The most important skill you will ever have is not taught in education. It’s not taught in middle school. It’s not taught in universities. There is no professor majoring in this skill. There are no government policies that promote the wide spread use of this skill. You won’t get a grant for funding the development in this skill. Yet this very skill can change the world and anyone can master it.
Some don’t even know or realize what the most important skill there is to learn is. Do you?
The most important skill on earth, that you will ever master, is simply the skill of feeling good. The highest expression of this skill, known to select groups of people (they’re called children) and few adults, is the skill of feeling good without good reason at all!
There are very few people that wake up and ask themselves the question “How can I feel as good as possible?”. “How can I improve my ability and capacity to feel good?”. It’s almost unheard of. To some it will sound like unrealistic hedonism, which is a term often ascribed to people that spend an inappropriate amount of time seeking pleasure. But, let’s explore why this skill is indeed, the most important skill you can ever master.
credit: Dawn Ashley Feeling Good for No Reason At All
When people, society, your mother, your religion talk about virtues you ‘should’ have, you will find among the long list, things like being respectful, grateful, loving, truthful, generous, giving and compassionate. On the other side of the list are the things we don’t want people to do, things like lying, stealing, killing, hurting and so on. While these virtues are indeed recommendable guidelines, having these as rules that need to be enforced by social pressure is almost absurd when you think about it.
If you look at societies recommended virtues, like being loving, truthful and generous, they are effortless effects of feeling good. Sure you can act generous when you feel bad, but often it will seem like a strain and in better cases it will lead you to feel better. But when you feel good, generosity comes easy! Likewise, you don’t have to exercise will power or effort to express gratitude, when you are feeling good. At the same time, looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, to things like lying, stealing and harming people, they are the result of not feeling good. So how come we as a society don’t place a higher emphasis on the skill of feeling good?
To me it seems we get so caught up in controlling and judging people based on these virtues. And ironically we do it because in some sense, we want to maintain feeling good. But you don’t feel good punishing people when they harm others. You don’t even feel good by saying to someone ‘be grateful’ when they are annoyed, nor would you feel better if someone asked you to be loving when you’re upset. So it’s almost a no-brainer: asking other people to act in certain ways does not guarantee you’ll feel good. Nor will it make other people feel better, so it doesn’t decrease the likelihood of doing things we don’t like.
What if we would make feeling good our top priority? Would the world economy collapse? Would our relationships fall apart? Would anything ever get done?
Just wonder, how many people did you insult, hit or cheat on when you were feeling good about yourself and in a state of bliss?
Chances are you never have.
If people were highly skilled at feeling good, violent acts would diminish. If we stopped asking people how to behave in order for us to feel good, there wouldn’t be as many hostilities between groups as there are in today’s world. You can’t feel good and bad at the same time. Conflicts arise from feeling bad about something. So, although it sounds almost too simplistic, being able to feel good will reduce conflict. The problem is people get into conflict looking to feel good, thinking that if only the other party adjusts their ways, they will feel good. That is describing the pitfall in a nutshell.
Feeling good for no good reason is a skill. But people don’t look at it that way do they? We take it for granted. It’s almost like reasons need to supplied to feel good and then it happens automatically. So circumstances start to dictate when and how long we feel good.
Ever caught yourself laughing out loud and then thinking: “I haven’t laughed the whole day until now”. For some it might be days. For some even weeks.
Children have mastered the art of feeling good for no ‘good’ reason. They will laugh at anything. Why do we lose this natural inclination to feeling good? It is about time we start feeling good for no reason at all. That is the best feeling of all. And when you get good at this, you will make better decisions in your life. Your life will look better. People will even start liking you more.
Feeling good gets better with practice.
When you see the art of feeling good as a skill, you start to appreciate the value of practicing and expanding on your capacity to feel good. Because the more you do something, the better you get at it. The better you generally feel, the better your decisions will be, the better your life will become. So ask yourself,
If feeling good really is a skill, how skilled are you? And how can you improve your skill?
Peter – I loved this article. Yes, feeling good is a skill, one that I myself am going to master in this lifetime. You are an excellent writer and made some really good points here. Thank you for giving me something to really think about this morning as I start my day.
Veronica
Love this Peter! I can refer my clients to this article.
~ the joycounselor
I felt good reading this! Actually, I’ve been working on this principle this past few months. Great article.
Peter, usually I need a little musical help–James Brown, I Feel Good!