I Wish I Had Let Myself Be Happier

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Recently, I wrote a piece on regrets—specifically, how to not create them.

I shared Bronnie Ware’s book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a worthy read which, contrary to our perception of the subject, is not morbid but inspiring.

After I published my piece, many of my readers asked me to explain what I thought Ms. Ware meant by seemingly the most abstract of the regrets, “I wish I had let myself be happier.”

What does that even mean? And how do we make it real?

So many of us can take that to mean we should do whatever makes us happy at any given moment, but in doing so, we would be missing the point entirely.

Notice that the regret is not “I wish I had made myself happier”—It’s “I wish I had let myself be happier.”

It appears that on our deathbed, we gain the kind of clarity that’s hard to access in the noise of our busy, hustling, and goal-driven days. This wish confirms one of the most significant obstacles I encounter when coaching certain clients—the habit of non-allowance.

Most of us don’t realize that “allowing” is a skill and a practice. We understand controlling, chasing, and generally “going after it”—the “it” being happiness and whatever else we desire.

But we are not encouraged to learn or taught how to allow joy, ease, and blessings into our lives. This is especially true if we are over-achievers and believe anything worthy must be hard-earned, fought for, and difficult to achieve.

But allowance is a learned behavior, and when we engage in an ongoing practice or discipline that teaches us how to be present to what is—how to allow rather than achieve, chase, or pursue—the whole feeling of our life changes. And in the process, we remove one of the five regrets from our future.

I can practically hear you yelling at me, “But HOW??”

Before I share some practices I’ve found helpful in cultivating allowance, let me share the primary obstacle that keeps us from considering this beautiful path—in other words, even if I share a hundred ways we can master the art of allowance, none of them will work if we don’t remove the chief obstacle to achieving it.

And that obstacle is our fear of becoming complacent—of losing our edge. Know this. To allow ourselves to be happier does not make us less ambitious. It doesn’t turn us into Cheeto-eating, Netflix-binging laggards. 

Becoming someone who lets/allows themselves to be happier has nothing to do with becoming complacent. But our mind doesn’t believe we can be both in a place of allowance and ambition. Our mind tells us that these two desires are in opposition.

Don’t believe everything you think is more than the title of a book. It’s a life-changing practice, and you can begin it at any stage of life.  

The most successful people I know are unapologetically (although quietly) ambitious, and they achieve their goals through ease, flow, and allowance rather than hard-knuckling their way through life. On the outside, they often present as being lucky. On the inside, they consistently practice the four paths to allowance.

These folks will not die with the regret of not allowing themselves to be happier.

This is my list of the four ways we don’t allow ourselves to be happier, followed by the antidote to each. As always, the headlines and the information does not lead to transformation. Only a committed practice will achieve that goal, but awareness is a solid start, so let’s go!

1. Worry

Worry is the greatest obstacle to allowance. Worry feels productive, helpful, and empathetic. In actual fact, it’s the least useful and often the most destructive emotion we can indulge in. I call it an indulgence because we have control over its reach and can teach ourselves to release the habit.

The antidote to worry is learning to keep your mind in the present moment. It’s impossible to surrender to incessant worrying (different from concern) when we are not allowing our minds to gallop into an unknown and seemingly frightening future. Stop using the most incredible gift–your imagination—to create negative scenarios, most of which will never come true.

2. Dogma

Dogma is the practice of “shoulding” on yourself. In the past, dogma mainly belonged to the world of religion, but now it’s everywhere. So many of us are afraid to speak our truth for fear of being canceled or judged by people whose opinions we care about.

The antidote to dogma is curiosity. Seeing the world in black and white is almost impossible when we allow our curiosity to open our world views. We can still have deep conviction and commitment to our beliefs but not be dogmatic with ourselves and others. Oh, and it helps to stop people-pleasing and instead figure out who your people are. Hint: It’s not everyone!

3. Toxic Productivity

Toxic productivity is best displayed by our addiction to speeding through life and checking off boxes without taking the necessary time to assess whether we are moving in the right direction and if the boxes we’re checking have any meaning in the big picture of our lives.

The antidote to toxic productivity is mastering selectivity. Most people want to increase their productivity so they can spend less time on the task. But before you worry about being more productive, think about being more selective. 

What is it that you genuinely want to do? Here, I’m not denying the existence of specific daily tasks that need to get done for our lives to function. I’m talking about the many “other” things we do that, if we were honest, we’d recognize are not aligned with our life goals.

To be selective is to direct our energy toward getting to the bottom of how to start what we want to do rather than obsessing about how to shorten the things we don’t wish to do.

4. Assuming Malevolent Intent 

Assuming malevolent intent is arguably the greatest obstacle to our ability to allow positive emotions in our lives. Psychologists call it the hostile attribution bias, and it’s the epidemic of our times. If your bias is assigning hostile intent to the other person every time something you deem unacceptable happens, check yourself. Could there be a more kind, generous, and understandable reason for the negative event? Believing so does not make you naive. It makes you a person others and yourself want to be around.  

The antidote to this life-sucking mindset is believing Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Photo: Sketchplanations

Every single one of us can do something thoughtless and stupid. It’s called being human. But almost no relationship recovers from the assumptions that the other side is evil, malicious, or intentionally unkind.

Change this mindset, and you’re a giant step closer to removing the dam that has stopped the flow of happiness into your life.

Allow it!