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Archive for Happiness

Feb
22

Gratitude is Under Rated Life Force

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments (0)

Gratitude is a window into the state of one’s sense of self worth.

Iridology is the practice of looking into one’s pupils and diagnosing the body’s state of health.  Iridologists see the eyes as “windows” into the body’s state of health.-wikipedia

A person with gratitude is happy they are alive. They see each day as an opportunity to carry out their contribution.  That contribution might be helping their family get through life or helping customers solve problems or finding a cure for a disease.

Gratitude is reflected in your words, how you treat people, how you treat events, how you go about your work or fun,  and the look on your face. Like looking into your pupils, it is detectable.

The opposite could be said for each item of people who see the glass as half full. Things are always wrong, life is stacked against you, it is not certain things will turn out for the best, you have to be really careful or it will get you, and so on. This attitude is also like looking into your pupils. It might result in sickness and disease.

We can have gratitude right now. Just start thinking of the things you are happy about and your opportunities to make your life better. Life is tough, but having passions make the difficulties seem smaller. Enjoying nature makes every day a possible blessing.

Valuing the worth of others makes seeking better relationships worthwhile. Becoming a part of the environment or community is better than being sequestered.  There are communities for every interest.

There is hardly anyone that can’t contribute in some small way. Stephen Covey in the 8th Habit says its our purpose to express ourselves and help others do the same.

It’s a magical tool. You can flip the switch.

**

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Read   It’s Hard to Find Your Essence in all the Noise

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Feb
17

We Have Many Areas of Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

There are areas of happiness and there is over all happiness.  Some people perform great at work because they are doing what they love or maybe out of fear they are doing it for survival. Then after work, their life falls apart.

Anxiety is usually the result of having challenges for which we don’t see the answer. It is a loss of faith that we can work things through or lack of faith that things turn out for the best.  This may come from a general view that the glass is half full.

Happiness can be built from a foundation of behaviors that clip the continuous anxiety out of our lives. Having faith that we can solve our problems and that life is not set against us is the top side of what happiness looks like.

We need to be connected. We need to be connected to our bodies, which usually connects us to nature. Nature, the Universe, or God, has provided answers for 15 billion years now.  Everything keeps adapting. We can all adapt to what we face.

We should realize we are the result of generations of survival of the fittest. We are supposed to be here and our brains are geared for happiness. The brain is waiting to produce dopamine for us so that we can have gratitude that we are here.

Start with eating natural, the way all species on earth eat. Get exercise which all species on earth do naturally.  Your body is connected to everything on earth.  Feel the love.  Start adding things you can appreciate or enjoy every day. Look forward to pursuing things that make you happy.

If you can engage in pursuits that are challenging but manageable, the time spent in this engagement will look like being in the zone or flow. This produces happiness.  Having more activities that you look forward to, get your life more into flow.

You can work through the anxieties as you realize you are here to pursue your passions.

**

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Feb
11

Getting into Flow is Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments (0)

Flow or being in the zone are described as engaging in activities in which we are practiced to the exclusion of all distractions. The result is performance at the top of our scale and production of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

We certainly hear being in the zone  described in sporting contexts.  Flow is the same activity that can be experienced during any activity including writing, cooking, playing music, running, working, or hobbies.

So, if we wanted to exist in the happiness state all day, we would engage in activities we enjoyed.  Doesn’t seem to complicated.  I am sure we all want to engage in activities we enjoy, but often think we have responsibilities or our job that get in the way.

It maybe true, but this also says that happiness is no further away than creating the time to engage in our passions.  Don’t have any passions, time, energy?

One way to start creating more energy and getting our world grounded is to start eating more healthy and focus on eating just natural food.  Complement that activity with more muscle burning exercise even if you start with 10 minutes a day.

The further you get with healthy eating which leads to getting lean and more muscle burning exercise, the sooner you will start to feel more energized and inspired.  Getting our bodies fit creates a real connection to Nature.

The next biggest avenue for safe risk and excitement is self expression. What could you do that is uniquely you that would put something out into the world?  You may have to start at step one.  Do you want to write, paint, start a hobby, start a small business?  What is it that might express you?

