Five Things That Lead To Happiness.

Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t. ~ Steve Mariboli

Who else loves a list?  I have lists of things I want to read (someday), places I want to visit (now please), people I need to contact again (been too long) not to mention the more mundane grocery and to do-lists.  Sorry, didn’t mean to mention them.

As a list lover I thought it might to fun to have a list of things that could lead to more happiness.  Some as designated by psychologists, who should know these things, and some designated by me who just knows what makes me happy.

My desire is that some of them make you happy too.  Although, truth be told I think if we just copied number 10 pm from Ben Franklin’s list below, we’d experience high levels of happiness.

Benjamin Franklin’s list.

In case we don’t get around  to Ben’s list, here’s one just for us.

 1. Be Forgetful

I don’t mean forget where you put your keys, or like me forget to put water in the steamer and burn the heck out of everything.

I’m talking about the kind of forgetfulness that impacts our lives in deep ways.  Don’t hold grudges, apart from the fact that it doesn’t feel good, it isn’t healthy for your body.  Apparently the willingness to forgive and forget is a key factor cited by centenarians for their ability to live to see their 100th birthday.  Always assuming you want to live that long…personally I’ve picked 96 as being a good age to check out.

It’s really about more than forgiving that ‘someone who done you wrong’, we can take it further and forgive our day, which means we get to edit and revise.  Ever fancy changing the events of the day around to make them better?  You can.  Curiouser and curiouser you might say… for those who want to know more I wrote about it in a previous post – Editing Life.

2. Find Your Optimism Streak

We all have one, somewhere.  And we need that glass half full mentality, it creates a vibration of energy that attracts great things.  Much that’s good and wonderful has come into our lives without us having a clue that we were it’s creator.  How much more of creation’s infinite wonders could we experience if we were chock full of optimism?  If this is a challenge for you try the alwayswellwithin prescription that Sandra wrote about, because living in a high vibration = receiving and feeling great things, yay, sounds a lot like happiness.

 3. Being spiritual

Allows us to have faith.  Faith that we are all connected to the Divine.  Faith that there is a wonder working power within everyone of us leading us always ever higher towards greater expression and expansion.  The prerequisite for having our desires realized is the belief that it is so.  This requires faith. As if that wasn’t enough, then we get to live in a higher energy of hopefulness.  All good stuff.  And the icing on the cake is that studies show people with strong spiritual or religious affiliations report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than most.  Works for me.

 4. Having personal control over one’s life

Where might you find unhappy people with low morale? Those places where people have no sense of personal control of their lives, whether it’s a nursing home or a prison, because control equates to happiness.  I actually never knew this, but it makes sense doesn’t it?

Emory University psychiatrist Gregory Berns makes the point by distinguishing between pleasure and satisfaction, saying that “while you might find pleasure by chance, satisfaction only occurs by conscious choices.”

This is where conscious living comes into play.  As we determine our aim in life, be it for this day, this week or this year, we are creating a passionate direction in life.  There is no stopping the person who lives an imaginative life.  They grow their way out of limitations.  And once we really get that our consciousness is the cause of every event and experience in our world,  we can stop bowing before the dictate of facts and get to work on changing the actual cause, our mental activity.

How, you might very well ask?  By use of our imagination.  Woohoo…maybe I’m some kind of control freak, ‘cos this makes me very, very happy.

 5. Great Consciousness

What we think, feel, and believe is the determiner of our life experience.  Have you ever noticed that some people who win big on the lottery, revert back to the level of, or lack of, abundance they experienced prior to their win?  It’s because of the set point of our consciousness.  It’s a bit like a thermostat and we’ll always return to it.

Be it our weight, our wealth, our relationships.  For lasting changes to occur in our outer world, we must change the inner.  Let’s get that consciousness working the way we want it.  Experience has shown me we can be anything we want to be, if we make our concepts habitual and think from them as though they were true.

We can do it. – A final happy thought.

Encourage one another.

Love Elle.

xoxo

Images

matthewvenn

Eddi van W