3 Rare Qualities Of Women Who Manage To Hold On To Happiness Once They Find It
Three areas happy women focus on for maximum reward.
Mihail Guta and KrakenImages via Shutterstock I'm turning 50 in just a few days. Honestly, I'm excited about it. This has been the best part of my life because I've finally found happiness. It all started with balance, and for me balance translates to happiness.
But finding happiness and learning how to hold on to it took me years to figure out. And, I wish it hadn't. So, I'm going to tell you the three core truths about holding onto happiness once you find it. That way, you can skip to the front of the line and enjoy more time in a balanced, happy life, too. Maybe you won't have to wait until your 40s or 50s to find it!
Here are three qualities of women who hold onto happiness once they find it
1. They accept that happiness doesn't mean doing it all
For most of my life, I thought, just like almost everyone else, that balance meant balancing everything I was doing and getting it all done as perfectly as possible. While I was a child living at home, this was pretty easy to do. I just had to balance school, play, and chores. Aren't there times when you long for those days, too?
By the time I was a teenager, I had a part-time job and boyfriends to add to my very simple balancing act. As most teenagers idealistically do, I thought I had the whole life balance thing pretty well figured out.
When I got married, finding life balance quickly became much more complicated. Suddenly, I had to reorient my life to balance my roles as a student and wife. It wasn't easy. This was when I began my intense struggle with finding balance. There was just so much to do, much of which I only grudgingly did because of my husband's expectations.
Just like everyone who struggles with the demands of family and work, I decided prioritization would help me reclaim the balance I had before I said "I do." I prioritized by putting the things that others needed from me high on the list, and put what I wanted and needed lower and lower on my to-do list, until it just fell off of the list completely, as explained by a study of other-centeredness in Personality and Individual Differences.
2. They refuse to neglect their own happiness
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Yet, like so many of us do, I survived (barely) with my warped sense of life balance for years. I made it through all the normal things in life—moving, deaths, births, work—but it was too much to try to balance just by doing (and doing and doing) without any real renewing.
Life balance is about your individual life. Life is about how you want to experience it, how you want to love the people important to you, and how you want to make the world just a bit better because you've lived. When you don't pay attention to what's important to you, then your life can crumble painfully away. That's exactly what happened to me.
I got divorced and felt burned out. I had totally and completely misunderstood the idea of life balance and become a human "doing," not much more than a soulless machine. Yet, this is exactly the crippling misunderstanding many of us have.
We believe life balance is about putting others first instead of ourselves. We forget that without taking care of ourselves, we reach the point where we have nothing left to give to anyone else. This problem seems to affect women's happiness, specifically.
In a decades-long survey of happiness and well-being, researchers discovered that men are generally happier and more satisfied with life. Often, this is because women put ourselves first and find our happiness slipping away as we focus on caring for others.
Once I understood that, I struggled with how I could change. I tried putting my feelings first and decided I needed to become a human being, someone who pays attention to their feelings and going with the flow, instead of worrying about doing so much.
Despite spending almost a decade trying to find balance by being a human being, I got very little accomplished to help me reach my dreams. And more importantly, I wasn't happy. My experiences taught me that life balance isn't about living either as a human doing or a human being. Existing at either extreme for any length of time is exhausting and debilitating.
3. They understand that happiness exists in the process, not the outcome
The goal is for you to enjoy yourself, whether or not you're pleasing anyone else. It's finding the sweet spot between being a human doing and a human being. The most amazing part is that the sweet spot moves; it moves to support the situation you're in at the moment.
By balancing my life like this, I've been feeling a greater sense of freedom and accomplishment than I ever have before. There's a balance in my life of work, service (not people pleasing), play, and relaxation that makes sense and energizes me.
So, really, there are two wonderful things about turning 50. First, I've finally discovered the secret of life balance. And most importantly, I hope I'm making the world just a bit better, because now you know the secret of the best and most lasting life balance, too.
Dr. Karen Finn is a divorce and life coach. Her writing on marriage, divorce, and co-parenting has appeared on MSN, Yahoo, Psych Central, Huffington Post, Prevention, and The Good Men Project, among others.
