How to Have The Happiest Year of Your Life Part 2

Happiness and Fulfillment through Social Contacts for Both the Introvert and the Extrovert

By Neal Griebling
Chaplain & Career Coach
Principal, Future Design Studio, Inc.

Neal is the director of Future Design Studios, a powerful program for those who want to find and follow their bliss.

I am delighted Dr. Nancy Mramor has asked me to contribute to her How to Have the Happiest Year of Your Life. We live in chaotic, challenging times. Without innovative, empowering approaches to nurturing our inner and outer selves, we can be overwhelmed by the wars, terrorism, global economic recessions and natural disasters that encompass so much of media news coverage and subsequently engage our attention. Dr. Mramor’s work is a wonderful counterweight to the widespread unhappiness caused by such phenomenon.

I must confess at the outset that I am not a researcher. I am professionally certified as a Life and Career Coach, a Zen Chaplain, and a Constructive Living Instructor. As a Life and Career Coach, I use a model I call Life-Work Discovery to help individuals identify and find work they love. As a chaplain, I focus on the needs of the dying and their families, training volunteers to become compassionate companions to those individuals nearing the end of their lives. As a Constructive Living Instructor, I teach individuals how to fully accept their thoughts and feelings, take purposeful action to reach their goals, and to cultivate gratitude for how the universe and all sentient beings support them in their daily lives. I have had my practice for 10 years and have undoubtedly learned as much or more from my clients as I have given to them. Nevertheless, I believe I can offer you, the reader, insights I have gained in my work with my clients as well as some holistic approaches to finding both happiness and fulfillment, for as we shall see, they are by no means identical.

One of the things that I must determine in order to support individuals in finding happiness is to identify what they really want out of their lives and careers.  In this mon’th’s E-zine, Nancy Mramor, Ph.D. and Jennifer Antkowiak have been talking about the ways in which social connections make people happy. As a matter of fact, the development of social connections is one of the primary tools for happiness that research has discovered.  But I believe that there are individual differences that might change the way that social contacts affect different people, particularly introverts and extroverts, who each have very different social needs.  To this end, I will examine happiness and then will take a look at how each of these two types of people develop social contacts.

So What is Happiness?

Before writing this article, I’ve been letting my fingers trip through the second concise edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary. In it happiness is defined as “the state of feeling pleasure, joy.”

The great Japanese psychotherapist Shoma Morita (1874 – 1938) was fascinated by a particular type of neurotic individual who was morbidly self-absorbed, unable to take action and who suffered from chronic anxiety. Morita showed that very little is under our direct control: the weather, the movement of the stock market, the thoughts and feelings of others, the life expectancies of our loved ones and our selves.

Morita went on to demonstrate that our initial thoughts and feelings are not within our control: they are like clouds that arise, pass through the sky and disappear. Joy, despair, elation, depression, anger, anxiety are all like this. Happiness, too, is a feeling. We do not experience continuous happiness or continuous anger.

What, then is within our control? Morita tells us it is our behavior. He taught us to fully accept our thoughts and feelings, especially our negative thoughts and feelings. They are part and parcel of our humanity. However, he stressed the importance of taking action and “getting done what needs to be done when it needs to be done.” (The ToDo Institute’s Concise, Little Guide to Getting Things Done edited by Gregg Krech and Linda Anderson Krech, p.2).

Happiness & Fulfillment

In my work with my clients I point out some basic differences between happiness and fulfillment. My Webster’s defines fulfillment as “the state of realizing one’s ambitions or potential.” While happiness and fulfillment are most definitely related, they are not the same thing. Happiness is feeling driven. Fulfillment is action driven.

Too often we yearn for happiness, but fail to recognize the role we must play if we are to experience more moments of happiness. Fulfillment arises from within; it emerges from an understanding of our true nature; it is nurtured through the actions we take to realize our fullest potential. In looking inward, we experience an abiding sense of satisfaction when we take action to realize fulfillment. You must embrace your own experience to determine whether fulfillment is more substantial or longer lasting, than happiness. Perhaps, when all is said and done, as words they are both fingers pointing to the same moon.

Personality Type

“I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me.
That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.” – Please Understand Me, Character & Temperament Types, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates

Since I established my coaching practice, I have been using the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to determine the personality type of my various clients. I don’t consider the findings of this instrument to be holy scripture, but it has proven to be a valuable tool to help me better know and understand my clients.

In the first decades of the 20th century many psychology pioneers stressed man’s fundamental likenesses. Freud posited the notion we are driven from within by Eros or pleasure, and what seem to be “higher” motives are merely disguised versions of Eros. Adler saw us all as seeking power. Fromm had us seek after Self. (Keirsey & Bates, p. 3.)

It was Jung who stressed that individuals are fundamentally different even though they all have the same archetypes to drive them from within. While Jung’s work was subsequently dismissed or ignored by later psychologists focusing on the dynamic or behavioral aspects of the species, it was revived in the 1950s by Isabel Meyers. Meyers and her mother, Katheryn Briggs subsequently developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which identified 16 different patterns or personality types.

The KeirseyTemperament Sorter is an abridged version of the more comprehensive Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. However, my clients and I have found it to be a very useful tool for self-understanding.

This instrument differentiates four pairs: Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I); Sensing (S) and Intuition (N); Thinking (T) and Feeling (F); and Judging (J) and Perceiving (P). Most individuals completing the 70-item Temperament Sorter will wind up with one of sixteen four-letter types, eg. INFJ. Some individuals will have a mixed type; that, is they will have equal scores for Sensing and Intuition, for example. Thus the Temperament Sorter actually offers 32 mixed types in addition to the 16 unmixed scores.

Dr. Mramor is exploring how social connections bring happiness and how much connection is enough and how much is too much. She has asked me to comment on how extroversion and introversion impact on the making of social connections. I can speak of my experience with both introverts and extroverts, and how they have been able to establish social connections in their search to find meaning in their lives and careers.

Extraversion vs. Introversion

Let’s be clear from the outset: one can be extraverted to some degree as well as introverted to some degree. The question is a matter of “tilt” or preference. Furthermore, we do not know conclusively whether these preferences are “inborn” or develop through circumstance in infancy and are further developed in the aging process.

In general, we can say that extraverts are energized by social contacts while introverts feel depleted by social contacts. Extraverts thrive at parties and often want “to party” after the party has ended. Introverts may attend the party and enjoy themselves up to a point, but leave early, exhausted.

Extraverts are social and actively seek out people. Introverts are  territorial and seek inner and outer space (environments) where they can reflect and pursue solitary activities. Extraverts cultivate wide ranging relationships with many people. Introverts develop deep relationships with a limited number of people. (Keirsey & Bates, pp. 15 – 16.) What is vital, I believe, is the quality of the relationships that individuals establish. Meyers says extraverts comprise 75 percent of the general population, with introverts forming 25 percent.

Western culture in general and contemporary American society in particular seem to place a greater emphasis on the outgoing, social, community-seeking individual over his more private, inner-directed fellow.

However, my experience as a life and career coach tells me there are other factors, perhaps even more important factors, than extraversion and introversion, which determine whether individuals experience happiness and fulfillment.

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• Introduction
• Dr Nancy's RxTV
• To Find Happiness, Going it Alone is Not the Way to Go!
• Happiness and Fulfillment through Social Contacts for Both the Introvert and the Extrovert
• List of Resources
• Coming Events
• Sign Up Now for the Happiness E-Zine