3 mind shifts for success and happiness

Nataly Kogan made every single mistake possible trying to find happiness. Those failures, though, eventually put her on the path to find genuine joy as well as financial success.

Kogan was born in the former Soviet Union. When she was 13, she came to the United States with her family. Between them, they had six suitcases and $600. On that meager start, Kogan built her belief that financial success equals happiness.

When Kogan grew up, she worked hard in hopes it would lead to her true happiness. “I never took time to rest, and I never paused long enough to enjoy any of this great life I was building,” Kogan said during a 2019 MDRT Global Conference presentation in Sydney, Australia. “Slowing down, enjoying the present moment — that felt like it would only slow me down from achieving more and more and more,” she said.

And Kogan was successful by anyone’s standards. In her 20s, she became a leading venture capitalist. She held top positions at Manhattan-based firms McKinsey and Co. and Hudson Ventures, served as the only female board member at Constant Contact and worked at Microsoft’s state-of-the-art Future of Social Experiences Lab.

For two decades she aggressively pursued happiness through grinding hard work and sacrifice, but happiness eluded her. Then she hit a wall. “I burned out,” Kogan said. “I was hardly functioning, as a leader, as a mom, as a human being. I was failing my teams, people who depended on me. I needed help.”

This led her to look for happiness in places other than long hours in the office. Instead, she turned to research. What she found was that happiness, emotional health and success could all be hers — however, it required her to change her thinking. Three mindset shifts empowered her to find sustainable success.

1) Stop treating emotional health and happiness as a bonus you might get by accomplishing enough.

When we look for happiness as a result of our achievements, we endlessly chase results. We “push ourselves to exhaustion and sacrifice our emotional and physical health, and other things and people that matter to us along the way,” Kogan said.

Research shows that happiness isn’t the result of success but an essential input into it. Happy people

  • Make better decisions at work
  • Enjoy stronger relationships
  • Make more money and have more success over their lifetimes

2) Being happier doesn’t mean being positive all the time.

We can’t expect to find joy in every moment — some moments in life are difficult, stressful, even tragic. Instead of pretending they aren’t or faking our way through them, we need to learn to embrace all of our emotions, including the difficult ones.

3) Happiness isn’t something you feel, it’s something you do.

Genuine, lasting happiness doesn’t result from anything on the outside. It’s a skill, and as with any skill, you can improve it with practice. You hone your happy skills by regularly practicing gratitude.

“Gratitude helps us to not take for granted the many joys that are already there in our lives but our brains have adapted to,” Kogan said. Through gratitude, we can reverse our negativity bias and find more joy in the everyday moments of our life.

Watch the presentation and see more from the MDRT Global Conference. [MDRT members only]

For more about the role of happiness in success

 

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