Watch: Module 11 – Eliminate Contradictions that Cause Unhappiness – Living Without Wax (18:58)

Now that we’ve discussed the two different kinds of happiness (short-term positive/negative affective hedonic emotions and long-term eudemonic well-being/satisfaction) and how they arise from your beliefs, values, goals and actions, you might be asking yourself whether or not you actually want to take the steps needed to achieve more happiness.

I think everyone can agree that certain things in life are universally good and should be maximized, like health. We all want to be healthy. Everyone agrees that exercise and eating nutritious food are good ideas. Everyone wants a 10 out of 10 for health. Nobody wants a little cancer or the occasional bout of depression. But how much happiness and well-being do you want in your life?

Do you aspire to being the happiest person you are capable of being? Or would you prefer to have an average level of happiness? Or perhaps you might think that a bit of suffering is needed to balance against being too happy or perhaps make you appreciate what you already have?

Over the years this question has generated a lot of lively and interesting discussion with my students. Some resent or are jealous of happy people. Others would never want their peers to know how happy they are for fear of being disliked. Some think too much happiness is bad because life should be about something else (e.g. service to others, duty, family, God, having children…). Some students don’t think they deserve or should aspire to being happy. Some don’t think that real happiness is even possible on earth, but is only reserved for the afterlife.

Personally, I don’t think that searching to increase your own happiness and well-being is necessarily in conflict with any of these ideas. In fact, the field of positive psychology, as a branch of the medical sciences, has explicitly studied this issue and found that their recommendations are in harmony with every major religion, philosophy and culture in the world. Once upon a time, there were certain ascetic monasteries and convents who practised self-inflicted pain, flagellation and starvation to “mortify the flesh in order to save the soul”, but these cults are no longer condoned by any major religion that I’m aware of.

If you are searching and trying to discover the path to your own personal happiness, then I believe the methods in this book will help.

I believe you can use entrepreneurial methods to search for and discover the answers for yourself. I believe you co-create your future happiness through your choices and that there are literally thousands of different paths you can take. There is no “one true” belief system (that I know of), grand plan or set of rules that works for everyone. Perhaps the world would be a happier place without the belief that we must all follow the same plan.

Cognitive psychologists and researchers have demonstrated that improved happiness and well-being can be achieved through harmony between your beliefs, values, goals and actions while climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Values. Attainment of values matters. Your design challenges to gain these values will change during the course of your life. As you make progress toward achieving self-sufficiency and financial security, you should shift your focus to love, self-esteem and eventually self-actualization and meaning. As you achieve the lower values in the pyramid (like money and physical possessions), gaining more of them does not impact your happiness nearly as much as shifting to achieve the higher values. It has clearly been shown, for example, that income has almost no impact on happiness once a person is not poverty-stricken. Once you have a certain minimum threshold of money, food and housing, you do not become happier by getting more money, better food or a bigger house. This is known as “hedonic adaptation”. As you become acclimated to having the things you have, you desire more and bigger things. You become happier by learning to love the things you already have, rather than desiring things you don’t. That’s why savouring and being grateful for what you have are key happiness skills.

The basic idea is if your goals and actions are in harmony with your thoughts and feelings and value hierarchy, then you will be on a positive path toward happiness and well-being. In order to do this, you should know what your conscious and subconscious beliefs and values are, and live in accordance with them. It’s been called “Living without Wax”.

As I describe in the video, the ancient Romans sold two kinds of statues. One kind of statue was imperfect – it had at least one crack or cavity or flaw and they used wax, usually coloured with dirt, to cover up these flaws and make the statue appear to be intact. The other kind of statue was perfect and was without wax, and thus worth more than the imperfect statues. In Latin it was sold as being “sina cera” – which is the etymological root for the English word “sincere”.

