I’ve lived a life with plenty of unnecessary struggle, heartbreak and frustration.
I’ve always been interested in what separates generally happy people from those who seem to attract all the struggle and bad luck.
There are several ‘secrets’ shared by the happiest people I know.
Here they are:
1. Stopped searching
A curious thing happens when we do as 99% of humans do, which is to search for happiness: we become unhappy.
If we’re knowingly pursuing the illusion of ‘happiness’, we are unwittingly communicating to ourselves that we’re - you guessed it - not happy. The chase emphasises the lack.
When I reveal to my clients they already have everything they need to be happy, right here, right now - I always enjoy watching the relief wash over them.
‘You mean I don’t need to get the girl or the Lambo to be happy?’ You can absolutely prioritise those things if you like.
But you do it from a place of wholeness and innate happiness.
When you approach life FROM happiness, you perform 100x better.
2. Confirm connectedness
Recently, as I was sitting taking notes by the river, someone waved at me from a passing boat.
Whether it was aimed at me or not didn’t matter. I waved back in acknowledgement of my understanding and confirmation that we’re all connected.
To sense the connection we have with all things is happiness.
By creating the reality we want, we confirm it. If we see others as connected, we are connected. If we see ourselves as a victim or an island, we create that reality and we feel the depression of that reality.
Seeing continual confirmation of your connection to other people, regardless of who they are, is a high-consciousness life hack.
3. Prioritise light-heartedness
The ‘happiest’ people by no means have ideal lives. No one does, dumb dumb.
Even the people you envy are dealing with shit you don’t want. What happy people have in common is maintaining a continual need to keep things light.
I’m not saying you should be the over-the-top insufferable pun joke-telling guy who smiles when things need to appropriately be more low-key.
No. I’m talking about being light-hearted where appropriate and keeping the people around them lifted.
Most people are focused on their own miseries.
Happy people transcend this and actively practice the art of light-heartedness.
4. Befriend the dark
Want to know the quickest way to be continually miserable?
Resist ‘bad’ stuff.
Resist your inner shadow side.
Refuse to accept the cruelty of human nature.
Whine when it rains.
You could never enjoy life if there weren’t darker moments.
And you could never truly embrace human nature, or yourself, if you didn’t accept and acknowledge our darker elements.
Happy people have accepted the horrors lurking in the dimly lit avenues of the world around us.
They don’t reel off hundreds of affirmations with a forced smile hoping and praying the bad things get covered up like clown paint and disappear.
Happy people are not deluded. They accept. They use their aggressive nature.
They learn to love reality for what it is. They do what they can to address evil, but they don’t try to change things out of their control.
5. Actively compassionate.
No one is born any less compassionate than the next person, even though it doesn’t seem that way as we mature.
But we always have a choice. We can find things to like in other people. We can find reasons to love others (even if they choose to dye their hair blue).
Compassion is part of what it means to be human. It isn’t to be deluded or a ‘hopeless optimist.’
It is to open up to humanity and expect the best in others. It is to see ourselves in others.
When we do the opposite, we become jaded and bitter, tighten around people, and fail to seize opportunities for healthy collaboration and mutual joy.
We lose the most in the end.
If you enjoyed this, you’ll love my Untethered Mind course.
The course guides you from feeling overwhelmed by your thoughts to mentally strong within a few days.
If you’d like to support me and gain access to hundreds of locked articles like this one, you’ll want to become a paying subscriber here on Substack for less than the price of a couple of large coffees each month:
There is a deep warm embrace knowing that everything is interconnected!