What do you think is the most important factor in personal happiness? Love is invariably cited as the no.1 quality in life, and I would have agreed at one time, but as wonderful and important as love is, my work with clients and personal research has led me to a different conclusion, that to me explains succintly why some are happy and others are not. I venture to suggest that one can live a perfectly fulfilled contented life without any great attachment to anything. As wonderfully priviledged as I have been to be loved, and have the greatest gratitude for it, it isn't the "bottom line" quality that lives my life meaning. There is another more primal quality that determines true happiness.
This quality is self-worth. Those who have it in abundance are positive and fulfilled in the face of almost any circumstances. Those with none are either suicidal or psychopathic. For clients that come to me with trauma, stress and confidence issues, invariably the lack of self-worth lies at the heart of the problem. I have little doubt that this is a hard-wired primordial instinct common to all apes. Survival for ape species depends on membership of the tribe, troupe or colony. Self-worth is a subconscious belief that membership is assured, and therefore survival. Though humans living in civilisation no longer actually physically need to belong, the instinct remains genetically hard-wired into us. You simply won't be happy without self-worth.
Self-worth is obtained from a number of sources, and unfortunately most people depend for theirs on the two most unreliable: success and approval. When we all lived in tribes, success and approval were fairly essential qualities - you had it or you died! What comprises success, and what you must do to be approved is determined by general consensus. In our culture, qualities such as wealth, sex-appeal, victory, political power and fame are the criteria for success and approval. Unfortunately this "locks out" the majority of people from happiness straight away, as most of us will simply never obtain these or hold on to them. Even when people obtain these things, they then often find themselves with nowhere to "move on" to and become unhappy, as any celebrity gossip magazine makes obvious.
I teach my clients to divorce their self-worth from success, approval and the expectations of others. The best and consistently reliable source of self-worth is in fact in our ability to continually create. Almost everyone can make a positive difference to their immediate environment, and it is in the exercise of this ability that an endless sense of self-worth is achieved. The old proverb "it is better to give than receive" is far more profund than most people realise. To kick-start this process, I teach my clients that all creation starts in the imagination.
The imagination is the factor that sets us apart from all other life - we can see things before they exist! All things created by human beings were first conceived in the imagination. Far from being some sort of childish amusement as most people believe, it is an incredibly powerful creative tool. If you can conceive of it and give the thought enough attention, it is highly likely to happen. People who can focus their imagination and keep it locked onto one possible thing find their self-worth flows naturally from within them, without need for any external support. No surprise then that this is what I teach my clients to do.
Of course, no one's self-worth is invincible - if you receive a hard enough disappointment, your self-worth can be destroyed, just like a tornado can destroy the strongest house, but even then, it can be rebuilt by refocusing on new targets. Those abundant in self-worth always have "one dream left" - there is always something new to create.
It's worth remembering that all created things, either natural or man-made, ultimately become un-made. But when your self-worth derives from the act of creation itself, there is always a reason to go on.
