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Tag Archive: Happiness

You’re Not Responsible for Their Happiness

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.

The Right Attitude For Finding A Job You Actually Like

NOTE: While this article was written using a backdrop of finding a job you like, the essence of what you are about to read applies to finding a great relationship, and, actually, just about every aspect of life. So read it with that awareness.

If you ever hope to have a job you love, there are some fundamental things that you’re going to need to change about yourself before it can ever happen. Even if you manage to fool your way into an incredible job that you totally love, you will eventually find the job meeting you head-on and many of the elements you’ve hated about past jobs will come rushing in, ruining  the experience of the new job that you started thinking might be your “perfect” job.

The problem with so many of the things you don’t like about various jobs comes down to the thoughts and beliefs you have. Each belief is like a filter. When you start at a new job, your attention is overwhelmed with the newness of the job. Since you have high hopes that the job will match your desires (or at least your needs), you instantly pay attention to everything that is different and good with the new job. But once the newness wears off, you begin to take a closer look and evaluate everything through your belief filters (which, in this case, are a specific set of job-related biases). Then you start to notice how dirty the bathroom is, how the employees don’t clean up their messes in the break room, and you even begin to encounter the same type of back-stabbing, lazy, double-talking people you left at your last job, and the job before that, and the job before that…etc.

A Simple Way To Transform Your Life

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.

When you are trying to make changes in your life, there are two core steps that are simple to understand but can be powerfully transformative. And those steps are:

1) Change the way you think.
2) Change the way you act.

No matter what books you read about self-improvement or what religious, spiritual, or mindful path you may follow, these are the two themes behind all mental and physical self-improvement. When I’m sharing ideas or strategies, everything circles back around to these two themes, and these are fundamental to your behavior and overall level of motivation. But there are also two sub-themes that I often return to in various forms. Those are:

5 Essential Communication Skills For A Happier Marriage

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.

Because thoughts shape behavior, communication skills shape how you interact with your partner. Authentic communication takes practice and more practice. But simply talking is not the same as communicating. True communication in a great marriage is a tw0-way conversation. Therefore, it takes practice from both people. However, you can only do your practicing and encourage your partner to do the same. It can be tricky when a partner doesn’t want to communicate, but that doesn’t mean the partner doesn’t want to solve the issue. It takes time, patience, and even great care to develop solid communication skills; it’s always a work in progress. But you can’t master something you’re not practicing, so how do you practice communication? The following five skills are essential for a happier marriage.

30-Day Challenge: Declutter Your Life

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.

Well, now is a great time to get a fresh start by trying this 30-Day Challenge. Thirty days from today, you could finally have your office cleaned up, or that space in your attic. Perhaps you’ll finally tame that monster hiding in your garage and have room to, once again, park your car. I feel like clutter is a type of psychic cancer, eating away at your creativity, your energy levels, your inspiration and totally draining your motivation even before it gets started. Well, it’s time to change that. It’s time to rediscover your inspiration, your creativity and your floor! Here’s how:

FYI: Happiness Set Point

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.

As with graphs that chart trends, your happiness set point sometimes trends upward, trends downward, or may stay mostly the same over time.

We all face challenging lives. Sometimes we’re in a good mood, other times, we’re not feeling so cheery. But somewhere between your wonderful highs and your depressing lows, you’ll find your average level of happiness or happiness set point. In spite of all the highs and lows of life, your happiness set point tends to stay relatively stable. But that doesn’t mean you’re happy on average. It only represents your average mood, or how happy you tend to be, overall. So if you don’t feel very happy most of the time, your happiness set point might be lower.

The happiness set point is like a groove. You’ve practiced it so much that it’s easy to fall back into it no matter how high or how low your mood goes. The good news is that your happiness set point can be raised over time, by making a conscious effort to spend more time doing things that cause your happiness to go up and stay there longer. Want to raise your happiness set point? Try out these simple strategies:

For Sale: Happiness

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…

Suppose it was really expensive, say $500…maybe $1,000, or even $10,000, would you pay it?

How much you’re willing to pay might be determined by how unhappy you are to begin with. If you’re desperately miserable, you might pay anything for some relief.

What if you took the box of happiness to the checkout register and found out that it was free? All you have to do is practice happiness for 12 hours every day for the next 12 months. That means you would have to constantly practice being happy. Don’t know how? Well, that’s why they call it practice. Just do the best you can. Right?

But wait, there’s an owner’s manual with this box of happiness. It says the following:

About
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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