MICHAEL B. FRISCH

The Meaningful Life Project™: What the Latest Science Tells Us About How to Build a Life of Meaning, Happiness, and Joy

Careers, Jobs, Retirement Pursuits and the Recession

The Meaningful Life Project™ aims to enhance the quality of life of the general public by sharing what science tells us about how to how to build a life of happiness, meaning, and joy. It further aims to promote science as a vocation in the young and old alike.

It seeks to enhance learning and to make it intrinsically satisfying by translating scientific findings into easy-to-understand language, prescriptions for living, enjoyable games and exercises, and compelling video documentaries of the leaders in the field.

Step One in building a meaningful life, a better life or BEST LIFE for you and your friends and loved ones:
• Get a physical exam from a primary care physician
• It is frightening and sad, how many have suffered for years with unhappiness, only to find that a medical condition or medication side effect was responsible!!!!
• If you fear a psychiatric or psychological disorder, a qualified mental health professional can assess you. Still, as part of their assessment, they will want to talk to your primary care physician about your recent physical exams.

How to Assess Yourself And Get Help For Clinical Depression And Anxiety:
• In an emergency, you can always call 911 and/or go to the nearest emergency room of a local hospital.
• Go to adaa.org and take the tests for clinical depression and anxiety.
• If you are really clinically depressed or anxious, get the dynamic duo of help that really works: 1. research-supported medication—from a psychiatrist expert and 2. research-supported psychotherapy such as Beck’s cognitive therapy that has been proven effective in hundreds of clinical trials around the world. Find a therapist with supervised experience in a research-supported psychotherapy. They should have a great reputation in the community for treating the problem. They should also be able to prove their supervised experience to you with a certificate and actual research studies showing that the approach works… Note: Be wary of nutrition supplements or therapists who claim years of experience and success without research proof for their approach. This can be like taking a seaweed pill or primal scream therapy for pneumonia, instead of a proven antibiotic that starts to work immediately! Not sure what you want to do when you grow up?

Getting Started: Theory and first Techniques

After genetic factors like your temperament which you inherit from your parents—are you a sweetheart, a grump, or something in between, Quality of Life Theory says that your overall happiness is made up of your satisfactions with specific areas of life.  That is, happiness is the sum of satisfactions in areas of life you care about.  People are given tools for reaching goals and boosting satisfaction in any one of the 16 specific areas of life in order to enhance overall contentment or quality of life. 

Here is a Happiness Pie showing the happiness ingredients of someone trying to be happier:

Your Higher Purposes And Lifetime Goals. Positive Psychology Coaching starts with a quality of life and higher purpose (or goal) assessment.  First, we want to see how happy you are related to the general population and which areas of your life need improvement.

Secondly, we also want to know your higher purpose or purposes in life.  These are long-term Goals and Values that are really important to you, including career goals, family and relationship goals, and spiritual goals. 

We must have some lifetime or long-term goals like the characters played by Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in the movie, The Bucket List who write down goals to accomplish before they die or “kick the bucket.”  See website at:

http://thebucketlist.warnerbros.com/

How to Generate a Life List of Your Most Cherished Needs, Goals, and Wishes: Growth Exercises

Creating Your Best Life Coaching and Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching (QOLTC) has some cool ways to help you make your own Bucket List and  identify your most cherished needs, goals, and wishes.  These tools are  like the Happiness Pie pictured above, Happiness House in which you literally build a house based on your priorities of life, Vision Quest, or the computer-based, Quality of Life Inventory which anyone can take and which predicts college retention one to three years in advance.

Happiness House (.doc)
Vision Quest (.doc)
Quality of Life Inventory (QOLI)

Stay busy pursuing your goals on a daily basis

Having goals and a purpose in life is essential to happiness.  Also essential is a daily plan of activities designed to make our life list happen, to make our dreams become a reality.  Recent research suggests that goals that are non-competitive and are service, relationship or hobby oriented may be very important to a life of meaning or happiness.

