Understanding Happiness – The 3 Legged Stool of Happiness

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week’s video is going to get down to some real foundational teaching about just what is happiness. How do we look through kind of an academic lens to understand what makes up happiness? Is it just when we feel like we’ve got a big smile on our face or is there something more to it? The interesting thing is that academics have kind of come at this from a few different theoretical approaches. Maybe today, I’ll look at one of them and in subsequent weeks, I might look at some others that have equal validity. There’s just a different lens to look into the same question of who are we when we’re happy? What are we doing and what’s the meaning behind the idea of happiness? So, stay tuned. That’s coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, what the heck is happiness anyway? Is it just the way we feel temporarily that we’ve got a smile on our faces and that is happiness? Or is happiness a construct, an intellectual way of considering who we are as human beings that maybe is a little bit more complex than just feelings?

There’s a few different ways that academics look at this and they’re helpful for us lay people too, to be able to say, “Hmm, am I happy?” and have more than one dimension of happiness to look into our own lives and gauge where we’re at. We may find some guidance as to where we should put our energy into becoming more happy. So, let’s start with this first construct. It’s um, what’s called this three-legged stool of happiness. In this three-legged stool, if you have just one of the legs going, you’re going to be unstable and not really be well. If you have two going, it’s still going to be out of balance and not 100% well. But, if you’ve got all three of these legs for the stool of happiness, most people will be all right. There may be more weight on one leg versus another. These three legs consist of pleasure, meaning, and something that psychologists are calling psychological richness and we’ll explain each in term.

The first one, pleasure, is maybe the easiest to understand and it’s wonderful. It’s often a sensory experience. We taste something good, we listen to good music, it’s the things that give us positive affect where we just feel happy. Those feelings might be joyful, pride, curiosity, amusement, inspiration, any number of things. Positive emotions. When we’re feeling those positive emotions, that’s one view of happiness. From an academic perspective, this is often kind of given a little bit of short shift. It’s seen as less impact and less quality of a line of inquiry than say the other two legs because it’s just after all the fleeting feelings that we have from time to time. But, we shouldn’t undervalue this one. There’s a tremendous amount of benefit we get when we’re walking around with a smile on our face or inspired or filled with pride or hope or any one of those things.

The interesting thing is, one additional feeling is considered part of this positive affect of pleasure, and that’s the feelings of security and safety. So, even though those aren’t big happy smiling feeling kind of happiness, when we’re feeling safe and secure, gosh, that’s pretty important. So, there’s one lens to look into what is happiness. It’s this lens of pleasure includes safety and security and all kinds of positive emotions. That’s the first leg of the three-legged stool.

The second leg is something that we refer to as meaning. And meaning is kind of, I often talk about this in past videos, when we’re living according to our values. That’s maybe a little bit simplistic in its own way. Meaning maybe has three sub contexts with which we can look at what it means. The first one is this sense that we have purpose in our lives. You know, if I have a purpose, I get up in the morning and I know what my intentions are all about and that I’m pursuing these values and have a mission in my life, then that’s going to give me a sense of direction. And that’s one component of meaning.

The second one is that this purpose I have is significant, it’s impactful. Whether it’s impactful for the world at large isn’t important, it’s impactful for me. I get up, I have a purpose in life, and when I go and do it, I feel like it makes an impact in a way that’s meaningful to me. Then thirdly, to have meaning, we need something that psychologists call coherence. That’s where this purposeful action that’s impactful is within a context that’s bigger. It’s not today, it’s not next week, it’s not one part of my life, the relationship I have with my dog, or the rest of my work. Instead, it kind of has this more broad understanding that it has meaning in different parts of my life and through different periods of my life. It doesn’t have to be decades, but certainly more than a day or two. In order to have meaning, we have to have coherence that ties all this purpose and impactfulness over periods of our lives that are somewhat substantial. That’s the second leg of the three-legged stool of happiness.

The third one is a relatively new finding and I’m kind of excited by it. It’s not shocking when you hear it, but it’s new to the field of psychological positive psychology research, and they’re calling this psychological richness. This isn’t necessarily the one that puts a happy feeling in our bodies or in our minds and our intellect. It’s this sense that when we’re challenged in life in ways that cause us to grow, when we’re put into novel situations where there’s complexity and something that causes a perspective shift, then we have something called psychological richness. Maybe the best example I can give this one is international travel. For those of you who’ve done that a bunch, you know exactly what I’m going to be talking about. It is not always fun. We’re often in a place where we don’t speak the language, we’re hungry, we’re far away from where we need to get to, and there’s these challenges in our lives. It’s not necessarily making us happy or feel good in the moment. But after the experience and we navigate our way and we mine the directions that we need from some stranger on the street who turns out to help us and we see the exposure to new art and new foods and we learn a little bit of the language and we watch people interact in a way that’s foreign to our own culture, that’s psychological richness.

I remember when I was in Cancun just very recently, and we went to this very authentic local market, called Market 23, in the city proper, away from where all the resorts are. It was so much fun. I’ve seen it in other places in the world where you’re very kind of rudimentary markets, like butchers that are chopping stuff up right there in front of you, in a competitive place that’s unlike any we’d see in North America, where there’s just one butcher after another in these little kind of kiosks. And then, once you get past the section with butchers, it’s the people selling fresh produce. And there was a richness to watching that, even though I’d seen similar markets in many other places in the world. There was something that was true to this Mexican Latino culture where there was a richness to the social way that people were connecting. Families were eating at little stand-up restaurants all over in this market. And there were these boisterous greetings that people would have with one another as they were meeting real friends that they hadn’t seen for a while. But in this marketplace, they were meeting and you got this sense of the Latin culture there. And this richness to my experience, and that richness that I was getting, is this third leg of the stool, called psychological richness. Does that make sense?

So this three-thing, it’s a dual construct for what is happiness is: pleasure, meaning, and psychological richness. And next week, I’ll tell you about some other way of looking at the whole subject of positive psychology. Thanks for watching. If you like this kind of content, click the like button and share it with your friends and family. Bye for now.