Ep 14 Achieving Peace and Joy in Life Without the Striving
Unlock the secrets to mastering peace and joy in the complex game of life. Imagine for a moment life as the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure game, where every choice leads to new paths, challenges, and rewards. Yet, in our relentless pursuit of happiness, we often overlook the simple truth: the source of true peace and joy lies within us, not in the external world. Join Cliff Ravenscraft and Daphne Scott as they unravel the misconceptions that lead us astray, from the impact bias that skews our expectations to the hedonic treadmill that keeps us chasing the next big thing. Are you ready to start a new adventure, try a different path, or even listen to a new podcast? Dive into this game-changing conversation and discover how to play the game of life with peace, joy, freedom, and a sense of endless possibility.
We discuss
- The Concept of Life as a Game: We start by exploring why life can be seen as a game, including the strategies, the challenges, and the victories that define our existence.
- The Pursuit of Happiness: An insightful discussion on how our chase for external achievements—things, moments, goals—believes to bring us ultimate happiness, and why this pursuit often leads us astray.
- The Illusions of Happiness: Unpacking the psychological phenomena that mislead us:
- Impact Bias: Overestimating the happiness certain achievements will bring.
- Hedonic Adaptation: The tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of happiness regardless of significant positive or negative changes in our lives.
- Miswanting: Being wrong about what will make us happy in the future.
- Focusing Illusion: Focusing too narrowly on one aspect of our future desires.
- Comparison and Goalpost Moving: How constant comparison and shifting our goals can undermine our contentment.
- Finding Joy Within: The realization that true peace, joy, and calm come from within, not from our external circumstances.
- Life’s Freedom: Seeing life as a game liberates us from the attachment to outcomes, allowing us to enjoy the journey, take risks, and embrace changes with an open heart.
Conclusion: A powerful quote that encapsulates the episode's essence comes from the book "The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary by Catherine Gray: " Victory wears off; agony does too. Euphoria fades; despair too. Love wanes; heartbreak too. And life events that we expet to clinch eternal happiness, or spell cataclysmic lifelong doom, just...don't.
Unlock a level of freedom and joy previously unimagined by recognizing minute by minute where it is really coming from.
Call to Action: Check out Cliff's new offer for coaches, ProfessionalCoachingPath.Com.
Daphne also has an online leadership course for leaders wanting to truly learn the skills of leadership. Yes, there are real skills in leadership that you can learn. Check out the course: Waking Up a Leader
References in today's show:
The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary by Catherine Gray
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech