A concept I love is that of the beautiful life – one that is good both for ourselves and our world. This weaving together of personal and collective wellbeing lies at the heart of our approach at CollegeOfWellbeing.com. With so many disturbing world events, it is much needed in these times. But how do we do it in practice? How can we develop richly satisfying lives that also generate ripples of benefit extending beyond ourselves?
I’d like to describe three pathways that can act as growth edges for this beautiful life approach: Active Hope, Listening Skills and the playful art of Su Ha, which is a system for cultivating Sustainable Happiness.
1) Active Hope as a practice for personal and collective wellbeing
We live at a time of widespread loss of hope, with surveys showing a significant majority believe world conditions are getting worse. When facing threats to personal and collective wellbeing, Active Hope is different from hopefulness. It is an energy of engagement that can happen through us, through our actions and choices in support of the kind of future we hope for.
What I’ve found so useful is thinking of Active Hope as a three-step practice we can engage in each day. First we start by taking in our current reality, facing what we face and feeling what we feel. From this starting point, the future can develop in so many different ways. The second step is to identify versions of what might happen next that we hope for. These hopes act as guiding signals, giving our lives a direction to move in, and a purpose to follow. The third step is act in ways that support our hopes, that move their way or help make them more likely.
Research identifies many wellbeing benefits from experiencing strong purpose in life, including improved health, mood and sleep as well as longer lifespan. Yet there is so much that can stand in the way of engaging in purposes that call to us. That’s why I think of active hope not just as a practice, but also as a skill – it is something we can become more skilful in, and with that, our sense of purpose (and life satisfaction) grows.
If you’re interested in exploring this more, I invite you to join me for a webinar on Active Hope I’m doing with Action for Happiness on Thursday 23rd February. I’m pleased to add that the new edition of Active Hope, the book I wrote with Joanna Macy, has been nominated for an Ommie Award. To get the award though, we need lots of people to vote for us before March 1st. Please help us by voting at this link.
2) Listening well as a practice for personal and collective wellbeing
How might our world be if we all listened better? How might your personal and work relationships benefit as well? You might already be a great listener, but whatever your starting point, it is interesting to reflect on the skills that help us hear at a deeper level and how we might grow these more.
A good starting point is to remember times you’ve felt listened to well, and also other moments when you’ve encountered the opposite. How do these experiences differ? It may come as no surprise that research shows work-related wellbeing is improved and stress levels lower when colleagues, particularly those who supervise us, are rated as good listeners. Listening well is also linked with higher levels of satisfaction in relationships. But if we want to listen better, and help others do this too, where do we start?
Four listening skills I focus on in my training work are
- the skill of paying attention
- the skill of expressing empathy
- the skill of deepening engagement
- the skill of building trust
Paying attention involves mindfulness, but also goes a step further. There’s a skill that helps people know you’re paying attention to them – it can be expressed in something as small as a shift in your direction of gaze, where you actively turn towards someone. Relationship experts Dr John and Julie Gottman describe ‘turning towards’ like this as a simple step people can take to improve their relationships.
If you’re interested in exploring the listening skills I’ve mentioned here, you might be interested in a course starting next week called ‘Love Your Listening Skills’. Over a series of four webinars starting on Tuesday 21st Feb, we focus on developing or improving skills that help us build and grow our capacity to listen well. One of the most reliable ways of improving wellbeing is to build and maintain good relationships. The ability to listen well helps you do that.
3) Su Ha as a practice for personal and collective wellbeing
Have you ever done something that gave you joy in a moment but which led to later regret? This is such a common experience that happiness is often thought of as a fleeting feeling that comes and soon goes. Yet there might also be moments that happened years ago that you still feel glad about. They have a warm afterglow of satisfaction that can linger, perhaps even for decades. What I’m drawing attention to here is one way of thinking about the difference between unsustainable happiness and sustainable happiness.
Sustainable happiness can extend in time and space beyond the present moment, and also beyond ourselves. If you plant a fruit tree, for example, you might enjoy the experience. and also have future fruitfulness to look forward to. But it isn’t just me who benefits. Future generations, perhaps even people not yet born, might experience ripples of benefit from my tree planting and tree care.
For some years now I’ve been exploring this difference between actions, or moves, that bring short term pleasure but longer term cost, and those that might have lingering benefits, not just for ourselves, but also for other people and our world. I’ve been much influenced by my many years of working in the addictions recovery field – and also by my deep concerns about the unsustainable path of modern civilisation. Could the way we approach happiness be a potential key cultural shift point for both personal and collective wellbeing?
Working with others, I’ve developed an approach called Su Ha – it is like a playful martial art that seeks to protect and nurture wellbeing, not just in ourselves but also in other people and our world. We can do Su Ha moves each day – some of these moves involving shifts in the way we think and look at things, as well as act. I’ll talk a bit about this in the Action for Happiness webinar on Active Hope – and I’m also offering a free Su Ha webinar to explore it more on May 23rd – followed by an online course called Su Ha Foundations Training that starts on June 6th. I know that’s a way off. But I’m planting a seed and inviting you to reflect on the moments that lead to lingering gladness. How can we help them happen more? Perhaps active hope and good listening are among the places to start. I look forward to exploring this with you more.
