What you will get from this article:
- Why a sense of fulfilment and achievement are essential to a happy life
- The impact that feeling fulfilled has on your life
Have you ever felt unhappy after completing an important goal?
It happens to many of us. We’ve been focused for so long on a particular outcome, but when it comes, we find ourselves thinking: “Is this it?”
Instead of feeling joy and excitement, feeling fulfilled, we feel there is something missing and perhaps feeling disillusioned.
You may have asked, how can that be the norm? Why isn’t the achievement enough? When do we fully grasp how to feel fulfilled? Perhaps a more powerful question is: what do successful people, who are fulfilled, do or have or think about, that brings them joy and excitement while achieving their goals?
We know that a sense of fulfilment is not just “good to have” – it’s in fact vital to our feeling grounded in life. It is the message from deep inside of us that says we are on the right path. It is our inner radar that guides whether we are aligned with what matters most to us.
HOW TO FEEL FULFILLED: THE ESSENTIALS
A coin has two sides and they always stay together. By mastering both sides you start living an extraordinary life that you deserve.
The first side is the knowledge or strategy – this side teaches you the three steps to achieving. It is the process of getting consistent positive outcomes or results. Each step is a force of creation. These three are Focus, Massive Action, and the Unexplainable Flow and are all covered in next week’s article, so stay tuned!
But success and getting results is only half the side of the coin or half of the story. To achieve balance and harmony with the other side of the coin, you learn how to develop a feeling of fulfillment. This is the critical key to creating lasting happiness…
We have all been influenced by the external messages that material possessions, wealth, a University degree or any other definition of success, will make us happy. We learn to focus on those external messages to seek happiness and fulfilment. When we reach them sometimes we are pleasantly surprised and often we are disappointed and confused.
Harvard professor Todd Rose advocates that individuals transform their understanding of how to feel fulfilled. Rather than look to success to provide contentment, we must turn our attention to fulfilment itself.
Life is not an either/or where we are either “successful” (constantly running to keep up with the neighbour or friend or other role model for success) or “fulfilled” (sacrificing outward success to tend to “softer” emotional needs).
Success and fulfilment are complementary pursuits – two sides of the same coin. Together they are a force that brings human beings to a sense of completeness.
It’s our ability to build relationships and our own self-confidence that drive our capacity for success. The more supported we are in life via getting our needs met, the more we’re able to nurture feelings of contentment.
There are plenty of people who are incredibly successful, yet remain unhappy and discontented. It’s like they don’t know how to feel fulfilled at all. Call it the law of familiarity – the more used to something you become, the less you appreciate it. But your life doesn’t have to stay that way.
UNDERSTANDING THE ART OF FULLFILMENT
To live a rich life, you need more than just success. You need to live. And living requires fulfilment, not just achievement. Developing your sense of fulfilment comes from finding what makes you happy, what brings you joy.The art of fulfilment is to start appreciating more. Begin to see, and be grateful for, what you already have.
Instead of taking for granted the talents and abilities you have – ignoring the gift that you have and the abilities to make things happen and celebrating who you are and what you are capable of doing and having, we fall into the trap of “expecting” – it has become familiar to us – and we expect it to be repeated without really seeing it and appreciating who we are and what we do or have.
Our mind alone won’t make us happy – we have learned to look for faults and failure and what is not!
We have not been taught to focus on how to feel fulfilled.
Choose to take delight in the ordinary, like a smile or the sun on your face, and you become the richest person you know, no matter how much you have in the bank. Even better, you’ll give more to those around you, creating a positive feedback loop of energy. Now when you achieve something, no matter what it is, you’ll be able to truly celebrate instead of feeling empty.
Taymour Miri is an ICF master coach and a Gallup certified strengths coach and more recently one of the first 136 coaches world wide to be awarded an Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching. He has 30 years’ experience in leadership roles and 20 years of experince in coaching. Taymour has trained
over 1,500 coaches across five continents and is the founder of International Coaching Education (ICE).