EP 290 – How Do You Define Happiness?
A recent trip to Hawaii afforded me the opportunity to reflect on a question that my significant other Amy asked me: when was the last time that you were happy?
In this episode of Bullpen Sessions, I share how swimming in waterfalls and eating raw cacao beans with Maris, the local tour guide, helped me remember that happiness isn’t tied to sales figures and revenue numbers, but in the simple things.
Am I suggesting that you should quit your job and move to Hawaii to live off the grid like Maris? Not necessarily, but I share two important lessons I learned that have helped me embrace the present, even if it’s not where I want to be yet.
Resources:
- Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyneary/
- Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy_neary/
Video Transcript:
This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
Hey, hey, welcome back to Bullpen Sessions. My name is Andy Neary, and this is episode 290. In this episode, you are going to answer the question, how do you define happiness? In this episode, I am sharing my recent adventure to the big Island of Hawaii and how and then encounter with a man named Maris in the YPO Valley of the Big Island.
It shifted my perspective on how I define happiness. You see, I have to admit, I’ve been a little crabby lately. As we continue to focus on growing complete game consulting, I have been finding myself, resenting the journey a little bit and not having as much of a enjoyment in the process as I should. And having my best significant other, Amy, look me in the face and say, hey man, when was the last time you were happy?
And it really, really forced me to get real with where I’m going on things. And so I wanted to share this with you today, share my thoughts on how I am shifting my perspective on how to define happiness. And I think you can do the same for you. So by tuning into today’s episode, you are going to learn really what it means to be happy.
You are going to be given an exercise that might help you realize you’re already living a life of happiness. And I know it changed my perspective. So I can’t wait to have you here about my journey to Hawaii, about the man we call marriage who lives with life’s simplicities, and what you can do to redefine the way you bring happiness to your life.
So let’s tune in. I can’t wait for you to to listen to today’s episode. And here we go. Hey, hey, welcome to the bullpen Sessions Podcast, a podcast for driven insurance professionals who are looking to reach their full potential in their insurance careers. This is the place where we help motivated insurance professionals build the right mindset and tools, create more credibility with their target prospects.
I’m your host, Andy Neary, former professional athlete turned insurance advisor. Each week, you will learn tips and strategies to help you execute a clear prospecting game plan every single week. Clarity creates action when you’re clear, you’re confident. When you’re confident and consistent. When you’re consistent, you are unstoppable. All right, let’s dive into today’s episode. And hey, welcome back to Bullpen Sessions.
All right I am excited for this episode because today I’m going to do a little reflecting in this episode. I am reflecting on a recent trip Amy and I took to Hawaii, and how an encounter with a Hawaiian local completely shifted my perspective on how I define happiness. And I’m going to help you do the same today. If you could use that same adjustment.
I’m excited with this episode because this is on the heels of Amy taking a week off, which is very unusual for me. and we had a chance to go to spend a week on the Big Island of Hawaii. Amy has a former dentist she works for that has now opened a practice on the Big Island. So we got a chance to go spend some time at the beach and spend a few days with him.
And spending time with Alex gave us, a little feel for what it’s like to be a local on the island. So we got the local flavor of living on the island, which was a really amazing adventure, three day adventure. And there’s one specific moment of this adventure I really want to share with you today, because the reason I really wanted to talk about this, this topic of how you define happiness is, I got to be honest with you, over the past 4 or 5 months, I really haven’t been enjoying the process and it has nothing to do with what I do.
It’s I was just getting stuck in the weeds, caught in the minutia of what we’re doing. You know, as we continue to build complete game consulting, we are growing at a very rapid pace. I am in the position right now where we are scaling more horizontally than we are vertically. Meaning now it’s time to continue to bring on more people to the team, which means you have to give up a little profit to do so so that you can scale faster in the future.
And so yeah, it’s been quite the journey over the last six months, and I have caught myself really not enjoying the process, if I’m being honest with you. And I had that pivotal moment prior to heading to Hawaii, where I was continuously showing up every day for Amy Crabby. when she would ask me how I’m doing, it was just the typical, oh, I am so busy or I’m so overwhelmed.
