Discover the secret to linking happiness

It’s a common misconception that we will gain happiness when we achieve future goals. However, this mindset can leave us trapped in a never-ending cycle of chase. The secret lies in understanding that happiness is not tied to external achievements, but rather, it’s a state of being that we can cultivate in the present moment.

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Timestamped summary of this episode:

00:00:03 – Welcome to the Samantha Leith podcast. With me, Samantha Leith. I have a passion for exploring anything and everything that can help us to be extraordinary. Each week I’m going to dive into a topic and explore it extensively. Because if there’s something that makes for a better life, I want to learn about it and more importantly, share it.        

00:00:23 – And hey, you may just get the odd song thrown in. There’ll be deep conversations, fun and frivolity helpful tools for you to add to your life straight away. Random musings about anything from coffee to sex and information that may just blow your mind. This is a podcast for dreamers, believers, action takers and achievers. It’s personal development, but not as you know it.         

00:00:51 – Hello and welcome to episode 37 oh, sorry, 38 oopsie of the Samantha Leith podcast. Why you can’t link your happiness to your goals. It’s a biggie. This one I myself have fallen for. It’s almost like a bit of a lotto dream kind of scenario.        

00:01:14 – Like I’ll be happy when oh, my gosh, when I meet the person on my dreams, have a million dollars, only have to work 2 hours a month, blah, blah, blah, blah, I will be happy. My happiness is dependent on those end points. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. And I’m sure if I could ask all of you listening to this podcast right now to put up your hand and go, have you ever caught yourself thinking, I’ll be happy when I’m guessing 99.99% of you would be putting up your hand?        

00:01:56 – So let’s talk about it and kind of unpack why, that’s a little bit of what I probably want to call a happiness trap. Okay. Where we have it dependent on that and it’s fine to give you a little scenario so you know how we can go, oh, I’ll be satisfied when I’ve had lunch. That’s different. You’re hungry.        

00:02:24 – You need that food for fuel, for energy to stop your stomach going. That is going to happen right then. That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about when I’m saying like, putting off that happiness till something happens. I’m talking about the bigger things. And they’re generally the goals that we set ourselves or the ideas or the dreams that we have in our minds that are not able to happen in two minutes or five minutes or ten minutes or even 24 hours.        

00:02:53 – They’re days away, weeks away, months away, even years away for some of them. Heck, some of my big dreams that I write in my journal every single day don’t have a date on them. They’re things that it would be amazing in my lifetime to have that happen. But I’m not going to stop living my life and being happy now waiting for that to happen. Okay?        

00:03:18 – A lot of the times we tie these specifically to things like our physicality finances and love, I would definitely say they’re the three biggest ones for myself and my clients. Over the years. So one of the reasons we do this is that there’s, like, this illusion in the world, whether it be through social media or through books or movies or anything that’s kind of outside of us. It may even be your friends or society in general, where there’s this picture painted of people being happy doing this particular thing or having this particular thing. We all grew up well, I know my generation.        

00:04:04 – We definitely grew up where happiness was being married, having a couple of kids and a job, and you went away once a year, that kind of thing, and you were happy when that happened. Then there were things like in advertising, for example, they kind of teach us that you’ll be happy when you have that big car. You’ll be happy when you have paid off your mortgage. There’s all those things that surround us. They bombard our brains with kind of almost making us feel like it’s wrong for us to be happy.        

00:04:37 – If we don’t have those things, if we don’t have the perfect body, if we don’t have the most amazing love life in the world, if we don’t have that particular vase or we can’t cook like that, then we definitely don’t deserve happiness. If we can’t cook like Nigella. Okay, only joking. But I do like to consider myself a bit of a Nigella. So it’s a trap.        

00:05:04 – I just have to tell you it’s a trap. There’s a great quote, and I can’t remember who did it, and I should have Googled this. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. I made a note of it and didn’t write who it was.        

00:05:19 – My apologies for that. If anyone knows who did do that, actually, I’ll Google it, and we’ll put it in the show notes. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. Like, what a great quote.        

00:05:31 – Now, having said that, got to remember that life is 50 50, okay? You can’t be happy all the time. Crap happens. You just have to look at the world in the last couple of weeks to go, yeah, bleep happens. There’s wars, there’s famines.        

00:05:52 – Your friends are killed. Your family are killed. People get sick. You lose jobs. You have a fight with your child.        

00:05:59 – There are things that happen that make us feel miserable all the time, so don’t expect to be happy all the time. That’s another way to set yourself up for failure. But that’s a whole other podcast. There’s actually a theory or a concept about the hedonic treadmill. So it’s about no matter how much we achieve our baseline, happiness tends to go back to a set level over time.        

