Happiness

Look around you next time you are out.  How many people look happy?  I'm often astounded because so few people really look like they are happy.  The same goes when you talk to them.  I believe one of the main reasons for this is that they are looking for happiness outside of themselves. Happiness comes from inside. As Denis Waitley says, it comes from a sense of love and gratitude and grace. It is also a choice which we often forget. We are taught to focus on the things that have gone wrong so that we can fix them, however, when we do that were always thinking of things that don't make us happy.

I remember one of the first things I read about parenting is never to tell your kids to think about what they did wrong. The reason for that is because then that's all they are thinking about. Instead we should tell them to think about what they could have done differently that would've been a better choice. The same is true for us when we've done something that we would rather done differently. Rather than focusing on what we did and beating ourselves up about it, reliving it over and over again in our minds, we should focus on what we would have liked to have done.

A great exercise that I invite you to try is tonight when you go to bed if there's anything that went "wrong" in your day, think about how you would've liked that situation to go. Think about what the outcome would've been if you could change it.  Remember to think about the whole situation and make the changes.  In other words, if someone yelled at you at work, instead of thinking about the perfect comeback you could have made - think about how you would prefer to be treated and see them treating you that way.

Let me know how it goes.