Let me start with something I believe deeply: Everyone deserves to be happy.

Not just content; Not just getting by; Actually, genuinely happy in their work, in their relationships, in the quiet moments when they’re alone with their thoughts. Happy in a way that feels authentic, sustainable, and aligned with who they really are.

This belief isn’t just philosophical for me. It’s personal. And it’s the driving force behind why I developed Intentonomics^®.

The Pattern I Couldn’t Ignore

Over years of studying human behavior and observing patterns in how people approach change, I kept seeing the same heartbreaking pattern. People would know exactly what they needed to be happier:

• The executive who knew she needed to stop working 80-hour weeks to save her marriage
• The middle manager who understood that speaking up in meetings would advance his career
• The parent who recognized that being present with their children mattered more than scrolling through emails
• The friend who knew that having difficult conversations would deepen relationships
• The entrepreneur who understood that delegating would reduce stress and grow the business

They knew. They all knew.

But knowing and doing lived in completely different worlds.

I watched brilliant, capable, well-intentioned people repeatedly choose paths that led away from their own happiness. Not because they were self-destructive or lacking willpower, but because something fundamental was missing in how we think about human choice and change.

That’s when I realized: We’ve been solving the wrong problem.

The Real Problem: The Choice Gap

Most approaches to happiness, whether in self-help books, organizational development programs, or therapy sessions, focus on what people should do differently. Better habits, clearer goals, improved systems, enhanced skills.

But I discovered that happiness doesn’t fail because people don’t know what to do. It fails because people haven’t truly decided to do it.

There’s an invisible barrier between knowing and choosing, between understanding and committing, between seeing the path and actually walking it. This barrier isn’t about information or capability. It’s about the quality and strength of our intent.

This realization became the foundation of Intentonomics^®: the behavioral science of strengthening choices to enable action.

The science part matters because I’ve seen too many people beat themselves up for “lacking willpower” when the real issue is that their choices lack the psychological and environmental conditions needed for sustainable action. When we understand what actually activates human intent, we can design both personal and professional transformations that stick.

Why Intent Is Everything

Think about the last time you made a choice that genuinely moved you toward happiness. I mean really moved you, not just a temporary pleasure or quick fix, but something that created lasting positive change in your life.

What was different about that choice compared to all the times you knew what would make you happy but didn’t pursue it?

If you’re like most people, you’ll recognize that the successful choice had a different quality to it. It felt solid, clear, aligned. You weren’t just considering it; you had decided. The intent was strong, and action followed naturally.

Now think about an area where you’re stuck. Maybe it’s setting boundaries with work demands to protect family time. Or having honest conversations with your partner about what you need. Perhaps it’s pursuing a creative project that brings you joy, or investing in friendships that energize rather than drain you.

You probably know what you should do. The question is: have you truly decided to do it?

This is where Intentonomics® becomes transformational for both your personal life and your professional impact. When you strengthen your own choices, you don’t just change your circumstances. You become someone who models possibility for others. Your team notices. Your family notices. Your friends notice.

And here’s what’s fascinating from a business perspective: the same choice-strengthening principles that create personal happiness are exactly what drive successful organizational change. Every failed training program, every stalled digital transformation, every leadership initiative that fizzled out can trace back to the same issue: people knew what to do but hadn’t truly decided to do it.

The ORBIT^™ of Happiness Across All Life Roles

I developed the ORBIT Principle™ as an engine of Intentonomics^® to map the specific conditions that transform weak intentions into strong choices. Let me walk you through how this applies to happiness across every role you play in life:

 

Opportunity: Is There a Meaningful Reason to Act Now?

For happiness to become real, you need genuine opportunity. I use what I call the P.U.R.E. method to validate this:

In Your Career: What problems are you tolerating that drain your energy? Perhaps you’re saying yes to every project request, even ones that bore you, because you fear losing the chance to be noticed. Once you identify the real problem (boundary setting, not workload), you can see the opportunity: more selective work choices could increase both your income and your satisfaction.

This same principle applies to organizational change. Companies often launch new systems or processes without validating whether there’s genuine opportunity for improvement. They assume the problem is obvious, but teams might see it differently. When a sales team resists adopting a new CRM system, the real opportunity might not be better data management, but addressing the underlying frustration with administrative burden. When you identify the true problem from the users’ perspective, you can design change that people actually want to embrace.

In Your Relationships: What unmet needs exist in your closest connections? Maybe you know your marriage is struggling but keep saying you’ll “work on it later.” When you recognize that your relationship feels more like roommates than partners, the opportunity becomes clear: invest in connection now, or risk losing what matters most.

In Your Personal Life: What aspects of your health, creativity, or growth have you been neglecting? You might keep saying you miss painting but have no time. The real opportunity isn’t finding more hours. It’s questioning why you’ve convinced yourself that joy is a luxury you can’t afford.

