What I've learned in 2025: True Happiness requires work
2025 has been a hard year for the collective and also for me personally. I’m coming out of it more resilient and with a deeper understanding of what happiness truly is. I want to share with you a little about my journey delving into understanding happiness as I move into the next chapter: no children living at home and caretaking of elders taking up more space in my life.
Here's what I’ve been learning about happiness from the inside out.
Real Happiness Is Hard Work
What does it actually mean to be happy? Not in the “feel good” sense, but in a spiritual and psychological sense. The truth is simple, obvious, and deeply challenging - happiness isn’t bought, chased, or achieved. It’s something you practice over and over, day in and day out. It’s how we relate to ourselves and to the world, especially when things aren’t going well.
I’ve been learning that happiness is less about arranging life to be pleasant and more about building the internal capacity to meet life as it is. It’s hard but feels worth it.
In 2023 I attended an extraordinary conference at Harvard led by Arthur C. Brooks. The leading thinkers in happiness science were there, and the research presented related directly to my executive coaching work. These ideas met me where I was in 2023, they stayed with me, and my coaching clients have also benefited.
1. Happiness isn’t soft—it’s strategic. It shapes communication, decision-making, and performance. Happiness isn’t about having a good mood; it’s about clarity, purpose, and how we connect with others. It’s a leadership competency, not a luxury.
2. Connection is the new currency. The research is blunt: relationships keep us healthy, creative, and resilient. Loneliness is now understood to be as dangerous as smoking or chronic illness.
3. Self-compassion is a performance skill. Harsh self-talk erodes resilience. Leaders who can treat themselves with kindness think more clearly, recover faster, and lead more effectively. If you can’t extend empathy to yourself, your capacity to extend it to others is limited.
4. Well-being is teachable—and measurable. Roughly 40% of our happiness is shaped by habits and practices within our control: sleep, movement, gratitude, kindness, restorative relationships. These aren’t “nice-to-haves;” they move the needle on performance and culture.
5. Hope and resilience are future assets. Happiness looks forward. Hope predicts whether people invest in their own futures; resilience predicts whether they can grow through adversity. Leaders who acknowledge what’s hard and still believe in what’s possible create environments where others can do the same. This balance of realism and optimism is one of the most powerful happiness skills we have.
This research gave me language and tools, and it clarified what leaders need to better understand about wellbeing. But as life shifted for me this year, I found myself needing something more. Becoming an empty nester and stepping more fully into caretaking roles pushed me into deeper territory. Several elderly people in my life are declining physically or cognitively, and those changes raised harder questions for me:
If happiness is linked to purpose, how does that shift when a central part of my identity as a parent naturally falls away?
If (or when) my body or mind deteriorates, what will happiness look like then? How do I prepare myself for that?
These questions are what led me to the work of Father Richard Rohr. His decades of integrating mysticism, spirituality, and psychology have helped me probe some of my assumptions about happiness.
Rohr talks about cultivating a “just-right mind”—not the eradication of ego but having a balanced mind capable of experiencing joy and suffering without being overtaken by either. As he puts it, happiness isn’t about “feeling good all the time,” but about being present, humble, and compassionate.
A recent interview he gave moved me deeply, especially his reflections on happiness in the face of aging and loss. After suffering a stroke, he described having to redefine happiness altogether. His words were honest: aging is humiliating. And he added: “You don’t need to change or fix things to be content. You have to set your mind straight.” Sometimes the work is simply to be present to ourselves, to others, and to reality.
Rohr frames suffering and joy as two sides of a meaningful life. Growth, empathy, perspective, and depth often emerge from pain if we meet it with a “just-right mind.” Avoiding suffering doesn’t protect us; it narrows us. Meeting suffering with openness expands our capacity for joy.
Happiness also needs community. Rohr emphasizes something the data confirms: isolation weakens us. Connection through honesty, humor, ritual, shared vulnerability, and love is a spiritual and psychological nutrient. Happiness can’t survive in isolation; it needs belonging.
This year has taught me that happiness is not a destination and not a mood. It’s a way of showing up. A way of orienting toward life with steadiness rather than frantic problem-solving. For those of us who carry a strong internal drive to “get it right” or “hold it all together,” this is challenging work. But it’s also clarifying.
Happiness grows when we lean into love instead of control; humility instead of certainty; community instead of isolation; compassion instead of relentless self-judgment.
It also means accepting that life is uncertain, fragile, and beautiful all at once.
I don’t expect happiness to be effortless. I expect it to be something I build, moment by moment, through how I show up. And that feels like a steadier foundation for whatever comes next.