Richard Hogan: Will you take my happiness challenge for 2022?

"Change will never occur until we introduce disruption into the system we are living in. This happiness challenge will be that disruption."

Thu, 30 Dec, 2021 - 08:19

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and I have one simple question for you — would you like to be happier in 2022? I think I know the answer to this question. But you’d be surprised how many new year’s resolutions are designed to actually make you feel less happy and more hopeless.

I see it so often in my clinic. Clients come in at the start of January excited for the year ahead, full of expectations for a healthier and happier year, but by the end of the month they have fallen back into their old habits and ways of thinking, they feel completely powerless to change.

Generally, the goals they set themselves were too much to sustain over a long period of time, or they didn’t really know what they were striving for. They only knew they wanted to be happier, but didn’t know what they needed to do to bring that change into their lives.

This can cause a lot of suffering. Feeling powerless to change is a very troubling feeling to experience, and it’s not true.

Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher, says that if the premise is wrong, the conclusions will always be wrong. I can’t think of a more erroneous premise than ‘I am not able to change’. We can all change, and we can all attain happiness.

So this January, after everything we have been through over the last two years, I am launching a free 21-day happiness challenge to make sure you don’t fall into the trap of new year’s resolutions and actually attain the happiness you deserve.

Yes, that’s right. You deserve to be happy. All evidence shows that this is the only life you are going to live, and so living it with energy, enthusiasm, and free from negative paradigms about who you are and your potential is something you owe yourself. We must be more intentional about our happiness, or else we will continue the way we have been going for so long.

Change will never occur until we introduce disruption into the system we are living in. This happiness challenge will be that disruption. Each day, for 21 days, I will be setting you a challenge, and I will be offering you new ways to think about your happiness. Each task I set is based in scientific research, neuroscience, and from my own experience working clinically with clients over the years.

On the first day, I will be asking you to draw a Genogram, this is a map of your family of origin. I will be asking you to think about the family you grew up in and the impact it has made on your thinking and the way you live your life.

I am a systemically trained family therapist, I see first-hand the legacy our family of origin has on levels of individual happiness. This is so often the obstacle to our happiness. We launch out in resolutions, no insight into why we act, and we behave a certain way, which causes us unhappiness because we feel stuck. So I am going to hack that on the first day.

Many clients I meet come into the clinic motivated to be happier in life, but don’t understand what motivates them or drives their negative impulses. They only know that those impulses are there, but not where they came from.

The first day will be unpacking all of those early experiences in your life. You are only a prisoner to your patterns of behaviour until you see them. Once you are aware of them, it’s harder to do them unconsciously. I will also introduce you to the five personality types, and ask which one describes you and what this means for your levels of happiness. In just two short videos, you will understand your family of origin and your personality type and how that impacts on your happiness.

There are so many people involved in the wellbeing field currently, it’s big business. And not all of them are qualified to speak about mental health. We have to be careful about what information we consume about our wellbeing.

Much like those adverts that promise a flat stomach in three minutes, happiness will not just happen. You have to understand what impacts your levels of happiness. Simply going for a walk or eating better won’t bring the change you desire.

Often understanding what your happiness would look like is a good starting point. We have to have something to aim for, and it has to be unique to you. That’s the problem with many of these new mental health coaches, it’s all so generic and designed for profit.

In this free 21-day challenge, you will be asked to take a happiness quiz before you begin, and I will track your happiness throughout the journey. I know we are all so busy, so each video will be no longer than five minutes. There will be a new task each day, some you never imagined you would ever do.

But I am very confident by the end of the 21 days, your levels of happiness will have increased and you will have gained deep insights into how to sustain happiness so that you can live free from negativity.