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The Four Levels of Happiness^®

Happiness is the only goal that people pursue for its own sake, which makes it an ideal lens for explaining why people and organizations behave as they do. The Four Levels of Happiness model shows leaders how to elevate the powerful drive for happiness and direct it toward shared goals, strong ethics, and great performance. Click here for a full description of the Four Levels.

  

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More News

• The Many Faces of Fr. Spitzer
• Level 3 Culture Key to Success at Gonzaga
• Dialogue with ERC Fellows Underscores Challenge of Building Level 3 Cultures
• Untroubled Leadership in Troubled Times
• Construction Execs in New Orleans Receive Their First Spritz of Spitzer

Ask Fr. Spitzer

• Are Bailouts Ethical?
• How Many People Need to Change for Culture Change to Happen?
• A Level 3 Mission Doesn't Guarantee a Level 3 Culture
• Connection to Covey?
• Is There Nobility in Selling Paper Clips?
• Dealing With a Level 2 Aggressor
• What Are Your Views on the Banking Crisis?

The Levels in Action

• The Case for Making Forgiveness a Corporate Value
• The Mother of All Bureacracy
• Never Waste a Perfectly Good Recession
• The Web Conference From Hell
• The Tale of a Level 3 Leader's Trial by Fire
• Seeing the Best in Others
• The Perils of Making Managers Play the "Comparison Game" at Review Time

 Ethics in Action

• Good Ethics Is Good Business
• Ethics with a very Small "e"

 

The Four Levels of Happiness for Kids

There’s a comment we often hear from people taking the Journey to Excellence, or from people who hear one of Fr. Robert Spitzer’s talks about the Four Levels of Happiness®. Parents in particular say, “This is something we ought to be helping our kids understand.”

The people at Healing the Culture, an institute founded by Fr. Spitzer, have made it much easier to introduce kids to these life-enhancing ideas. They maintain a website, fourlevelsofhappiness.com, which is designed with kids of grade-school age in mind.

The website offers a selection of games, stories, and a quiz, as well as a description of the Four Levels tailored to the interests and experiences of kids ages 6 to 12.  The key messages are that all four levels are good, but you can’t be really happy, or happy for long, if you only live for the lower levels. In our materialistic, competitive culture, that’s a message all kids need.

“Our kids are already starting to play the Comparison Game by the age of 11,” Fr. Spitzer observes. “The messages they hear all around them can lead to a dominant Level 2 outlook before they are even teenagers. All the psychological anxieties of Level 2 can start in earnest around this age, and they can develop into a full-blown neurosis by the time kids turn 20. That’s why we have to start education early and protect children from the belief that  the only thing that matters in life is winning.”

Healing the Culture, established in 2003, aims to “empower people to make healthy choices individually, and in community and policy, by advancing the most complete and dignified vision of human personhood.” The institute makes frequent use of the Four Levels of Happiness to “inspire individuals to live for deeper meaning and purpose, and to encourage the culture to embrace ideals that are truly worthy of the human family.”

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Last changed: Apr 07 2010 at 11:14 AM