Have you noticed how some people spend a lot of their time looking and sounding happy while others appear miserable most days of the week?
Happiness is not something that falls out of the sky and lands on some lucky people and not others. If it were, we would have no control over our own happiness. While fate or luck can mean that good things happen by chance to some people, this is not the cause of ongoing happiness.
Lasting happiness comes from within us and it’s something we have a lot of control over. To be happy most of the time is a skill and like all skills, it can be learnt.
Professor Tim Sharp is the founder of The Happiness Institute and he has outlined 10 simple steps that if followed, can bring more happiness into our lives. Reading them is a good start, but to make it happen, you have to actually do them
Step 1. Make a conscious decision to be happy and start to believe that real happiness is a real possibility.
Step 2. Determine what happiness means to you. Decide what’s important in your life & what you need to do to get more of it into your life.
Step 3. Think optimistically about achieving the life that you want to achieve. While being realistic, be positive and stay focussed on doing what you want and need to do to achieve happiness.
Step 4. Don’t go alone. Be with people who are important to you.
Step 5. Get organised and make plans. Success and happiness require a certain degree of good management. Learn to control what you can control, accept what you can’t control and be wise enough to know the difference.
Step 6. Live a healthy life. Happiness and success are more likely to be yours if you eat well, keep active and get enough sleep and rest.
Step 7. Have fun! Engage in more activities you find pleasurable and enjoyable. Be grateful for what you have in life, rather than focusing on what you don’t have.
Step 8. Find a sense of spirituality that works for you. Try to find a sense of purpose and meaning either through organised religion or another option.
Step 9. Go with your strengths rather than worrying about your weaknesses. Find what you’re good at & find ways to apply these strengths wherever possible.
Step 10. Persevere. Stick at it. Be prepared to work at attaining happiness and recognise that it might take some time to implement some of these steps.
These steps and other information about happiness are covered in a lot more detail in our book “The Rest of your Life – How to make it as good as you want”. To find out more about the book, or to buy it, click on this web address: http://www.mylifechange.com.au/the-rest-of-your-life