Boost Your Happiness Level With These 7 Tips
What if you woke up one morning and saw a sign above you that said “happiness bus – jump on here for the ride of your life”? Would you excitedly jump on or would you pass, get up and just face your day? Happiness is within the reach of any person who desires it. It truly is there for you to just reach out and grab hold of and here are seven tips to boost your happiness level, whatever that may be.
But why would you bother? Surely it is enough to just cruise along with life, taking it as it comes and if you are unhappy, that is just your fate in life. You may be surprised to know that there are happiness experts who study and teach happiness, sometimes known as positive psychology. These experts hold the view that happiness is a choice; you can choose positive emotions, you can choose to let go of fear, anxiety and sadness and you can choose to pursue happiness. According to the studies, most people believe that happiness is important and is worth having not just for the individual but for society as a whole.
Happy people earn higher incomes and are more productive, they have longer and more satisfying relationships and more friends, more energy, better health and even longer life. There is evidence that individual happiness is a key factor in organisational performance so any employers reading this might want to explore happiness further. The best possible news is that you can train your brain for greater happiness. Read on to find out how.
1. Create the habit of keeping a daily journal. This might take a while and some discipline and every day that you do it will make it easier to continue. When you get to 90 days it is very likely that it will have become a habit. Your daily journal should be primarily about the positive things that occur in your life and that you appreciate about yourself.
2. Develop gratitude by adding to your daily journal a minimum of three notes about things for which you are grateful that day. Write down the things that people did that you appreciated, anything that made you smile or that you felt thankful for. Talk to others about what happened and reinforce gratitude in your life.
3. Use your daily journal to identify the things that you can see are your strengths. You might find that your writings about what you appreciate in yourself show some of your strengths and you can also ask trusted friends and family what they see as your strengths. Use your strengths to make your life more enjoyable, for example, when you must do something that you do not like, approach it from the angle of your strengths. Build on your strengths at every opportunity.
4. Give generously of acts of kindness. Decide every morning how you will give at least five acts of kindness that day and be on the lookout for opportunities. Doing this just feels so good and other’s are very appreciative. It is like giving and receiving gifts all day long!
5. Have fun! I know that sounds a little crazy and looks obvious – happy people have fun right? You know what though? Sometimes we just stop being playful and exercising our sense of humor and again, it is just about practice. So be on the lookout for happy people with whom you can have fun and practice being funny.
6. Be still with yourself – meditation, yoga and such pursuits calm the mind and give you time to see life from a different perspective. Meditation can also help you to release fear, anxiety and sadness giving you room to allow happiness in. Meditation, by the way, can be a lot more simple than you may think. It can be as easy as watching the waves role in and letting all thoughts drift away in the process.
7. And finally, create yourself some habits like meditation, yoga or exercise. The creation of habits reinforces your belief in yourself to be, do or have anything that you want, including happiness.
So now you have the secret formula to happiness, you know why you would bother and you know that it is possible to be happy even if you are usually unhappy. The choice is yours – reach out and grab hold with both hands or let another day pass. Have fun with these seven tips and be happy.
Using Contrast To Achieve Success
I am currently visiting Canberra – the cold Capital of Australia – and thinking about how contrast helps to achieve success. In the week that I have been here the temperatures have bottomed out with the coldest September day for 40 years and snow falls just 30 kilometres away ranging up to a very warm 24 degrees yesterday. I am used to a fairly stable tropical temperature of 20 to 30 and have now realised just how that has left me with little variation. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the tropics. However I have discovered once again that contrast is pretty exciting.
But how do you use contrast to achieve success? Most of the elite writers about personal development, whether writing from their own experience or channeling the wisdom of others, write about contrast or duality as it is sometimes called. Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch is deals with this subject throughout the series. These writers are referring to the learning gained from knowing one side and then the other of an experience. So how can you know happiness if you have never known sadness. How can you know courage if you have never known fear. The way that I am thinking this through at the moment is that it is very much about feelings and getting familiar with your own feelings; being able to detect constantly how you are doing.
Feelings have a great deal to do with the path to achieve success. Esther Hicks writings on the Law of Attraction and almost any book that you choose to read on this subject will refer to the ability to get to know and understand your feelings and the ability to change those that you do not like. My own professional colleagues use this on a moment by moment basis. Feel something that they do not like – they simply reach for a better feeling thought. Getting used to and interacting with contrast/duality is one way of experiencing your feelings on that particular situation. This week I have found that the deep contrast in the weather has heightened my sense of feeling around a number of matters and reminded me to welcome such contrast into my life.
So instead of finding the weather a nuisance, I am now looking at it as a beautiful way to experience contrast and therefore my feelings. I am sort of back in the zone a bit, dragged away from the constancy of business and back to the real business of life. If I use this experience well, I will be in a state of great vibrations and definitely attracting into my life those things that I desire. Still in the zone to achieve success.
Do you have any special tips and tricks that keep you in touch with your feelings and the way that you are vibrating at any given moment?
