Summary: Joy at your good intentions, efforts, and results is very important to stay motivated. It need not be easy, natural, or intrinsic. Instead, deliberately starting to practice joy can be a very helpful exercise. This involves selecting genuinely good actions to celebrate, learning to generate the feeling of joy, and then defending this feeling from any assailing doubts. One helpful support can be a daily "Three good actions" exercise.

The practice of joy

One glaring hole that many of us have in our skillsets is generating joy at our own goodness, whether they are our good impulses, our good efforts, or our good results. We often feel like we need to achieve certain goals to avoid damnation, put our nose to the grindstone grimly, and when we finally finish, we move right on to the next looming responsibility that must be addressed. This is not helpful, so today, let’s examine the topic of joy, how it can be generated, defended, and practiced.

A common misconception

Let’s start with a misconception I encounter often, which is that joy must come naturally and automatically for it to be real. This is simply not the case. Our self-judgement and grimness often feel natural because they’re habitual, they’re practiced, they’re customary. When you decide to go against that internal grain and set up an intention to feel some joy at your goodness, part of the mind rebels: “This is artificial, this is awkward, this is weird…” Ok, so what? All new skills are going to feel strange at first, and joy is no exception. Think of toddlers learning to walk. It involves a lot of standing up and falling down, it involves a lot of stumbling around and flapping their arms, but eventually the unnecessary movements subside, the gait gets more regular, and confidence grows. Eventually their walking is habitual, practiced and customary. So too it is with joy.

Pick your topic

So, if our metaphor is toddlers and walking, what is our first step in learning to feel joy at our own good actions? Well, we need to find an action, something that we did, that we rationally think was a genuine example of us trying to do something harmless and good. This doesn’t have to be something big, or something that other people will admire, simply something small, simple, and beneficial. Maybe something comes to mind, you might have dealt with a mess in your house recently, or done a simple kindness for your neighbor, or kept your temper in difficult circumstances, or sat down to work on that project that you’ve been procrastinating on. If nothing at all comes to mind, then consider the fact that you’re currently reading an article about how to develop skills of the heart, and realize that this, in and of itself, is a good action. Then pin that action down as the thing you’ll be trying to feel some joy around, and we should be all set.

A wobbly step in the right direction

Having picked our good action, the next step is to generate some warmth and appreciation inside. This might be genuinely hard, but here are some tips. Simple physical feedback can do wonders. Try to put a warm smile on your face. You can make encouraging noises out loud, a bit like how you would encourage a dog: “gooood, well done, good boy”. If this feels a bit embarrassing, that can actually be a good sign, often underneath that embarrassment is the warmth we’re looking for. You can try to breathe in a deep and encouraging way. Or if you’re feeling particularly adventurous today, here’s a fun exercise: start patting your own head with your hand in a gentle, supportive way. Really put all of your mental energy and focus in trying to do the patting really well, you are in your hand, and that head that you’re patting is almost like it’s someone else’s. Then, after doing that for 6-10 seconds, keep on going but switch your focus around to your head, you are in your head and that hand that’s patting your head so gently and well is almost like it’s someone else’s. Try to really feel your head being patted, so nice and warm and encouraging. These are just some examples, try and experiment and find something that works for you today.

Do not be surprised if there is a welling up of sadness. A lot of us have been in many situations where we were proud over something good that we did but either got shot down, or also very commonly, shot ourselves down, in ways that hurt very deeply. After a while we started distrusting this joy and pushed away the parts of us that were hungry for it. Now, with an upwelling of simple, physical joy, those sad, repressed voices can come up again. It is really important that you don’t go running with them, don’t get lost in their stories but also don’t push them down again. Try to create room for the sadness, allow it to exist in a part of your heart, but stay focused on generating joy. If the sadness really does stem from that hurt, vulnerable place that you shoved down ages ago, then learning to consistently generate and protect these good feelings over your own goodness will gradually mellow out these negative feelings. If that is not the case, then there will be other work that needs doing, but for that work it is still good if you can feel good about doing it, so doing this practice can still be helpful.

When doubt comes

Now, once you’ve generated some good feelings, the other side of the practice of joy is defending it from doubts. As we already mentioned in the previous paragraph, we often shoot ourselves down when we feel joy at something, and we need to start counteracting this bad habit. It is really hard to avoid these self-critical, judgemental voices coming, so instead of keeping them away, we’re going to cut them down when they come. It is hard to anticipate exactly what arguments the internal doubters will bring to convince you that you suck and that your joy is misplaced, so you are going to have to think on your feet, but let’s cover a few common ones and how you might counterattack.

Every step matters!

