Measuring Happiness & What It Means for Your Performance
The following is an excerpt from Module 2 of our digital course. Learn more about the full course and get started now.
In a previous blog post, we introduced the five factors of personal health and performance. We also took a closer look at the first four factors: energy, calm, mood and identity hours. In this post, we’ll discuss the final factor, happiness, and figure out what it all means for your performance.
Let’s look at the happiness scale.
This is, in many ways, an outcome of the other factors, but for me I also found it’s a leading indicator as well. Happiness perpetuates happiness. When our mind observes us doing the things that make us happy and protecting ourselves by making sure we always have time for them, it actually starts to reward us with more happiness. We feel confident about the fact that we know we can serve what we need in the future in order to make ourselves happy as well.
But the opposite is also true. When we’re living in a state of unhappiness and we’re not doing much about it over time, we tend to be a little unhappy about that and it perpetuates itself downward as well. I found it incredibly useful to track happiness both as a leading indicator, as well as an outcome. Ultimately by being an entrepreneur I wanted to create a world where I would have an impact and that would create happiness in the ways that I wanted it in my life as well.
The happiness scale is a single number, and it’s your general level of happiness during the measurement period. Think back over the last 90 days. Generally, how happy have you been? I know there are some good days and some bad days, but let’s try and average it out for the sake of the scale. Remember, it’s okay to be unhappy sometimes. In fact, as entrepreneurs, often we have to do things that really don’t make us happy at all: Bookkeeping, calls with our attorneys, whatever it might be. Talking to customers that are unhappy, solving tricky problems.
But tracking happiness over time helps us make sure that we’re moving in the right direction. If ultimately whatever we’re doing to optimize our lives professionally and personally is causing us to be less happy, then it’s a great shot across the bow to help us remember that we did all of this to try and be happy in the first place, and that we probably need to make a change in order to try and get there.
If we’re a 10 out of 10 happy, we feel engaged with life, we have great enthusiasm for our goals, and for growth, for improving, we feel optimistic about what’s coming. We feel very content with what we have, we’re not desperately needing to improve. It’s part of contentment. We feel stable in what we have, and we can appreciate ourselves as well as other people. We can see the positive side in everything around us. If we’re unhappy, sometimes this one is easier for us to understand because we feel it more than we feel happiness on the other end, at least I do sometimes. If we’re unhappy, its low mood, lack of energy, we feel restless, irritable, it even could lead to frequent arguments and frustration coming out in other ways in our lives.
Next steps:
Now, take a second to fill out the Five Factors Scorecard. If you haven’t already downloaded our Scorecard app on iOS and Android, you can do that right now.
The app records your daily scorecards, lets you go back and fill in missed days, and it reminds you each evening if you haven’t reported for the day. It turns your numbers into simple letter grades that are easy to follow over time.
I know that until I sat down and was intentional about measuring these things, I didn’t know where they stood over the last couple weeks and months. I could have made some rough guesses, but you can see through the worksheets that other people have uploaded exactly where they determined they were as they were starting this program as well, and that’s really helpful.
Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here. You can say there are some scales that look better than others or there are some numbers that are more desirable, but they’re all real, and that’s the important part. Those of us who have wider ranges, or ranges that are just different from what we might like, we have so much more to gain by learning new tools and developing new skills through this course. Honestly, the folks that are already protecting their health have a lot that they can share. So, if you see someone whose numbers show that they’re really nailing it, it’s a great time to ask them what tools they’re using in their life and what sort of rules and routines they have. We are all here to learn from each other.
Lastly, the tools that we teach in this course work for entrepreneurs from a really wide range of backgrounds and experiences. They’ve worked for me, but there’s an endless list of things that work for each individual person. So, using the free community to ask questions opens you up to unlimited sources of inspiration and improvement. I highly recommend it. I’ve been doing this for years and I still learn something new from the Founders First community every day.
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Founders First is a set of evaluation tools that will improve your business by strengthening its most critical asset: You.
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