‘To live without wax’ means to be sincere and not allow flaws in your character. This means to ensure that your actions are in harmony with your values and beliefs (integrity), your words are in harmony with reality (honesty), and your actions are in harmony with your words (reliability). You focus on actions and goals that are in harmony with reality (honouring your interests and aptitudes – focusing on your signature strengths). This is the essence of achieving happiness through harmony – to be free of contradictions. You would never deliberately allow weeds to grow in your garden, why would you deliberately allow a flaw in your character, saying “I guess that’s just the kind of person I am”, without trying to fix it? Don’t allow weeds in your garden and don’t allow weeds to grow in your character/soul.

In ECLD Module #11, I talk about harmony between what you say, do, think and feel. I call this the Principle of Integrity – the Principle of being Principled. Integrity will increase your happiness and well-being when your beliefs, values, goals and actions are all in harmony.

As discussed, there are three primary sources of unhappiness you can work to solve as design challenges:

1) Day-to Day Reactions to Events Outside Your Control. This is normally the first place to look for sources of unhappiness in your life. You can’t control external events, but you can control your reactions to them. If you allow external stuff to “make you” mad, sad or react, then you have lost control of your agency. Your Executive is not in control of your Elephant. Your System 1 subconscious automatized responses are dominating and you are not turning on your System 2 conscious thinking processes to take control of your life. I refer to this as reacting to the world instead of proactively acting on the world.

Some people or things seem to trigger inappropriate emotional reactions. Sometimes you lash out and later have to apologize. You don’t live up to who you want to be. This is not a path to lasting happiness.

If you find this to be an issue, I suggest that you want to foster the ability to control your emotional reactions, you want to exert greater control over what you say, do and think, you would like to let external things roll off you like water off a duck (or loon). This can be accomplished through Mindfulness, Positive Self-Talk, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and/or Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) using ECLD Tool #10.

2) Day-to-Day Controllable Habits and Activities. The next place to look for contradictions is between your actions and your goals. Are you making positive progress toward your goals? Are your actions effective at achieving your goals or do your actions need to change? Are you devoting the time and energy required to attain your goals or are you simply failing to act? When you do make progress, does it make you happier? Should you change your goals and/or improve your daily habits to get better at achieving them? Should you add new goals and/or remove some?

In many cases, you know what you want to achieve (i.e. you’ve set your goals), but you just can’t seem to manage to accomplish them. You seem to lack the willpower, self-discipline, time management skills or character to properly follow through on the goals you set. Life seems to get in the way with interruptions, distractions, phone calls, or being tired. There’s always some excuse (some good and some weak). Maybe you want to stop smoking or cut down on eating junk food, or focus on your homework, but seem to fail to live up to your commitments. Often, this is simply a matter of building better self-discipline and time management habits. To solve these challenges, try practising some of the tips and techniques I gave you back on page 33 just before ECLD Tool #9 Goal-Setting and Time Management.

Another possibility is that your goals/hypotheses are just not realistic or achievable and you need to pivot. That’s OK – don’t become too attached to your hypotheses or Odyssey Journey – you need to honour the scientific method and discover whether your hypotheses work out in reality or not. I’m over 50 years old, weigh less than 170 pounds and have never tried boxing. Setting the goal to become a world-class heavyweight boxing champion is just a bad idea for me. Reality will beat me up (literally) until I pivot to some other goal. Similarly, I need to accept that there are many other potential goals that reality simply will not permit at my age and financial status. I also don’t have the ability to win the Nobel prize, run a marathon, write a book, take daily naps and learn German this week. Reality prevents me from doing all these at once and I have to prioritize which goals to focus on. I can’t have it all right away and need to balance my short-term and long-term goals. I can’t stamp my foot at reality and wish the world was different. All I can do is change my goals.

Maybe you really just can’t become an Olympic athlete or boxing champion because you are too old. Maybe you discover that you can’t find a career in the theatre that pays what you want. Maybe the house of your dreams is beyond your financial means. Maybe you just don’t have the time to learn how to become a pilot with three young children at home. Sometimes you need to act toward achieving your goals for a period of time before you figure out that certain things just exceed your grasp. That’s why they were called hypothesis goals in the first place – now and then you just need to pivot (or defer these goals until things change).

