Finding real happines

What makes you really happy?

What do you want out of life?

Does what you have not satisfy you and therefore you want more?

Do you feel you are in competition with others to reach the top?

Do you strive to maintain your grasp on things like power and status, afraid of what might happen if you lost them? And is this preventing you from enjoying life to the full?

What are the consequences of your striving to achieve or obtain more? Are you feeling increasingly stressed?

True happiness is not possible unless you have inner peace.   Inner peace requires your to take the time to sit and look deeply at what you are doing.  Without this awareness and understanding you will be unable to identify and meet your  real needs.   Real happiness requires understanding, love and compassion for yourself and others.

Happiness also depends on your having the ability to handle painful feeelings.  Handling painful feelings requires you to stop running away from or difficulties with constant activity or consumption.

Finding real  happiness is not a selfish act because once you have found real happiness you will be better able to relate to other people and their suffering, to put yourself in theor position.  Once you do this you will then have a better idea of what you need to do to help them.

7 Tops tips for motivating yourself to make changes

1.  Sit down and take some time to discover the thoughts and ideas that underpin the need for change.  You need to discover your own reasons for wanting to change not other people’s.

2. True power for change lies with you..and it is up to you to follow through, you and you alone are responsible for your actions.

3. Think about the different options you have for achieving the change you want.

4. Reassure yourself that change is possible by focusing on previous successes and highighting the skills and strengths you have.

5. Examine the discrepancies between where you are now and where you want to be and identify how the ways you behave interferes with you achieving your goals.

6. Resolve any ambivalence you may have by focusing on the consequences of not making changes and any benefits you will gain from making changes.

7. Talk about the changes you are going to make, the more you talk about them the more likely you are to change.

New Year Planning

Somebody asked me to write something about New Year Planning so here goes….

It is that time of year when in the past I would purchase my new Filofax inserts and spend time making plans for the coming year….projecting my earnings and expenditure, organising how I would spend my time, planning how much weight I would lose on my new diet etc  etc.  My aim was to create the perfect life….and to feel in control.

From experience I know that my good intentions rarely lasted beyond early February and life did not go according to my plan.  And that this caused me a lot of unnecessary stress.

There will be no New Year Planning activity this year.   In May I made a decision to just let myself be carried along by the flow of life and to see what happened.   Instead of lots of SMART objectives I decided that may only goals were to live simply and to be kind to myself and other people.  Simple…but not easy!

It has meant letting go of the stuff that used to be so important to me. Most importantly it has meant letting go of the need to control, analyse and make judgements…..and instead learn to enjoy, and learn from whatever arises.  I no longer feel as if my life is mapped out, and backed up by an endless “to do” list.   And do you know what, its working out OK.

I came to understand that underpinning all this planning was a sense of needing to improve myself.  so my New Year Plans always included a lot of self-improvement activities….and then beating myself up when I failed to reach some unrealistic goal.  I have learned to be less self-critical and more relaxed.

By not planning I have created the space needed to listen to my gut feelings rather than the rational mind that does all the planning.  And as a result I have found that I am making better decisions and acting in ways that feel right for me.  I have also come to understand that in New Year Planning I wasted a lot of time and energy trying to control things. I have come to understand that none of us really knows what is going on and things are changing all the time.   I am far more effective in life when I acknowledge that I do not know what is happening, and curiously engage with things as they unfold .

May you be happy in 2012.