Being unhappy to find happiness

Finding happiness by making yourself unhappy

Many of us, or most of us, are trying to find happiness outside of ourselves. Happiness
is an inner game and should be pursued on the inside. If we continue
to look on the outside we are going to be disappointed as we always look for
more and ultimately happiness becomes the end of the rainbow, something we
can never reach.

How we define happiness is the key to our success of finding it inside of
ourselves. For example the first few months of blogging I wanted to make
a million pounds and follow people like Steve
Pavlina, Darren Rowse, Debbie
Weil, Robert Scoble and Seth
Godin but I quickly learned I was not going to
make that. I did lose heart but I kept on writing and I wondered why
I did keep writing. The answer was of course because I loved the writing
and the possibility that some people might find my articles useful. From
then on I wrote because I loved writing, I wrote because it might help other
people, not because it was all about the money. What happened then was
that the money started coming in and more ideas came my way and now that I
concentrate on the writing the money side takes care of itself and I intend
it to keep on taking care of itself until I can finally do what I love doing
full time; either writing for the blog or giving seminars.

We have to take time to stop and think about our lives every now and again
and re-evaluate what we are doing and whether or not we are happy inside or
chasing the rainbow.

Test your happiness

One of the ways you can test your happiness is by testing your unhappiness,
sound strange.

Okay, here’s how it works. (Warning! this is a very powerful
exercise so be prepared)

Think of something that would make you unhappy; for example losing your house,
or losing your family. Reflect on that for a moment, what would your
feelings be: sad, miserable, lonely, suicidal, and really go for it and try
to imagine the thing that would make you unhappy. When I do this exercise
I imagine losing my family and I really do get to the point of being tearful
(okay I admit it, I do get tearful). Now, come out of the scene you were
in and look at what you have. For example if you pictured losing your
family, look at your family now. How does it make you feel? I always
feel extremely grateful and look at them in a different way as if I have been
given a second chance with them. This feeling lasts a long time before
I slip back into my normal loving self. However, what it does is let
me be thankful and never take them for granted.

So it is with life. We are so busy chasing the rainbow of happiness
we forget what makes us happy now. We have to get that feeling back. So
many of us are working hard to make money, working long hours, nearly killing
ourselves all in the pursuit of happiness for us and our families when in fact
if we loved our families first and loved the job we were doing we would find
that happiness here and now and not in the future.

Be thankful

How many of us have seem something on TV and said ‘It really makes you
appreciate what you’ve got’? I bet most of us have said this however
how long has it taken us to forget this and get on with our lives and forget

what we really have!

For any of our dreams to happen in the future, and they will if we intend
them long enough and work at it, we have to be thankful for what we have in
the here and now.

I am thankful for my wife, my two boys, my dog, my house, my job, my mum,
dad, sisters nieces and nephews and my health and I am thankful too you for
reading this.

What are you thankful for?