Happiness Boosting Philosophy of Life

Positive Psychology Coaching never dictates goals or values.  Still, in terms of goals, it helps to make meaning or happiness a priority in your life, if only to make you more able to help others.  It also helps to cultivate happiness habits that work and avoid all influences that rob you of a sense of optimism and belief in yourself.  We never give up on ourselves in Quality Of Life Therapy and Creating Your Best Life Coaching. Finally, it helps to make the leap of faith that “meanings are like buses; there is always another one coming around the corner.”  That is, no setback, failure, loss, illness, or disability has to defeat you.  Even those paralyzed by terrible accidents have found happiness and ways to engage life and serve others in a happy and fulfilling way.  This concept is called meaning optimism.  In qolt-ullc, we stay optimistic that we can find meaning and purpose in  life no matter what happens to us.

According to QOLTC and Creating Your Best Life Coaching, life should be your lover, something you embrace every day and have fun with.  As the play says, “life is a banquet and most of us are starving!”  Positive Psychology Coaching helps you dive in and enjoy the banquet of life.

Inner Abundance technique

One of the first techniques  in ullc or qoltc is Inner Abundance or  Chill Pill Time.  You must care for yourself enough to get calm, relaxed, and centered in a way that works for you.   With time, you will find a consistent or semi-reliable way to access your center of calm, the calm self, or what some religious traditions call,  the God within.  This Calm Self response is part of our makeup as much as the Fight or Flight (tend or befriend, freeze, or faint) response.  This me time to relax and unwind is needed to de-stress from life, recharge your batteries, set cherished goals, and problem solve about ways to become more satisfied with life, including ways to help or serve others:
Inner Abundance means feeling deeply calm, rested, centered, loving, alert, and ready to meet the challenges of your day and your life after caring for yourself in a thoughtful, loving, compassionate, and comprehensive way. When you do the very best for you, there is a lot more of you available for other people and activities. We must feel centered, calm, and good on the inside, hence the “inner” of Inner Abundance, to serve others or to pursue happiness in any of the areas of life in QOLC/T.
Being good at self-care  means putting time, effort, and thinking into what renews you each day and then making time to do it. Above all, Inner Abundance relies on routines, that is, overlearned actions or Happiness Habits that require no thinking.

Growth Exercises

After Inner Abundance is discussed, Creating Your Best Life Coaching and Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching (QOLTC) immediately teaches proven and tested pathways to your lifetime goals.  That is you will apply the latest in positive psychology (the science of happiness) and to help you fulfill your most cherished needs, goals, and wishes in valued areas of life. Goals related to particular  areas of dis-satisfaction such as Spiritual Life, Work, or Retirement are especially important to tackle.

After learning and playing with other positive psychology exercises and strategies for each of your areas of dis-satisfaction, you will be ready for the last part of your Happiness Program.   Here you simply re-check your happiness level and progress toward the goals you have set for yourself.   If the Happiness Program is working, you’re done (except for tips on relapse prevention so you don’t backslide into habits of un-happiness).  If there is a problem, qoltc/ullc wants you to face it directly and fine-tune or re-work your Happiness program until you get the results you want.

Five Paths to Happiness

Quality of Life Theory also says that our satisfaction with a each  area of life is made up of five parts that can be transformed into Five Paths to Happiness (or CASIO model/acronym), a popular exercise for any area of life.  The five ways to boost happiness in any area of life are to:

Change Your Circumstances

The first strategy involves changing your circumstances to improve a particular area of your life.  Some circumstances are terribly unfulfilling or “psychonoxious”  and must be changed to find happiness.   For example, you could try to change boring  job or a loveless marriage by talking to your boss or getting marriage counseling.  If all else fails, you may need to leave the situation and start over to find happiness as in the song, “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.”