And one day she looked at me and she decided to call me out. And when I gave her one of my candid answers of I’m too busy or I’m just overwhelmed, she said, let me ask you something. What was the last time you were happy?
And I got to be honest, that. That question punched me in the stomach.
Because whether it caught me at the right moment or not, or the way she said it to me, I realized when the when she said it, it it made me just stop. And it was like all the air of anxiety and stress and everything I’ve been dealing with for the past few weeks just went out of me. And in that moment, I realized that I have been so focused on scaling complete game consulting that I’m forgetting to enjoy the process of growing it.
And we are a team that moves fast. you can go ask my employee, Amy, and go ask Chris. We move fast, and I’ve found myself lately hopping from one goal to the next, one priority to the next, never taking time to celebrate the small wins along the journey. And I know I talk about this stuff sometimes on LinkedIn, and I have to be honest, I’m not living it.
I have been living it lately. And so when Amy asked me, when was the last time you were happy, I realized she’s right. When was the last time I really was enthusiastic about what I was doing? And in that moment, I also realized that I’ve been quite crabby and that was no fun to be around. And it’s been really interesting lately.
But again, if I’m being honest with you, it’s kind of been like an out-of-body experience where I realize I’m crabby or I realize I’m pessimistic and I can actually watch myself be pessimistic, and it’s like, what the hell is going on? And I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that. I wanted to share this with you, because maybe you’ve had a very similar experience where you find yourself maybe edging on the on the side of pessimism, or you’re more irritable or crabby than you normally are and you’re like, the heck’s going on?
Like I said, it’s like an out-of-body experience, right? And it was kind of laughable. We had a moment in Hawaii. Amy and I were driving the car, and I had one of those moments in Hawaii where I was getting irritable and she asked, what’s going on? How are you feeling? And I’m like, I’m mad right now because I’m mad.
It’s that realization of where I’m watching myself, like I said, like I’m having an out-of-body experience and I am mad and I don’t know why, but now I’m mad that the fact I am mad, so I share all this, with this being said that, you know. There were a couple moments. In Hawaii that really shifted my perspective.
And and what was happening all the way up to the trip to Hawaii is I wasn’t defining what made me happy. Right? Growing a business make I thought would make me happy. Making more money I thought would make me happy. Right. I and I am somebody I share this as somebody who has been guilty of tying his happiness and his self-worth to external things.
So when I was a picture, my happiness and my self-worth were often tied to the scoreboard. If I was pitching well, my era was good, my win loss record was good, I was feeling good. If I wasn’t pitching very well, my era was high. My my win loss record reflected a losing season. I would let it negatively impact my view of myself.
I did the same in business. I just moved the sports scoreboard to the business scoreboard. Right? If I was growing revenue, I was making sales. I felt good. I would often tie my worth to my client’s happiness. So I can remember being an account exact early in my career, and when all my clients were happy and there was no problems, I felt good.
But the second I’d have a client or two who was upset about something, or you’re irritated at our agency, I would let it impact my image of myself. I tie I’ve been. I’ve been guilty of tying my self-worth and my image of myself to the relationship. Simon. Right. It’s. I have been one who has just really never been good at defining what is happiness.
And so we go to Hawaii and we spend the first four days at a Airbnb on the beach, beautiful condo overlooking the water. Every night, go to bed sitting on the deck, the sun setting over the ocean. It was just absolutely stunning. And the last three days we headed north to the north side of the island that the big island of Hawaii and then spent three days with Alex.
And if you’re unfamiliar with Hawaii, the Big Island, it is a very different ecosystem on one side to the other. The West Coast is looks a little desert, like. You’ve got the volcanic rock. It’s where all the beaches and the condos and the resorts are, because that side of the island is always sunny. And then you go to the north side, and it’s more like a rainforest, where it often rains.
