Richard Bandler: Most people are looking for happiness like they’re going to get there – like you fall into it and float around for the rest of your life and happy is an adverb. 
One happily goes to the store, one happily discusses things with their wife, one happily looks at their children’s progress in life… Happiness is more of a state of consciousness. The people who seem to be happier seem to have certain characteristics. In my book, The Secrets of Being Happy, we list all the things that define what makes being happy worthwhile: you live longer, you heal from injury faster, you get over operations and heal more thoroughly, you live longer, your relationships are better, the list goes on and on. They’ve studied it scientifically. Of course, those are social scientists which I don’t necessarily trust, but even Western medicine has now looked at the difference in longevity and even at how happier people have an easier time quitting smoking and losing weight, so that the benefits of being happy everybody knows about.
Now, the procedures that you need to do in order to become a happier person I outline in my book, and they’re quite extensive, but they boil down to simple things, like you need to have a purpose which is achievable.
It’s one thing to say you want to be happy and that you want to lose weight. It’s another to say “I’m going go to the gym 80 times in three months”, so that tomorrow when you’ve gone once you can go 79 the next time, 78 and feel a little better as the number decreases, because most people they get all worked up and then they run out of steam.
Happy people seem to get more of sense of a satisfaction the closer they get to a goal and they don’t set insurmountable goals. It’s one thing to say I want to run a big corporation, I want to be a millionaire, I want to own a boat – than to lay out the pieces that it takes to get there and every time you get closer to achieving a piece feeling a little better.
I believe this is because it relates to our neurology, and our neurology is designed when you look at a glass and you want to drink a glass of water. When your hand starts moving it moves slower but the closer you get to glass, the more it hones in on the target, the faster your hand moves, till the moment it touches then all those muscles release and you switch another set of muscles and it lifts off slower than it does to the moment it gets to your lips.
Our neurology is designed to increase speed and accuracy the closer you get. It has a very non-linear relationship. When you organise your thoughts that way and you target this and you start moving towards it and feeling better the closer you get it releases endorphins and people become happier and happiness has to do with your serotonin levels, your endorphin levels, and more importantly, the by-products of those, which is oxytocin.
People who have a mission in life have a tendency that they have a mission statement: !I’m going to accomplish these big things, now here’s a chunk of it” – and the more they get each chunk done the better they are. It doesn’t matter whether those goals are raising really happy kids or whether those goals are to own a home and take care of it, that way every time you start to mow the lawn, as the lawn diminishes and gets done, you get to feel good about your overall goal. If you read a book and you get all excited and you read the first page and then you’re less excited and less excited, you never finish the book. As the pages go by you look and go “239 pages” and you start reading through and as the numbers get higher and the number left decreases, you feel better, you’ll finish the book.
This is how our neurology is structured.
The other thing is to make clear ideas in success and move towards them rather than just moving away from. “I don’t want to be fat” is different than “I want to be in shape”, and the more people set these positive goals.
I lay out in my book all these exercises. When people come to one of my seminars they come to a prep course for seven days and not only are they learning NLP techniques, I’m making sure that, for seven days, they practise feeling good, because most people are just not good at it. And while I lecture to them I make sure they stay happy, I’m a hypnotist, that’s pretty easy to do.
All the exercises are designed to make you enjoy yourself while you’re doing things and while you’re solving problems and people have come up to me at the end of seminar and go “it’s the best week of my life”. Now, to me, I’m thinking “that’s a statement on their life, isn’t that a shame” but now that they’ve had a good week they know what one is like so now it’s easier for them to go “I want more weeks like this, I want more days like this and I want more moments like that”.
The more you get used to feeling good it’s just like riding a bicycle, the better you get at it.