One common doubt comes when you’re happy about finishing a subtask or a milestone of a larger project. This doesn’t have to be a work project, it could be that you finished doing the dishes but you still have to tidy the living room. You feel happy at your intermediate result, you did a thing that was hard to do, and the voice pipes up: “Yeah, but you’re not there yet”, and the old, automatic, internal response would be “Ugh, yeah.. guess not”. But that response is not necessary, there are other things you can say like “Every little step matters!” or “No goodness too small to celebrate!”. When you then hold that counter-argument, really try to invest it with your heart. There is simple, real truth in the statement “Every little step matters” and that firm conviction, that insistent belief, can protect your joy from your doubts. Note that you don’t have to convince the negative voice, you don’t have to get it on your side. You can just cut it down with universal statements, “No goodness too small…”, “Every little step…”. You don’t engage in the argument about whether this goodness is large enough or not, you simply state that the size is irrelevant, this little thing is good, and you will be insistently happy about it.

Independently good!

Another voice that can come doesn’t necessarily point at things you haven’t done yet, but instead points at other ways in which you did fall short. “Yeah, you handed in your thesis, but you handed it in 1 year late”. I’m sure many of us can relate. Here too, you can strike at its root. “Every goodness is independently good!”, “This is good and nothing else matters right now”. This perspective needs some explaining though, and probably warrants an article of its own that I have yet to write, but in short: Many of us seem to treat our goodness as an average across our actions. We did some bad things, we did some good things, so it all balances out. This is a very unhelpful perspective. Each good thing you do has value, and each bad thing you do will bring its own negative consequences. A good metaphor here might be a garden. You plant some fruit trees and you plant some poison ivy. Eventually you will have fruit and a painful rash. The fact that you planted the poison ivy does not remove the goodness of the fruit, in the same way that planting the fruit will not protect you from the poison ivy. And while the implications of this perspective are wide ranging, in this context it simply means that good actions are independently good, their goodness does not get diminished or counteracted by other ways in which you might have fallen short.

This is not about other people

One final insidious voice that I think comes up commonly is the “don’t get too full of yourself” voice. This one can be a little harder to deal with because although it isn’t true, it’s truth adjacent. There is a kind of pride where you place yourself above others, and that kind of pride is genuinely dangerous and harmful and should be avoided. However, taking joy in your goodness does not contain that conceit. You can be happy about your good actions on a deserted island. You are simply happy over having done something good, not because you are better than others. This is a subtle distinction, but a very important one, and this distinction can help you battle this doubt. Another, funnier way of tackling this voice, is simply turning it around on itself. If you should not be too full of yourself, then that voice should not be so full of itself that it can tell you what to do. Clearly it is a little too full of itself and is not living up to its own standards.

You are practicing a skill

Having discussed how to start generating joy at your good actions, and how to defend it from some common assailants, all that remains now is to practice. Don’t expect this to feel natural or easy quickly. This resistance to feeling joy goes deep in many of us. Just chalk it up to cultural baggage and keep practicing. One very deliberate practice that can really help is a daily ‘three good actions’ exercise. At the end of the day pause for a moment and set the intention that you are going to recall three good things that you did that day. Mind you, three good things that you did, not three good things that happened. Then really try to generate some juicy joy for each one in turn, meanwhile protecting that joy from any assailing doubts. Again, if you have trouble coming up with any, the first one can always be that you’re doing the “Three good acts” exercise right now, and then take it from there. If you regularly struggle to come up with any, try to pay more attention during the day for small opportunities to do good, do them, and tell yourself “Hah, got another one for tonight’s exercise”. Learning the skill of feeling joy at your own goodness, and starting to battle your bad self-talk habits can have a deep impact on your quality of life.

Three footnotes

So, that’s all I really wanted to cover for this topic for now, but I wanted to add three footnotes.

Joy is not contentment

Firstly, joy does not equal contentment. When you practice joy at having done a good thing, that does not mean that you will not take it any further. You really celebrate having done the good thing, and then you use that joy as fuel for your efforts to keep doing more good things.

Learn to recognize genuine goodness

Secondly, when picking things to celebrate, be really careful about what you select, since they’re behaviors that you’re encouraging internally. What you really want to celebrate are harmless, genuinely good actions. Kindness, generosity, maintaining your composure, perseverance. Don’t celebrate having gotten one over on someone else, or a stroke of good fortune out in the world, or having had a really nice meal. Some of those are just bad, others are out of your control and therefore not that valuable. Good, harmless, intentional action is where it’s at.

There are other approaches besides the counterattack

Thirdly, I highlight counterattacking as a way to deal with your doubt, and even though it’s a very good strategy to have in your toolbelt since it’s quick and direct, there are other ways to deal with doubt that I hope to highlight in the future. You can, for example, try to notice their silliness by finding that they still object to fantastic scenarios. I know my “Not good enough” voice would still be discontent, even if I went above and beyond. All the voice really does is pipe up and say “Not good enough”, it does not stop and think. It’s a box that you poke and it says “Not good enough”. Once you see that emptiness, that can also really help take the sting out of its comments, it changes from incisive and impactful commentary to “The cow goes moooo”.

Very well, I will leave it there for now, and I hope you find some genuine use in this article. This, like many of my other posts is deeply interrelated with the others. You use your joy to keep you motivated, you use your efforts to fuel your joy, and you take the difficulties and obstacles you encounter as reminders to keep practicing. As always, I hope you all keep up the practice and look after yourselves well.