The Way To Happiness

It's been told that happiness is a journey, not a destination. Then again, many of us make the mistake of denying ourselves joy until something happens - until we get a promotion, until we get our dream house, until we clinch that million-dollar contract.

Happiness can be elusive, but if we follow these simple steps, we may yet attain it faster and with less strife than we think.

Are you overwhelmed by a sense of dread when you try something new every time? Positive and spirited people focus on what is possible rather than dwell on the chances for failure. They look at the brighter side and find humour even in sticky situations.

This also extends to inner judgements. Minimise being self-critical, when we need to practice a little kindness towards ourselves. Take note of your own thoughts - what do you tell yourself about how you are handling things? Perhaps you did make a mistake, but you were exhausted.

Do you complete one task only to rush on to the next? Similarly you may meet challenges of a more personal nature, such as having a difficult conversation with a loved one, without acknowledging your own effort. It's important to absorb the satisfaction from your achievements.

Some people believe the world owes them - and they are entitled to "the good life" and all its benefits. They become bitter when setbacks happen and tangible rewards stay out of reach.

We need to ask ourselves - what can I offer to other people? What can I contribute to my family, my community or the world at large that is align with my skills and abilities? Sarah Bernhardt, a flamboyant French actress in the late 1800s showed uncommon wisdom when she mentioned, "It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich."

Recognizing our life values, determining how we want to achieve them and taking steps to act on them is self-empowering and fulfilling. When you able to understand that you are doing what is most important to you, your happiness level shoots right up.

No one likes feeling wedged. It is essential to know what you really want and then take some action towards it. Even if progress is slow, do not be disheartened as you will feel better going in the right direction.

No matter how stressed you are, take a break from your routine to admire the simple things around you or share coffee with a friend. It is the moments which make us happiest - yet so many of them slip by unnoticed.

Dealing With Disappointments

Someone once mentioned, "No appointments, no disappointments."

We experience these somewhat similar emotions when we have created expectations relating what we will receive from others, life or even from ourselves. We might also feel such emotions relating our own abilities or efforts when we are unable to achieve the goals we desire.

We feel this way when things do not go the way we expected, or more often, when others are not who we expected them to be. We form expectations, and then feel cheated when we they are not fulfilled.

When we succumb to such feelings, we often give up making any further effort, which in turn hampers our growth. In order to manage disappointment, we have to first understand that we are all in a process of evolution and that no one is perfect. It is irrational to expect or demand perfection from ourselves or others. We would not be here in this evolutionary process if we did not have much to progress.

Have faith in the flow of life. There is a wisdom greater than ours. Something drives the turtle to return to their birthplace to lay eggs upriver. Something unfurls the flowers at dawn and closes them in the evening. Something makes the penguins to go out and come back fish for his/her mate. We don't yet fully understand what that something is, but there's no denying it's there. So instead of demanding results at once, we need to learn that change, manifestation and creation are usually slow organic processes.

Now this is challenging to do when faced with disappointment - having confidence that with patience, practice and perseverance, we can manifest the changes we seek. But it's crucial that we develop greater trust in our ability to manifest our goals and life purpose with or without the help of specific persons.

See how you can attain greater self-sufficiency. When we are independent, we need less from others and will expect less from them too. What are the voids in your life you now require others to fill? How can you work towards in filling them yourself?

Pebbles Equals Diamonds

One night a group of nomads were preparing to retire for the evening when suddenly they were surrounded by a great light. They knew they were in the presence of a celestial being. With great anticipation, they awaited a heavenly message of great importance that they knew must be especially for them.

Finally, the voice spoke, "Gather as many pebbles as you can. Put them in your saddle bags. Travel a day's journey and tomorrow night will find you glad and it will find you sad."

After having departed, the nomads shared their disappointment and anger with each other. They had expected the revelation of a great universal truth that would enable them to create wealth, health and purpose for the world. But instead they were given a menial task that made no sense to them at all. However, the memory of the brilliance of their visitor caused each one to pick up a few pebbles and deposit them in their saddle bags while voicing their displeasure.

