We live in stressful times, in a stressful, conflicted world. But the most significant part of that reality is contained in the first two words you just read—“We live.”
The quality of our lives, although impacted by external events, isn’t determined by them. How much goodness, and beauty, and truth we experience in our lives depends on how open we are to recognizing them and to creating them in our individual lives.
Happiness opens us to seeing broader vistas. But it’s not only we ourselves who are enriched by allowing more happiness into our lives. Happiness is contagious.
Happiness radiates out from us and affects everyone we encounter. It wakes people up. It encourages them. It makes them feel connected and validated.
Each person who finds happiness in life moves the whole world in a more positive direction.
Over the past nine weeks, we visited each of the nine choices that happy people make in their lives. Looking at them together, we can see that each of the choices supports and builds the others.
What all nine choices have in common, is that all of them are rooted in the awareness that the choice is ours to make.
1. The first one is intention, a commitment to allow more authentic happiness into your life. This is the central choice around which all the others revolve.
Happy people begin their days by recalling their intention to find the juice in every situation the day brings. They imagine their plans unfolding well and benefiting everyone concerned. They expect happy outcomes.
2. The second choice, accountability, is a commitment happy people make to choose from all the viewpoints and alternatives available throughout the day the ones that are most in harmony with their genuine needs and desires.
In order to build more happiness into their lives, happy people make a choice to recognize for themselves what brings them joy, or pleasure, or satisfaction, or a feeling of well-being and peace.
3. Happy people work at noticing and naming for themselves what enriches them. Identifying the kinds of things that uplift you lets you know where to invest your energy and time.
4. The fourth choice, centrality, is a choice to make the things that enrich you central to your life.
You commit to giving those things priority over activities that hold lesser value for you. You learn to say no to the things that don’t matter in order to say yes to your honest desires.
5. Recasting is the choice to find new paths to happiness when your life is struck by misfortune. It’s remembering that you and you alone are accountable for your happiness. You determine to recast your attention toward positive possibilities regardless of the setbacks that life sometimes brings.
6. Happy people keep their options open. They look for alternative ways to create a sense of well-being or to achieve an important end when their original plans are blocked. They adopt the attitude that when there’s a will, there’s a way. They look for opportunities, or create them.
7. Happy people choose appreciation as a primary orientation toward life. They actively look for, and express, things to appreciate in their circumstances and in others—even those times or people who seem difficult or distasteful.
They look for qualities to appreciate in the current moment, in their surroundings, in their activities, in the company at hand.
8. Because they’re appreciative of the people, things, and events in their lives, happy people are giving. They share their talents and strengths, their wisdom and knowledge, their time, energy, goods, and money freely, with a sense of gladness, from the core of happiness in their hearts.
9. Finally, happy people unfailingly choose truthfulness as a fundamental guiding force in their lives. Knowing that truthfulness is the foundation for genuine intimacy with others—as well as for genuine personal authenticity—they choose to be honest and to live with integrity.
Few of us make all of these choices consistently. We all have our off days, our stretches of darkness. But as with all ways of being, we get better at what we practice. Practicing the choices for happiness allows them to come more and more freely and naturally all the time.
The key is being honest with yourself about wanting greater ease and contentment in your life and then making a real commitment to allow it. That commitment means you remind yourself every day that you are by nature happy, that you intend to let happiness play a central part in your life from now on.
Then you make the choices that foster happiness. For your own sake, and because your happiness makes the world a better place.
Wishing you a week of happy choices. Beginning right here, right now.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Pexels from Pixabay