00:06:26 – And this theory is out there for lots of things in life, whether it be our happiness, our weight, our finances, the way we deal with ourselves in relationships, we kind of go back to our base level in lots of things. So finding your best happiness base level is really important and we can build on that base level, like with repeating habits and things we do all the time, we can actually bring up our happiness base level, but we’re probably asked to going to return to it at some point, so just keep that in mind. Now, what’s one of the best ways to be happy? Don’t worry, be happy. Now, sorry, side note, did anyone have one of those wallfish that went, that sang that don’t worry, be happy, nothing on a plaque on the wall.        

00:07:19 – They were so 90s, early 90s, late 80s, whatever it was. Don’t worry, be happy. Now, being present, and you’ve heard me speak about it before, is one of the best ways to improve that happiness baseline and to be able to kind of dig into our reserves of finding what is going to make us feel happy. And I’m not talking like the happiness of bringing a big smile to your doll and laughing out loud and all that kind of thing. It’s just as I’m not waiting for it.        

00:07:54 – It’s like I don’t have to have that permission slip that goes, dear Samantha, you have now achieved ten goals. Here is your permission to be happy. That’s not what we want. You have that permission to give yourselves, by the way, and if you don’t think you have it, I’ll send you a sign we can find it all the time. Now, I know last week or two weeks ago, someone I knew passed away after a long illness, but it was still a shock and I was really, really sad.        

00:08:28 – It impacted me for quite a while, actually. Just a little bit older than me. Child like really hit me in all my bones, as the saying goes. And I could find joy and happiness in the life that she’d led, in the moments we’d had together, in the photos that were being shared online, in the stories that were being shared online, in knowing how much love she was surrounded with, I could find these little peaks of happiness. So if you’re going, oh, I can’t be happy until I get that Ferrari, a, I don’t know why I want a Ferrari, because there’s nowhere to put the groceries, my mother used to say.        

00:09:09 – But B, find that happiness now. Find something to be happy about in that present moment. One of my happy places, one of my sorry defaults to finding happiness is to go to a happy place. And happy places for me usually involve water. And I’ll want being in nature with water, like a boat or harbor or a walk down by a river, even a swim in a pool, listening to water.        

00:09:40 – Any of those kind of things can bring me back to myself and make me feel present and help me to find happiness in a particular moment, even if I’m feeling like absolute crap. Older. Because as Egart Tolle said, you’ve got to realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. So don’t waste those precious, precious present moments thinking, well, I can’t be happy because I haven’t even gone for that promotion, let alone you didn’t get it. You haven’t even gone for it yet.        

00:10:17 – In your long distance mind, you believe that you are going to be able to be the CEO of the organization you work for and oh my gosh, I’m clapping. You really, really believe that you are able to do it, but don’t wait to be happy until you do it. Find something to be happy about in your present role in the people you’re working with now. Get happy about what you need to do in order to become the person that is going to get that role as a CEO. Makes sense?        

00:10:49 – I hope it makes sense. I’m like waiting for you all to go, nod like I’m going to speak you on a stage and get that feedback, but hey, this is a podcast, so if you have this mentality of when I have or when I do, so when I have X off your Y, et cetera, it will lead to perpetual dissatisfaction. Like, it’s not going to stop because your goalposts will change, what you want will change. So it’s like you’re going to be on that never ending treadmill hoping, just hoping that someone’s going to turn it off at some point and give you the prize. No, that treadmill is just going to keep going until you turn it off.        

00:11:41 – So why not be happy while you’re running on the treadmill? Crazy way for me to discuss that, given how much I dislike running on treadmills. But you get the idea, this holding on to this idea of future joy. No, find joy now because I’ll tell you a story. I’ve achieved many goals in my life and I’ve also not achieved many goals in my life.        

00:12:12 – And there have been moments when I’ve achieved something like sold out a gig or when I did run that five K before I hurt my leg. There’s been many examples and I’ve gotten to it and gone, yeah, I did it. Yeah, I guess that’s pretty good. And I’m excited and I’m proud of my success and my achievement, but it hasn’t changed me achieving it didn’t change me achieving it. There wasn’t like this big bang and a band and cheerleaders jumping out going, woohoo, you did it.        

00:12:52 – But the things I did, and I’ve spoken about it many times before and I will continue to speak about it. Who we become and what we do while we’re achieving that goal, that’s the awesome source. So finding the happiness in the doing of all that, that is so much more fulfilling than thinking it’s just all going to be rainbows and daisies when I get to the end. Because in this thing called life, our endpoint, that’s when the lights are out. Achieving a goal is not an endpoint.        

00:13:23 – Achieving a goal hopefully you start to feel something different about yourself and you want to go to another goal and you want to achieve something else, you want to try something else. Maybe you want to pick up a new skill every single year. So imagine I actually was listening to a podcast with a woman who does learn something new every year, whether it be a bit of a language or an instrument or a skill, does something every year, which I just love the idea of. Now imagine if she said, well, I’m going to be really happy when I’ve achieved that goal. And she’s got that twelve months and she’s like working, working, gets to the twelve months and goes, oh, actually no, didn’t really lead to a lot of happiness because I’m onto my next school.        