They traveled a day's journey and that night while making camp, they reached into their saddle bags and discovered every pebble they had gathered had become a diamond. They were glad they had diamonds. They were sad they had not gathered more pebbles.

That story was featured in an article written by John Wayne Schlatter, from the book "A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul".

Every experience, whether small, overwhelming, joyful, or upsetting, is a pebble we find on the road. If we leave it there on the road and glean nothing from it, then we will end up with an empty bag at the end of our journey.

However, if we begin to cherish and appreciate every pebble, learn something from it, and keep it in our bags, we will finish our journey with a bag full of diamonds.

The irony of the story is in the arcane message delivered by the mysterious voice, supposedly the voice of God. Understanding fully the nature of Man - which is to be suspecting and lazy - he knew from the beginning that the nomads would finish their journey both glad and sad.

Not one of them was faithful or industrious enough to follow the instructions properly, and so they all ended up regretful that they had not gathered more pebbles.

Treat every experience in life like a pebble that will yield a diamond in the future. In this way, you'll ensure that you constantly develop and grow, as well as accumulated a wealth of knowledge to enrich you in the years ahead.

Story taken from "A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul" edited by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

Practise in Self Belief

To achieve any goal in life, you must believe you are going to be successful. This conviction gives you the strength and resilience needed to achieve your objective. It also helps you to actively seek and recognise opportunities and stepping stones.

So how can you develop a powerful sense of self-belief?

Before you begin any endeavour, you should be confident that the end result is possible. Don't focus on whether it's been done before or not. Don't listen to others who might be feeding you with negative thoughts. Be clear in your own mind that the goal can be achieved.

More crucially, believe that the end result is possible by you. We often hold limiting beliefs about our own ability to achieve goals. We may believe the goal is possible, but we often don't think it's possible for us to achieve it. So identify those beliefs that are holding you back and take time to address them.

Now that you know you can achieve your objective, how much do you want it? The more we want to achieve a goal, the bigger the hurdles we'll jump over to get there. So choose a goal you really want; take the time to ask yourself why you want it and how badly you want it. What are the values underlying that goal? Is it a desire to help people? A yearning to be your own boss? Or is it to do something that allows you to spend more time with your children?

Next you have to believe that you deserve the end result. Hidden under the surface in many people is a belief that they do not deserve to succeed. Because of some deep-rooted experience that caused their self-esteem to decline, these people often choose to remain where they are, or even slide, because they feel that they are not worthy of success and happiness. When they try to take action, this belief restricts them, they lose motivation, and fail. But always remember that if you work consistently toward your goal, you deserve all the success you get.

Also, achieving your goal should not contradict any other beliefs or values you have. For example, if you believe strongly that rich people are greedy, you'll probably not be motivated enough to build a successful business. Try aligning your goals with your values. An entrepreneur perhaps could work towards making a lot of money so that he can use part of that money to help the needy.

Believing in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals is the first step towards building a better future for yourself.

Stop Complaining

We all know that life wasn’t meant to go your way all the time. This state of uncertainity is designed to help us grow into the kind of human beings we can be, to help us understand how we fit into the larger scheme of things, and to prevent our minds and bodies from declining in a state of inertia.

So, in many ways, disappointment is an indispensable part of life. Without it, we would become complacent and slothful, success and love wouldn’t fill our hearts with as much joy, and there would be no push towards improving ourselves.

However, when circumstances take twists and turns we can't predict, we often feel discouraged. And we feel the need to complain. Some people feel it’s a right. The so-called logic is “If the world is treating me unkindly, why shouldn’t I make some noise about it?”

Well, the “noise” may release some tension initially, but complaining doesn’t solve anything. Besides, it conditions a negative mindset. It forces us to unwittingly dwell on what's wrong in our lives instead of focusing on what we can change or do to make things right. When complaining becomes a part of you, you’re inviting a lot of negative energy into your life.

When something goes differently than we had planned or when something that's difficult pops up unexpectedly, we should allow ourselves to feel the confusion, anger, or whatever other emotion comes along as a result.

