Happy – The Fullfilment Project

Spirit Of Generosity

Christmas is a time of giving, as the saying goes. It is a time when we spend a lot of money on presents for our loved ones. We also spend our time with then too. I would argue that it is more meaningful and more of a gift to spend time with others. We can always get more money, but time is a non-renewable resource. Who we choose to spend our time with is meaningful and has a significant impact on our lives.

This generous spirit is not something we should limit to the Christmas period. Ideally, it should be a way of life. If we live our lives with a generous spirit then we will make those around us happier, whether they are family, friends, or colleagues, or people we are meeting for the first time. The wider we extend who we are generous to the happier our lives will be.

To help others without expecting anything in return is planting trees under whose shade we will not sit. The fruits of the trees will benefit those we will never meet. It is also true that one generous act encourages another and the wave of generosity goes out into the world making it better one small act of generosity at a time. Even a smile is a gift that can lift someone’s spirits. So go and be generous every day and see how your life changes and how you change the lives of others.

Choose a Better Response

Happiness, Health, Relationships, Success

I often see people swiping their arms at flies buzzing around them, which is usually accompanied by comments such as “damn fly” or “irritating fly.” I have increasingly been of the opinion that being annoyed by a fly is a choice.

This comes from the perspective that life and the world are not as they are but how we are. We interpret the events that go on around us based on the meaning we put on them. This is not to negate verifiable facts that exist independent of interpretation. What I mean is whether we see something as good or bad, intimidating or joyous.

If it is true that we put such meaning on the events that we experience, then we choose to see a fly as irritating. We can, if we choose to, say hi to the fly and thank them for their visit, for example. They can not harm us and will usually fly away shortly after they fly near to us. If we apply this idea to the rest of our lives, there are many situations where we can choose a better response rather than reacting with negative emotions.

Be A Rebel, Be Content

Happiness, Health, Success

To buy the new fashion item or the new gadget, etc is to be unhappy with what you already have because it is not the new thing being sold to you. That is what it boils down to. This comes from the story told by those selling things to us that what they are offering will make us happy. This cannot be true if the last thing they sold us, which is now out of fashion or less up to date, also was supposed to make us happy.

It is better to try and be content with what we already have. Otherwise we will be leaping from shiny object to shiny object and never really being happy, just momentarily joyful.

The Key To Being Happy

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We often get frustrated that things don’t go as we want them to. Sometimes it feels like the world is against us and nothing goes our way. Thinking about life in these terms is destructive towards our happiness.

If the world was always as you want it to be, then it would not be the way someone else wants it to be. There are billions of people in the world and each person has ups and downs in life. I am glad everything not how you want it to be, because your way is different to the way of so many others.

The key to happiness is not to try and control what happens in the world, or even to expect things to be how you want them to be. The key is to control how you respond to the events of life. Your mindset is the thing that impacts your level of happiness the most. How you explain the events in life to yourself matters.

Saying something bad always happens to you takes away any influence you have on the situation and you end up feeling helpless. It is better to say the bad things happened at a specific time, to limit its power and then decide what positive actions you are going to do next.

The Work Of Being Happy

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There is an impulse in us to avoid negative thoughts and feelings at all costs. Some, however, dwell within the negativity and let it take them over. Neither approach, I feel, will be effective in the long run, if you want to be happy. It is better to engage our negative thoughts and feelings and invite them in for tea, so to speak.

Once they become familiar to us as aspects of ourselves then we can understand why they are there and resolve the underlying causes. This is the work of living a happy and fulfilling life. I recommend utilising both meditation and writing a daily journal.

Are We Addicted To Our Mobile Phones?

Happiness, The Fullfilment Framework

“Gadgets helps the solo, not the soul.”
― Amit Kalantri,Wealth of Words

Witnessing Addiction to Mobile Phones

Recently, standing on the platform of a tram stop waiting for my tram, I saw a lady walking along, headphones in her ears, watching a video on her mobile phone and hardly even looking ahead of her as she walked. My mind was filled with thoughts around how human beings have become slaves to our mobile devices, how we have become a society who craves instant gratification and how addicted we all are. Then, another lady walked passed a moment later holding up a book she was engrossed in as she too walked along the platform.

