Here's the second-most helpful thing I've ever learned about human happiness.

The first-most helpful thing ties into our connection with God, but as a pastor you knew I'd say that, so we'll skip to number two.

The second-most helpful thing I've ever learned about human happiness is the one-to-ten scale.  Here's how it works.

Every day, we react to things, because things happen (or things that we wished would happen don't happen).  You could make the case that paying attention to our reactions is the road to a life that works.  And that the one-to-ten scale is the key to how to do this.

Some years back I was asked to develop a new division in an organization, something the folks up top desperately wanted, but hadn't been able to pull off.  I did, and it boomed. 

One of the team leaders I was supervising ran into trouble.  I weighed in.  He didn't like my approach and went over my head to complain.  My immediate superior, without speaking to me, rebuked me and told me to make things right with the man who'd complained about me.

I went ballistic.  On a scale of one to ten, my reaction was, let's just say, a ten.  I planned out my exit strategy.  Over lunch a few days later, I fulminated about this to a wise older friend in the organization.  He listened thoughtfully and said, "It seems like this has really tapped into something for you." 

Now I erupted at him.  "Tapped into something in me?  Yes, it's tapped into that part of me that hates to be betrayed by people I've done a favor for!"

But he kept going.  "Look, you and I both know how the dynamics of this place work.  Your boss freaked out that someone was mad and quickly tried to quiet things down.  He does things like that, and, sure, it's annoying, but it's not the end of the world.  You'll push back a bit, meet with him and his supervisor; he'll back down, and then you all will figure out what to do next."  I did just what he described and things went exactly as he said.

And yet it had been decades since I'd been that mad. 

My friend's point?  I'd reacted at a level ten to, say, a level three offense.  Yes, it had been annoying and, yes, they'd wronged me.  But it wasn't an ultimate wrong and it was relatively easy to fix.  So what was interesting wasn't what had been done to me, but the substantial gap a reasonable observer would suggest between the degree of the offense and the volume of my response.  What had this tapped into in me?

Well, upon reflection, it tapped into some fundamental ways I'd felt powerless and betrayed as a kid.  My unsuspecting supervisor had no idea.

What does one do with this information?  Most people start by realizing two things about their strong reaction. 

(A) It's super-important and needs to be paid attention to.  (B) It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with reality.

(B) can be very hard to believe when we're in the middle of our reaction.  If we feel so strongly about something, we must be right!  We'll fight anyone to the death if they suggest we're not right!  It can feel like a death to entertain the idea that our response reveals a wound in us.  But if we balk right at this point, our road is one of increasing isolation and unhappiness. 

And this is why this is the second-most-helpful thing I've learned about happiness.  People who embrace this have seen marriages saved, have (like me) resisted foolishly leaving jobs, have maintained great friendships over decades rather than seeing them flame out in months, and have grown in the kind of personal skills that have brought them a kind of internal peace they'd given up on-and that, as a throw-in, that have made them valued friends. 

I now live in a world where I almost daily hear someone say something like, "It seems to me that that's a level seven response to a level one offense."  I have friends who can precisely calibrate these things; they use fractions. 

Now what we actually do when we discover this gap, when we die to the thought that our outrage necessarily represents any actual reality, is a column (a thousand-page column) unto itself.  Because whatever we should feel under these circumstances, we actually do feel outrage and something has to be done with that.

And perhaps that's where the first-most powerful thing I've ever learned about happiness comes in.  But there is surprising power, at least as a starting point, in this one.