Personal Growth & Are You Happy?

Plenty of writers, researchers, and licensed professionals have tried to map out how a person actually becomes happy. The thing they keep circling back to is that you won't find it in a possession, in another person, or in whatever treatment happens to be popular this year. Real happiness grows inside you. Without it, emotional stability stays out of reach, and that stability is what lets you think clearly and hold yourself together when life gets ugly.

So what does happy even mean? It shifts from one person to the next. Ask a room full of people and most will point outward: my kids, my spouse, my partner. The better question to sit with is what makes you happy. For a long time my own answers looked exactly like everybody else's. My job. My partner. Then the job hit a rough patch, or the relationship did, and I would slide straight into something close to depression. Was that happiness? Maybe a version of it existed, but it was temporary and bolted onto things that don't last. I had parked my sense of well-being inside people and objects.

After my partner and I broke up, and after I finished feeling sorry for myself, I started a deliberate rebuild. Everyone needs to refill the tank now and then, and for me it began with writing a list of the traits I wanted to work on. Whatever shape your own growth takes, the first job is figuring out what genuinely makes you happy. Hand that responsibility off to other people and circumstances, and two things tend to follow.

First, you lose your sense of self. Don't let other people or your possessions tell you who you are. If you doubt this applies to you, try listing your own characteristics. Stuck? Then write down how others would describe you to a stranger, and notice how fast you reach for your job title or someone else's name. Define yourself that way and you turn into a shell. When the career ends or the person leaves, does the whole structure collapse?

Second, your peace of mind goes. An internal happiness that doesn't depend on anything external is where that peace actually lives, and peace of mind belongs on the growth list too (a subject for its own article). When the people or things you leaned on disappear, you reach for distraction: entertainment, gossip, whatever keeps you away from yourself. Keep feeding on gossip and you start living through everyone else's story. Independence quietly turns into co-dependence on other people's drama. You go numb to your own wants, and from the outside you look obsessed with other people's lives.

It can feel satisfying at first. Eventually you end up ringed by people who only get their fix from talking about someone else, every conversation, every time. Stop feeding that bottomless hunger with the contents of other people's lives. Build something internal instead, and let go of what everyone around you is doing.

Once you've checked yourself against those traps, go looking for what truly lifts you. Internal happiness doesn't flicker. No person and no event can pull it out of you. I found mine in my own abilities, my intelligence, and a fresh appetite for life. Some people might read that as conceited. I'm fine with that.

As for what inner happiness does for your growth, start with perspective. The entire point of personal growth is seeing your life differently, and the internal version of happiness is the hinge. Once it clicks in, the days stop looking bleak.

You also start spotting a way through. In rough situations, there's a sense that the tunnel has an exit, and you stop quitting even when quitting tempts you. Problems get solved faster, and they stop running the show.

And you recover the parts of yourself you'd misplaced. Base your happiness on objects and people long enough and pieces of you go missing; find the internal kind and you begin setting healthy boundaries, with others and with yourself. Maybe you promise not to fall in love so fast. Just don't wall yourself off so completely that you can't connect with anyone. Some vulnerability has to stay in the mix. Be vulnerable without letting people walk over you. Happiness is still what you make it. So, is it the foundation of personal growth? Heather Browning, MBA, BA