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SALT LAKE CITY — How many times have you began a sentence with, "I will be happy when..."?
How do you fill in the rest of that sentence? When I get a job? When I get a promotion? When I get a better job? Or how about when I find a mate? When I get married? When I get divorced?
Author and "human potential" expert Shawn Anchor has a bone to pick with this sentence.
"This innocent comment is the very reason that happiness is so elusive for us in the modern world," he writes in The Huffington Post.
Anchor would know. He's the author of "The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work."
"Over the past several years, I have been researching the relationship between happiness and success, only to discover that the problem is not that we forget to pursue happiness, but that we are pursuing it with the wrong formula," he writes.
The problem, Anchor says, is that this sentence implies that happiness is contingent only upon achieving an arbitrary goal. But goals can shift, be delayed, change or completely evaporate over time, leaving you to helplessly chase after happiness instead of creating it throughout your journey.
"The key is to cultivate happiness first," Anchor writes, "instead of wallowing in the discontent of delayed happiness, waiting for some arbitrary success point in the future to trigger happiness."
Anchor offers a three-step approach for learning to cultivate your own happiness and break the contingency dependence. Read his full article on The Huffington Post to learn more.
Lindsay Maxfield is a writer, the editor of the Happy Living feature section on ksl.com and a writing coach for Deseret Connect.
