Creating your owner's manual for a happy life: Britt Reints at TEDxGrandviewAve

[Music] the time yet if saying hello to the Internet so just yeah oh wow man I thought this is gonna be so much cooler okay all right yeah we start that I didn't might need all my minutes okay so when I was 25 years old I had it all I was married to a gorgeous kind generous man who adored me I had two happy healthy beautiful children one boy one girl basically we were a living Kleenex commercial our entire extended family lived within about a two-hour radius of us which meant lots of Sunday dinners and free babysitting my best friend lived one block away from me and one block in the other direction was the church that we attended regularly I volunteered in that church we even had a savings account with money in it basically every single thing the experts say you have to have to be happy I had going for me and I was miserable everything looks so good on the outside but on the inside I had this as hole in me that I could never quite fill every Sunday when some sweet old lady would inevitably tap me on the shoulder and say you have such a lovely family I had this overwhelming urge to turn around and flash her drop an f-bomb or something you know something so that she could see that I was not lovely that I was a fraud do you know what that's like you know it's like to have everything look good on the outside but feel wrong on the inside to be doing every right and still not feel satisfied do you ever lay awake at night and think what that was wrong with me why can't I just be happy I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you what's wrong is that so many of us are trying to live the lives we think we're supposed to instead of the lives we were meant to how does this happen well it makes sense because we live in a world full of shoulds you know the Internet is flooded with one-size-fits-all advice daytime talk show host promises you life-changing answers in a five-minute segment books tell you lean in newspaper articles tell you opt out magazines tell you lose that baby fat you should you should you shouldn't it's so loud and so much and it doesn't even all agree and no wonder we're confused what if instead of a whole bunch of ill-fitting shoes you had an owner's manual something that was made just for you that you could literally open up and say oh okay this is the advice I should take this is what makes me happy this is the path that I should be on I'd be great right I want to show you today how to create that owner's manual in three steps step one okay step one stop shooting on yourself stop shooting on yourself remove the word should from your vocabulary and from your reason for making decisions the word should has nothing to do with you it's all about outside expectations think about it think about when you use the word should you know oh I should go to the gym I should probably work overtime I should really get down to my kids to school and volunteer for that fundraiser and the thing is there's nothing wrong with any of these actions you know going to the gym can be good working overtime can be great volunteering at fundraisers can be a really good thing but motivation matters and the work should is a big red flag saying hey you're not choosing this because of you you're not paying attention to what's in here you're listening to what's up there I remember the day I stopped shooting on myself it's about to be a very serious story don't laugh it's the day I told my husband that I wanted a divorce and I was terrified not of losing this 10-year long relationship but of what everybody else was going to say my in-laws would hate me my very Catholic grandmother would be very disappointed my parents were going to be ashamed but I just couldn't take it anymore you know I was just so overwhelmed by the outsides not matching the insights and by trying to do all the right things and being unhappy anyway and I just finally said enough I told my husband I didn't care who hated me and how horrible of a person I was I needed to be happy whatever that took and so I asked him to move out and then I called my mom and told her and then he called his parents and told them and then well then nothing really I mean I survived the world kept on spinning as if I hadn't just blown a huge hole in the middle of it and that was kind of amazing I mean I have just invested a whole lot of time and energy into trying to be a good person and it turns out no one really cared near as much as I thought and that was pretty freeing to discover that I could really really really screw up and the circle of people that were actually affected was relatively small funny thing about figuring out that you don't have to be married because you should I actually decided that I wanted to be married because hot gorgeous generous man oops so I called my husband up beg for his forgiveness told him how sorry I was tried to explain this whole philosophy and because he also happens to be one of the most forgiving people on the planet okay so he comes home we go to marriage counseling we you know put everything back together and it turns out being married not because you think you should but because you want to is a whole lot better so motivation matters right so stop with the shoulds every time you hear yourself say should just stop check yourself and say okay but why and if your reasons don't have to do with you and your values then drop it and move on alright so that's step one clear out the shoulds step to start a gratitude practice does anybody here know what a gratitude practice is okay so for those of you who don't a gratitude practice is it's just this you write down what you're grateful for it you make a list of what makes you happy and you do it like every day or something that's it and this is where I lose a lot of you I don't get it I mean how can something as simple as today I'm grateful for make any difference in your life first of all I want you to think about what you already know about writing things down I'm sure every single person here has heard that if you write down your goals you're like a gajillion times more likely to achieve them and maybe you know somebody who or you've done it yourself who has you know written down everything they're eating and kept track of their calories and you know that that makes it a heck of a lot more likely that you'll actually make permanent changes to your eating habits so we know writing stuff down works when you write down what you're grateful for or what you're happy that makes you happy you're basically just measuring or keeping track paying attention to what makes you happy that's all very well and good I actually started my gratitude practice as a marketing gimmick from my blog see after almost getting divorced and putting my life back together I thought the very next thing we should do is sell our house and all of our stuff and buy a little RV and and move into it and travel around the country because I mean obviously that's the most likely thing you do when you've survived a near divorce experience so alright that picture was not meant to be funny so I had this idea to help support us while we're traveling around and I was going to write have this weekly feature on my blog where I would write down once a week the best parts of my week I was going to call it happiness highlights right and so what would happen is that brands would pay to sponsor this weekly feature because who doesn't want to be associated with