Change Your Attitude

The second way to improve your happiness in a particular area of life is to change your attitude about the situation, to correct any distortions or negativity in your thinking. The essence of the Changing Attitude Strategy from the CASIO model is to find out what is really happening in an area and to carefully evaluate what it means for you and your future in an objective and realistic way that preserves your self-esteem and gives you some reason to hope for fulfillment and happiness in the future.
Changing your attitude involves taking a new look at an area of life  by asking two key questions:
(1) “What is really happening here?  What are all the facts?” and
(2) “How will this situation affect me and my future prospects for happiness?”
“What does this situation say about my abilities or my worth as a person? 

Many times our view of a situation is not based on the facts.   For example, you may believe that your boss is unhappy with your work because he or she seems to be ignoring you, when in fact your boss is preoccupied with a personal problem. Because of our tendency to jump to conclusions, it is important to get all the facts, before deciding  things are hopeless.  Our interpretation of facts can also give us trouble.  It is important to develop the ability  to picture yourself eventually surviving and thriving even if your worst fears came true and, say, you lose your job or your marriage fails (see Meanings Like Buses Tenet).

Change Your Goals and Standards

The third strategy for boosting your satisfaction in an area of life such as work or love is to change your goals and standards for that area. This will boost your happiness with an area even though you have done nothing to change things!  The key idea here is to set realistic goals and to experiment with raising and lowering your standards of fulfillment for particular areas of life that you are unhappy with. To do this, you have to answer questions like “What do I really want in this part of life? How much is enough?” Often it helps to lower your standards slightly so that you can gain more fulfillment in that part of your life.

Change Your Priorities

This part says that you can boost your overall quality of life by de-emphasizing specific areas you cannot change and putting more importance on areas you can change or control.  For example, if you have an untreatable health problem, you may de-emphasize the importance of health in your life and instead focus on relationships or your work. These may be two areas you can change to make yourself happier. To pursue this strategy, you have to ask “What are my priorities?”

Boost Your Satisfaction in Other Areas Not Previously Considered

The essence of this strategy is to try to increase your quality of life by increasing satisfaction in any or all areas of life  you care about, even ones that don't seem to be a problem right now.  This is especially helpful when you are working on an area that is very difficult and slow to change, such as a love relationship. While a particular area of concern, like Love, may be moving slowly toward improvement, you can boost your overall quality of life by focusing on other areas of life that you care about, such as recreation and friendships, even though these areas are not your “number one” concern at the moment.

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String of Pearls Intervention

For a quick improvement in contentment, the String of Pearls intervention is popular and easy to remember:
The String of Pearls says that the goal each day is to be mindful of every social interaction; paying attention as one interaction starts, unfolds, stops, and another beings. With each interaction try to do no harm in terms of being surly or rude or ignoring others—Besides doing no harm, try to be kind and responsive in each of your daily interaction. If you are kind, you can judge that interaction as a positive pearl for your necklace for the day. It matters not if others always respond to these pearls of kindness; the pearls are counted even if the other person is too grumpy to accept them.
String of Pearls is meant to become a habit of kindness toward others in every interaction. This principle will become a no brainer, something we do without thinking that will build deep bonds with those we see on a regular basis (see Favor Bank) and will make us feel good about how we treat strangers. String of Pearls will also eliminate guilt from being rude or dismissive to others. As the How Kind and Serve Others tenet say, being kind and decent is the essential fruit of most spiritual practices and is something that will brighten our day, increase our enjoyment and satisfaction with life and ourselves, and make the world a better place for others whose paths we cross.

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Additional Growth Exercises:

• Basket of Eggs (.doc)
• BAT Exercise (.doc)
• Budget Skills (.doc)
• Creativity Skills (.doc)
• Five Paths to Happiness (long version) (.doc)
• Flow It (.doc)
• Habit Control Diary (.doc)
• Mindful Breathing and Meditation (.doc)
• My Best Job, Retirement Activity, or Place to Volunteer (.doc)
• Neighborhood or Community Checklist (.doc)
• Occupational Survey (.doc)
• Play List (.doc)
• Recession Era Budget Skills (.doc)
• Relationship Skills (.doc)
• Strength It Exercise (.doc)

Consider a Life in Science. You’ll be glad you did!