BEYOND HAPPINESS
The 6 Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction
Dr. Jennifer Guttman
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Post Hill Press
5/30/23
Nonfiction
Self-Help, Psychology, Family & Relationships
Hardcover, 224 pages
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"Guttman's book is a game changer. It offers a crystal clear plan on how to transform everyday patterns and lead a more joyful life."
- Amy B. Scher
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Are you happy? Nearly half of adults worldwide (40%) would say “no.” The problem with this question is that happiness is a fleeting emotion, and “achieving happiness” can be elusive.
In Beyond Happiness: The 6 Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction, psychologist Dr. Jennifer Guttman guides readers toward living a deeply fulfilling life. Over the past five years, she has combined both personal experience and professional insight gleaned from her three decades in private practice to introduce her theories to over two million people via her YouTube series on Sustainable Life Satisfaction® (SLS) and monthly articles published in Psychology Today.
After enduring a series of health and family challenges, Dr. Guttman analyzed the steps she took to persist in the face of distress and despair, to spring back from adversity, and to remain optimistic despite the obstacles. Then, she shared these actionable techniques with clients suffering from depression, anxiety, feelings of unlovability, and feelings of existential despair. She discovered that the SLS tools helped both adolescents and adults and did not require expensive, often inaccessible, one-on-one therapy to work.
Dr. Guttman offers her groundbreaking Sustainable Life Satisfaction plan for achieving a full and rewarding life even amidst adversity, helping people learn to avoid assumptions, reduce people-pleasing behaviors, face fears, make decisions, complete tasks, and practice active self-reinforcement—techniques that will foster feelings of inherent lovability, defiant resilience, patience, authenticity, and self-confidence. Tangible, clear strategies will help you apply these techniques in your daily life. Best of all, you will learn to stop chasing the fleeting idea of happiness and start focusing on an attainable goal: satisfaction.
Beyond Happiness offers a friendly, practiced approach to not only survive life's pitfalls, but to flourish while enjoying the journey.
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Dear Reader,
Beyond Happiness is the culmination of a journey that started several years ago, marked by three watershed periods in my life that occurred in relatively quick succession. After a nine-year struggle with doctors to understand my son’s medical problems, I learned he had a heart ailment requiring extensive surgery; next, I suffered my own life-threatening health emergency; then, my father passed away. These events forced me to pause. I needed time to take stock and think, to gain some perspective after seeing up close how fleeting life can be. What did I want to achieve?
During that time, I reflected on the thousands of clients who had passed through my doors. I was struck by the overarching theme I had been trying to help them wade through. The vast majority felt they were failing at being happy. I thought about how fleeting and spontaneous happiness can be. Being alone during that period also gave me an opportunity to think about my own emotional landscape: happiness, sadness, and satisfaction. How did they intersect?
I began to recognize that to really help people, I needed to show them that the quest for happiness is elusive. A search for satisfaction is more achievable, enduring, and within our control. Satisfaction is our belief in our ability to achieve our goals. Kernels of six techniques crystalized over the next five years into what would become Sustainable Life Satisfaction (SLS). Developing SLS has brought me a great deal of peace and, yes, satisfaction in achieving one of my goals. I hope you too can find contentment within the SLS toolkit.
Wishing you a lifetime of satisfaction,
Jennifer
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BEYOND HAPPINESS
Book Club Recipe and Menu
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Although Beyond Happiness doesn’t discuss food per se, while writing the book, I thought a lot about the people who had influenced the way I think about life. Their wisdom helped me distill some of the techniques that today make up SLS.
One of those people was my grandmother. I reference her in the chapter called “Crossing the Finish Line.” Omi, as I called her, was an amazing cook. When I think about comfort food, I think about many of the foods she made for me as a child, which represent quintessential satisfaction for me.
Remarkably, what I now realize is that she was preparing three-course meals out of a kitchen with basically no counter space. Her kitchen was so small, she had to use the sink as an extra drying rack for glasses; when she finished baking, she would take the item to a bedroom to “rest” before serving. I would eagerly search each bedroom, hunting down my favorite treat, orange pound cake. The cake had a slightly browned top and insides that were the perfect texture—never dry, and infused with just the right amount of orange to sweeten it without making it too sugary.
Omi held the recipe only in her memory over the years, from her childhood in Germany to her life in the United States. She wrote it down only when, as an adult, I asked her to. Even then, the measurements were approximated. Omi’s special orange pound cake can serve as a perfect breakfast food, snack, or dessert. Although I’ve made it many times, I can’t say I’ve ever mastered it as she did. Maybe the dose of love she added from her German childhood is different from the dose of love I add today. But if you try her recipe, adding your own dose of love will make a difference every time. I hope you enjoy it as much as she did, and as much as I still do!
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Serve the cake with:
Chamomile Tea: Cooking is an art form, and my grandmother Omi was a master of her craft. Just like her orange pound cake, she was delicate, full of zest, and multi-faceted all at the same time. Creativity in her small kitchen and improvised solutions contributed to the extra flavors she got. In the evening, Omi served this orange pound cake with warm chamomile tea, steeped for 5 to 7 minutes in barely boiling water and strained.
Orange Juice: In the morning, Omi would serve her cake with freshly squeezed orange juice made from what was left of the oranges used in the cake —so nothing would go to waste—and add some additional oranges. She made the juice simply. I remember her rolling the oranges along the countertop, then slicing them in half and squeezing the juice into a bowl. She transferred the juice into a pitcher, and once chilled, it would be the perfect breakfast accompaniment to the pound cake.
She would want the cake savored as one would live—with joy, appreciation, and a hunger for more.
-Dr. Jennifer Guttman
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