Should happiness be a struggle for us? No, it shouldn’t be. Is happiness is a choice? Yes! Every feeling we have begins in our heads and becomes a choice when we allow it to. It moves to our hearts, then our bodies react accordingly. It then controls our choices, our actions, our reactions. Happiness is the one thing that we are all striving for but most give up on. When we do, we give up on everything else as well. Being happy comes in many forms and means different things to different people. Happiness is a thousand things wrapped into one.
Happiness is…. hope, peace, love, joy, security, vacations, rest, sleep, things, people, time spent with people, laughter, it is living in gratitude. For some it’s being creative, a job, a car, music, being around people, being alone, family time, hobbies, camping, surfing, hiking, stargazing, working out, tinkering, playing, dancing, writing, loving, belonging… I’m sure you all can think of ton’s more, which is great – write them down! The more we can think of the happier we will be, that means we have awareness of more ways to put or pull happiness into our lives. So, keep writing, figure out what happiness is to you. Figure out all the things that bring you happiness and add them into your every day!
Squeeze as much happiness into every day as possible.
#LifeGoals #OverflowHappiness
Happiness is not only a choice, it is a million choices. It is one choice at a time, replacing things that do not make us happy with things that do, people, places, jobs, love, puppies, and all the things you ha listed above! Find things that make you so very happy and do them!
Today…. and every day, every hour, every minute…
we are given the same choice…
To be happy or to be unhappy that is the question.
What do we choose on a daily basis? Doesn’t matter what we chose yesterday, it matters what we choose today, chose tomorrow, and every day thereafter. When we wake up, seems that would be the perfect time to be happy, as nothing has gone wrong yet. It’s a fresh day with no mistakes in it. Can we all agree to CHOOSE to wake up happy tomorrow- simply because we did wake up when so many didn’t?
What about when someone asks us how we are, or how we have been…. Do we answer positively or negatively? I know for me personally I used to take a deep breath and think of all the things I was going to say to someone, but then just answer the word “fine”- knowing what I really wanted to say was… “I have this, and this, and this, and this, and I don’t know how I’ll do it all” and basically anything else that could be summed up in one word… Overwhelmed. Now, I answer “I am wonderfully fantastically awesome (or some other amazingly fantastic upbeat word with my body language matching) How the heck are you!?”. The truth is- No one really cares what our answer is, and no one deserves for you to throw your burden on them. Nor do they usually wait around to hear our answer, they’re just ready for you to ask back. People don’t listen to what we say- They listen to how we make them feel.
When we pour positive energy out of ourselves and onto others – it’s contagious! With a positive upbeat reply and a “how are you” 75% of the time, others will answer back in the same fashion you answered- most people are mimickers and one-uppers. If we had complained, they would have complained back at us and not only that they would have felt the need to one-up us. But, with a positive answer, we are giving others permission to be positive as well and one-up our positivity hence sending their day in a different more positive direction. They will have enjoyed their time with us as we made them feel positive and positivity breeds energy.
Try it and see. If you answer that one simple question with a complaint or a positive note, the person will “one up” your reply by their own story… and back and forth it goes, for better or for worse! Let’s see if we can stop the negativity spreading before it starts, and always be spreading positivity and making people’s days a little bit brighter.
But, for some people, it will take two or three interactions before they change their tone. Twenty-five percent of people are stuck in their negative stories. Their identity is in their pain, in being a victim because it’s all they know. It’s not in their happiness because somewhere along the way they forgot to be happy. They became addicted to the negativity, the pity for attention and lost their own self-worth along the way. Let’s make sure that is not us. Let’s make the effort to not be the kind of person that no matter what is happening, we find some way to complain about it, be a victim, and live in and wallow in our pain, to get pity attention, let’s not walk around like Eeyore. That sucks all the life and joy out of us and everyone around us.
But we can change it! Or help others to change by our own examples! Isn’t that exciting? Every time someone around us says anything negative, let’s do our best to turn it into a positive, no matter who, or what it is. By training ourselves to think better and to see the positive side in all things; we will teach others to think better as well! Good or bad, We are all contagious. Making this shift could completely change and save their life. I know it will change yours because it HAS CHANGED MINE!
Happiness is a perspective.
How we choose to see things will control our happiness. Today…. and every minute of every day… we are given the same opportunities to CHOOSE to find the good or the bad in all things, in all situations, in all people- even if we are just being glad we are not them or in their shoes. It is ALWAYS a choice to be happy or unhappy, happy or sad, happy or mad, happy or well… anything else. Each is a choice. Circumstances, places, people, jobs, things, situations, pasts, futures, bad days… All a chance to see things in a happy or unhappy way- CHOOSE HAPPY. I know that’s such a hard truth to swallow that we have chosen to be unhappy, every time we were but….It is also a blessing because we must own our choices and CHOOSE to be happy and….
Find the Joy in all things.
It may not be so easy.. at first. But, it gets easier and easier. Every time we choose to find the joy, to be happy in each situation, those are WINS. Wins feel good, feeling good feels GREAT! Yes, some wins are bigger than others for sure. The best wins are when we replace something that makes us unhappy with something that makes us happy! We should go about our days with intention and take notice of how things make us feel. It will be very obvious to see what things need to be replaced.
When choosing happy things, every little bit helps.
Choosing happy things, come in all forms. Spending more time with people who make us happy than those who don’t. If traffic puts us in a funk every day, we can take a different route, leave at a different time, find something to listen to that empowers us, makes us laugh, or gets us to get our groove thang on! Start an audio book series, some podcasts, or dance ridiculously just to make the people around you smile, their smile will make you smile and it has brightened someone else’s day! Or we can use our time to listen to a class, learn a new language, learn something that enhances your career or future and gets us ahead to who and where we want to be in life. If someone at work gets on our nerves, we can either avoid them and let them annoy someone else or we can complement them and smile really big and it will either mess with their head or… teach them to be nicer. Who knows, they may only be a jerk to you as a defense if they think you don’t like them, or they have low self-worth or something else they have been assuming all along! Either way, it can’t hurt to make them feel better about themselves. Point out their strengths and they will show them to you every time.
Today we will start a new adventure within our adventure of life. We will…
Say three positive things, the moment we wake
about the day we are about to embark on.Find three positive things about everything that annoys us.
Say three positive things to the person who complains.
Three positive thoughts to ourselves when we complain in our heads.
Replace three negative things with three positive things in our day.
Today is a new adventure and our adventure is Choosing Happiness!
Inspired? Let us know! What thoughts did this bring up for you?