Guilt has a sneaky way of weaseling into hidden areas of your life. Are you doing things out of guilt? Do you feel obligated to participate in certain events or activities and feel guilty if you don’t? Ever feel like you’re being dumped on, like everybody wants something from you and you’re always so busy trying to make everybody else happy, that you never have time to do things that make you happy?
From a very early age, we learn how important it is to please everybody else. If you do something that your teacher doesn’t like, you’re scolded and maybe told that you’re being bad. When you’re with your parents, the same kind of messages get through. You might get yelled at and told to stop “acting up”. So you learn how to feel guilty at an early age. It’s as if everybody is saying, “Don’t act in any ways that will make us unhappy.”
While I’m not suggesting that the adults who are responsible for raising children allow them to run free and wild, I’m only saying that this early message–”do what makes us happy, regardless of how it makes you feel”–never changes. You never learn that it’s okay to do things that make you happy.
There are some themes that I write about again and again because I know the power behind them. Whether you’re just starting a journey of self-improvement or you’ve been fine-tuning your life for years, transformation isn’t random, it’s definite. I know that how good or how bad you feel about your life comes down to a couple of key concepts which influence every aspect of who you are, the choices you make, and how you live.
Communication is vitally important because we’re so dang bad at reading our partner’s mind (until we’ve been married for many years, that is). The best marriages have a great deal of communication; the worst have little or none. But every aspect of a marriage requires communication in some form. When our emotions get fired up, we are quick to make assumptions based almost entirely on our own unrealistic thoughts about the situation. Most of the time, these assumptions are partially, if not completely, wrong.
When you look all around you, do you see stacks of mail that need to be processed? Perhaps you’ve got books laying around along with a million miscellaneous scraps of paper with scribbled notes on them. Remember that thing you were going to fix that you put aside until you had more time…and now you’re tripping over it every day? Whether you want to be more disciplined, more organized, or just plain happier, clearing out the clutter and freshening up your environment will make a huge difference. In fact, you may not realize how much your psyche is affected by clutter and how different you can feel until it’s all gone.
Happiness Set Point is your overall happiness average. Imagine a graph that looks like a roller coaster; a line moves across the page dipping down and swinging back up, then dropping again. The high points are when you’re happiest. Obviously, the low points represent when you’re a bit depressed or just not really all that happy.
If happiness were for sale, how much would you be willing to pay for it? I’m not talking about a pill. Imagine buying a box, and when you open it, you would have instant lifelong happiness. Good deal? Maybe…
Hi, I'm Scott and I have a passion for helping people change how they see things. Few people really understand how thinking and behavior affects their lives and motivation. That's where I come in. I help people make that connection. I'd like to show you how simple adjustments in your thinking can make your life better.
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