00:14:05 – Hang on, twelve months later, it’s just going to keep going. So find the happiness in what you’re doing as you go. Now, I’m going to tell you a few sorry, not tell you. I’m going to share with you a couple of ways to help you kind of find or embrace joy in the current moment. And I have talked about presence, I believe it was last week’s episode, might have been the one before.        

00:14:32 – And some of these things I have mentioned before. So it’s like the penny will drop one day, actually. Side note, I remember someone saying to me many years ago, why do you keep going to these seminars? Why do you keep reading these books? They were like they couldn’t understand that I wanted to go to something because I wanted to learn more or I wanted to read a book because you get something different out of every book, even though the book might on the surface be about the same thing.        

00:14:59 – And I jokingly said, because one day the penny will drop. But I kind of mean that. I think the beauty about things like these, my podcast and other podcasts that I hope you’re listening to is that you’re going to get information and ideas and little nuggets of wisdom from a whole lot of different people and a whole lot of different perspectives. And slowly but surely, little pebbles will just the penny will drop. And I’ll be like, Ah.        

00:15:26 – And you’ll start to make changes in your life. Okay? So keep listening, keep reading, keep doing it. End of. Side note, the penny did drop for me, by the way, but now I’m waiting for other pennies.        

00:15:38 – So some of the things that you can do to embrace joy right now while you’re working towards that goal is your gratitude practices. It’s so simple. And you might not want to journal, like me, pieces of gratitude every day, but maybe you want to go to bed every night. And for the last thing before you go to bed, whether it’s turning to your partner or your child as you tuck them up, or even if it’s just yourself or your cat, what’s one thing you’re really grateful for that day? One thing.        

00:16:07 – Three things. Five things. Pick a number. Some days it’s going to be harder than others, but you will get into the practice of it. Mindfulness moments.        

00:16:16 – I talk about mindfulness a lot because it’s important. Taking those deep breaths, having some space to get into nature. Now you might not want to meditate and I go through stages of meditation. Sometimes I find it really hard and stressful. Other times I find it really joyful and really peaceful.        

00:16:35 – Turns out what’s going on in my life. So I’m yet to be what I would call a professional meditator master. I don’t know. But I will get there. Maybe I won’t get there, but I do enjoy the practice as I go and every time I do, it brings something different to me.        

00:16:51 – But I want you to redefine success. Like if you’re chasing a goal or something that you’re going for, maybe that’s not how you should define success. Maybe you want to define success with words about how you want to feel or who you want to be connected to or the simple kind of things that are in your life. Success is getting to spend two weeks a year by the beach. That doesn’t have to happen in ten years’ time.         

00:17:26 – When you’re a multimillionaire, you could hire a tiny little beach house. You just go for a walk at the beach every day for two weeks. Okay? And I want you to celebrate all the little small wins because it’s those teeny tiny things that really, really help us to feel better about ourselves and what we’re doing and bring us joy. Like doing the washing is so simple, but doing the washing and actually putting it all away that day, I consider that a small win.        

00:18:01 – That makes me happy, that brings me joy, that makes me feel accomplished. And that’s not a big goal. I’m not delaying my happiness until I have a whiz bang fancy housekeeper that does all my washing and miraculously changes my sheets every day. That would be amazing, by the way. But that small win of me getting it all done in the one lot, love it, feel great.        

00:18:25 – So I’m going to leave you in a second, but I want you to just remember that this is all up to you. No one is telling you that you can’t be happy until you get the messages around. Don’t get me wrong, we do have those messages around that the big house and the car and everything’s going to make us happy. But you’re not being told that that’s what you have to do. You get to decide.        

00:18:51 – And if you keep postponing it and going, it’ll be then you’re always going to be in chasing it. You’re always going to be running to find that happiness. So if you embrace it now in something, if you find that ability, if you create that habit of finding joy, and happiness as often as possible. You’re always going to have it. No one can take that away from you.        

00:19:17 – You can be dropped anywhere in the world or doctor who can pick you up and take you somewhere crazy and you will still have the skills of being able to find it. And remember that all of these things that we want to go out and create and go for, I want to encourage you that it’s in those experiences that some absolute magic happens. So don’t not go for the goal, go for the goal, go for the goal, go for the goal. But remember to just enjoy the moment and really grab all that you can in the experience of going for it and find the happiness and those kind of things, not at that end point. Okay?        

00:20:02 – Love you and leave you, my friends. Have an amazing week. Make it an extraordinary one. Either even and I will catch you next week. And hey, tag me in a post letting me know where you found some happiness this week.        

00:20:21 – That would be awesome. Ciao. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Samantha Leith podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the world of personal development and what’s possible for you, then I’d love to invite you to join the club. It’s my monthly membership designed to guide and support you with the tools and the coaching you need to be extraordinary.        

00:20:46 – Head on over to Samanthaleith.com forward slash the club for more information. I’d love to see you on the inside close.