This stark contrast is only really a contrast in the source of their attention, rather than the activity they were engaged in. It begs the question, are we missing life by becoming regularly absorbed by activities that do not promote good mental and physical well-being. In our western society, to get drunk and the morning after not remember what we did the night before is lorded as almost a badge of honour. To binge watch whole series of a program on our preferred online streaming platform is a common occurrence too.

Are We Zombies?

It seems we are losing the ability to just be, to be aware of what we are doing when we are doing it. Our search for activities that give us quick wins, and as a result, hits of addictive Dopamine, is turning us into zombies, of sorts. I say this as a fellow zombie, but seeing a lady walking along a tram platform watching something on her mobile, and not able to wait until she was at home or somewhere else more appropriate, and safer, woke me up to the realities of our current quick fix culture.

These observations also beg the age old question of how we should live. Should we follow the crowd and become absent from the world while we stare into our mobile devices, or is there a better way to live. There is some merit for living without the constant availability of entertainment. I am not sure I could do it, but will try to cut back on how much I watch things on my mobile phone.

There is also the question of what we watch. If we watch lectures on the merits of theological or philosophical positions, or we watch instruction videos to help us do yoga or learn a new skill or something else that improves our lives, is this not a good thing? I suppose mobile devices, and by extension social media, are tools that can be used to make our lives, and the world better, or they can be used to simply waste time, which we cannot get back. Time is a currency that can never be bought back. I use Facebook to try and create a community as an extension of this blog, to try and get people to help each other live well. Even social media can be a beneficial in our lives.

The answer to the question of how we should live, I would suggest, trying the improve the lives of others, to help others find meaning and to be happy, and if this means we use mobile devices and social media to achieve this, then I am all for it.

Something to reflect on:

If we let the things we watch, mobile devices and social media dictate our thoughts and actions, then we must ask are they in charge of our lives?

Stepping into the unknown

Happiness, Success

“Until you step into the unknown,

you don’t know what you’re made of.”

― Roy T. Bennett

Making choices

In life there are many avenues to go down, many paths to take, or not as the case may be. Some of these paths lead to dead ends and some to wonderful opportunities. The challenge we have is that we never know beforehand, for certain, if making a particular choice will bring a positive outcome or not. Each time we are stepping into the unknown. We can, however, as the saying goes, learn from our mistakes and use our experience to weigh up the options and make a decision. Some say we should go with our gut, with what feels right, but if this is not tempered with wisdom and experience then we will only be following our instincts, which are primed for survival, not necessarily leading a fulfilling life.

The unknown could be a new job, a new relationship, trying a new hobby or something that changes lots of things in our lives like moving to another town or city. We make these sorts of changes every day, but they still come with uncertainty and some anxiety. Each new change begins with a decision and leads to more decisions along the way. I would argue that no approach to making decisions is the best or the worst, as we each live individual lives and we are all individual people, but there are some things that can help when we are stepping into the unknown, which I will come onto in a moment.

Why do we step into the unknown?

However, first of all I would like to explore why we might feel the need to step into the unknown. It has long been part of the human spirit to push beyond our boundaries into uncharted territories. Human history is full of examples of men and women that have strived beyond the boundaries of their day to create new innovations and break records, whether this is manned powered flight or reaching the South Pole on foot.

For most of us such challenging goals are not things that we aim to do, partly because we are interested in other things and partly because we have commitments in our lives that need our attention and focus. That being said, we all have things that we are passionate about, things that we would happily do for free if time and circumstances permitted. This is the unknown territory that I want to talk about today, the venturing into the things that we are passionate about. Often, we don’t jump into our passions because we have responsibilities that we feel we must commit to or we lack the confidence to do so.