Much of this book has been about using experimentation, the scientific method and design thinking. You set a certain hypothesis goal and then take action to test if your goal is achievable (or not) and makes you happier (or not). If you are making good progress, then you are on the right track and you should persevere toward that goal. If you are not, then you may need to pivot and change your goals. This is the essence of design thinking and lean methods. It really doesn’t matter what your wishes, desires, hopes or beliefs are. Reality is the final referee of whether or not you can achieve your goals. You can choose to feel bad about that or you can use the Pilot-in-the-Plane principle to accept those things you cannot change but have the courage to change what you can. Sometimes the only thing you can change is your emotional reaction to things beyond your control.

3) Fundamental Contradictions between your Beliefs and Values. The third potential source of long-term unhappiness is caused by your current “programming” or a lack of harmony involving your conscious and subconscious beliefs. Here you seem to be doing all the right things, or accomplishing all your goals, but you just can’t seem to find long-term sustainable happiness and well-being. Your current “programming” isn’t working for you. Your subconscious and/or conscious beliefs are not in harmony with your actions or your goals conflict with each other. Here you want to take charge of your own programming. Don’t just allow whatever random assortment of ideas you absorbed from the culture, parents, teachers, religion, TV or other children to dictate your happiness in adulthood. Some of your current programming might be great, but some of your programming might be causing you unhappiness.

I’ve seen a number of common beliefs that cause unhappiness in my students over the years and they tend to fall into the general categories of Duty to Family, Duty to Others, Religion, Determinism and Money is the Root of All Evil.

Many of my students still live at home with their parents and family. Families can be a tremendous source of financial security, support, belongingness and love. However, they can also be a source of significant stress, argument and feelings of duty. For example, students might value moving away from home and seeking adventure and travel, but they feel obligated to get a job, settle down, get married, have children and/or take care of their elderly parents and/or grandparents. Their values of travel and adventure, or just living their own lives, can be in conflict with their belief that they have a duty to their family. They find it difficult to choose between their own happiness and what their family expects of them. This feeling of duty to their family’s expectations can give rise to the most difficult design challenges in a young person’s life as they seek values such as independence, self-sufficiency and autonomy. It can be especially difficult to get perspective while living at home.

I’ve seen that religion comes up a lot as a source of unhappiness for my students. Some students’ spiritual beliefs provide them with security, certainty, confidence, belongingness and meaning. Others, however, find that the organized religion they were brought up in causes tremendous suffering or guilt. My LGBTQ+ students often find themselves condemned by their religion. This can result in being ostracised by their family and friends due to their religious beliefs. Other students find themselves asking “too many questions” about their religion, resulting in anger and disagreement. Some find that religious affiliations get in the way of their relationships or cause a deeper source of long-term existential guilt. Their religions give them impossible moral ideals that they can never live up to, thus setting them up for long-term unhappiness.

Most religions embrace altruism as a moral duty and instruct you to live in service to others and/or love others as yourself. Altruism is the doctrine that you should place the needs and desires of others above your own; that you should exist for the sake of others. This is not the same thing as being nice to other people or helping them – it means putting other people’s happiness above your own as a moral requirement or duty. In your university ethics class, you learned that this is called the “deontological” ethical duty to place other people’s interests above your own in matters of ethics. According to altruism, something is moral only if you don’t benefit from it. For example, helping other people is only a moral action if you gain absolutely nothing from it. If it makes you feel better, then you are doing it out of self-interest and thus it is not moral. Anything done in your own self-interest is immoral (or neutral at best), whereas doing something that is against your interest and good for others is moral.

This conflict between what is moral (altruistic duty to others) and what is practical (desire to achieve your own values) can cause unhappiness because there is a dichotomy or conflict between what you want to do and what others say you should do. The belief is that if we did not have a moral duty to act against our own self-interests, then we would all be murderers, thieves and scoundrels. (You can probably find this line of reasoning to justify the need for ethics in your business ethics textbook. An example of this explicit view of how rotten humans are can be found, for example, in the textbook “Business Ethics” by Shaw, Nelson Publishing, 2016.)

