The Spark

When I talk to people for the first time, especially in the context of coaching, I ask a simple question: What makes you happy? You may or may not be surprised that this simple question stumps many people.

People usually come to talk to me because they’re unhappy or not satisfied with the story they are telling themselves about their life at the moment. When you’re caught deeply in your unsatisfied story, the thoughts in your head can be almost entirely negative, critical, or downright abusive.

When someone then asks, “what makes you happy?” it creates a dissonant sound in your head. For a moment or two, it doesn’t compute.

But this simple question cuts to the core of who you are and how you can be successful.

It’s not that we need to be happy all the time - though that would be nice. What we do need is to know what joy feels like. We need to resonate with the deep feeling of joy that enables happiness.

There’s something extremely important there for us when we’re setting out on the adventure of a consciously lived life. There is something vital in that feeling that can guide us to our work—the work that opens a portal to something deep and true for us in our lives.

Recognizing what makes us happy—or, to be more specific, resonating with the fundamental feeling of aliveness—awakened, engaged, presence—is crucial to ground us in our efforts, get a handle on the feelings of chaos and disorder, and undermine the overwhelm that can be so debilitating.

There is energy in the system, in your body, that is available to you when you’re connected to what is most true for you. That energy is quite often blocked, diminished, and can even feel extinguished (though it never is) when you stray too far from it.

When you lose connection to the signal—that which brings your curiosity and vitality to the surface and makes you feel ‘happy’—you can feel lost, disoriented, and listless. It becomes impossible to handle all that is being thrown at you in your work and your life. You truly become overwhelmed and may collapse under the pressure.

What’s worse (if anything could be worse than being flattened by the weight of your world), your thoughts, which tell you the story of who you are, turn dark. You lose the ability to distinguish between the story and reality. Even if you’ve practiced the steps to outsmart your decision-maker, even if you at one point were able to undermine your overwhelm, you can still fall prey to the tyranny of negativity in your head.

So now I ask, “What makes you happy?”

Does that illuminate the signal?

Does it ignite the spark within you?

Or does it sound like something said from a great distance, where you can barely make out the words?