You still get a lot of sun, but you can get a rain shower every day and it’s a lot greener, a lot more lush. And if you look at a Google image from space of the Island, you can literally see where the divide is between the green and the brown of the island. It’s really, really interesting. So last three days we’re hanging out with Alex, and the first day he decides he’s going to take us into the YPO Valley.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar, I had no clue about this. YPO Valley is a unbelievable rainforest on the north side of the island. when you go down in the valley, it kind of reminds you of a scene from, like, avatar or something. And the island only allows locals to go down into the valley. And that that was a decision they made after Covid.
before Covid, it was kind of getting overrun with tourists. So they made the decision that after Covid, it was their chance to kind of shuffle, shuffle the tourists out of there. And now moving forward, only locals are able to go down in this valley. So because Alex lives on the island, he was able to take us down the valley and first of all, you go down this road that has a 25% grade.
It is kind of a hairy drive to get down into the valley. But here’s what the point I’m trying to make. The reason we were going down into the valley is we were spending the afternoon with a friend of Alex’s named Amyris, and Marris lives down in this lush valley rainforest, and he lives in a shack, for lack of a better description, with no electricity.
And he bathes in the river. He washes his clothes in the river. he is connected to the real world with an iPad and things like that. But for the lack for the for for for most intents and purposes, he is cut off from the world. He lives off grid, down in this valley. In fact, when he has to fly off the island, he does go back to the mainland once a while.
He will hitchhike to the airport. So we got to spend the day with Maris. And the thing I quickly realized into our time with him is, this is one happy man. This man has no electricity. He literally pays and washes his clothes in the river. He lives off the land for the most part. And this guy couldn’t be happier.
And we sat down in his backyard, which is the valley first and foremost. He takes us on a hike. We go on a hike and it’s about a half a mile, three quarters of a mile hike up to this waterfall. And this waterfall has three levels. It’s it’s stunning. Like you see it way up, comes down to a pool, then down to another pool, and then a third waterfall down to the bottom pool.
And we climb up to the third pool and go swimming in it and it’s crystal clear water. It was again absolutely stunning. Well, that when that hike was done, we came back to his commode, his his hut, his is shack and we spent the afternoon hanging out in the backyard. Now, a specific moment I remember from this hike going up to the waterfall is on the way up.
Marris grabbed a cocoa bean from one of the cocoa trees in his yard, and he cracked it open, and he gave it to Amy and I to eat on the hike. It’s literally we’re eating raw cacao beans out of a, cacao pod. And I remember on the way back after swimming in the waterfall, Amigos, how’s it going?
And I said, I don’t know, I just swam in a waterfall and now I’m eating raw cocoa beans out of a cacao pod in the middle of a rainforest. Could life get any better? But after spending that afternoon with Meris. It really gave me a perspective shift that I didn’t realize I was going to have. And that was how difficult we make happiness, right?
You think about living in the in the world we live in on the mainland, where we get pissed off when our Starbucks coffee isn’t ready in time and we get so caught up in the dramas of life and chasing this goal to the next. And oh, I can’t meet with you unless we we schedule time three weeks from now because I’m so busy that we have completely lost how we define happiness.
And I know I have myself have been guilty of that, but sitting in that backyard looking up at this rainforest, Maris calls his backyard palm trees bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. You got these flowers bigger than my head. Cacao trees. Like this man just freaking loves life. And he has to be present every single day because he really has no other distractions.
And it was in that moment I made a commitment to myself that I am going to redefine happiness. This is an opportunity spending a day with him to redefine what happiness means to me. And the second thing I did that that story number one, the second thing I did while we were spending the week on the island is Amy asked me to sit down and make a list of all the things that make me happy.
And so I sat down, grabbed, took my notebook out, and I started making a list, and I was rattling off things like, what makes me happy? Paddleboarding, exercising, eating healthy, playing golf. Spending an early morning before the sun gets up, drinking a cup of coffee. All these little things, all these hobbies and rituals and events that just make me happy, that bring me happiness.
