My Secret to Happiness
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” — Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
I have always been quite a happy person (well, some people who know me would probably say that’s an understatement :-D) I think that’s why I was so surprised when I got unhappy for several weeks last summer.
Maybe it’s because I don’t do it enough (being unhappy) but I really wasn’t good at it. It was painful and I didn’t enjoy it at all.
I felt disappointed, frustrated, annoyed, even angry. Certainly 100% not happy.
So I switched on my thinking brain and decided to figure out why I felt that way… which led me to discover my new key to a happier life.

As I started to explore the reasons for my unhappiness the first answer seemed obvious — there were three disappointing experiences that occurred around the same time:
- My business had a one year anniversary and I didn’t get it where I wanted to within a year,
- I failed to convince one of my clients to focus attention and resources to an initiative that I believed would save tens of millions of pounds, and
- A romance, I was sure would happen, didn’t.
It was the third one that sparked a light bulb for me. In a hindsight it wasn’t really a surprise the romance didn’t materialise — there were only a couple subtle hints it would, yet in my mind there was no doubt what the reality would turn out to be.
And then it hit me — I noticed a pattern and this pattern was true for each one of those situations:
The (only) cause of unhappiness is failed expectations.
I put “only” in brackets as I am open to the idea there might be other reasons out there however the more I looked at my life and other people’s lives and our moments of unhappiness the stronger the pattern got.
It’s not the situations that make us feel unhappy, it’s the difference between what happened and what we had expected would happen that is the root cause of unhappiness.
So what did I do?
I decided to live life without expectations.
And my life transformed. I felt less stress, more freedom and greater peace.

I’m definitely not perfect at this, I still do get disappointed occasionally (though less and less frequently). However when that happens today, I pause and I ask myself whether I did set expectations.
And every time I realise that was the case. I laugh.
I laugh because now it’s like a game to me — I know the rules, I know I shouldn’t have set the expectations in the first place (even though it was subconsciously).
And knowing it was just this tiny thing of forgetting not to set expectations makes it much easier for me to swallow any disappointment and move on back to my happy self.

