research. It’s easy to think that maybe you should just create a happiness plan with self-confidence and hey, you’re done! Hold on. It’s not quite that easy.

First, the relationship between these skills and happiness is not always linear. For example, if your work-life balance is awful, it has a huge impact in your happiness. If your work-life balance is so-so, then it has a smaller impact on your happiness.

The same is true with kindness. A little kindness goes a long way when it comes to your happiness.

In the figures below, you can see that if your scores are very low on work-life balance or kindness, these skills have a huge impact on your happiness (that’s why the line is very steep). As your scores get a bit better (above a 2 or 3), these skills contribute less to your happiness.

This means that building certain skills (like work-life balance and kindness) is more important for some people than others. And if you score low on a skill (for example, I struggle with managing stress), it’s likely more important that you build this skill (but more on that later).

Other skills, like self confidence, are related to happiness no matter what your score. This means that building this skill, regardless of whether your score is high or low, is likely to help you improve your happiness. In the figure below, see how the line is nearly flat? That means each little boost you have in self-confidence is expected to result in a little boost in happiness.

Because all of the happiness skills are important, there is not a wrong way to map your happiness journey. But, just like taking a short-cut would get you to a destination quicker, there are ways to get your “happiness destination” quicker and planning to be happy by prioritizing some skills over other skills.

These guidelines can help you decide what to put first in your happiness plan.

Working on your “weak skills” is often thought to be the most effective approach for making the best and fastest overall progress on your happiness. Why? Because you have more room to develop and improve these skills.

But keep in mind, this is likely also the most challenging approach. Why? Well, these skills wouldn’t be your weak skills if they weren’t already hard for you to build, right? So building these skills wont be easy.

This is the approach that is believed to be most effective if you often quit things quickly or get bored easily. By choosing to build a skill that you will enjoy more, you’ll stick to building this skill for longer and make more progress than if you started building skills that were boring for you. You can find a bunch more happiness skills to here and here.

This is likely the best approach if you’re new to the science of happiness, if you are questioning the benefit of building these skills, or if you are doubting your own ability to build the skills that lead to happiness. By choosing an easy skill, you can get a quick, easy win. This way, you’ll discover that building these skills is indeed possible and, as a result, you’ll be more likely to stick to it.

There is some evidence suggesting that positive thinking is the easiest skill—which includes gratitude and savoring—but remember, it depends on who you are and what you personally are good at.

You can use these tips here to create a really effective happiness plan—one that helps you progress quickly and efficiently. But, as you may have gathered, it can sometimes be hard to figure out exactly where to start, what to do, and how to do it.

So I’ve aimed to take all these considerations (and more) into account to create a happiness program that helps you build your happiness more strategically. You focus on the basics, the high-impact skills, and the fun stuff first before graduating to more complex topics. Check out the Happiness Program Here to learn more about how you can plan to be happy.

References:

• Baumeister, Roy F., Kathleen D. Vohs, and Dianne M. Tice. 2007. “The strength model of self-control.”  Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (6):351-355.
• Fogg, Brian J. 2009. “A behavior model for persuasive design.” Proceedings of the 4th international Conference on Persuasive Technology.
• Sheldon, Kennon M, and Linda Houser-Marko. 2001. “Self-concordance, goal attainment, and the pursuit of happiness: Can there be an upward spiral?”  Journal of personality and social psychology 80 (1):152.