“…the past does not equal the future.”

More often than not we do not follow our passions because we have had bad experiences trying new things in the past and we think that the same thing will happen again. There is an important principle connected to this that I have recently being trying to apply in my life, which is that the past does not equal the future. A lot of people, including myself, are held back by failure, because based on past experience we expect to fail again. The problem is that we see failure as a negative thing because of our past experiences. If we accept that we will fail sometimes then we can employ all of the resources that we have to make it work and to succeed.

Not everything is instantly obtainable

We also live in a time when almost everything is instant. Whatever it is you want to buy, often there is an option to have it delivered the same day. We can do our banking on our mobile phones, we can send an email to someone and they will receive it a few seconds later, no matter where in the world they are. Innovation has made our lives a lot more convenient, but not easier. This is because we expect everything to be instant, but many of the important things in life take time and effort. For example, relationships take time and effort to become strong and durable through the ups and downs of life. It is the little moments of asking how someone’s day is going and caring about the answer, of engaging in small talk in the moments between doing other things. These things help to build strong, healthy relationships.

Too often we are spending time with people without spending time with them. I’ve seen couples in restaurants where they are both on their mobile phones and not looking at or communicating with the person they came to the restaurant with. It has become an accepted thing to do to scroll through our Facebook feed instead of making a connection with the person we are with. This has had a knock-on effect that means young people are finding it difficult to build relationships, because the social skills that are normally built up through trial and error as a child cannot be practiced if they are looking at a screen and not a person.

Failure also seems all the more magnified because if we expect something to be instantly successful, and we fall at the first hurdle, we give up. We are becoming conditioned for insecurity when we should be conditioned to fail our way to success. I guarantee that every successful person who is famous for their success has failed more times than most other people have. It is not about how many times you get knocked down, it is about how many times you keep getting up. Having this sort of mentality will enable us to stride forth into the unknown with the confidence to fail and try again.

For this to work, however, we need to have the right motivation. Wanting to be successful so that we can be rich is a motivation, but it will inevitably lead to an emptiness, because you cannot buy happiness. If, on the other hand, we want to be successful so that we can help more people live better lives, then fulfilment will be our reward. Motivation is key and it has to fit with our values and beliefs, this above all else is important, because to live a fulfilling life our thoughts, speech and actions should reflect what we value and what we believe.

Wisdom guides us

But where do our beliefs and values come from? They are manifestations from the culture and community we grow up in, the examples our parents give us and how they raised us, as well as the experiences that we have had. Through all of this input we piece together what we believe and what we value. All of this then effects the decisions that we make on a day to day basis, but I believe that if we are to make wise decisions in life then we should seek out wisdom, which can be found in any of the many religious scriptures, philosophical and secular texts from around the world. If we have wise guidelines or principles to follow, then stepping into the unknown will seem less scary. I suggest firstly analysing what is holding you back from stepping into the unknown and try to overcome it, through seeking wisdom and figuring out your beliefs and values. These things will guide you on your path. It helps to accept whatever is in front of you on your path and then figure out how to deal with it.

Something to reflect on:

Often what is holding us back is our own misguided beliefs and the baggage we carry from past experiences. Holding on to bad experiences weighs us down. Once we let them go we are more free to move forwards. This is not easy but essential if we are to live a fulfilling life.

How to be happy in your life

Happiness

“Attitude is a little thing

that makes a big difference.”

– Winston Churchill

Attitude

Part of self mastery is choosing our attitude in any set of circumstances. This is undoubtedly one of the most difficult things that we can do, but it is possible. There are many examples in our history of people in extraordinarily awful situations and yet they manage to find a positive outcome, because their attitude to the situation was a positive one. This begins with building the habit of looking for the positive in every situation. Being caught in traffic means that you will be late for work, but you can still enjoy the view, or use the time to listen to your favourite music or a self development CD in the car. This is a habit we need to build up in every situation that makes us feel uncomfortable, unsettled or unhappy. If we can find little things to be positive about then we can build up a resilience that will include the power to choose our attitude in any set of circumstances.

