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Practicing Happiness Now To Make It A Habit

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Practice makes perfect, right? Wrong! First of all, nothing’s ever perfect. I’d even say you don’t really want anything to be “perfect.” Why not? Well, once you’ve reached it, where else is there to go but backwards or, even worse, nowhere? Practicing happiness or anything else should be a process.

How To Start Practicing Happiness In Your Life Now

When this post was originally written, the Winter Olympic Games were just starting, I started to think about the art of practice and perfection. Watching the athletes get ready to compete, I am in awe of their strength, dedication, and focus. There is no doubt these athletes are striving for pure perfection.

The point of practice isn’t perfection

We want to strive for perfection, yes, but that’s only going to work if you understand that it’s not just about the destination but the journey, as well.

That’s why it helps to look at process when it comes to those outcomes we’re reaching for. Because what would be the point of getting to where you always wanted to be, if you’re beat up and worn out by the time you get there? Where’s the happiness in that?

Happiness Is A Process As Much As An Outcome

I mean, don’t get me wrong. A hard-earned victory is awesome. But think about it; should happiness in life be restricted to success in finances, or business, or career, or the attainment of goals?

We have all been there at some point in our lives, saying something like, “If only I had [fill in the blank], I’d be so much happier.” Hey, sometimes we may even get whatever it is we think will make us happy, but what usually ends up happening? We’re psyched for a little while—if at all—and then we find out it wasn’t really enough to make us as happy as we thought it would. There’s always more.

You can work your butt off to get to where you want to be by practicing your delivery, your backhand swing, your investment strategies—you can practice anything until you get it down, but that doesn’t mean things are always going to turn out perfectly.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

Practices Becomes Habit

Practice becomes habit, and habits become permanent unless we consciously change them. We’re practicing something all the time through our habits, even when we’re not really thinking about it.

If you practice the thought that “I’ll be happy when [fill in the blank] happens,” then guess what? You’re always delaying your happiness until [fill in the blank] happens. Not because things will never be great, but because you’ve become a master at being unhappy. Unhappiness will be your habit!

You have to prioritize happiness. You have to practice being happy no matter what is going on in life; whether you win or lose, succeed or experience temporary setbacks, whether everything is the way you have always dreamed or if you are still on the road to your next major destination.

Practice Whatever You Want To Be In The Future Now

If you want to be more patient and less reactionary, practice patience now. If you want to be a manager of your own personal wealth, start managing your finances now, no matter how much money you earn. If you want to be successful, then practice being successful now. If you want happiness, start practicing happiness now.

The key is to enjoy the process, enjoy the journey. We can have moments of perfection, times where we wouldn’t want a single thing to change, but it’s unfair and unrealistic to ask that of life all the time. But it’s totally within our control to practice being whatever we want to be right now!

Now that you hopefully understand why you should practice happiness, you might be wondering how to do it.

I’ve been prioritizing happiness for a long time, studying and practicing what it really takes to be truly happy. Would you like to know what I’ve discovered?

Well, I’ve got some great news! I’ve developed a set of seven principles that have transformed my life and made me a much happier person. One of them, which we’ve been talking about here, is that you have to prioritize happiness. 

I’d love to share the other six with you, so I’ve put together a FREE, brand-new online training to walk you through them. It’s called: 

The Shocking Truth About Happiness

If you join me for this FREE training, I guarantee you will be much better equipped to create real and lasting happiness in your life. 

Here’s a taste of what you’ll discover:

  • Why happiness is your natural state of being 
  • How to eliminate the true source of UNhappiness
  • How to be happy AND achieve more in life
  • The 7 precepts of happiness you MUST understand in order to be truly happy

And much, much more!

Remember, time is your most precious asset. In less time than it takes to sit through a few episodes of a Netflix show, you can attend this class and get on the path to a completely new and much more joyful life.

In fact, just by signing up, you’re taking your first action step in prioritizing your own happiness. 

Click here to pick the best date and time for you. I hope to see you there!

What’s one way you could practice your happiness today? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

For Your Freedom,

6 Simple, But Impactful Tips To Become A World Class Speaker & Trainer

UP NEXT:

Being Present and Finding Happiness in Your Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Practicing Happiness

Posted on by 125
elderly woman holding hands up in convertible

Practice makes perfect, right? Wrong!

First of all, nothing’s ever perfect. I’d even say you don’t really want anything to be “perfect.” Why not? Well, once you’ve reached it, where else is there to go but backwards or, even worse, nowhere?

No, the point of practice isn’t perfection. We want to strive for perfection, yes, but that’s only going to work if you understand that it’s not just about the destination but the journey as well. That’s why it helps to look at the process when it comes to those outcomes we’re reaching for. Because what would be the point of getting to where you always wanted to be if you’re beat up and worn out by the time you get there? Where’s the happiness in that?