Although most people consciously accept altruistic duty to others, few people actually live in accordance with their altruistic beliefs, and this lack of harmony or integrity may cause them to experience a nagging guilt and unhappiness as a result. For example, one of the most common role models named by American women used to be Mother Teresa. [Mother Teresa was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to the poor. She and others in her congregation take vows of poverty and physical suffering, emulating the suffering of Jesus. She is revered as a humanitarian icon and is expected to eventually be canonized as a saint.] Yet how many people actually do what they say they aspire to and move to Calcutta, give up all their possessions, and live the life of suffering and dedication to service that they say they “should” do or aspire to do? Their conscious belief is that they should be like their role model Mother Teresa, but they fail to live up to their moral ideals. This causes them to feel guilty because they consistently fail to live up to who they think they should be.

This conflict is known as the moral-practical dichotomy, or mind-body dichotomy, a common cause of unhappiness. Morality demands that they should live a life of service to others (like Mother Teresa or some other religious figure), but their practical desire for happiness causes them to go astray. Their mind says they should act one way, but their body refuses to comply. Their religion gives them a seemingly impossible moral ideal that they simply can never fully live up to, resulting in guilt and unhappiness based on the dysfunctional beliefs of helplessness, unlovability and worthlessness.

I teach in the business faculty and most of my students want to earn money. Many want to start up businesses. But some of them also hold the belief that “money is the root of all evil” and/or that capitalism is immoral. So they are torn. They want money (it’s “practical”), but think it’s bad (“immoral”). They want to be successful from within the capitalist system, but think it’s wrong and thus feel guilty. The more successful they are, the more they feel hypocritical since they are not living in accordance with their beliefs. Instead of being proud of themselves and their companies, they feel guilty. In some cases, if pride is considered a vice in their belief system, the more pride they feel, the more guilt they feel. (In Catholicism, Pride is named as one of the seven deadly sins.)

I also have a surprisingly large number of students who give up on their goals quickly, before ever really trying. Or they refuse to set goals in the first place. They might say things like “what’s the point” or “whatever will be will be” or “everything happens for a reason” or “the system is rigged against me”. They may or may not consciously believe in fate, destiny, astrology and other such determinist beliefs, but they act as if they do, based on these subconscious beliefs. They have values, but they don’t take action towards achieving them or give up quickly because the outcome is predetermined anyway. This belief that they won’t achieve their values through their own actions becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy reinforcing feelings of low self-esteem and/or low self-efficacy.

I cannot tell my students what to believe – that’s something you need to discover on your own. The take-away point is that you should be aware of what your beliefs are and question whether or not they are putting you on a path toward happiness or not. I can tell you about the path I took, but you need to find your own.

Assignment #4: Make Progress on your Character-Related Design Challenges through Positive Self-Talk and Habit Formation

The focus of this course is on your career-related design challenges and you should continue to make progress on your DCQs and goals from Assignment #3 as you build toward your Final Report (Assignment #5).

Assignment #4 will help you apply entrepreneurial principles to your character-related design challenges using Tool #10 positive self-talk, CBT and mindfulness.

Tool #10: Positive Self-Talk Statements to Consciously Practise Building Your Character

Watch and Use Tool #10 – Positive Self-Talk Statements (29:55)

There are many tools to help you become aware of, understand, and/or change the subconscious and conscious beliefs that affect your goals, habits, actions, emotional responses and, ultimately, your happiness and well-being. In the video I provide an overview of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness, Neuro-Linguistic Programing (NLP) and Positive Self-Talk.

The ultimate goal is to exert Agency over your life and your own programming. To control your actions and reactions you need to first control your thoughts, your “Self-Talk”. What you say to yourself when your Executive is talking to your Elephant. What your System 2 sounds like. It’s a way to be sure your hand is on the wheel, that you have a Pilot-in-the-Plane.