The better you get at your new found activity, the sooner you will get into flow where there is nothing but you and your engagement.  Happiness doesn’t have to be purchased, it has to be sought.

**

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Feb
06

Self Expression as a Factor in Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

Mammals are very social beings.  They can usually be found living in communities.  The advantage of living in communities can be for survival but it then has a big communication component. We communicate to take care of basic necessities, but then we like to communicate to express ourselves.  Mammals like to play and frolic.

What is it about play that is so fundamentally important? Children love to play, dolphins love to play, horses love to romp and chase.  It is an expression of feeling good.  It is a form of happiness.  And yet with our tremendous mental capacity, we can play in many more ways than the physical.

In our youth, little girls’ minds develop faster and they take to conversation before boys.  Boys develop physically faster and they take to the terrible two’s because that’s how they best express themselves at that stage.  Later we might use our minds or our bodies or both to express what we feel and who we are. It is our way of playing out our experience of what life means to us.

The more we focus, the more uniquely or skilled our expressions can be.  The 10,000 hours of practice makes people experts in their expressions.  The term “flow” is said to be the highest form of emotional intelligence, at least as defined by Daniel Goleman in his book  Emotional Intelligence. Being “in the zone” is the place a person can achieve with practiced skills to the exclusion of distractions and with disregard to judgment.

Neurologists say that being in flow or in the zone, the brain produces dopamine as our happiness chemical.  We are pre-wired to be experts in expressing ourselves and getting rewarded for doing so.  Maybe in our search for “happiness” through acquiring and achieving we lose touch with the most elementary mammal desire.

We like to express ourselves and we are often inclined to see if their is a limit to just how good we can be. Why climb Everest? Because it’s the tallest mountain or we would climb something else.  Why go to the moon? To see if we can do it.  Why practice the violin ten hours a day? Because we want to see just how good we could be.

If you are getting bogged down in daily life and want to find some happiness, key into a passion of self expression.  We often use up our time with meaningless activities like TV, marrying our smart phones, and so on when real happiness awaits our arrival.

Get into something that is uniquely you.  Write, dance, cook, build, paint, sew, climb, surf, bike, or whatever it is you could practice regularly and improve upon your skills. This is where happiness lies.

**

Get a few sessions of Life Coaching to find areas of interest and eliminate the drains on emotions and time.

Read   Happiness is a Collection of Habits

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Jan
30

What Smiling Does for Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

It’s hard to smile if you’re not happy about something. Smiling usually indicates something has tickled your fancy. So why not use smiling to get out of negative thoughts.

We take life seriously, often too seriously. We have our daily objectives of what must get done today to keep our job or life in order. During the day there will be many obstacles of life events that try to frustrate our progress, like traffic.

We need a smile library. Go through the things in your memories that have made you smile or when you think of them make you smile. Sometimes you can smile with joy just thinking about a certain person. Sometimes you could smile thinking about your favorite dessert. Maybe you got a big check and you felt proud or your child kicked a goal that won a game.

Go to this library to break your mood when life is getting in your way.

I have created a Google + page on Health Fitness and Happiness and soon I will put photos of things that make me smile. Maybe they’ll work for you or maybe you have your own that your mind can bring up on call.

**

Get Life Coaching to put more smiles in your life

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Jan
29

How We Try to Manipulate Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

With enough money you can buy anything.  So we believe, when we are young and sometimes as we grow older.

We know some people who get really rich and are in the public eye get themselves into very unhappy situations. We’re they rich in our minds and not in theirs?  Did they give up on improving after they hit a plateau? We might think they had more money than we would need, but did they think they did not have enough money or that with the money, they didn’t get what they needed to fill the hole?

We manipulate happiness buying things even if we don’t think we are rich.  We try buying things because at the moment we fill an inkling of richness and want the whole feel of happiness that buying something brings.  It often brings that feeling for a few minutes or hours or maybe even weeks.

Food can bring temporary happiness when we don’t have the money or the inclination to go out and buy something.  Obesity is certainly the one result of trying to buy a lot of happiness with food.  Alcohol and drugs bring on a lot of nervous system relief which feels like happiness. When you are not worried or anxious, that’s almost as good as happiness.