But once you have vented, stop yourself from dwelling on the thing that caused the negative emotion. Quit complaining. When you complain, you tell several people over and over about what went wrong. Your mind is hooked onto the horrible thing. You bring others and yourself down by your complaining. You become stuck in your own whiny, nagging slime.

So, after venting, allow yourself to pick up the pieces and see where you can proceed from where you are. What can you do to make things better? How can you respond so that achieving your main priority is still your focus? Think about things that have turn out right in your life. Appreciate what you have been able to achieve so far and give credit to it.

By asking yourself questions and recollecting past positive moments, your mind accepts what has just happened and moves on to what will happen next. It uses the lessons you just learned as corrective feedback to help you stay on track with your goal or to help you determine a new one with a focus.

So go ahead and let it out, but quit complaining. You will be in a much better position to handle things when they don't go your way.

Love Need Not To Be Bartered

You usually do what you're told or asked to, even when you really don't want to do it. You hold your grudges inside, but because you feel mistreated, you grumble, complain and have frequent bursts of anger. You feel suppressed, but just can't seem to say "no".

Does that sound like you?

If you're consistently suppressing your desires to accommodate other people's needs, even it makes you really unhappy, perhaps you need a shift in self-perspective.

You probably feel that if you don't give in to others' requests or demands, that people will not love or accept you anymore. You believe that their "love" for you is based exclusively on the pre-requisite that you comply with their every wish.

People trapped in such relationships can't seem to refuse the requests of family members or friends. And their family members and friends have become so used to seeing them in the submissive role that they often think that's what makes them happy, so they leave them to it. These people also get feelings of self-worth from being the "victim", the "martyr", or the one who has to give up their own needs to accommodate the desires of the people he loves. This is a false line of reasoning that he has permitted himself to believe.

But your family members and friends will just as easily love you even if you can't give in to their desires. Love does not require that you hide your true self and happiness. Love does not need you to be unfair about your real feelings.

True freedom is found in giving out and sharing of love and not out of fear. When we give out of fear of rejection, we are not really giving but bartering whatever we are giving in exchange for others' acceptance and approval

No one can respond to what others ask of them all the time. And you are just as worthy of love even when you can't accommodate the needs of others.

Is it time that you allowed others to be responsible for their own reality? And for you to be responsible for your own happiness and fulfillment?

Managing Negativity

Our lives these days are filled with negativity - terrorism, disease, natural disasters, war. The messages we receive on a daily basis mostly aim to induce a feeling of dissatisfaction, envy or fear. As life gets more stressful, we encounter more negativity from our family, friends and co-workers.

How we deal with this information is up to us. We can either absorb it all and allow it to negatively dominate our thoughts, emotions, attitudes and our day-to-day lives. Or we can view these events as an unfortunate but unavoidable part of our existence and concentrate on those things we can do something about - such as our own personal lives and how we can positively influence ourselves and those around us.

The more we focus on the "bad" or negative things around us, the more our thoughts and behaviour work towards an undesirable outcome. But if we change our focus to the good things of life - the positives - there is an above average chance that things will get much better. Negatives fill our emotional bucket quickly and before we know it, they are spilling all over ourselves and those around us. Isn't it far more logical to fill our bucket with positives? The people around us are sure to be much more receptive to any spillage the might occur.

If your optimism is taking a beating, try saving some time for yourself and writing down the good things in your life - the things you enjoy and appreciate. Start with the fact that you even woke up this morning, then go from there. No matter how bad your situation is, if you try just a little you'll have plenty of items on our list. Keep the list handy and add to it as you think of other things. There will always be days when your list will come in handy to give you a pick-me-up.

Be selective about what you read, watch on TV, hear on the radio and the music you listen to. Think about the information your mind is absorbing and determine whether it's really good for you. Be selective with your friends and pay attention to the conversations you are having. Is the relationship - or the conversation - based on negative words and feelings? Would you be better off changing the subject - or finding someone different to spend your time with?

And watch your "self talk". This is the imaginary conversations we have with ourselves and others, especially when there are potential conflicts on the horizon. Stop "badmouthing" the people in your life and stop "badmouthing" yourself! Every time we do that, we are reinforcing to ourselves just how miserable the world is and how unfortunate we are.