Ok, full disclosure—this article is going to be a doozy. I really, really tried to cut it down tight, but there’s a lot of key info in here and this is arguably the most important topic in a life coaching relationship. So, here we are! 

Notice the title of this article is “return” to happiness. That is very intentional. Because happiness is actually within you (and all of us) at all times—we’ve just unknowingly covered it up with our negative conditioning. 

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If you currently identify as “unhappy,” getting back to a state of quiet contentment absolutely does not involve doing anything in external reality. You don’t have to chase anything outside of yourself to get back to that state. Instead, you must do the opposite—you have to learn to let go of a lot of the negativity you’re unintentionally holding onto. 

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Many of my clients come to me because they want to find their way back to happiness. The 6 tenets I’m going to share throughout this article form the bedrock of my life coaching practice, and are representative of the insights I try to guide my clients towards. 

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Since this article is long, I recommend skimming to the tenet that seems the most shocking, confusing, or insightful and starting there: 

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1. Life itself—the fact of being alive—is itself a miraculous, positive thing. Therefore, your resting state as a human is contentment and joy. 
2. However, all events that actually occur in life, no matter how seemingly awesome or terrible, are actually neutral. They just are, and you don’t control any of them. 
3. Our subconscious minds automatically interpret these neutral events as positive or negative based on our past conditioning and beliefs. 
4. When we interpret neutral events as negative, we feel bad. If we don’t fully allow our negative feelings to wash through us, we unintentionally ‘trap’ them in our minds. 
5. To return to happiness, we must fully feel our stored negative emotions without distraction or rumination so that they can release. This gets us back to our resting state. 
6. Doing tenet 5 is really hard because we falsely believe our negativity to be an inherent, fixed part of our “self.”

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If you’re totally lost or just don’t believe me, bear with me, please. I’ll break this down further. 

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Tenet 1: It’s a joy to be alive

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If you’re a cynic you probably raised your eyebrows at that. However, to demonstrate this point, I’d like you to turn your attention to the wisest members of our society—children! 

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Children are the best demonstrations of the basic, fundamental joy of being alive. They spend most of their days excited to just…do stuff. Every moment of a child’s life is play. And like all of us, they’re also fallible to pain and discomfort. 

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When a kid scrapes their knee for the first time, they throw an absolute, mind-rending temper for a few minutes. And then they immediately resume playing once they're done. If they scrape themselves enough times, eventually, they learn to not run so fast. Ironically, this is actually the same behavior we need to relearn as adults to let go of our own negativity. We’ll get to that in a bit. 

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This is a tiny example of how all of us develop mental conditioning. Conditioning is important—it’s what allows us to automate small actions through repetition. We clearly wouldn’t be able to function if we had to relearn how to walk every single day. We can thank our brains for that miraculous ability. 

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But as childhood goes on, we start to adopt harmful conditioning. We start to absorb the critical voices of our parents, teachers, and friends. When we get scolded, or shamed, or rejected, we feel really awful—it’s painful. And when that happens enough times, we unknowingly give our brains a task—”please let me never feel this way again.”

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This desire forms a critical inner narrator whose entire job becomes maneuvering life so that we never feel that awful emotion again.

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When I was a kid, I sucked at traditional sports. I got bullied a lot in gym class, and that felt awful. So my inner narrator created a story about me—”we’re just not athletic, so we should stop trying any sports.” I believed this story, so I stopped exploring sports of any kind and missed out on what could’ve been a formative life experience. For all I know, I could’ve been a great gymnast, dancer, or fencer! 

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So it goes for all of us as children. I like to say that nobody gets out of childhood unscathed. We all come out of it with at least a few negative beliefs about ourselves that live rent-free in our heads. Part of this is actually psychologically important in that this is where we create our egos, our separate identities that allow us to tell the world who we think that we are and what we can do in it. 

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While ego is necessary, when left unchecked, it starts to become a problem because it falsely believes that it actually has the power to maneuver life in such a way that we always get the things that we want and avoid those we don’t. 

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We start to believe that gratifying our ego’s demands is the only way that we can become happy. This belief is a one-way ticket to the land of suffering, and takes us into our next tenet.

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Tenet 2: Everything that happens in life is actually neutral and you don’t control it

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I think this point is the hardest for adults to understand, and typically, I spend a lot of time at the beginning of a coaching relationship here. Every single thing that could ever happen to you in this life—from the most awful tragedy to the most beautiful triumph, is actually just a neutral event that your mind has given an (often automatic) interpretation to. 

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And yes, I mean everything. I am talking—death of a loved one, crippling tsunami, terrorist attack, birth of a child, winning the lottery, buying a house—all totally neutral events. 

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Simply, they just are. Things just happen and we do not control them at all, despite what your ego wants you to think. The control topic is also another sticking point, but for the sake of keeping this article readable, I won’t go into it here. Start here if you disagree about control. 