But happiness would be better if we didn’t have to buy, eat, or drink our way to it.  Do the dues seem to steep to pay to endeavor doing it the hard and long way?  Are we strong enough to take the pain without the medicine of quick reliefs?

What are some of  the feelings of happiness?  Health, fitness, love, gratitude, charity, generosity, contribution, and self expression to name a few.  What do they require? Some real basics would be respecting ourselves, respecting others, wishing well for others, and gratitude for who we are and what we have.

Whether or not we have money or fame we can always be more than we are. We can work on skills and become more skilled.  Skills express who we are. When we are engaged in activities that we enjoy and that require our skills we can get into blissful enjoyment. It is also called flow or being in the zone.  The body rewards this pursuit with the happiness chemical dopamine and other neurotransmitters. The short cut for a few minutes is cocaine.

Love is probably the best solution because it seriously bathes our entire mind, body and spirit.  When we love ourselves because we have the opportunity to self express, enjoy nature, give to others, and receive others’ love, we are living in flow.  Our minds are continuously producing dopamine without the need for money, food, or alcohol.

We can start appreciating our selves by taking care of the body nature gave us. In doing so, we become at one with nature, God, the Universe or what ever you want to call it. With the discipline to eat healthy, exercise to burn muscle, and engage in activities that spark our passions we are achieving true happiness that can last years.

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Want to discuss a path of discipline that results in more real happiness?  Life Coaching can create a starting path.

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Read  Exercise Improves Productivity and Happiness

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Jan
24

How to Bake the Cake of Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

For some reason I seem to be stuck on the cake analogy lately, but I have found that happiness requires several ingredients.

You have to have some peace of mind or freedom from anxiety or you are not going to be happy. There are some important requirements and steps that can be taken.  I cannot include your need for medication for anxiety but I will assume normal every day stresses of job, family, and future types of anxieties.

You need to have a plan and feel your house is in order.  Your finances don’t have to perfect, but you need to be free of worry about impending doom. You have to live within your means.  If you can cut back to the point you have savings every month, even if its a dollar, you are there.

Your relationships have to be in order. If you have unresolved issues with people close to you, this will prey on your mind.  You have to be in good health. Chronic issues or concern about developing issues can wreak havoc on your nervous system.

If you are clear of health problems, start building better health in the future with healthy eating and exercise. The leanness you will gain, the pride you will feel, and the relaxation that will result from daily exercise will start to build exponential benefits.

Start expressing yourself. You are a wonder of nature. You have the same talents as given to famous people except they have practiced more than you. Start investing time into a passion that expresses who you are.  As you build competence you will experience periods of “flow” which is engagement without concern for judgment. The brain produces dopamine as happiness in reward for your efforts.

Having your house in order and creating flow in your life daily produces a very delicious cake.

**

Discuss Life Management to create flow in your life.

Need a Speaker to talk to your group about a little cake of happiness?

Read    Can Life Be Fun First, Work Second?

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Jan
21

Real Fun Doesn’t Need Alcohol

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

When ever we think about blowing off some steam, alcohol seems to be part of the equation. One of the reasons we need to blow off steam is that we are not having fun during the week.  We really can’t help it if we don’t like our job or if it is too stressful because we need the money.

Real fun comes from stretching your capabilities and reaching new plateaus in self expression or new frontiers in your passionate pursuits.  There is risk expressing yourself.  It takes as much courage as jumping out of an air plane. I know, I have done both.  I used to think that if I conquered things that scared me I would eliminate fear.

I learned you can’t eliminate fear and if you hide, you just live a boring life. You can learn to manager fear. Big time surfers looking at 25 foot waves have lots of fear. They know that death could be the result of their fun. They have practiced competence and apply it to test their capabilities.  That’s real fun.

Testing your limits creates adrenaline and the right amount of adrenaline leads to the production of dopamine. Dopamine is your brain neurotransmitter commonly associated with happiness.  Now we’re talking. If we could have the right dose of daily adrenaline that produced copious amounts of dopamine, we wouldn’t need alcohol to have fun.

