We give people the skills to boost their well-being, social support for growth in listening circles, and knowledge they can use to find their own paths to happiness. We hope some of the affluent may then choose to reduce consumption as an unnecessary limitation.
At a glance
- Boost your wellbeing
though skills to reduce stress, solve problems, and change habits, and manage your moods. - Find social support in listening circles
because it is easier to change yourself with social support. - Understand happiness
What really makes you happy may not be what you think - Balance consumption
Discover and neutralize the irrational forces that tear you away from happiness. Reduce excess consumption to serve the wellness of all.
- 1. Boost your wellbeing
- Download the Owner’s Guide to Difficulties (pdf) to read some of the skills.
- Want more power over your own life? Try:
- The CALMER: a simple routine to reduce stress in seconds
- The SOLVER: make life’s problems easier to solve and get better results.
- STAR Scripts: one of many tools to change those habits that seems to control you and manage your moods. “You can change how you feel by changing how you think and act.” But you have to know how.
- The Wellness of All begins with yours
- Back to top
- 2. Find social support in listening circles
- Learn to use skill power in small circles of people, who listen to each other without interruption. Help yourself and others just through listening.
- Listening circles leave you free to be yourself. Listening has power.
- Download working drafts of documents for listening circles: Format, Purpose, Principles, Skill List
.
- Back to top
- 3. Understand happiness
- It’s often hard to know what will make you happy. (Think of bad choices you’ve made . . . we all have.) But researches have identified the main factors-and the results make sense to most people:
- Having enough and feeling secure
- Personal relationships-intimacy and community
- Meaning in life
- Joy in work
- A feeling of control over your own life
Balance these factors to your taste, practice mood management, and find the sweet spot in your life.
- Back to top
- 4. Balance consumption
- Western visitors to the third world are often impressed by how happy they are, though they have little. What’s keeping people in affluent nations from happiness?
- Up to a certain point, more income makes people happier. Beyond that point, it more income makes little difference. But social comparison and status are powerful forces; people want to spend more to establish social status, and their brains trick them into believing it makes them happy, even when they are too busy and tired to enjoy it.
- Transcending this delusion and curbing the addiction to ever more consumption frees you to enjoy life to the fullest. Work less, consume less, enjoy life more.
- We have a right to live. Spend as much as you need to live, then enhance your life in other ways. Earning respect through doing good feels good and raises your social status.
- Limiting consumption may be the single most important activity in healing the planet. Every dollar you spend is spent and re-spent by others again and again. It quickly gets mixed in to the common pool of money, like an ink drop in a glass of water. No matter how you spend it initially, it has the same effect on green house gas emissions and other pollutants in the long run.
- Reducing consumption may be the single most powerful way for the affluent to help heal the planet.
- Healing the planet requires many changes; reducing overall consumption is vital. But we can do that while increasing overall well-being.
- Back to top