After Factoring out Genetics Or the Genes We Get from Our Parents, Our Overall Happiness

From the book:

Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide by Caroline Adams Miller and Dr. Michael B. Frisch. Sterling, $19.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4027-6259-8

Happiness House: This is the initial goal-setting exercise of the book, Creating Your Best Life, which describes Best Life Coaching and Counseling™. The “Five Paths to Fulfillment and Happiness” is part of Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching, one of the very few research-supported and comprehensive positive psychology approaches in the world.[1]

Instructions for Building your own happiness house:

After factoring out genetics or the genes we get from our parents, our overall happiness is made up of the areas of life that we care about. The 17 (or 16 if Spiritual Life is seen as part of Goals-and-Values) areas in the game have all been found to be important building blocks of happiness for many, but not all, people around the world, regardless of culture or ethnic grouping.

Use a scissors to cut out the 17 area of life squares or potential rooms for your Happiness House. Here they are:

Health
is being physically fit, not sick, and without pain or disability. / Self-Esteem
means liking and respecting yourself in light of your strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, and ability to handle problems. / Goals-and-Values
(or Philosophy of Life)
are your beliefs about what matters most in life and how you should live, both now and in the future. This includes your goals in life, what you think is right or wrong, and the purpose or meaning of life as you see it. / Spiritual Life
refers to spiritual or religious beliefs or practices, that you pursue on your own or as part of a like-minded spiritual community. If important, Spiritual Life becomes an important part of a person’s Goals-and-Values.
Money
(or Standard of Living)
is made up of three things. It is the money you earn, the things you own (like a car or furniture), and believing that you will have the money and things that you need in the future. / Work
means your career or how you spend most of your time. You may work at a job, at home taking care of your family, or at school as a student. Work includes your duties on the job, the money you earn (if any), and the people you work with. / Play
(or Recreation)
means what you do in your free time to relax, have fun, or improve yourself. This could include watching movies, visiting friends, or pursuing a hobby like sports or gardening. / Learning
means gaining new skills or information about things that interest you. Learning can come from reading books or taking classes on subjects like history, car repair, or using a computer.
Creativity
is using your imagination to come up with new and clever ways to solve everyday problems or to pursue a hobby like painting, photography, or needlework. This can include decorating your home, playing the guitar, or finding a new way to solve a problem at work. / Helping
means helping others in need or helping to make your community a better place to live. Helping can be done on your own or in a group like a church, a neighborhood association, or a political party. Helping can include doing volunteer work at a school or / Love
(or Love Relationship)
is a very close romantic relationship with another person. Love usually includes sexual feelings and feeling loved, cared for, and understood. / Friends
(or Friendships)
are people (not relatives) you know well and care about who have interests and opinions like yours. Friends have fun together, talk about personal problems, and help each other out.
Children
means how you get along with your child (or children). Think of how you get along as you care for, visit, or play with your child (or children). / Relatives
means how you get along with your parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and in-laws. Think about how you get along when you are doing things together like visiting, talking on the telephone, or helping each other out. / Home
is where you live. It is your house or apartment and the yard around it. Think about how nice it looks, how big it is, and your rent or house payment. / Neighborhood
is the area around your home. Think about how nice it looks, the amount of crime in the area, and how well you like the people.
Community
is the whole city, town, or rural area where you live (it is not just your neighborhood). Community includes how nice the area looks, the amount of crime, and how well you like the people. It also includes places to go for fun like parks, concerts, sporting events, and restaurants. You may also consider the cost of things you need to buy, the availability of jobs, the government, schools, taxes, and pollution.

Start to build your Happiness House using the blocks or rooms that you have just cut out. Put the areas of life that are most important to your happiness or quality of life on the first floor or level of your Happiness House. Put areas 2nd in importance to your fulfillment on the second floor, put areas 3rd in importance to you on the third floor and so on. Your House may not look like a real house and that is ok. There are no right or wrong ways to do this game.
Choose only areas that matter to you and are important to your happiness, fulfillment or quality of life. Turn over or discard any areas of life you do not care about.
For each area in your house, turn the paper over to its blank side and quickly write in your life goals or the things you would like to accomplish in that area during your lifetime. These should be goals that you feel will make you fulfilled, content, and satisfied with your life.
Save your Happiness House to remind you of what is important to your happiness, contentment and quality of life. Try to put time in to all the areas you really care about.

Save your Happiness Houseby taking a picture of it, writing the floor numbers on each area of life so you can quickly re-build your house, or just glue or paste your House onto a sheet of paper.

in order to be reminded of your priorities and goals every day, you can tape a copy of your Happiness House on your refrigerator or a bulletin board or put your picture of your house in the Start Up folder of your computer Your priorities and goals can change, so re-do the Happiness House exercise at least once a year.

Happiness House Feedback and Interpretation.

There are no right or wrong answers.

The idea is to post this somewhere to remind yourself of your priorities and goals –priming—so that they are not lost in the shuffle of a busy schedule.

Act on your current priorities as revealed in Happiness House. These may very well change in the future. For this reason, you are urged to re-do the exercise every 6 months or a year (or sooner if you feel your priorities have shifted significantly).

Plans for boosting your happiness in any area of life. There are Five Paths to problem-solving or Five Paths To Greater Success and Happiness for every area or room in your House.

Both Best Life Coaching and Counseling and Quality of Life Therapy suggest research-supported pathways to fulfillment and success in areas of life that are not satisfying now or could use a boost.

These pathways and related exercises for personal growth can be found in the books, Creating Your Best Life and Quality of Life Therapy:

Quality of Life Therapy by Dr. Michael B. Frisch. John Wiley & Sons. (368p) ISBN-10: 0471213519.