Having Fun and Enjoying Success in Canberra
I am reminded today that life is like a box of chocolates – variations of sweet and fun. And there is nothing sweeter than time with my daughters. This week has been a spectacular catch up with two of my daughters when we met up in Canberra. It has been a time to remember that happiness and success is about many things and for me, it is about holding on to that lovely experience of family connections, friendship connections and the freedom to work and play just as I wish.
What does success mean to you?
10 Of The Best – Top Tips For Happiness and Success
For many people, the combination of success and happiness is elusive; sometimes finding one without the other and sometimes finding neither. It is possible to have both and like many things in life, that will require the burning desire and discipline. The burning desire to be happy and have all that you want and the discipline to stay the course while you achieve that. These 10 of the best tips for happiness and success will point you in the right direction and then it is up to you.
1. Bounce back. When things are not going right or you get knocked down, bounce right back again. Find your resilience factor and make it stronger by bouncing back every time. Allow only half an hour for feeling bad and then shift those thoughts and get on with it. Never give up, persevere no matter what. Some successful people take many years to hit their stride. Success might be just around the corner for you and if you give up, you will never know what you might have done.
2. Have a sense of humor. Whatever is happening in your life, do everything possible to find the funny side. Laugh at yourself first and then at everything else. Keep your funny bone finely tuned; it is a lot more enjoyable to be funny than cross. Laughter also gets your endorphins (feel good hormones) flowing and opens up the mind for creativity.
3. Commit your self 100% to your dreams and goals, read them and work to achieve them every day. If you want a prize winning garden you work in it every day; if you want your own prize you work towards it every day. Hold your commitment even though there might be some dream stealers around, hold onto that dream.
4. Start from where you are at and if you do not like what you are doing then learn to love it or find something to do that you do love. Just do not drive everyone else around you crazy with what you do not like. Love what you do.
5. Look for solutions not problems. When you start with a problem you are starting from the negative; when you start to look for a solution, you immediately come from the positive. From that place you can look for great ideas. People around you will love to work with someone who can see possibilities instead of problems.
6. Get out of your rut, try new ideas, have a go at something new and check to see if you have old, limiting beliefs that are holding you back. When you are trying new things your mind is opening up to possibilities and is moving out of your current way of thinking. This also allows creativity in and it is a lot of fun. What if you try running backwards on the beach instead of forward, would you see a different view of the beach and the people on it?
7. Take care of yourself in three ways; your health, your relationships and your work. You need to make sure that each of those are getting equal attention so that you feel balanced and connected to your friends, family and colleagues. You also must give yourself a healthy dose of inspiration at least once a week. A lot of attention is paid to physical fitness and little to brain fitness. So go ahead and give your brain a workout as well as your body.
8. Be kind and generous to others; look for things that you can do for someone else every day. When you are doing this, you are not only building relationships with those people you know, but opening yourself up to new experiences with people who you do not know. You never know when you will see that person whom you have helped or how a kind action will come back to you. Always be prepared to give someone else a hand up; there is enough to go around.
9. Find your passion and let it grow. If you lack passion it is hard to hold the commitment and action required to succeed. Go in search of your passion, try out lots of different things until you find it. Volunteer your help, try different jobs, mix with a different crowd or go back to your childhood dreams. There are many ways to find your passion and your life will be richer for having it.
10. Build relationships. We are moving into a time when people are increasingly looking for relationships in everything that they do. Web 2 is based largely on that premise; customers want to interact and not just buy, people want to keep in touch through various means and not just social networking sites. So join the crowd and create a network of support and like minded people around you.
Well there you are, 10 of the best tips for happiness and success and a checklist that you can use to get started with your own personal development program. Check in with this list occasionally to see how much progress you are making. Beg, borrow or exchange some inspirational products like the book “Think and Grow Rich” or the video “Know For Yourself” and find a way to inspire yourself every day. And finally, try keeping a journal and write about the progress you are making, then go back every now and then and read it. It is fun to look back and see how much you have changed.
What do you do to inspire yourself?
Laughter Makes You Feel Good
According to the Law of Attraction, you monitor your feelings on a moment by moment basis and when you are feeling great you can attract into your life those things that you desire. That being the case, the aim is to feel good and there are lots of ways to do that. If you are not already, then it is important to get in touch with how you feel so that you know when something does not feel so good. You can also learn to understand your feelings by doing things that you like and then noticing what it feels like. Now I say these things because not everyone knows what the various feelings feel like or has felt joy recently.
Laughter makes you feel good, it has a beneficial effect on a variety of diseases such as heart disease and high blood pressure and reduces stress. It is just straight up good for you and that is why a whole industry has been created around it. No, I am not talking about the comedy arts, I am talking about laughter workshops and so on that help you learn how to laugh! But you can have your laughter free or at least at a very low cost.
Watch a funny video, read a funny book (free from the library) or play with your kids or dog. Laughter is guaranteed with a bit of play. If all of those fail, then lock up your house and just laugh yourself silly until you are laughing at your self. Doesn’t matter how you get it, a good laugh makes you feel good and when you feel good you are attracting good things into your life.