The opportunity for happiness exists when you can clearly see both what’s not working and what’s possible, with a realistic path forward.

Relevance: Does This Align With Who You Really Are?

Sustainable happiness must connect to your deeper values. This is where many corporate wellness programs fall flat. They offer generic solutions instead of helping people connect change to their authentic selves.

Personal Values: When you examine what you truly believe matters, the answers reveal why some happiness pursuits stick and others don’t. If family connection is a core value, working toward better relationships becomes deeply relevant. If creativity feeds your soul, making time for artistic expression isn’t selfish. It’s essential.

The same relevance principle explains why some corporate training programs create lasting change while others are forgotten within weeks. Generic leadership development often fails because it doesn’t connect to what individual participants actually value. But when learning experiences help people see how new skills serve their personal career aspirations, strengthen their ability to support their teams, or align with their deeper sense of purpose, engagement skyrockets. People don’t resist change that feels personally meaningful.

Life Stage Alignment: What you need for happiness shifts as you grow. Twenty-five-year-olds focused on building careers might sacrifice relationships that would anchor them. Forty-five-year-olds questioning their legacy often need to shift from climbing ladders to building meaning. Those thinking about retirement usually need to redefine contribution rather than achievement.

Identity Integration: The most powerful happiness choices feel like coming home to yourself. When choices align with who you’re becoming rather than just solving who you’ve been, they create energy instead of draining it.

Belief: Do You Really Think You Can Create this Change?

This is often where people get stuck, and it’s where the science of Intentonomics^® becomes crucial for transformation. Belief isn’t just positive thinking. It’s grounded confidence based on evidence and capability.

Self-Efficacy: Look at your history. When have you successfully created positive change before? What capabilities do you have that you’re not acknowledging? You might think you can’t influence your company’s toxic culture, but then remember how you’ve successfully mediated conflicts between colleagues, advocated for flexible arrangements, and mentored others. The evidence of your capability is already there.

Outcome Belief: Do you truly believe that investing in your happiness will yield meaningful returns? Or are you secretly convinced that you don’t deserve it, that it’s selfish, or that it won’t last? This is where professional and personal transformation intersect. When you believe your wellbeing contributes to better performance, relationships, and leadership, pursuing happiness becomes strategic rather than indulgent.

In organizational contexts, belief challenges show up everywhere. Teams might resist new collaborative tools not because they don’t understand the features, but because they don’t believe the investment in learning will actually improve their work experience. They’ve seen too many “transformational” initiatives that promised big changes but delivered minimal impact. Building belief requires showing clear connections between effort and meaningful outcomes, often through small wins that demonstrate real value before asking for larger commitments.

Environmental Trust: Sometimes we need to start with small experiments to build belief that our circumstances can support change. You might believe your industry is too demanding for work-life balance. Starting with protecting one evening per week for family dinner could lead to broader conversations about sustainable performance across your entire organization.

Integrity of Thought: What’s Your Energetic State?

Your consciousness level directly impacts your ability to create happiness. I’ve observed this pattern thousands of times, and it explains why some people can transform quickly while others struggle for years with the same insights.

Low-Energy States that weaken your intent to pursue happiness:

• Shame: “I don’t deserve this or to be happy”
• Guilt: “What we are doing is not correct or It’s selfish to prioritize my own fulfillment”
• Fear: “What if I pursue this objective or happiness and fail?”
• Apathy: “Nothing will really change anyway”

High-Energy States that strengthen your intent:

• Courage: “I’m willing to take risks for what matters to me”
• Reason: “I can think clearly about what serves this objective and my wellbeing”
• Love: “I care enough about myself and others to pursue this”
• Joy: “I’m energized by the possibility of greater achievement and happiness”

The higher your consciousness level, the stronger your choices become. This isn’t mystical. It’s practical psychology. When you operate from courage rather than fear, from love rather than shame, your brain literally processes information differently. You see opportunities instead of obstacles. You take action instead of avoiding risk.

This consciousness principle is crucial for implementing organizational change. Teams operating from fear (“What if this new process makes us look incompetent?”) or apathy (“Here we go again with another change initiative”) will struggle to engage authentically with learning and transformation. But when you can elevate the collective consciousness to curiosity (“What might this enable us to accomplish?”) or courage (“We’re capable of mastering this challenge”), the same training content becomes exponentially more effective. It’s not about the information you share, it’s about the energetic state people bring to receiving it.

Trust: Do You Trust the People, Process, and Path?

Happiness requires trust across multiple dimensions, and this is where personal transformation enables professional leadership. When you learn to trust yourself with your own wellbeing, you become someone others trust with theirs.

People Trust: Do you trust yourself to make good choices about your own wellbeing? Do you trust the important people in your life to support your growth? You might be hiding career ambitions from your partner because you don’t trust they’ll support your pursuit of a promotion that might require travel. The conversation you’ve been avoiding might actually deepen your partnership.

