How to be happier

IN MY business, I have so many people ask if I “can make them happy”.

My answer is no. Because the only person who can make you happy is you.

We are all on this journey to “happiness”, and with good reason. Science tells that “happy” people make a faster recovery from illness and hardship. Common sense tells us that happy people are better to be around.

Happiness is not just an accidental state of being – it’s an important skill. A skill that can be mastered.

So, what do I have to do to be happy? There is a science to happiness that can give you many clues as to how you can find your inner peace.

First – you need to be proactive. You create your own happiness. So be open and willing to reframe your mindset and be a “doer” in life to achieve this happiness.

The next step is to do a self-audit and ask yourself “Is how you are dealing with issues in your current world working for you and your significant others?”

If the answer is yes, keep doing what you’re doing. If the answer is no, you need to answer the next challenging question – “do you want a happier, more focused and fulfilled life?”

Take an honest and deep look into yourself to answer that question. The obvious answer, and the one you would expect from most people, is yes.

However, there are some people who seem happy to adopt a victim mentality – a “the world is against me” attitude – and they’re quite comfortable with that.

At some level, they have accepted that they don’t want/deserve to be happy or, the way they will seek and gain their happiness is through other people’s concern for them with “attention seeking behaviour”.

While this may work in the short-term, trust me, it is not a long-term viable strategy.

People quickly turn away from victims or, worse still, they become surrounded by people with the same victim mentality, which makes their own world even less exciting.

If the answer is truly yes, you do want a happier more fulfilled and focused life, there are three areas you need to focus on:

Are you clear on your values? What do you stand for? What are your virtues? At the end of the day, how clear are you on who you are and what you stand for?

Do you have a purpose in life? Not what or how but why – why do you do what you do? All of us need an overarching purpose – it may not actually be what we do every day but rather what long-term purpose are we working towards that gets us out of bed and will keep getting us out of bed on an ongoing basis.

Does that purpose give you long-term sustainable pleasure in your life? There will be times in our life’s journey where what we are doing is not very pleasurable but we can see there is some future or some reason for going through those hard times. Imagine you are 90 years old, sitting back with a cup of coffee (or something stronger) and reminiscing on your life – would what you are doing now and what you are working towards bring a smile to your face?