27 Mar The Happiness Institute’s CHOOSE model
As regular readers of this eNewsletter, or of our other works, would well be aware we espouse, here at The Happiness Institute, a simple approach to achieving happiness in your life. In short, we believe that happiness is something you “choose” with choose being both a philosophy of taking responsibility and also, an acronym representing 6 key positive psychology strategies for bringing about more happiness and success in any endeavour of life. Although we’ve written about and described these principles before, we thought we’d remind you of them here and specifically, connect them to Shawn Achor’s 7 principles briefly described above.
The “C” stands for clarifying your life direction and goals. This is, essentially, a combination of the Zorro Circle and the Tetris effect as we recommend you focus on that over which you have control and in doing so, you boost your confidence and self-efficacy.
The “H” stands for healthy living; something not addressed by Achor in too much detail but touched upon in his principles 1, 4 and 6!
The first “O” stands for optimism which is very much aligned with all three of the first three principles – the happiness advantage, the fulcrum and the lever, and the Tetris effect.
The second “O” invites people to focus on others and is, quite obviously, very consistent with Achor’s final principle of building social support.
The “S” highlights the importance of working with strengths, as opposed to just trying to fix weaknesses, and is similar to several points Achor makes throughout the whole of his book.
And finally, the “E” in our CHOOSE model is for enjoying the moment and having fun which is most closely associated with principle 1.
But as Achor notes, it’s best to see the principles or strategies not as separate entities to be used in isolation but more so, as ways of thinking and doing that can and should be interwoven through everything we do in life and all of our being. If you can achieve this, I’d suggest, then you’ve achieved real and meaningful happiness!
PS: if you’d like to read or learn more about Prof. Sharp’s positive psychology approach to happiness and living a great life you might like to check out his highly acclaimed book, “The Happiness Handbook”, which is easy to read, informative and highly practical providing simple but powerful and proven steps for a happy life.