The Secret of Happiness According to Maz Kanata

I've been looking forward to writing my first blog post ever since I first considered putting it off at some point in 2004. And now here we are, nearly 12 years later and I'm finally getting round to it. So you can take this first blog post as some sort of confession to poor time management skills and a lack of motivation. But that's all behind me now - I have kids to feed and a business to promote. Plus, the Force Awakens has re-ignited my barely latent Star Wars fandom and once again, I have found an obscure way to link Star Wars to the world of business development (my first one is a tale of Yoda and flogging electrical goods - that's another blog post).

Did the title of this blog grab your attention? Good. Now for the bad news.

There isn't some over-arching secret to happiness that works for the entire human race.

Anyone telling you otherwise is a charlatan trying to flog you a book, or a seminar, or a course. Sorry about that. There is, however, an over-arching secret to YOUR happiness. Your personal happiness, that is, related to you alone. And I, dear reader, have no idea what that might be? How could I? I have no idea who you are. 

That doesn't sound particularly helpful, does it? But maybe that's the point, to a certain degree. Because the point of this post is to gently point out that for all the truisms, theories and assertions that float clog up your LinkedIn or Twitter feed, the real truth is that there is no universal applied theory of personal satisfaction that can...    well...    satisfy.

Think of the diet industry. It markets brilliantly. It sells diets by the bucket load. And yet, waistlines in the developed world are stretching like the Green Goddess (ask your dad). Some people really do well on some diets and these same diets don't work for others (there's a whole heap of things to say about motivation, but that's another blog post...).

So most of us try lots of proverbial hats on as we grow up, discarding some bits and keeping others as we discover they work for us. Ulitmately what we end up with is a set of values - what is really important to us? What personal qualities keep us going when times are hard?

The question is this - do you know what your values are? Could you list them in simple words?

Businesses spend a lot of time and money employing people like me to help them discover what their values are. Why? Because it's a guideline for how the organisation wants to conduct its business, how it wants to be seen and how it wants to be remembered. It's a checklist for potential employees - "Do I want to work with these people?" The trick is, of course, that the organisation should actually stick to these principles and review them against prevailing market conditions to make sure they're always relevant to customers and employees alike. Move away from them and the organisation plays a dangerous game.

As an example, recently I saw an excellent article in Management Today about WH Smith. This is a business that has moved away from its core principles of innovation (WH Smith was the first ever chain store in the world and they invented the ISBN book numbering system) and customer focus to that of pure profit return for shareholders. This is evident from the way that their high street stores are barely invested in (unless it's new ways to shift those £1 chocolate bars at the till), their inventory is confused to say the least, their merchandising is all over the place and their prices are on the whole sky high. So you end up with good profits but bad practice - tatty, confused stores that no-one really enjoys going to any more. The inevitable consequence? I predict that unless WH Smith make some major changes, it will go the way of Woolworths at some point in the next 5-7 years. I hope I'm wrong, I still have great love for it.

So how can you discover your personal values? Here's a few questions to get you started:-

- If you won the lottery tomorrow, what would be the first things that you would do?

- If you were given 6 months to live, what would you do with those 6 months?

- What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?

Some of these questions may appear a bit on the morbid side, but they're designed to ask you about your personal fundamental values. Because the follow-up to these questions is to say, "If you're not already living to the answers to these questions, what's stopping you?" The answer to that is going to be personal to everyone, but the secret is that being honest with yourself about what is stopping you is the first step to removing those barriers. Because more often than not, those barriers are either in your own mind (such as "I can't because I'm no good at it") or societal ("My mum wouldn't like it") and in either case, you have to decide how important doing that thing or behaving in a certain way really is to you. Is it more important than the status quo?

So in answering the questions honestly and candidly you can start to think, "Well, why aren't I lobster fishing in the Caribbean?" or "Why shouldn't I live in Argentina?" or "Why shouldn't I be known for being creative?" There is a killer question to help you get over any anxieties related to attempting to change your life or achieve certain things and it's this:-

"What's the worst that can happen?"

It's the killer question - because the answers will often be "How am I going to pay my bills?" Well guess what, with good planning, you can overcome that bit. "I can't" or sentences starting with "Yes, but..." should be banned from your vocabulary.

And that's what this is all about - giving yourself permission to be the way you want to be. It may need effort, determination, motivation and/or practice but if you want to give it all up to become a bee keeper, like TV Presenter Bill Turnbull did recently, you can do it. Yes, you can.

So there's no one big secret - but there is a personal realisation that can lead to transformative change. So as Maz Kanata said in the trailer for the Force Awakens, "just let it in."