Happiness Is Not A Goal, Nor Is It An End State: It’s A Way Of Being
Hacking Happiness is about giving yourself permission to ride the wave of every emotion that life throws at you and know that you have the skills, support and resources to come out the other side a little better than you were before. Sounds great right? But you’re probably thinking “how do I do that and where do I begin?”
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I have spent years speaking to thousands around the globe about adapting for greater happiness… and every time I speak, I am asked the same question.
This recurring question set me on a personal mission to explore how I could use my experience, science and experimentation to develop a compass for other people (like you!) to hack their happiness.
It’s out of this drive that the Intentional Adaptability Quotient® was born.
Your Intentional Adaptability Quotient (IAQ®) is the measure of how skilled you are in making intentional change in a complex and uncertain environment that is evolving at speed.
It’s not about speeding up and squeezing more into an already full day (or brain); it’s actually about slowing down, creating the space to think and bring intention and meaning to the forefront of how you make decisions. When I couldn’t find anyone teaching a concept like this, I went out and created it.
The benefits of turning up the dial on your IAQ® can not only be profound but life-changing. Participants who have invested with me to amplify their IAQ® have shared that committing to this practice:
+ provides a compass to effectively navigate the complexity and uncertainty of exponential change
+ helps unlock potential they didn’t realise they had, enhancing creativity and innovation
+ enables deeper human connection and amplifies relationships
+ provides a feeling of empowerment and control over one’s life
+ enables greater fulfilment in the everyday
+ improves mental wellbeing and reduces feelings of anxiety
+ activates a mindset that challenges one to look at the world through a different lens
+ changes lives for the better (this is my favourite one)
Building your IAQ® muscle focuses on leveling up three key skills (the inner circle of the model) to enable greater clarity around what makes you happy and providing a framework for bringing more of it into the everyday.
Curious about your IAQ® score?
Building your skill in Focus is centred around enabling you to ditch distraction and create the space for more of what matters.
It’s about learning how to step away from the noise of busy and create the space to be, the space to think clearly, to determine what brings you joy, and experiment with behaviours that enable you to bring more of that into each day.
Courage is centred on teaching you how to shift your mindset around fear and failure. Rather than seeing fear and failure as barriers to change, we focus on using them to shape the change you seek. We don’t want to avoid fear: we want to feel it, understand where it shows up in our bodies and what triggers it, share it with others and use it as an opportunity for growth.
Curiosity is an innately human skill; we are born with it. However, the institutional constructs we push people through have significantly affected our ability to activate our curious being.
When I teach curiosity, I teach it as a state of being, not something you do in your spare time (of which people tell me they have none! Agree?). We experiment with how to be curious in each moment, how to have more curious conversations, and ask more curious questions than state opinions, because we know no-one learns anything by talking all the time.
Discover where your IAQ® muscle is at!
IAQ® is designed to develop self-sufficient perpetual learners who can reinvent themselves time and again off a foundation of meaning and knowledge of what makes them happy. You do this through the amplification of skills in the outer circle of our IAQ® model:
Self-Accountability is about learning how to focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. It’s about taking control of your mindset and behaviour in order to shape that 40% of your happiness that is within your sphere of influence.
Human Connection is about exploring how opportunity, mental wellbeing and happiness are amplified when we are more humanly connected.
Experimentation is about learning to get comfortable with trying new things that feel uncomfortable and even impossible. We learn and grow through experimentation, even if the experiments don’t work out as intended.
Reflection is about how, if we don’t take the time to reflect and ask ourselves what worked, what didn’t and what we’re going to do differently next time, do we adapt for the better?
