Happiness Through Goal Setting

A Practical Guide to Reflect on and Change the Reasons Why You Pursue Your Most Important Goals in Life

Christian Ehrlich, Sashenka Milston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032002316
• eBook ISBN: 9781000411492
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

An evidence-based, practical guide to reflection on the most important goals in life, this book provides a unique framework and thought-provoking exercises to modify personal and professional goals to increase happiness.

Why we pursue our most important goals in life is an important question, and the answer we give ourselves greatly influences our happiness. This book presents the goal-striving reasons framework to illustrate the essential positive and negative ingredients: pleasure, altruism, self-esteem, and necessity. This new framework and the practical exercises throughout the book will enable readers to change their reasons for pursuing goals and achieve the ultimate aim of becoming happier in life.

There are many books on happiness – no other discusses happiness specifically from a goal-setting perspective. Human resources and mental health professionals, mindfulness practitioners, coaches, mentors, higher education staff, postgraduate students, and others will benefit from the hands-on guidance in this book.

Part 1

The big picture

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is focused on one fundamental question: why do you pursue your most important goals in life? This question is an important one because research has shown that the answers you give yourself matter to your happiness. So, we might as well ensure that we are pursuing our most important goals for the right or best possible reasons. But what are the right or best possible reasons? And are there any wrong reasons? This book, based on empirical evidence, identifies two happiness-increasing reasons to pursue one’s goals and two happiness-decreasing ones. It also contains effective strategies to help you either change your goals or the reasons for pursuing them, with the ultimate purpose of making yourself happier.

To give you a quick overview of the four reasons the book focuses on, here is a brief explanation of each. The first positive reason for pursuing your goals is that you really enjoy what you are doing. “Well, that’s fairly obvious”, you might be thinking. And you would be right. But it does beg the question, why aren’t more people enjoying the goals they are striving for? It seems evident when we look around – or maybe even at ourselves – that quite often, or even far too often, people are doing things that they do not really enjoy. So, the challenging quest behind this first reason is figuring out how to pursue important goals that are also enjoyable. Increasing the amount of enjoyment within our goal pursuit can enhance happiness. The second positive reason for pursuing a goal is that we feel it helps others or it makes the world a better place. Helping others is one of the most powerful things we can do to make ourselves happy. However, one of the most crucial goal-reasons that hinders us from becoming happy is doing things to prove our self-worth. If we strive for certain goals because we need to (constantly) validate ourselves, then this stands in the way of our happiness. Finally, doing things out of necessity can also detract from our happiness. We all have to do some things in life that we do not particularly like, but there is an ever-present danger of doing too many things we do not like, and so it is worthwhile reflecting on them and checking if they are truly necessary.

We believe that you will get the most out of this book by applying the information about “happy goals” to your own goals. So, a good way to kick things off is to state your four most important goals in life/work in Table 1.1. Remember, they are not set in stone and could even change as you work through the book. But it is difficult to work out if you are on the right path or if you require a course correction unless you know your current location. There is also space in the table to jot down the reasons why you are striving for each of your goals. This will be useful for reflecting on those reasons as you work through the book.

Table 1.1 Your most important goals

My most important goal is
The reason(s) why I strive for my most important goal is/are
My second most important goal is
The reason(s) why I strive for my second most important goal is/are
My third most important goal is
The reason(s) why I strive for my third most important goal is/are
My fourth most important goal is
The reason(s) why I strive for my fourth most important goal is/are

Chapter 2

Why happiness matters

Happiness is seen by both researchers and lay-people as an ultimate goal in life. This is evident by the number of research papers, books, forums, and websites dedicated to the topic. Indeed, for many, the state of being happy is a central criterion for living a fulfilling life.

It is also not just a Western phenomenon (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). Happiness is now seen as a global issue, with people around the world seeing happiness as an important aspect of their lives. So much so that the United Nations has recognised happiness as a universal right of humans. In 2012, the UN convened the inaugural annual meeting on happiness, bringing together global data on national happiness levels and reviewing evidence from the science of happiness, and officially declared the 20th of March as the International Day of Happiness.

All of this is for a good reason: happiness brings a multitude of benefits in multiple domains. In an exhaustive review of all available happiness research, Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) examined experimental, longitudinal, and correlational data from over 275,000 people. They found that happiness can lead to positive effects on our performance (e.g., increased productivity and quality of work), health (e.g., more energy, better immunity, lower stress and pain levels, longer life), relationships (e.g., longer and more satisfying marriages, more friends with richer interactions and greater social support), and society as a whole with more helpful and charitable behaviour. Ed Diener, another leading researcher in the field of happiness, supports the message and suggests that the evidence is “clear and compelling” (Diener & Chan, 2011, p. 33) that happiness influences health and longevity.

Shawn Achor writes about a fundamental truth in his book, The Happiness Advantage (2011), and this may be one of the most important messages. We are taught to believe that if we work hard, we will be successful, which will then make us happy. However,

the formula is broken because it is backward. More than a decade of ground-breaking research … has proven in no uncertain terms that … happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement.

(Achor, 2011, p. 3)

Most importantly, the fact that you are holding this book in your hand right now means happiness matters to you.

References

1. Achor, S. (2011). The happiness advantage: The seven principles of positive psychology that fuel success and performance at work. London: Virgin Books.
2. Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011). Happy people live longer: Subjective well-being contributes to health and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3(1), 1–43. doi: 10.1111/j.1758-0854.2010.01045.x
3. Lyubomirsky, S., King, L. A., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803–855. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.803
4. Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111

Chapter 3

Things to consider on your happiness journey, including a word of warning

If you have picked up this book with the ultimate aim of leading a happier life, or even just finding a few new ideas, then this chapter may help you with some general knowledge and guidance. It touches on the three key aspects around happiness which are important to keep in mind when modifying your reasons behind goal pursuit and apply to any changes you make to become happier.

Intentional activities and life circumstances – two areas for long-term happiness

There are many strategies for increasing happiness. Lyubomirsky (2007) suggests there are around 200! However, while some are well-researched, others are more mythical in nature. This book primarily focuses on the importance of goals, along with various strategies that can be applied to your goals, none of them mythical in nature!

To set the scene and provide a little background explanation, we will start on a broader level. Research suggests that there are three key areas that influence our happiness: our biological set point, the circumstances we are in, and intentional activities (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). This original research gave rise to the sustainable happiness model and suggested that our genes (biological set point) influence our long-term happiness by up to 50%. There is not much we can do about this factor. Our circumstances, such as how much money we earn, the house we live in, etc., contribute 10%. The remaining 40% is determined by our intentional activities – things we can do to improve our happiness that do not happen on their own and require some effort. Goals are subsumed under this category.

The model was academically critiqued and the 40% attribution to intentional activities was suggested to be overestimated (see Brown & Rohrer, 2019). In response, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2019) agreed that it was difficult to quantify the influence of those three factors. However, they stood behind the central premise of their model and successfully demonstrated that long-term happiness is possible by continued, wilful effort in eudaimonic-type activities (growth-promoting goals and intentional behaviours). At the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART 1 The big picture
• PART 2 The four reasons
• PART 3 Related topics around goals
• Index