Happiness is a process as much as an outcome. Don’t get me wrong – a hard-earned victory is awesome. But think about it; should happiness in life be restricted to success in finances, or business, or career, or the attainment of goals?

We have all been there at some point in our lives, saying something like, “If only I had [fill in the blank], I’d be so much happier.” Hey, sometimes we may even get whatever it is we think will make us happy, but what usually ends up happening? We’re psyched for a little while—if at all—and then we find out it wasn’t really enough to make us as happy as we thought it would. There’s always more.

You can work your butt off to get to where you want to be by practicing your delivery, your backhand swing, your investment strategies—you can practice anything until you get it down, but that doesn’t mean things are always going to turn out perfectly. Practice doesn’t make perfect.

Practice becomes habit, and habits become permanent unless we consciously change them. We’re practicing something all the time through our habits, even when we’re not really thinking about it. If you practice the thought that “I’ll be happy when [fill in the blank] happens,” then guess what? You’re always delaying your happiness until [fill in the bank] happens. Not because things will never be great, but because you’ve become a master at being unhappy. Unhappiness will be your habit!

You have to practice being happy no matter what is going on in life; whether you win or lose, succeed or experience temporary setbacks, whether everything is the way you have always dreamed or if you are still on the road to your next major destination.

Practice whatever you want to be in the future now. If you want to be more patient and less reactionary, then practice patience now. If you want to be a manager of your own personal wealth, start managing your finances now no matter how much money you earn. If you want to be successful, then practice being successful now. Start small. Engage in things that you’re already good at and challenge yourself to be better, even if it’s just in small increments.

The key is to enjoy the process and the journey. We can have moments of perfection, times where we wouldn’t want a single thing to change, but it’s unfair and unrealistic to ask that of life all the time. But it’s totally within our control to practice being whatever we want to be right now!

So now it’s your turn:  What are you going to practice right now?  What’s that one thing you want to achieve and are willing to enjoy the process while making it a habit?  We want to hear from you!

Money is Not the Answer

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That’s got to sound ironic coming from someone who believes whole-heartedly in the benefits of being rich. Forget about getting out of debt, paying bills, buying nice things, etc. That stuff’s great, but at the end of it all you’re not going to give a damn about your credit rating. Money’s the last thing on your mind in that moment, I would imagine.

Money can reduce the stress of living, but it can bring just as much if not more anxiety. I’ve gone through my cycles of accumulating and losing money, getting more and losing it again. The money wasn’t burning a hole in my pocket. I just had a big hole in my pocket and didn’t bother to sew it up. That hole represented something in my mental blueprint that kept me from being stable with money. There was nothing wrong with the money.

On the other hand, people without money often think if they just had enough to do this or that, then things would be better. While that may be true, what happens when the mind goes into ‘Only if …’ consistently? That’s exactly what you get … ‘only if.’

‘This will only happen if…’

All of a sudden nothing’s happening and you don’t even know or remember that rule you created. In business that thinking often translates into “It takes money to make money.” No! If you have money it can certainly grow more money, but it doesn’t take money to make money. It takes creativity to make money.

Throwing money at a problem is disaster! In business there’s no such thing as a money problem. That problem grew out of somewhere else. You want to fix the root of the problem. If you throw money at a business problem, you’ll have the same business problem for the rest of your life and no money. Creativity and knowledge are the answers, not money.

It’s also not logical to blame money for people’s shortcomings, or the world’s for that matter. Obviously there are people that are rich and greedy, but there are poor people who are greedy and there are middle class people who are greedy. There are rich, poor, and middle-class people who are generous. There are rich, poor and average income people who can be both generous and greedy, depending on the stress they’re going through at any given time.

To say rich people are greedy as a blanket statement is just as unfair as saying poor people are lazy. I’ve met many a hard-working poor person who just hadn’t yet turned the corner on working smarter instead of just harder.

Money can’t be the root of all evil. Envy, jealousy, and greed—all based on fear of not having or getting enough of something we want—pre-dated currency (think about the story of Cain and Able). It’s a part of what it means for us to be human.

If money isn’t the cause of all that’s wrong, it’s not going to be the cure either. It’s not the answer. It’s the fruit of our expansion—or lack thereof—beyond ourselves and of the impact we’re having on the world. What we choose to do with that is a result of who we choose to be, not because of money.

Anger

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Of all of the negative emotions we have to deal with, the most debilitating of them is anger. Anger sometimes runs and can often ruin lives.