I made a list. It probably had a good dozen or 15 things on this list. And when I got done writing, making the list, I looked down at it and I read it through about 3 or 4 times, and then it hit me.
Isn’t it interesting that everything I just put on this list, I’m already doing?
Every single piece, every single hobby, ritual, event, moment. Things that bring me joy I am actually doing in my life today. On the weekends, we go out paddleboarding. On the weekends I play golf with my dad. Once in a while, I exercise every day. I eat healthy, all the things that make me happy. I’m already doing so how in the world can I not be happy?
And after making this list, it hit me. Dude, you are already living a life that brings you happiness. What’s your problem? And so I wanted to share this with you today because I want to pose the question to you. How do you define happiness? Is it the accumulation of wealth? Is it the accumulation of material items? Do you like flexing?
Having a Lambo makes you feel like you are happy. Do you find yourself constantly chasing bigger, better goals, sacrificing your happiness today because you’re getting ready for a happier tomorrow? So what? I’ve been guilty of my friend. That’s why I share this information and spending that afternoon with us. Making that list of what brings me joy made me realize how simple life can be.
This is why we moved back to Wisconsin. I love getting in my car and driving the five minutes downtown. Heck, I could walk downtown if I wanted to to have a cup of coffee with Mom and Dad on a Saturday afternoon or a Saturday morning, getting in the car and driving 15 minutes to a near, to a golf course nearby to play around with my dad, getting in the car, putting the paddleboard on the roof, and driving literally five minutes to our southwest to go paddle board on crystal clear Silver Lake.
I’m doing it already. And you know what? I realized to some, the way Amy and I live our life might be really boring because, God, it looks all the same every day.
Just like it did for us every day for us in that valley would look the same and it might look boring to people. He doesn’t have electricity. He’s got to go outside to go to the bathroom, to shower and to wash his clothes. Man, how could somebody live that life? But it’s in that simplicity that he finds happiness, that he finds joy.
In fact, I’d argue every day for him is an adventure.
Because when you live without life’s necessities, you don’t look ahead. You only have today. And that’s what I want to leave you with today. I don’t know if this message hit you on the right day, hit you from the right angle, but I know for the last few weeks, I have been terrible at defining what happiness is in my life.
I’ve been crabby. I’ve been so focused on being overwhelmed, being busy that I have not been enjoying the process. I’m so thankful. Amy asked me, when was the last time you were happy? And the timing of it could not have been better. Having her ask that right before we left for Hawaii, because it was in Hawaii where I encountered Marissa, I met her bears and I spent an afternoon in his backyard.
He calls the rainforest. It’s in Hawaii. I made that list of the things that bring me joy, and it’s Hawaii that has me coming back to the mainland with a shifted perspective on how I’m going to define happiness. Because I realize coming back here, I’m already doing everything that makes me happy. So what I want you to do today, after listening to this episode, is I want you to sit down, and I want you to make a list of the things that make you happy.
Because you just might realize, like me, you’re already doing them. So I hope this episode helps today. Enjoy the journey. I know you’re on the chase to get bigger, get better, set loftier goals. I love all of that. I’m all about consistency, all about holding yourself accountable. But at the end of the day, I don’t want you to forget to enjoy where you are at today.
Celebrate the small wins. Be where your feet are, as they say. And just focus on enjoying what you’re doing and living a life full of happiness. Do the things that bring you joy and they can be found in the most simple of things. Just like Mary’s living in a rainforest with no electricity, you too can find happiness and simplicity.
So I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be well. Go just sit down and make that list of all the things that bring you joy. And I promise you will shift your perspective on what it means to be happy, be good. That’s all we got for today’s episode of the Bullpen Sessions podcast. One thing that would really help us both and other new potential listeners, is for you to rate this show and leave a comment in iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you tune in to listen to the show.
Also, make sure to link up with us at Complete Game consulting.com on social media and please share this podcast with anyone who you think might enjoy it. Until next time, remember. Clarity creates confidence. Confidence creates consistency. Consistency makes you unstoppable.