Process Trust: Do you believe in the methods you’re using to create change? Are you confident in your ability to learn and adapt as you go? This is why I developed ORBIT™ as a diagnostic tool. Instead of guessing why change isn’t happening, you can systematically examine what’s missing.

Trust becomes especially critical in business transformation because organizational change affects multiple people with different perspectives and concerns. When implementing new technologies, processes, or ways of working, trust must be earned at every level. People need to trust that leadership genuinely believes in the change, that the implementation process will be fair and transparent, and that support will be available when challenges arise. Without this foundation of trust, even the most well-designed training programs encounter resistance that has nothing to do with content quality.

Path Trust: Can you see a clear enough roadmap forward, even if you don’t know every step? The most successful transformations start with people who can trust the direction without needing to control every detail.

When All Five Roles Align

Here’s what I’ve discovered: when you apply Intentonomics® to strengthen your choices around happiness, something remarkable happens. The different roles in your life start to reinforce rather than compete with each other.

The executive who finally sets boundaries becomes more effective at work and more present at home. The parent who pursues their creative passion models authenticity for their children while finding energy that makes them better at parenting. The friend who learns to have honest conversations deepens their connections while building skills that serve them everywhere.

Happiness isn’t compartmentalized. When you strengthen your intent to pursue fulfillment in one area, it ripples through everything.

This pattern plays out in organizations too. When leaders model the courage to pursue authentic fulfillment, it gives their teams permission to do the same. Employee engagement rises not because of new policies but because of new possibilities people see in their leaders’ examples.

The business implications are profound. Organizations that apply Intentonomics® to their learning and change initiatives see dramatically different outcomes. Instead of rolling out training that people attend but don’t apply, they create experiences that strengthen intent first, then build capability. Instead of implementing changes that people comply with but don’t embrace, they design transformations that people choose to champion.

Consider how this works in practice: a company wants to improve customer service scores. Traditional approaches focus on teaching new techniques or implementing new systems. But Intentonomics® would first examine whether teams have genuine opportunity to serve customers better (maybe current processes create barriers), whether improved service aligns with what employees value (recognition, pride in work, career growth), whether they believe their efforts will make a difference, what energetic state they bring to customer interactions, and whether they trust leadership’s commitment to supporting excellent service.

When all five ORBIT^™ components align, the same customer service training that might have generated modest results becomes transformational because people aren’t just learning new skills, they’re choosing to embody a new way of working.

My Personal Why

I want to be honest with you about why this matters so much to me. I’ve seen too many good people resign themselves to less than they deserve. I’ve watched brilliant minds convince themselves that happiness is selfish, unrealistic, or somehow not for them.

But I’ve also seen what happens when people apply the principles of Intentonomics® to their own lives. When they move from weak intentions to strong choices. When they stop waiting for permission and start designing their own fulfillment.

The transformation isn’t just personal. It’s generational. Happy people raise happier children. Fulfilled professionals create better workplaces. Authentic friends inspire deeper connections. People who choose their own happiness give others permission to do the same.

This is why I created Intentonomics®. Because everyone deserves to be happy, and everyone has the power to strengthen the choices that create that happiness.

Your Happiness, Your Choice

So let me ask you directly: What would change in your life if you truly decided, with clear, strong intent, to pursue your own happiness?

Not someday. Not when conditions are perfect. Not when you have more time, money, or energy.

What if you decided now?

Take a moment to examine your current situation through the ORBIT™ lens:

• Opportunity: Where do you see the clearest potential for greater happiness?
• Relevance: What matters most deeply to who you’re becoming?
• Belief: What evidence do you have that you can create positive change?
• Integrity: What’s your current energetic state around pursuing fulfillment?
• Trust: Who and what do you trust to support this journey?

Your answers will reveal exactly where to begin.

The beauty of Intentonomics® is that it works at any scale. You can apply it to a conversation you need to have this week, a career transition you’re considering, or a life pattern you want to shift. The framework adapts because it’s based on how human choice actually works rather than how we think it should work.

From a business perspective, this scalability means you can use ORBIT™ to diagnose why a small team isn’t adopting a new process, why a department-wide training program isn’t creating behaviour change, or why an enterprise-wide transformation is losing momentum. The same principles that help individuals strengthen their choices around personal happiness also help organizations strengthen collective choices around professional growth and change.

This is why I believe Intentonomics® represents a fundamental shift in how we approach organizational development. Instead of assuming that people will change when they understand what to do, we start by ensuring they truly decide to do it. We design learning experiences that don’t just transfer knowledge but strengthen intent. We create change processes that don’t just communicate new directions but build the psychological and environmental conditions that make new directions feel inevitable.

Everyone deserves to be happy; including you. Especially you.

Now let’s make it happen.

Ankur Shiv Bhandari (ASB)