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How can I know all things are neutral? Easily. If they weren’t—if they had some inherent goodness or badness to them—everybody on Earth would feel the same way about them. Yet when 9/11 happened, there were people around the world mourning and people celebrating. Same thing when Trump got elected. Same thing, even, when something like AIDS ravaged gay men around the world. Think of all the radical Christians rubbing their hands thinking that was “divine justice.” 

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We actually decide what’s “good” and what’s “bad” from our own unique perspectives. And as societies, we’ve formed collective moralities about what’s generally “good” and what’s generally “bad” in order for us to all function together. But just because a large group of people agree that something is “good” does not make it so. 

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There’s nuance and neutrality in everything and it’s our own unique perspectives that influence how we interpret what happens to us. So while the fact of life itself—your basic being—is undeniably beautiful, the events that occur within external reality themselves are always subject to interpretation. 

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Tenet 3: Your past is the lens through which you interpret what’s “good” and what’s “bad”

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What you believe to be “good” or “bad” is a result of your own unique personal history—your beliefs, experiences, and observations about this world. Your subconscious mind and your nervous system remember your entire life—far more than your conscious mind realizes. 

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And every time something happens in reality, your mind is commenting on it—this is “good” or this is “bad.” When the interpretation is “this is good,” you feel good. You want more of that thing, or to celebrate it. 

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When the interpretation is “bad,” you want less of it. You want to run away, block it, or remove it. 

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I want to be very clear about two, almost contradictory points here. First, there is nothing wrong with this process—it’s called being a human being. And also—this process, over time, is what results in you becoming unhappy. 

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There are monks and spiritual aesthetics who spend their lives developing so much equanimity that they almost don’t have any preferences anymore. I don’t think that’s an achievable goal for most of us—it’s easier to accept that as a human in society, you will have a brain that wants certain things and does not want others. 

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The more important point is that you are aware that your mind works this way. Once you know this deeply, you become what most spiritual people would call “awake.” The thing you are “awake” to is the fact that you are not a voice in your head dictating what must or must not happen next. You have the awareness to recognize that because you don’t control what unfolds next in life, you can soften your attachments to needing these events to be a certain way. 

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I can’t overstate this point enough. Awareness of your mind’s tendency to become conditioned is the first, essential step to returning back to your natural state of happiness. So many people end up living in a sort of simulacrum of life in which their ego is calling the shots because they haven’t connected with this insight yet. 

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Those of us who remain unconscious or unawake, unfortunately, begin to construct the prison that cements our own unhappiness, which is what the next tenet is about.

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Tenet 4: Seeking in external reality is actually what makes us unhappy

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Because most of us are unaware of how deeply we’ve conditioned ourselves, we run into problems. If we have a lot of stored negative impressions, we don’t feel very good inside, generally. Life begins to feel hard, onerous, and kind of shitty. So what do we do? 

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We start looking for relief in external reality via the positive impressions we’ve stored. We start getting drunk, buying clothes, having a bunch of sex, scrolling TikTok, and binging TV because these things (almost) distract us from the inner mess for a bit. 

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But you know how that story goes. Those things work for a bit, and then they don’t. So we try to get more of them, or we move onto the next novel thing—a new hobby, a new boyfriend, a solo trip to find ourselves, whatever. And that works for a while too, until months later, when we’re back to sitting with all the shit we’ve stored inside and looking for our next distraction. 

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What’s happening while we do this is actually quite insidious. Because we’re not addressing the raging negativity inside of us, it’s actually just getting reinforced. We’re unwittingly building up bigger and bigger illusions by saying to our brains:

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 “Hey brain, I feel like shit. Can you go find me something to make me feel better? Oh, cool you did, thanks. Oh but wait it doesn’t work anymore. I need more, more,more!” 

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We are conditioning ourselves to falsely believe that something in external reality can make us feel content inside again. The result is that we become great participants in consumerism and capitalism, and that we miss the fact that, actually, our true nature as a living human being is contentment. It’s already here, inside of you. It’s just being overshadowed. 

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Think of a little kid compared to a stodgy old person. 

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Kids tend to naturally be happy because, frankly, they don’t have many stored impressions about life—it just is and they’re just happy to play with what shows up! Old people, on the other hand, can tend towards misery if they haven’t learned these lessons yet because they have a lot of stored impressions. They have a lot of ideas about how it all should be, and when reality doesn’t mirror those back to them, they get cranky and miserable. 

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So that begs the crucial question—how do we actually return to that childlike state of contentment? 

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It’s simple, but it certainly isn’t easy. 

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Tenet 5: Choosing your values and releasing negativity

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Tenet 5 is where I spend most of my time as a coach because it’s all about valued action. 

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Values are sort of mysterious in that they’re things we feel pulled to do, but not on the level of conditioning. We don’t do them because they give us a brief hit of pleasure or help us escape pain. We do these things because they seem to scratch a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves. If you ever just felt called to do something in your life, that’s probably a value resonating inside of you.  

