10th Anniversary: Four Favorites
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
It just came to my attention this week that this is
the 10th anniversary year of my newsletter. I have
taken great pleasure in perusing the archives as I
revisit the themes and return to the issues that
have engaged my imagination and captured my
heartfelt attention throughout the years. While
they all continue to hold meaning for me, I came
upon particular articles that I would characterize
as my personal favorites, those that were a joy to
write but also received enthusiastic response from
my readers. In celebration of this anniversary
year, I have decided to select four articles from
over the last ten years to highlight in this
newsletter, for the remaining
months of 2013. I hope you enjoy my selections!
Rethinking Happiness: How We Choose To Be Content
With almost a hundred articles to choose from, I'd
like to share with you why I made this article one
of my top 4 selections. To begin with, if there is
one thing we have in common with each other and with
every person we come into contact with through our
work, it is this: we all just want to be happy.
While it is not news that as human beings we
naturally aspire to happiness, I believe now as
strongly as I did when I wrote this article in 2006,
that we are prone to some pretty misguided notions
about how to achieve it, and could benefit
enormously by reexamining our understanding,
approach and relationship to happiness, and most
importantly, the extent to which we can commit to
our own joy.
It was both humbling and surprising to me as I
revisited the tenets put forth in that article to
assess the extent to which I have practiced or
failed to practice each of them in my professional
and personal life in the past seven years. Most
importantly, I hope that you, like me, will find
value in returning to many of the essential
questions raised in the article, questions like: How
do you define happiness and what, for you,
constitutes contentment? How do you rein in your
standards for happiness by discerning "what is
enough"? How can we intentionally steer our focus in
the direction of our joy? How do we approach
happiness more as a by-product than a goal to
pursue, treating it more as a cause rather than an
effect? How do we accept the bitter with the sweet
As I say in the article, "Committing to our joy
means making the nonnegotiable choice to pursue the
greatest passions of our minds and hearts, making
that which pleases, nourishes and refreshes us
central rather than peripheral to our life
experience. By committing to do what energizes us
and makes us sparkle, we commit to showing up in the
world with the best we have to offer. There is a
wisdom and a fierceness to making one's sense of joy
a priority in one's life but it is not an easy thing
to do." Not easy, but oh so essential. Happy
reading!
~ Denise
You can read Denise’s new article, in PDF format:
Rethinking Happiness
We welcome your comments and feedback on this
article!
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Livelihood Newsletter.
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