FEATURE STORY
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EMERGING INSIGHTS ABOUT HAPPINESS
The burgeoning field of positive psychology defines happiness as positive emotions we have in regards to the pleasurable activities we take part in through our daily lives. Researchers from 60 countries gathered at the International Positive Psychology Association’s 6th World Congress in Melbourne in July 2019 to share cutting-edge insights on the science of wellbeing. Three of the emerging keys to happiness that stood out were positive solitude (alone time that feeds our wellbeing); feeling active (how energetic, vigorous and vital we feel); and future-mindedness (dreaming of great things to come).
Carren Smith. Image: Greg Gardner Photography
Keys to happiness For two Sunshine Coast women, their happiness has come from a great deal of heartache, but they are sharing their stories to help others who are struggling to find happiness in the world. WORDS: Leigh Robshaw.
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welve months before the Bali bombings, Carren Smith’s partner took his own life, leaving behind a note outlining why it was her fault. Guilt-ridden and unable to live with herself, she went to Bali with two friends on the anniversary of his death in October 2002, planning to take her own life. Instead, what happened gave her a reason to live. She was on the dance floor of the Sari Club when the bombs went off. When she regained consciousness, she found herself lying in a pit covered in dead bodies and a collapsed roof. Despite multiple injuries, she survived. Her two friends did not. The Bokarina professional speaker and business coach now draws on her story of survival to help others. She has worked with more than 600,000 people, delivered 3300 presentations and supported the successful launch of more than 3000 businesses. Her 2012 book Soul Survivor: The Compelling Truth About a Broken Woman’s Survival of the 2002 Bali Bombings details how she was able to reinvent herself in the wake of devastating trauma. “I didn’t understand why I came home,
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when I was the one who went there to take my life,” she says. “I needed to find the answer in order for me to be here. I needed to find my peace of mind, my foundations, who I was now.” Formerly a corporate high-flyer in Sydney, her old life no longer had the same meaning. “It wasn’t until I was standing in front of a thousand people in Melbourne, talking about happiness that I realised I had been working seven days a week,” she says. “I was always sick and so run down. When I was standing on the stage, it occurred to me I was running myself into the ground, trying to pay back what I felt I’d done wrong. “I wasn’t literally taking my life, but still killing myself trying to make up for it. That was about the 11-year mark after the bombings. I can say my real happiness came on that realisation, where I let myself off the hook. I concentrated on finding happiness, rather than paying a price. “I can’t even compare the profound love I have for myself now with how I was pre-Bali,” she says. “I didn’t know myself pre-Bali. I was just like everybody else,
getting up, going to work in Sydney, climbing the corporate career ladder.” As the general manager for one of the world’s largest recruitment agencies, Ms Smith was responsible for 300 staff. She says she was focused on having the title of general manager by the time she was 25. “I worked 18 hours a day, I sacrificed a lot in terms of relationships. I went after what I wanted hard. But how can you meet
“The more we go back to basics… the closer we come to our own inner peace” your maker face-to-face and not be changed spiritually? I was quite ambitious and single-minded pre-Bali. After Bali, my focus changed completely. I felt my purpose here was to show the world that if I can go through losing my partner to suicide and then be blown up in a bomb, we can handle anything.
“People don’t need to have a bomb under their butt to wake them up. They can use me as a platform to learn the lessons without having the suffering. So I set about becoming a professional speaker, so I could stand on stages across the world and be a beacon. I feel like what I’m doing now is profoundly more purposeful.” Ms Smith believes having a purpose in life is one of the greatest keys to happiness, but that happiness is something we all have already, hidden underneath life’s worries, stresses and strains. “I ascribe to the Dalai Lama’s view that happiness is our natural state and it is what is always present,” she says. “The barriers to our happiness are distractions. If we limit the distractions, then our natural state becomes happiness. We live in a world that is only about distractions. “I think as humans we haven’t quite figured it out yet – that the more we go back to basics, the more we stand still, the more present we are, the closer we come to our own inner peace. Inner peace, I feel, is a key to happiness.” Ms Smith says the benefit of COVID myweeklypreview.com.au
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