The 5 People You Need in Your Life
When you’re adulting, it’s challenging to recognize who your team is. The world is not as concentrated of an oyster as a schoolyard. Bullying becomes more subtle, teachers are not within earshot, and your lunchtime bestie may live in a different state.
However, an entourage of sorts is a must-have to survive networking, in today’s competitive space, and for overall day-to-day sanity. Or, as Americans call it, “happiness.”
Motivational speaker, Stacey Flowers realized this at a Beyoncé concert. She was a mom at seventeen, all odds of normalcy stacked against her, and with her then three-week-old son, trudged her way through her first college class to becoming an internationally renowned expert on being happy.
“December 23rd, 2013 my life changed,” she recalls in her Ted Talk (see the video below). “This was the day that I got to attend my very first Beyoncé concert.”
She said it was that evening, on the Mrs. Carter World Tour that she understood that it takes a certain five people with a consistent presence in your life to help you “catch happy.”
It was that experience, when she spent more than one thousand dollars that she set aside in her “Beyoncé Savings Account” for a VIP ticket and brief moment of actually touching Beyoncé’s hand that she knew, “happiness isn't all dancing unicorns and smiley faces, it's not uninterrupted moments of pleasure, it isn't even the accumulation of many things. True, bonafide happiness,” she says, “is about unleashing your God-given talents to positively influence this world.”
In order to do so, you need your “Factor Five” she says (because Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day) — five key people you can use as a sounding board for who you are: your cheerleader, mentor, coach, friend, and peer.
“Over a decade of research on success and happiness finally clicked [at the Beyoncé show] because what I had been obsessed with during this time is figuring out how we human beings miss happiness. We get into the college, we get the grades, we get the car, we get spouse, we get the house, we have the kids — we are met with these once in a lifetime opportunities, yet we continue to remain unhappy.
“What I found in my studies is that happiness happens before success. In American culture, we have been taught the backwards of this formula. We have been taught that if we can somehow capture success, if we look underneath it we will find our happiness.”
A Harvard researcher found that this is “incorrect,” she says. You need those five people to “connect and catch happy,” and that happiness becomes the success.
“I also found that optimism can be learned… the skill of seeing possibility before we point out problems…” and that “relationships have the deepest, richest impact on our level of happiness more so than any other factor combined.”
Learn how to recognize your “Factor Five” team in her video. Tag us and them on social @urbanwellnessmag.
