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Striving for happiness
6th October 2023
When I ask parents and teachers what they want for their children, ‘happiness’ always features in their answer. When our children start out on their educational journey, ‘happiness’ is often linked to building friendships and feeling a sense of belonging. By the time our children are teenagers, our hopes for happiness also include a readiness to take their place in the world as young adults.
But what is ‘happiness’? Each of us might define it slightly differently, but it is certainly not a constant, uninterrupted state of joy. We all experience life’s ‘ups and downs’.
Martin Seligman suggests that happiness has three features: your genetic makeup, your life circumstances, and factors within your control. The first two are often beyond our control, and the third we can influence.
In my work, I am often asked by students, parents, and teachers about the impact of stress and pressure on learning, and I firmly believe that stress and happiness are strangely linked!
We often misuse the word ‘stress’. Stress is what we feel when presented with a situation where we must act. It is our physical and psychological response to challenge. If we believe that we have the tools to cope, this stress is positive (eustress); it helps us to focus, motivates us and boosts our energy so that we can respond. However, if we view the challenge as a threat, then we experience negative stress (distress), and feel anxious, unable to cope and our ‘flight’ response is activated.
For me, happiness is not the absence of stress or pressure; that is not realistic. I believe that happiness includes the security and knowledge that when the inevitable stress of life occurs we have the tools to cope with it, work through it, and emerge from it. We might name this skill ‘resilience’.
One of my aspirations as an educator is to enable children. This does not mean adopting a ‘snow plough’ approach (clearing all obstacles out of the way for them), but exposing them to challenge and difficulties that pose a little discomfort. We can then support, encourage and coach them so that they learn problem solving, trial and error, and dealing with disappointment skills; all invaluable tools for coping with the difficulties of real life.
Professor Robert Bjork calls these ‘desirable difficulties’; experiences encountered by children that present the opportunity for new learning. In our classrooms this may include a teacher not accepting “I don’t know” as an answer and encouraging thinking with “what would be your best guess?”.
We all want children to know love and comfort, and we also want them to be able to cope with the realities of life. If we always make things easy, then our children don’t get to practice resilience, so sometimes we won’t remove difficulty, but intentionally present it, so that they can learn to work through it, and thrive.
And that is a huge part of being happy.
When I ask parents and teachers what they want for their children, ‘happiness’ always features in their answer. When our children start out on their educational journey, ‘happiness’ is often linked to building friendships and feeling a sense of belonging. By the time our children are teenagers, our hopes for happiness also include a readiness to take their place in the world as young adults.
But what is ‘happiness’? Each of us might define it slightly differently, but it is certainly not a constant, uninterrupted state of joy. We all experience life’s ‘ups and downs’.
Martin Seligman suggests that happiness has three features: your genetic makeup, your life circumstances, and factors within your control. The first two are often beyond our control, and the third we can influence.
In my work, I am often asked by students, parents, and teachers about the impact of stress and pressure on learning, and I firmly believe that stress and happiness are strangely linked!
We often misuse the word ‘stress’. Stress is what we feel when presented with a situation where we must act. It is our physical and psychological response to challenge. If we believe that we have the tools to cope, this stress is positive (eustress); it helps us to focus, motivates us and boosts our energy so that we can respond. However, if we view the challenge as a threat, then we experience negative stress (distress), and feel anxious, unable to cope and our ‘flight’ response is activated.
For me, happiness is not the absence of stress or pressure; that is not realistic. I believe that happiness includes the security and knowledge that when the inevitable stress of life occurs we have the tools to cope with it, work through it, and emerge from it. We might name this skill ‘resilience’.
One of my aspirations as an educator is to enable children. This does not mean adopting a ‘snow plough’ approach (clearing all obstacles out of the way for them), but exposing them to challenge and difficulties that pose a little discomfort. We can then support, encourage and coach them so that they learn problem solving, trial and error, and dealing with disappointment skills; all invaluable tools for coping with the difficulties of real life.
Professor Robert Bjork calls these ‘desirable difficulties’; experiences encountered by children that present the opportunity for new learning. In our classrooms this may include a teacher not accepting “I don’t know” as an answer and encouraging thinking with “what would be your best guess?”.
We all want children to know love and comfort, and we also want them to be able to cope with the realities of life. If we always make things easy, then our children don’t get to practice resilience, so sometimes we won’t remove difficulty, but intentionally present it, so that they can learn to work through it, and thrive.
And that is a huge part of being happy.
