‘We can’t direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails’
By this, I mean we may be hit by events that are beyond our control, but how we react is our choice.
Therefore our happiness is our own decision.
Choosing to be positive and optimistic is a state of mind that we decide on and the majority of the time; acting in a positive and optimistic way creates happiness.
Happiness is our perspective of how we want to view life; we can choose to be happy or unhappy.
Of course others can be an influence towards our happiness, they can put us in a good or bad mood. But ultimately it is our own choice if we wish to remain in a happy state.
There are steps that we can take to try and increase or preserve happiness, for example:
- Surrounding yourself with positive friends and family
- Filling your day with little things you love to do- sometimes happiness is created through the small things in life, whether that treating yourself to your favourite coffee or talking a morning stroll in the sunrise.
- Writing out your achievements – helping to train your mind to be positive- often we spend too much time focusing on the negative things bringing our mood down.
- Trying out something new- you often feel a new lease of life when doing something you haven’t done before, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, you often feel a rush of adrenaline and this can make you feel amazing.
- Creating a day that is perfect – take a couple of minutes at the beginning of the day to decide what needs to be done in order to make sure you have a winning day, where you feel accomplished at the end of it.
- Exercising- the release of endorphins to your brain, help us feel at ease and trigger happiness in our brain.
I used to strive to be successful, the last couple of years I’ve realized that its not success I want, its happiness. Albert Scheweitzer said ‘Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.’