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Champions Magazine Online Articles

FRIENDSHIP AND HAPPINESS
By Jonathan Siegel, Psychologist

“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”

Karl Menninger

There is an old joke about a Rabbi who secretly goes out and plays golf on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Jewish tradition and custom. He is playing the game by himself as all of his friends and members of his community are in temple praying. The Rabbi shoots a hole in one on the eighteenth hole. His enthusiasm, however, is short lived, and he walks off the golf course with his head bowed. He is depressed. The reason: he has no one to tell of his accomplishment and triumph.

No man or woman is an island unto himself or herself. While each person lives in the privacy of their own world, it is in the connection we make with others where our true selves are to be discovered and our potential revealed.

Our thoughts run about in our minds and seek an outlet for expression. If there is no outlet for these thoughts, then pressure can build up in our minds, like water in a dam. Internally, we experience a blockage, a build up of pressure, and a need for release of this energy. The need may be clear or ill defined and vague, but it is real and compelling. If the currents of our thoughts circle about in a stagnant manner, we are left with a felt sense of confusion, irritability or discontent. The privacy of our world can become lonely, dark, and cold.

However, once we find someone with whom we can share ourselves – our thoughts, feelings, and desires, as well as hopes, disappointments, and dreams – our minds release that pent up energy seeking to find a home for expression.
Magic occurs when we have someone who is there to listen and receive this energy. The magic is that in expressing and just being ourselves, we experience not only what is, but the potential of what might be.

Many people set goals and realize that happiness is not only in the accomplishment of the goal, but in the process of achieving that goal. It is in the process of achieving that goal that we become something that was once only potential, but now has become an actuality.

It is in the relationship and sharing of this process with a like minded soul – a friend - that we experience ourselves most fully, and kindle a flame of happiness that comes from the knowing – the deep knowing – that we are in this alone together.

The most successful people in business – those who achieve not only their financial goals, but their goals for happiness and the realization of their human potential, seek to have good friends, and be a good friend.

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