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Coaches are masters at helping you discover your own inner value system. The things you feel pulled towards on that deeper level. And I would argue that, other than just enjoying it, the other main goal of life is to live according to your values. Find what makes you light up inside and choose to spend most of your time doing those things. 

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And along the way, you’ll of course try to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Because again, you’re human. BUT, in order to prevent yourself from forming more stored negative impressions, you need to allow your inner negativity to fully release and complete itself. And by that I mean—feel your feelings. 

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If you are someone that identifies as unhappy right now, I bet you have a lot of inner sadness, fear, anger, and the like raging inside of you. And you will not be happy again until you allow those emotions to “complete” themselves and release. 

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Right now, you’re used to suppressing, blocking, projecting, or distracting from those feelings with stuff in external reality. To let them release, you need to stop seeking relief outside of yourself and turn deep within. Let the fear, rage, and sadness come bleeding out of you while you live your life and take your valued actions and give up your attempts to not feel these things. 

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That last point is important. Your brain does not understand language, which means you can’t tell it, “hey buddy, please let go.” You are welcome to go on a silent meditation retreat or go into years of psychotherapy, but you do not need those things—again, they are just more distraction. 

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The only language that your brain understands is behavior. If you want to release your negativity, it’s not enough to just be aware. You need to choose different actions. And those “different actions” are ideally you living your values while you feel like absolute shit inside and allow those feelings to complete.  

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That is a tall order. The next tenet gets into why that process tends to be a lot harder for us, in my experience. 

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Tenet 6: Our false beliefs about negativity make it impossible to release

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I’ve addressed two of the most common false beliefs earlier in the article. But I’ll reiterate them here, and then we’ll dive deeper into the 3rd, which is the sneakiest. 

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1. We falsely believe life itself is somehow negative or inherently bad. Untrue. Easy proof—children are playful and joyous little monsters. 
2. We falsely believe negativity comes from external events and not our own perceptions. Untrue. Easy proof—you can think an event is negative and your neighbor can feel differently. 
3. We falsely believe our negativity is an inherent part of our ‘self’ and we are therefore permanently stuck with it. 

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Again, I don’t have the space here to tell you why your idea of your “self” does not actually exist. This article goes deeper into that topic. 

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But take me at my word here—you may think your sadness, your anxiety, your anger, or your shame is an inherent, fixed part of you because it has been there in your head for so long unaddressed. I promise you that is absolutely not true. 

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Some of our conditioning has been with us for so long that we can’t remember a time when we didn’t act according to it. Because of our short conscious memories, we falsely attribute this negativity to be a core part of us. Always anxious, always sad, always unloved, always rejected. Whatever your particular story is, if it’s about “you,” I promise you, it is inherently untrue. 

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Some people will point to events in their past to justify these conclusions about themselves. “I’ve ruined every relationship I’ve ever been in, so therefore I must be unlovable, right?” Well, no. As my stats teacher would say—correlation is not causation. 

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The fact that you can observe a pattern of events that seem to form a theme in your life does not allow you to conclude that “you” are the direct cause. We can conclude that your behavior was probably a factor, but “you” are more than your behavior. Behaviors can and do change—”you” do not. 

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You cannot let your negativity release if you keep inventing reasons to hold onto it or to claim it as a core part of “your self.”  Once you become awake to the conditioned nature of your mind, the next thing to “awaken” to is the illusory nature of “your self.” 

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That one takes a bit longer, and frankly, it needs to come directly from you. The exercise that has been used for centuries to discover your true self is to continually ask yourself the question “who am I?” 

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Do this until you find something about you that has been unchanged and static your entire life. And when you figure it out, send me an email so we can talk more ;)

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Final thoughts—letting your past leave you

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A fellow coach and teacher I respect has a beautiful way to describe the release of conditioning. He tells his clients to say that when they are in the thick of a trapped negative pattern, “this is my past leaving me. May it go in peace.” 

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I can’t think of a better way to describe it, honestly. Because that’s really what our conditioning is—the past that lives on in our heads. And how can we ever hope to be happy if we keep unknowingly projecting the worst moments of our past onto each new moment of life? 

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This work is actually so simple that it can paradoxically feel quite complicated. If I can leave you with a single impression to ground these insights, it’d be to act more like the kid that scrapes their knee at the playground. 

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When life serves you pain, feel it fully and in the least destructive way you can. Let anger, fear, sadness, or whatever wash through you without any attempts to run from it or block it. 

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Abandon the delusion that there’s an imaginary person who can ‘prevent’ this pain or that it ‘shouldn’t’ have happened—that’s just ego trying to assert itself, and that’s just not how life works. 

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And when you have felt your pain fully, go back to playing again. Remember that no matter what happens, it is a miracle that there is something instead of nothing, and that you have the ability to feel these things in the first place. 

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The more you let your inner negativity bleed out of you, the more you’ll begin to see this whole thing as a giant playground again. 

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I really hope that you enjoy it and I’m here to help you get back to that place whenever you need me. 

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