happiness highlights it was brilliant a genius idea you all are laughing so you know it failed completely turns out no one else gave a crap about what made me happy even my most loyal readers really yeah that's nice but you know what's next but it ended up changing my life now first of all yes it changed my life in exactly the way that you would expect you know I every week I know I have to write something for these happiness highlights so I'm going out into the world every looking for something to be happy about lo and behold you look for something to be happy about and you're going to find it so that's great made me more optimistic bringing my step all that good stuff but what was much more remarkable was that this list that I was creating gave me something that no amount of therapy or self-help books had ever been able to it gave me something specific to replace all of those shoulds because I was doing it completely by accident but what I was doing is actually creating this living breathing evolving list of what mattered to me right what made me happy what really lit me up and the more I did this the more I added to this list I could even start to see patterns because some things would show up over and over and over again and that showed me not only what I valued but what my priorities were like how all of those good things stacked up against each other I remember one time during this trip I had a writer's conference in New York City and I got to spend three days in the ritz-carlton hotel overlooking Central Park hanging out with all my writer friends and it was fantastic and New York City is like my favorite place in the world and so that was great and then at the end of the conference I flew home and home at that time where the RV was parked was Nashville Tennessee and I don't know what we did that week we had some mediocre barbecue I think and drove around trying to spot a country singer we'd recognized nothing like all that great and I don't know if you know this but an RV is no ritz-carlton and my apologies to Nashville but it's no New York City right but at the end of the week when I sat down to write that blog post it was that homecoming that jumped out at me and in that moment I realized that I love travel it I love it Julie makes me happy but nothing makes me happier than spending time with those three people and maybe I should have known that I'm sure there are some of you there thinking that a mother and a wife should now that family's a big deal but I didn't in fact not too long before that I had been pretty sure that what I needed was more time in places like New York City more travel and adventure but here it was in black and white so clear out this shoulds start building this list right next step do more of what makes you happy because really what good is an owner's manual if you don't read it and use it so my family and I after spending about 10 months on the road decided it was time to get back to real life our teenager was becoming a teenager and we needed he needed other teenagers and so we were gonna you know get back to being in real life but again that kind of freaked me out because I didn't have such a great track record with real life you know I was terrified that I had made all of these sacrifices and drag my family through therapy and done all of this and it was gonna have been for nothing so my husband and I made this very intentional decision that this time we were gonna build our lives around what we wanted what made us happy forget all of the what we should do so we literally pulled out my owners manual you know we I would go to my blog and look through the posts that were tagged with these happiness highlights and we looked for the patterns and we thought back we spend some time thinking about what we had learned about what we needed we it was very clear we loved being in the city we are city people we loved to be able to go to a baseball game and go to the theater and be outside and just you know soak up the vibe of people being out about we love that but more than anything family time you know so that meant for us that we had to be in a really affordable City because we didn't want to be spending 80 hours a week just to be working just to pay the bills so that led us to choose Pittsburgh Pennsylvania as our new home and everybody thought we were crazy and there's a fair fair point because Pittsburgh happens to be 12 our 12 or drive from anything in anybody we knew when we moved here we knew exactly one person but I had just spent a year building this relationship with my gut so I knew that I knew that I knew that this was the right decision for us 18 months later we no longer look like a commercial we rent instead of own our car is the oldest and least shiny on the block that savings account is not a thing anymore but man the four of us spend a lot of time playing cards at the kitchen table in that rented house and sometimes we get a catch a baseball game at the most beautiful Park in the country and sometimes I take my laptop to one of my favorite coffee houses in our neighborhood and I get a write about stories that mean something to me and sometimes I get to do stuff like this and this life is not easy but it's authentic it fits me this is what I had been looking for all of those years when I was trying to do the right thing so what's my point it's my point to tell you you know try to screw with your relationships sell all your stuff travel for a year or or even move to Pittsburgh now the point is I want to encourage you to start your owners manual number one because it will make you happy but also because I wholeheartedly believe that it will help you find your purpose my mom used to tell me Brit God doesn't give you ideas and dreams just to screw with you and I think she was right you know I think these things that light us up these little things that make you happy that's God or your gutter whatever you calling it sort of nudging you towards your purpose and your job is to follow it and unfortunately while you're following along on this path you can't always see where you're going but man it's so good to know that you're at least headed in the right direction and you're on your path so drop the shoulds listen to your gut figure out what makes you happy and do more of it and I challenge you to start today if you have a pen on you there's a couple of blank pages in the back of your program and you could start right now if you don't have a pen I give you permission to take out your smartphones and just write down one thing that has made you happy so far today it could be you got to have cookies for breakfast it could be you actually had a grown-up breakfast it could be the person you came here with whatever pick one thing that really is good about today and write it down and when you go home tonight before you go to bed I want you to pull out that list and just finish it up and when you do this just shut out the shit's just be honest not about what you think should have been the highlight of your day but what really was do it again tomorrow keep doing it and I promise you will figure out not only what makes you happy but what it was you are meant to create [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 61,508

Keywords: tedx, ted, United States Of America (Country), Happiness (Quotation Subject), tedx talks, tedx talk, TEDx, Pittsburgh (City/Town/Village), ted talks, ted x, ted talk

Id: 0AJbU3mZHMQ

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 03 2014