什么是幸福并且美满的人生的决定性因素呢？ 这毫无疑问是一个人最重大的人生问题，我们无数的先人同样对此感兴趣。佛教的创始人佛陀为了寻找幸福甚至放弃了他的王国。一些希腊哲学家（从亚里士多德到伊比鸠鲁，从柏拉图到苏格拉底）都有他们各自不同的关于如何获得幸福的看法。当然，我们每个人都有自己对于幸福的理解。 如何确认我们各自的理解有多正确呢？ 直到最近，如果你希望得到这个问题的答案，你不得不依靠心灵导师对此的讨论。或者，如果你足够幸运，你可以基于你在深夜（或在醉人的氛围中）与你的朋友和家人讨论。值得高兴的是，现在我们有了彻底不同的评估方式。在过去的十五年里，科学家对此进行了深入的大范围的研究。现在，我们对于是什么因素使人过伤幸福且美满的生活有了非常深刻的洞知。 这门一流的课程，是由印度商学院和德州奥斯汀大学McCombs商学院联合推出的。Raj 教授整合不同领域的内容：包括心理学，神经科学，行为决策理论，从而提出的经过实践检测以及现实可操作性的实现幸福而美满的一生的秘诀。 虽然并非必须，但如果学有余力的话，阅读Raj 教授即将出版的《如果你很聪明，为什么你还不幸福？》（《If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?》，中文名待定，中文版未出）这本书，将有助于你复习和理解本门课程的内容。 一些知名的思想家将会在这门课程中露面，包括： 杜克大学商学院教授，Dan Ariely（《怪诞行为学》的作者，即将出版《Irrationally yours》） 伊利诺伊大学，Ed Diener教授，人称：幸福博士 芝加哥大学心理学，Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi教授，（《当下的幸福：我们并非不快乐》的作者） 通过这门课的学习，你将探索以下问题的答案： 为什么聪明又成功的人并不像人们想象的那样快乐？ 什么是聪明又成功的人也会犯的“摧毁幸福的七宗罪”？ 什么是“七个获得极致幸福的好习惯”，你又该如何将他们应用在你的生活里？ 在学习完这门课程之后，那些用功学习以及坚持不懈的实践的同学，将不仅仅获得什么是科学的幸福有更深层次的理解，并且也会生活的更加幸福。 翻译: ZhengHong | 审阅: Coursers Global Translator Community
Week 4 Video 6: Obstacles to Taking Personal Responsibility
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来自 Indian School of Business 的课程
幸福美满的一生
3155 个评分
从本节课中
Module 5: The 4th sin, habit and exercise
与讲师见面
Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan
Marketing
[MUSIC]
Ya, my Greek and other friends.
I actually can't believe that the greeting in Greek is just a simple ya.
I thought it would be a little more complicated, and all Greek to me.
If you know what I mean?
But returning to our topic of the fourth habit of the highly happy.
As I mentioned in the last video, it's taking personal responsibility for
your happiness.
What that means is never blaming other people for your unhappiness.
It means seeking to have the ability to regulate your own emotions and feelings.
If this is the first time that you've encountered this idea of taking personal
responsibility for your happiness, you may wonder whether this is even possible.
What if you break your leg, or
lose your job Is it even possible to remain happy, and
in control of your emotions, if something terrible like that were to happen?
The answer is, at least theoretically,
it's possible to be in full control of your feelings.
How?
By taking control of your thoughts.
As we saw earlier, our feelings are determined by our thoughts.
So, if we change our thought patterns, our feelings are naturally gonna change.
This is how people like Mandela were able to maintain their emotional equanimity,
despite being jailed for a good chunk of their lives.
This is also why the same event, for example,
failure to get a job can evoke such different feelings in different people.
As Milton famously said, "The mind can make heaven out of hell and
hell out of heaven." Research shows the Milton was right for the most part.
We can change our feelings by changing our thoughts.
But just because it's theoretically possible to change your feelings by
changing your thoughts doesn't mean that this is easy to do.
The problem is that changing your thoughts isn't that easy,
as I'm sure you know from personal experience.
You need to be able to develop skills to be able to change your thoughts.
The good news is that this ability, like most other abilities,
can be gained through practice.
The bad news, however, is that for
most of us developing the ability is going to take time.
Perhaps a lot of time and also a lot of patience.
I've also learned from teaching my class on happiness that it is also going to take
overcoming some internal obstacles that prevent us
from being receptive to the idea of taking personal responsibility for our happiness.
There are two main internal obstacles that I seem to have discovered,
that seem to bother my students about this idea of taking personal responsibility for
their happiness.
The first obstacle is a certain kind of pessimism.
When I mention the idea of taking personal responsibility for happiness, many of my
students ask, but how can I possibly be happy if something extreme were to happen?
For example, like I mentioned sometime back, I break my leg or I lose my job.
The fact that I can't be happy if something like that happens
means that I can never really hope to take complete responsibility for my happiness.
My happiness will always, at least to some extent, depend on external circumstances
and therefore, I don't even want to embark on this project.
To the students that raise that kind of a question.
I tell them that asking whether they can be happy
even if something really extreme happens is the wrong question to ask.