Beliefs and values

A large part of what makes us unhappy in life is our beliefs and values. Now, before you become defensive about your beliefs and values please hear me out. As I have shown in my Fullfilment Framework (Summary Explanation Resource), we begin with our Foundation of self knowledge, acquired wisdom and good health, but it is our beliefs and values that are a prism through which we see and understand the world. Whether we see something as good or bad affects how we behave and think about it. For example, if we believe that certain behaviours are bad we will label the people who display those behaviour as bad, whether intentionally or not. This could be a lifestyle choice, the clothes that someone wears or the religion they follow. This then causes us to compartmentalise the world into categories of right and wrong, good or bad, etc.

To a degree we have to separate out the world into categories so we can function in it, but often it the beliefs and values that we hold about ourselves that cause us to become unhappy. For example, if we don’t think that we deserve to be happy, this will be a significant obstacle to becoming happy. Some of us do this without consciously realising that we are doing it. We might believe that in order to be happy we have to own certain things, like a car or a house. This will never bring about lasting happiness, because things in the world are fleeting and therefore we constantly strive for something new to make us happy.

Advertising companies and the media tap into this to sell us things or encourage us to watch specific TV channels. This is the equivalent of a hamster running on a hamster wheel and expecting to get somewhere. Our beliefs around happiness have to begin with contentment, this is entry level happiness, without which we cannot reach the higher levels of happiness.

Thoughts, speech and actions

The things that have the biggest influence on our beliefs and values are our thoughts, speech and actions as they reinforce them with everything we think, say and do. Being mindful of what we say and do is very important because they have an impact on the world and the people we spend our lives with. Managing our speech and actions allows us to have a well managed life outside of ourselves. However, more important is the thoughts that we have, because they impact our mind and our inner wellbeing.

“…the most important relationship

we have is with ourselves.”

Many of the things we say to ourselves in our own heads we would never say to someone else, because they are too cruel. We would not want to hurt the feelings of the people in our lives, but the most important relationship we have is with ourselves. If we make a conscious effort to be kind, compassionate and supportive to ourselves in the thoughts that we have, then our level of happiness with multiply exponentially.

The path we walk and the way we walk it

Many of us have goals that we want to achieve in our lifetime, but there is one goal that I believe should come above all others. That is the goal to be able to look back at the end of our lives with no regrets and gratitude for a life well lived. This goal can be achieve by focusing on two things, the path we walk and the way we walk it. The path we walk is the journey from where we are right now to the place we want to be in the future. It is very important to have a life goal, something that you strive for every day. It might be a career in a particular company or to learn something new or to complete a degree in the thing you are passionate about.

However, it is equally important to know the way that you will be walking this path. The way we walk our life long paths comes from a number of sources. Our personality plays a big part, whether we are kind or courageous, dedicated or disciplined. We are influenced by our environment, the people we love and those we spend the most time with. Many of us have a religious tradition that we follow, or at the very least a life philosophy. All of these things are factors that affect the way we walk our path, but usually we do not have control over these things, they evolve and they come and go so we end up living from moment to moment rather than in a considered and constructive way.

In order to live a life well I believe that we need to begin with a Foundation of self knowledge, acquired wisdom and good health, have beliefs and values that come from our Foundation as a beginning, but then we need to dig deep inside ourselves and figure our what our ‘Why’ is, what our purpose for living is. Mine is to help others be their best selves. Everybody’s ‘Why’ is unique to them and can take years to figure out, but it is a worthwhile endeavour. This Why then becomes why we do what we do in every aspect of our lives. The second part is to figure out our ‘Way’, the way in which we are to live our lives every day, it is how we express our Why in our lives. To find out our Why and to live our Way is at the very centre of what it means to be human, and what it means to live a happy life.