Live a Life in Search of Meaning
Many of us traverse through life trying to avoid stress, drama, and failure. We try to find things that bring us quick boosts of happiness or pleasure to try to counteract the letdowns and frustration that life brings. Tell me if this sounds familiar: you wake up and run for the coffee to get some sort of energy flowing in your body. While you drink it before getting ready for the day, you find yourself scrolling through social media passing over written posts and only looking for memes and funny videos to bring some sort of smirk to your face. When you get to work, you know there are some tough conversations you need to have with your colleagues but you tell yourself the conversations can wait until a later time so you can be “fully prepared” to have them. After work, you run to the gym to find it as busy as ever so you decide to cut your workout short to avoid having to get home late. Once home, it’s time for a shower, dinner, and watching TV. Then rinse and repeat for tomorrow. Most people would say that sounded like an average day with a few minor changes to the schedule or addition of family. Something is missing from this equation and I would argue that the missing piece is the most vital for us to thrive and flourish in life. By avoiding all of the potential challenges or inconveniences in our day, we never give ourselves the opportunity to grow by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. By scrolling mindlessly through social media instead of journaling, reading, or doing something more meaningful with our time, we miss an opportunity to personally grow. By avoiding the tough conversations with our colleagues, we failed to strengthen the personal connections we have with others. By cutting our workout short, we let our environment control our behaviors rather than allowing ourselves to be in control of our choices. If you’ve ever read James Clear's Atomic Habits, little sirens might be going off in your head. This is because these small choices are creating feedback loops in our head. These feedback loops shift our habits and cause us to avoid the opportunities in life that can open the door for us to live a life full of meaning and excellence.
Being a mental skills and resilience trainer working with the military, I constantly hear that we need to improve Soldiers overall well-being and quality of life. When most leaders say this they usually mean that Soldiers seem depressed or miserable because of their working and living conditions and want them to be happier to avoid having to deal with hardships. While I agree that the overall quality of life and well-being needs to be improved for Soldiers and their family members, it should not be improved solely to make them feel good for a bit and then move on about their day. In order to better illustrate my point, I want to explore well-being through a lens you might not have heard about. The traditional definition of well-being that most people think about is feeling happiness through some sort of pleasure or joy seeking behavior while avoiding negative experiences or emotions. This is also known as hedonic well-being. Another type of well-being that is less talked about is known as eudaimonic well-being. Eudaimonic well-being is defined as a subjective experience associated with living a life of virtue and meaning in pursuit of human excellence. This type of well-being is connected with reaching our true potential in life and becoming the best versions of ourselves. Eudaimonic well-being does not mean life is seen as sunshine and rainbows. It means that we have to be actively working and living our lives in line with our core values and investing in ourselves and our relationships. So when leaders say we need to improve the overall well-being of Soldiers, I completely agree but it means that we need to be doing more to establish a culture where self-growth and development is seen as the standard. This is where it is important to be emotionally intelligent and to have strong and quality relationships with your friends and family.
The same goes outside of the military. In a perfect world, everyone would be actively living by their personal values and being true and authentic to themselves. Everyone would be focused on honing the skills and traits that make them great and continuing to develop themselves to better live their life with purpose and meaning. This may sound like a pipe dream, but if we want to see a change in our world and in our organizations, then we need to be willing to stand up for what we think is important and live by our own personal values to model the behavior for others.
This week I want you to reflect on your own current day-to-day operations. Are you just going through the motions? Or are you actively pursuing excellence by living out your values, investing in yourself and your relationships? Do your behaviors line up with living a life full of purpose and meaning or are you just trying to avoid feeling negative emotions? There is a time and a place to slow down and feel good by treating yourself, but this cannot be our only source of well-being in life. In order to remain Always in Pursuit, we need to be able to push ourselves on a continuous basis to be the best authentic versions of ourselves to continue to strive towards excellence and fulfill our purpose in life. This is how we live life on the offense.
I hope you all have a wonderful week. Happy Mother’s Day to all the true heroes out there! We would be lost without you all in our lives. A special shout out to the wonderful mothers in my life. You all have shaped and molded me into the man I am today and I am eternally grateful for your love, guidance, and support.
--Daren