You may want to consider starting this design Diamond Loop by asking questions that fall into the following categories of Self-Talk Statements:

• Day-to-Day Reactions to Events Outside Your Control
• Day-to-Day Controllable Habits and Activities
• Fundamental Contradictions between your Beliefs and Values
• The Cognitive Triad of Beliefs
  • View of Yourself
  • View of the World
  • View of the Future
• Reminders to Continue Doing the Things You Like About Yourself
• Things You Want to Change or Understand
  • Changing Habits
  • Re-Programming things you don’t like about yourself (CBT)
    • Inappropriate Responses (Anger, Anxiety, Guilt…)
    • Inappropriate Focus (Dysfunctional Beliefs, Poor Self-Talk, Negative Outlook…)
  • Change Your Focus (What do you pay attention to and say about things)
    • Focus on Positive Over Negative
• Happiness Generating (But Not Self-Aggrandizing or Self-Puffery)

Divergent tools to help you be more aware of your current self-talk include introspection, journaling, mindfulness, therapy and/or counseling. ECLD Tool #2 – Journaling suggested that you keep track of the events and people that “make you” happy or unhappy or spark inappropriate reactions. You can use “the 5 Whys” to understand what beliefs may have resulted in the emotional consequences of the event (The ABCs of CBT – Activating Event, Belief and Consequences).

Every design challenge needs a good starting point, so trying to come up with a good selection of useful self-talk statements in a vacuum would be difficult. It helps if you know what problems or needs you are trying to reinforce, change or understand. This is not an exercise in self-flattery to tell yourself what you want to hear. If this tool is to be personally and selfishly useful to you, then I suggest that you focus your time on statements that involve growth and aspiration.

Once you have divergently brainstormed the character-related issues/problems/habits you would like to address, you want to create positive self-talk statements that will potentially solve them.

As shown in the video, Positive Self-Talk Statement guidelines include:

• Use Personal Pronouns (“I”, ”me”)
• Present Tense
• Short and Concise
• Positive Goal Seeking, Not Avoiding Negatives
• Non-Competitive, Don’t Compare to Others
• Strive for Improvement, Not Perfection
• NOT Meant to Flatter or Lie to Yourself
  • This is Not Self-Aggrandizement or Self-Puffery!
• Memorable!

Examples from the Video for Tool #10

Your self-talk can help you reinforce what you already like about your character and help make you more consistent. It can help you reinforce good habits and make them more automatized. It can also help you change your habits or create new ones. You should use good divergent thinking and creative visualization techniques to generate a wide array of potential inspirational self-talk statements to choose from. You can also go online to search for good inspirational statements or find something in the examples to start with and re-write to make your own.

During the convergent thinking phase, you need to reduce this number down to something you can actually remember. I suggest around 10-15 of the best ones (See Crow Epistimology). I also suggest you sort your statements by category and make sure you pick at least one statement from each category in your final list.

 

I cover the issue of how to essentialize, remember, synthesize, integrate and recall concepts/principles in the video “Philosophy for Entrepreneurs – Part 1 The Crow”.

Tool #10: Positive Self-Talk Step-by-Step Review

1. Start with the list of questions given at the start of this tool
2. Review Journal and Current Self-Talk and use 5 Whys
3. Identify ABCs (Activating Event, Beliefs, Emotional Consequences)
4. Divergent Brainstorming of Self-Talk Statements
5. Divergent research for potential Self-Talk Statements online
6. Categorize into 3 Areas of Happiness
   • Reaction to Events Outside Your Control
   • Happiness, Habits and Self-Talk Within Your Control
   • Long-Term Sustainable Happiness Through Harmony and Eliminating Contradictions
7. Refine and Condense Individual Self-Talk Statements. Each statement will be a kind of shorthand notation to remind you about the broader principle or belief you are getting at with this statement. You may want to write down in your journal an example of what activating event or consequence you are trying to impact with this statement (the A & C of the ABCs).
8. Consolidate into a Short List of Self-Talk Statements
9. Print Out, Keep Handy, and Start Testing
10. Document Your Process (e.g. Take Photos of Your Work). Be sure to include a section in your report such as “So What?” or “Insights I Gained” or “What I Learned by Using this Tool”.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)