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.
Five Success Strategies For Positive Thinking
Read any self help or personal development book and you will find advice to maintain a positive attitude and approach to what you are doing in life. However, the world that we live in abounds with negativity of one kind or another. Bad news stories apparently sell well and anyone is more likely to tell you about what is going wrong than what is going right in their lives. How do you become and stay positive and optimistic? It is possible; try these five tips for positive thinking.
1. Provide yourself with a weekly inspirational fix from a positive, self development source. You could consider subscribing to a journal of excellence such as “Success Magazine” or an online site such as Napoleon Hill’s Mastermind. You could spend some time on inspirational blog sites or buy/borrow books from such authors as Brian Tracy, Zig Zigglar or Jim Rohn. These great investments into yourself will help you to work with the only person over whom you have direct motivation – yourself. Invest in yourself to stay positive.
2. Commence a prosperity journal. Join those who keep a daily journal or diary and create the opportunity to look back over where you have been and how far you have come. This is a delightful way to track your progress and give yourself your own positivity fix. For this particular exercise, you do not even need much by way of equipment, expense or time, just a little discipline until you have created the habit. Get yourself a notebook and each day, at a time that suits you, make entries about the good things that happened to you over the preceding period of time. It can be as simple as having been shouted a coffee or someone let you into the line of traffic. If it was nice, then write it down, regularly read back over your lists and savor those moments. Soon they will become very common for you.
3. Move outside of yourself and do something for another person; a random act of kindness. Such acts will give you a feeling of well-being and satisfaction and it is hard to hold a negative thought while feeling this way. Do this as often as you possibly can and watch your positivity and optimism grow.
4. Play, have fun and enjoy yourself lots and often. Use as much creativity in this pursuit as you can muster up. Building your enjoyment in life and developing your creativity is a great thing even if you are not concentrating on becoming and staying positive and optimistic. It is just fun and I beg of you, try to be negative while having fun.
5. Seek out the positive in every facet of your life, but most importantly, mix with like minded people. If you are on the path to positivity it is much easier when you are with positive people. That may mean that you create a bit of space away from your negative friends and associates for a while until you are well and truly in your positive mind set. Once you are confident in holding your positive stance you will likely be a great influence on them and others around you. Being influential is great, go right ahead and enjoy it.
There are many, many other actions that you can take to gain and maintain a positive attitude and these five are great to start with. There is no need to overload yourself; if this is all that you ever do, you will find that it works. The trick of course is to be committed and consistent until you have embedded these as daily habits. Above all, enjoy the journey to positivity and have fun with these five tips.
Become More Self Aware
According to Shawn Achor, Positive Psychologist at Harvard University, doing 5 kind things each day takes you outside of yourself and puts you into a mindset of thinking of others, thus becoming more aware of yourself. Shawn actually calls this 5 Random Acts of Kindness (ROKS) however I just think of it as 5 kind things to do. You should set this up at the beginning of the day so that you do not get to bedtime and start to think – well what did I do. It will work best if you start your day thinking about how you will do these 5 ROKS. That process alone helps with your self awareness.
This is because doing it that way actually gets you to thinking about others from the very start and not just filling in the gaps because you do nice things anyway. As you move more and more to thinking about how you can help others, you become more and more aware of how you behave, think and feel. You achieve self awareness more easily.
And by the way, it just feels great to do this, and that’s one bonus. Make it fun and that is the second bonus. Self awareness is the third bonus. Wow, three bonuses from one strategy – that’s got to be good.
What will be your 5 kind things to do today? I would love to hear from you about how you went.