Five Paths To Greater Success and Happiness

These five paths come from twenty years of research on the quality of life of nations and individuals around the world. An acronym for the Five Paths is CASIO, which reminds us that our fulfillment in any area of life can be enhanced or boosted by changing our:

Circumstances
Attitudes
Standards or Goals for that area both now and in the future
Importance or priority we place on an area
happiness in Other Areas of life outside of this area or room that we care about and that make up our Happiness House.

Remember that your satisfaction with each area of life is made up of these five parts that can be transformed into Five Paths to Happiness (or CASIO model/acronym), a popular exercise for any area of life. The five ways to boost success and happiness in any area of life are to:

1.Change Your Circumstances

The first strategy involves changing your circumstances to improve a particular area of your life. Some circumstances are terribly unfulfilling or “psychonoxious” and must be changed to find happiness. For example, you could try to change boring job or a loveless marriage by talking to your boss or getting marriage counseling. If all else fails, you may need to leave the situation and start over to find happiness as in the song, “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.”

2.Change Your Attitude

The second way to improve your happiness in a particular area of life is to change your attitude about the situation, to correct any distortions or negativity in your thinking. The essence of the Changing Attitude Strategy from the CASIO model is to find out what is really happening in an area and to carefully evaluate what it means for you and your future in an objective and realistic way that preserves your self-esteem and gives you some reason to hope for fulfillment and happiness in the future.

Changing your attitude involves taking a new look at an area of life by asking two key questions:

(1) “What is really happening here? What are all the facts?” and

(2) “How will this situation affect me and my future prospects for happiness?”

“What does this situation say about my abilities or my worth as a person?

Many times our view of a situation is not based on the facts. For example, you may believe that your boss is unhappy with your work because he or she seems to be ignoring you, when in fact your boss is preoccupied with a personal problem. Because of our tendency to jump to conclusions, it is important to get all the facts, before deciding things are hopeless. Our interpretation of facts can also give us trouble. It is important to develop the ability to picture yourself eventually surviving and thriving even if your worst fears came true and, say, you lose your job or your marriage fails (see Meanings Like Buses Tenet).

3.Change Your Goals and Standards

The third strategy for boosting your satisfaction in an area of life such as work or love is to change your goals and standards for that area. This will boost your happiness with an area even though you have done nothing to change things! The key idea here is to set realistic goals and to experiment with raising and lowering your standards of fulfillment for particular areas of life that you are unhappy with. To do this, you have to answer questions like “What do I really want in this part of life? How much is enough?” Often it helps to lower your standards slightly so that you can gain more fulfillment in that part of your life.

4.Change Your Priorities

This part says that you can boost your overall quality of life by de-emphasizing specific areas you cannot change and putting more importance on areas you can change or control. For example, if you have an untreatable health problem, you may de-emphasize the importance of health in your life and instead focus on relationships or your work. These may be two areas you can change to make yourself happier. To pursue this strategy, you have to ask “What are my priorities?”

5.Boost Your Satisfaction in Other Areas Not Previously Considered

The essence of this strategy is to try to increase your quality of life by increasing satisfaction in any or all areas of life you care about, even ones that don't seem to be a problem right now. This is especially helpful when you are working on an area that is very difficult and slow to change, such as a love relationship. While a particular area of concern, like Love, may be moving slowly toward improvement, you can boost your overall quality of life by focusing on other areas of life that you care about, such as recreation and friendships, even though these areas are not your “number one” concern at the moment.

Five Paths can be:

a happiness-booster for any area of life that you care about
a guide for creative problem solving, applicable to most problems in life. You can think of CASIO as potential solutions to any problem in life. Creative problem solving is an essential part of positive psychology or happiness change techniques (Biswas-Diener & Dean, 2007).
five possible pathways or strategies to achieve your life goals in valued areas of life.

Think of a problem or an area of life you’d like to be more satisfied with, and use the CASIO model to generate possible solutions or ways to be happier.

Area of Life for Greater Success, a Happiness Boost or with a Problem to Solve or Manage:
=
C / A / S / I / O
Questions to Consider
What about my Circumstances in this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Attitudes about this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Goals and Standards for this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Priorities in this area of life makes me unhappy? / What Other Areas of life have I neglected because of this one?
Your Answers to Questions to Consider

Positive Psychology Example of Completed CASIO Worksheet

Area of Life for Happiness Boost or with a Problem to Solve or Manage:
= Work
C / A / S / I / O
Questions to Consider
What about my Circumstances in this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Attitudes about this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Goals and Standards for this area of life makes me unhappy? / What about my Priorities in this area of life makes me unhappy? / What Other Areas of life have I neglected because of this one?
Your Answers to Questions to Consider
My immediate boss is very negative, criticizes me all the time, and is hard to please. / Everything I do has to be perfect. I always assume it’s my fault if I’m criticized and that’s wrong. / I do a lot of Jen’s job for her because she’s never here and it is killing me! / I act like this is a career job, when it is only to get me through school. I am missing out on too much fun, worrying and working so much. / All my eggs are in the one basket of work. I need to meet more people here, go to Temple, and just hang out at the bookstore like I did in Austin.

Make a plan and see if it works. Write down ways that you could make yourself happier or more successful in achieving your goals in this area of life, using the CASIO model. Write down ways that you could solve or manage a problem, using the CASIO model. Next, implement your plan and tell close friends about it. Then see if it works. If it doesn’t work, fine-tune or change your plan and try again!

[1] This includes government and grant funded research by the USA National Institute of Health conducted by independent researchers at Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard Medical School, including James R. Rodrigue. This research consists of the most rigorous test of science for effective interventions or treatments, the randomized controlled trial. It is the gold standard for an Evidence Based Intervention or Treatment.