I was angry at my dad for years. When I was a kid, I had this coin collection that I was really proud of, and I kept the coins in this piggy bank. My dad knew where I kept it as well, and one day it was just gone. My prized collection that—in my mind at least—I worked so hard for, just disappeared. Eventually, the piggy bank reappeared, but when I angrily accused my father of stealing … let’s just say he responded pretty angrily, too.

I thought of it as one of those things that ‘just happens,’ and you move on, yes?

Throughout my adult years I never re-examined that incident. I never considered his side of the story. My perspective was, ‘I’m right and that’s that!’ Fine and swell except for one problem: I unconsciously decided that men weren’t to be trusted with money or anything else. The anger and distrust was holding me back, not him. Think that had an effect on my long-term success and happiness?

Most of us are run by our past circumstances. We play the victim role based on an idea that it’s all our parents’ fault for how they raised us. ‘This is what happened, this is the conclusion, and now this is what I do.’

‘You want me to be a success? I’ll be a failure just to show you what a lousy parent you were!’

The most important thing to the conditioned mind is to be right. And when we’re angry, it’s usually about not getting what we want, and we feel justified in our position for the reason of the moment. So we retaliate by not giving the person that we’re angry with what they want. Meanwhile, we’re often going down the drain with or without them, true or true?

So … five different cities, 12 different businesses, 14 different jobs and 35 years later, I learned my dad was actually showing my prized coins to his poker buddies, and he didn’t want to confuse my coin collection with the poker pot so he just kind of stashed it away and forgot to put it back where I kept it. He was proud and protective, not a thief. Only when I became aware of why I wasn’t settled down—as a form of rebellion, anger and retaliation—I was able to make a new choice and build lasting success in life.

Anger and resentment only hurts you! You feel it, not whoever you’re angry at. It gets stuck in the cells of your body, not theirs. It makes you sick, not them. Even worse, sometimes that anger might actually be totally unwarranted, a simple misunderstanding. It’s not worth hanging on to.

Search your past for an emotional incident that resulted in your getting angry about something that concerned money and/or at least one other person. The idea is to simply re-look at a past or childhood situation from your current and (possibly) more mature point of view, and consider revising it so that it doesn’t haunt you anymore. What’s your story? We want to hear from you!

Be Right or Be Happy

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If you’ve ever related to another human being, you’ve probably experienced this.

You’re having a discussion with someone, and he or she says something you know as a matter of fact to be absolutely false. You can politely challenge this person’s inaccuracy, but most people don’t want to be wrong, and many others have a hard time admitting it. It’s human nature, our inner-fear mechanism adapted to today’s insecurities rather than the old “fight or flight” days. But depending on who you’re talking to, proving to somebody that they are wrong can get awkward if the people involved take it too personally.

Even when all evidence points to them being wrong, some people will stubbornly hang on to their views because they’d rather be right and comfortable in being wrong rather than risk the discomfort of having to assimilate new information into their worldview.

As a matter of fact, the people who are the most righteous are usually the most miserable people on this earth anyway, aren’t they? The ones who always have to be right are usually just taking their insecurities and unhappiness out on others, yes or yes?

Being right doesn’t always mean being happy, but if we’re happy it doesn’t really matter who’s right or wrong. Being right isn’t as important a consideration when you’re secure and focused. The only thing that’s important is: will the experience move me toward a result that I believe will support my happiness? That will mean being wrong sometimes, but we have to experience this in order to learn how to get it right, and then get happier.

Be right or be happy. Now replace the word “rich” with “happy.” Does that change the meaning of the phrase any? Not one bit! You can be right or you can be rich; it’s still a choice. Being right could mean holding on to old ways that aren’t supportive of being rich; unconscious blueprints, programming and conditioning that links negative thoughts to money. The more you decide that you want to be right, the more you’ve decided that you can pretty well kiss away being rich, not just financially but emotionally, spiritually, and mentally too. You can be right or you can be rich.

Money is a really blessed thing, and if you have the where-with-all to be able to earn or have a lot of it, you have an advantage over a situation; a gift, talent, skill or way of being that is actually a little different than most people out there. At that point, who needs to be right?!? The quality of your life is all the proof you need.

That doesn’t mean compromising your good sense to someone because of their inflexibility, but happy people don’t need to prove anything. They figured out that along the way, you have to be wrong at least occasionally in order to learn how to get it right. I’d rather be wrong and learn something that will benefit me later than “right” and learn nothing—and maybe get someone PO’d at me for being a smart-ass!

Do you have any stories of something that seemed like a disaster but actually turned out to be one of the greatest gifts you’ve ever received? An occasion where you were actually glad that you were wrong? We want to hear from you!

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