Five Secrets to Achieving Physician Happiness

I began participating in Professor Rao's three-month Creativity and Personal Mastery program

weekend and, even now, I find my mind drifting back to the deep, insightful conversations our small group engaged in

last

.

Our focus was happiness

—

what is it? Where does it come from? And how can we create it for ourselves?

"How can we live a life of joy in the face of all the stresses of our everyday existences?"

The underlying question we were grappling with was Pretty heavy stuff, yeah?

Since I derived so much value from the discussion, I decided to share some of our insights with you.

If you think about it, virtually everything we do in life is a quest directed at being happy, and yet we have little or no idea of how to actually find happiness. The world of advertising messages that surround us informs us that the secret to a happy life is to purchase the material “thing” or experience that is being promoted. In fact, most advertising strives to create our dream life and shape our desires, like a Fantasy Factory! And, gullible as we are, most of us buy into this in some form or another, even if we consider ourselves sophisticated consumers.

Yet most happiness research to date has uncovered only a weak link between our satisfaction with life and either our financial condition or our accumulated possessions, beyond surprisingly low income and asset levels.

So what then do we need to know in order to increase our daily joy or satisfaction, in both our personal and professional lives?

There is no money you need to spend on the following five secrets. The resources you will need to tap into include mental energy, discipline, effort, self-reflection, and openness to possibility. 1. Become aware of the conversation in your head. The mental chatter in our head is all pervasive. It’s that internal "monkey mind" monologue that is part of the background. In fact, we actually construct our lives guided by this monologue, accept this as our reality and run our lives from this place.

Occasionally, the ongoing chatter takes us to a place of hope, self-sufficiency, confidence and optimism. More typically, we find ourselves headed down the dark path to anxiety, frustration, depression, self-hatred and insecurity.

Our job is to become aware of how we talk to ourselves internally, and to begin to change the nature of the conversation. We have an opportunity to construct a new reality

—

one that serves us infinitely better!

Read the rest of the secrets.