The right question to ask is whether you can be happy
given the sort of commonplace and everyday events that routinely spoil your mood.
For example, can you be happy even though you're stuck in traffic?
Or can you be happy even though it's raining outside and
you wanted to take a nice walk?
Can you be happy even though you're boss has just shouted at you?
As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in one day.
Similarly, you don't double up the ability to regulate your thoughts and feelings,
in just one day, just like any other skill you need to build the ability to regulate
your feelings by taking challenges that are the right level for you.
The type of challenges that could get you into flow.
This is similar to any other skill really, if you wish to get all big and
buffed up you wouldn't pick weights at the gym that are too heavy.
That you cant even life them or too light.
You would pick ways that stretch you just beyond your current strength levels right.
Likewise if you wish to get better at regulating your feelings
you will need to pick the right level of challenges and
see if you can maintain your equanimity even in those situations.
By doing this regularly,
you're are almost certain to become better at controlling your feelings.
In fact some day after you've practiced this for more than 10,000 hours,
you may even reach the lofty levels that Gandhi or Mandela did.
Now there's another thing that internal optical that prevents a lot of my students
from even entertaining the idea of taking personal responsibility for
their happiness.
This obstacle is a misconception.
It is a misconception that if you take personal responsibility for
your happiness, the others around you will stop taking advantage of you.
Here's how one of my students put it.
If I'm always in control of my feelings, she said, and
I can be happy no matter what won't my friends and colleagues start abusing me?
Won't they think that since nothing spoils this guys mood,
let's take advantage of him?
Won't that happen, he asked me.
The answer is no, not really.
Because taking personal responsibility for your happiness,
doesn't mean that you don't hold others accountable for their actions.
Let me give you an example, to show you what I mean.
Imagine that a ticketing agent has made a mistake and
booked you on the wrong flight.
Because of this mistake, you won't be able to get to an important meeting on time.
In this type of situation, most people would get angry at the agent,
now if you had total control over your feelings,
you could change your feelings if you wanted to.
For example, you could change your anger into say compassion for
the agent, if you recognize that he's new to his job.
Or there's something else that's going on in his life that's really bothering him.
He's not able to focus on the job 100%, etc.
The fact that your feelings are under your control
means that you will not hold him, the agent, responsible for how you feel.
But just because you choose not to hold him responsible for
how you feel, doesn't mean that you should also not hold him responsible for
the mistakes that his behaviors have caused.
So for example, even though you may not be angry at him,
you may still make it clear that he needs to fix the problem that he's created for
you, which might involve getting you on an alternative flight, or
reimbursing you for the losses you might have had, et cetera.
In fact, it is by retaining control over your feelings that you're more likely to
get the agent to get your problem fixed for you.
Why?
Because, as several researchers have noted, and as David Rock
summarizes really well in his very, very good book Your Brain at Work,
it is when you have control over your feelings that your prefrontal cortex,
which is the part of the brain that allows you to make desirable decisions,
is more available for you, and you're able to make better decisions.
When you lose control over your feelings,
your limbic system takes over the functioning of your brain.
And you aren't able to think as clearly
which means that the decision making is going to suffer.
Here's how Amy Arsten, a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine,
puts it in an article that appeared in nature.
Even quite mild, acute, uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and
dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.
That is, by not being able to control your feelings,
you would lose your ability to make good decisions.
Which in this context with the agent means that you would likely be able to get that
agent to cooperate with you a lot less when you lose control over your feelings.
In other words, taking personal responsibility for
your happiness and being able to regulate your feelings
will not make you a doormat that everyone else can trample on.
Just like, as we discuss last week, being kind and
generous doesn't mean that you burn yourself out by being too giving.
You can be smart about when, how much and to whom to give and similarly, you
can be smart about when, how much and with whom you choose to control your feelings.
So to summarize, the typical obstacles that people tend to have for
taking personal responsibility for their happiness aren't really valid.
Which means, that, it's really desirable to embark on this journey of trying to
take personal responsibility for you happiness, and trying to regulate
your feelings and treating the keys to your happiness in your own two hands.
There are many research people that attest to the usefulness
of having the ability to control your own thoughts and feelings.
Here's perhaps the most comprehensive paper on this topic.
As the authors note in the abstract itself of the paper, and I quote,
higher scores of self-control, and by self control the authors here referring to
the ability to take control of your thoughts and feelings, among other things.
They go on to say, higher scores of self control correlated with making
better grade point average, better adjustment (fewer reports of
psychopathology, higher self-esteem), less binge eating and
alcohol abuse, better relationships and interpersonal skills,
secure attachment and more optimal emotional responses.
The question of course, is how to take personal responsibility for
your happiness.
That is, how do you gain the ability to regulate your thoughts and feelings?
Great question.
To help you answer the question,
let me first focus on another question in the next video.
How or why does taking personal responsibility for your happiness,
that is, the ability to regulate your feelings, help you get rid of or
at least mitigate the fault of deadly happiness in of being overly controlling?
That is, how is taking personal responsibility for
your feelings an antidote to being overly controlling?
Yashew and see you in the next video.
>> [MUSIC]
