The most popular WorkPuzzle blog to date is titled “Coaching for Confidence.”  In order to achieve a state of true confidence, you need to have worked hard at developing a talent or set of skills.  This development never comes easily and is always built with consistent and copious amounts of time and effort.

If you’ve read WorkPuzzle the last couple days (Part 1, Part 2), you know that science says the same thing about happiness.  Happiness, or a life with abiding and deep satisfaction, takes work.

For coaches, parents, and managers, this is invaluable information.  Only with this information firmly planted into your frontal lobe, can you know how to begin answering questions and fielding complaints regarding frustration, failure, roadblocks, and anxiety.

Let me give you some examples of what science says about happiness and confidence, and then tell you how to apply it:

1. Success and happiness never come solely from “the pleasant life.”  The pleasant life is defined as:  A life dedicated to maximizing the amount of pleasurable experiences in both frequency and duration.  People who value this goal above all others, exhibit more depression and anxiety, and are more likely to report feelings of “emptiness.”  (Martin Seligman, “Learned Optimism”)

2. People report much greater well-being when working.  They feel stronger, more creative, satisfied, and good about themselves when they are at work.  Studies show that while at leisure, people fall into the range known as “apathy.”  They feel passive, weak, dull, and dissatisfied.

There is one more surprising finding here:  The above respondents, despite their “greater well-being”, ironically reported that they’d rather be somewhere else than at work.  The reason for this is that our culture has gradually created some very strong stereotypes about work, such as:  Work is an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided.  (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “Flow:  Psychology of Optimal Experience”)

So, as a coach, when someone complains to you about how difficult it is to achieve what they want to achieve, and they insist that it should be easier – Remind them that everyone would be happy, confident, and successful if fulfillment was easily achieved.  Assign them the task of asking the happiest, most confident, successful people they know, how they got there.

I guarantee that the answer would be a long list of trials, failures, starts and stops, and difficulty.  Welcome to the life of a happy person!

Ralph Marston said it this way:

“If it were quick and easy you would have already done it.  The fact that it is difficult and time-consuming means you’re doing something truly worthwhile.  The value of any achievement is built with the time and effort you put into it.  Keep going, keep building, keep at it and you’ll truly have something of great value.  It is often difficult to stay positively focused.  And it is always worth the trouble.  Sure, it would be much easier to do nothing.  Yet by doing nothing, you create nothing.  Instead, step forward and do the difficult work that must be done.  With each effort, you are adding more value and substance to the achievement.  Feel the satisfaction as you continue the difficult and rewarding work of building that achievement.  Know that the value has already started coming to life.”