A Shortcut To Feeling Rich and Happy

I’m sure you know that one of the most powerful positive emotions known to man is gratitude. The human brain is so poor at holding two contradictory thoughts that the moment you throw a sense of gratitude into the mix it’s really difficult to feel all of those nasty negative emotions that may have previously been loitering in the nether regions of your mind.

In the exceptional book Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman talks about an exercise designed to move us into a sense of gratitude which in turn leads to feeling happier. Seligman suggests that every now and then we should say thanks to people we are grateful for, but may not know of our gratitude.

What a cool Rich and Happy trick that is, don’t you think?

I’m going to thank somebody in this post that I’m not sure if I have ever thanked properly before. It’s somebody that probably doesn’t even know the positive effect he had on me as he isn’t a close friend and I’ve never even met him.

About 6 years ago I was just getting into Life Coaching and the realization that I may leave sales and move into full time coaching was starting to crystallize.

At the time I was working for a huge sales organization and to say we were constantly under the cosh and morale was low would be a gross understatement. As a way of trying to feel better about what the situation I was in I’d stopped listening to the news on my journeys all over the UK and started playing self development cd’s instead.

One of the cd’s in question was a live performance by Michael Heppell of his book ‘How To Be Brilliant’.

I loved his message of being the best you can and always offering the best you can to the people you serve, and I loved it even more because I was laughing along with him for much of the 60 minutes.

One of Michael’s suggestions was when somebody asks us how we are, rather than replying with the normal “Not bad” or “Can’t complain” we say “I’m brilliant!” and see what the response is.

I ran this idea past a close friend of mine at work and we decided to do this for a month to see what happened.

The results were amazing.

Whenever we were asked in the office how we were doing we responded with “Brilliant” and then shot the person a big cheesy grin. This nearly always resulted in one of two responses.

Response 1: These people tended to be highly suspicious and asked questions like “What have you got to be brilliant about?”

It was almost as if they were frightened they were missing out on something, that we knew something they didn’t. They’d usually wonder off muttering to themselves about us not taking things seriously and looking for other people to confirm their belief that life really is as crap as they suspected.

Response 2: - This was the flip side and the really cool bit. Many people would immediately break out in a big grin and very often start laughing for no reason too. It was almost as if we had given them permission to be happy. As though prior to that there had been some unwritten rule that fun was to be checked at the door when arriving at the office in the morning.

Some of these people even picked up and ran with the idea themselves and it wasn’t long before one half of the office thought the other half was mental!

About 3 years ago just prior to  ‘Don’t Ask Stupid Questions’ being published I contacted Michael to ask for some blurb I could use to promote it. He was one of only 2 people that I would consider ‘famous’ from a total of about 20 that even bothered to respond (the other by the way was another great British speaker, Steve McDermott).

Since then I’ve had contact with Michael on a number of things, not least of which is the testimonial he gave us for the launch of How To Be Rich and Happy. I’ve even had a chat via Skype when he graciously offered me his time and experience on publishing matters.

So today I want to use Seligman’s ‘Rich and Happy’ trick and say a huge thanks to Michael Heppell. I’m extremely grateful I bought How To Be Brilliant and it’s possibly that without it, I may never have turned to coaching. I’m even more grateful to now consider Michael a friend and one day I might even buy him a beer if he gets his lazy ass to Florida.

Who are you grateful for that maybe doesn’t quite realize it? What about telling them right here and right now? If that’s not practical, pick the phone up or write a letter safe in the knowledge that you’ll feel better, and so will they.