**

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Read   Fun Breaks Make Life Fun

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Jan
17

Happiness is a Collection of Habits

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

Setting your mindset to positive is what happiness is about.  Do you see the glass as half full, are you optimistic about outcomes, do you feel gratitude every day?

If each circumstance you face is an opportunity instead of an insurmountable obstacle meant to ruin your life, you probably smile a lot, enjoy various activities during the day, love to eat healthy, exercise,  treat others kindly,  and feel you are contributing to the better of lives or the planet.

If you don’t have these feelings then maybe you should start including the above activities and behaviors in your life. The result of each one is usually more dopamine which is your brain’s happiness chemical.  Flow is engaging in activities that are challenging but within your capabilities.  Flow is a real dopamine producer.

Eating healthy and exercising support positive brain activity and support both alpha and beta waves.  Beta waves at the healthy level give you the adrenaline you need to accomplish tasks but is short of the amount that throws you into anxiety or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Building health as a priority says you value your life and you want to live better and longer to make a better contribution.  Placing tasks over health says you probably are anxious and not getting the most enjoyment out of your days on earth.  Even if you are a self sacrificer, your well being is important for you to develop gratitude and a generous spirit that others will find infectious.

Living well is a contribution because it acts as an example that others can follow to make their lives better.

**

Investigate Life Coaching to get the most out of your 75,000 days on earth. They go fast and you can’t buy more.

Would you like a Speaker to inspire your group on the advantages of good habits to live better?

Read    Doing the Right Things Every Day for Happiness

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Jan
15

The Life Affects of Having One or Two Passions

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

There are not too many positive feelings better than passion.  Even people who express anger or like being scared at the movies are getting high on the intense feelings that make you feel alive.  We have a need to feel alive and if we don’t get it from positive engagement we often turn to negative behaviors.

Flow is the engagement in activities that we find challenging, but are within our capabilities.  When engaged we bar distractions from our consciousness and get lost in the activity at hand.  It is the supreme level of enjoyment. Our brain registers our contentment by producing dopamine, the happiness neurotransmitter.

Having a passion in which you can engage everyday starts setting up your emotional balance to a positive outlook. You look forward to it in advance and you revel in the feelings afterward. It creates a rest for your nervous system similar to sleep or a vacation. We need these breaks from the tension and stress of daily existence.

If you can string several passionate activities together in a day, your life starts looking more like flow and less like negativity.  Passions that lead to flow  require practiced activity, discipline, risk, and courage.  To get better you have to leave your comfort zone.  Risk is exciting, but this is controlled risk in many ways. The only real risk is whether your ego take set backs or failure to progress.

Better to adrenalize your system with risk of progress than negative behaviors that reinforce you are alive.

**

Get Life Coaching for improving daily flow and creating passions.

Need a Speaker to adrenalize your group and help set some passionate targets?

Read   Doing the Right Things Every Day for Happiness

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Jan
14

Turning Negative Thoughts Around to Positive

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

We all have those little moments when the negative thoughts try to take over our mind. They can come in the middle of a perfectly good day or often slip in during the night when we are sleeping and vulnerable.

The first trick is catching them and saying to yourself, these are negative thoughts. The second trick is having your little reservoir of positive thoughts that you can access at any time.  You have to identify that you are having negative thoughts and move to your positive thoughts.

I can go to a day where I had three good events. I made a great break through in my surfing in the morning, I went with a friend to a fun restaurant we hadn’t tried, and then I sold a surf board in the evening.  On another day I had a fun surf session in the morning and enjoyed a visit from a friend and went to a happy hour with two other friends.

It doesn’t matter that these events actually occurred on different days.  I put them all together on the same day and can recall how I felt about each break through or social occasion.  Each recall puts my mind into a happy place and forces the bad thought to the rear.  I will stay with the happy thoughts until the bad ones are gone.

The final trick is catching the bad thoughts early and every time.  As soon as doubt or anxiety or fear creeps in, I go to a positive, happy, or success story thought.  Luckily,  negative and happy thoughts can’t exist in the same space.

**

My activities are my passions and I weave them together for creating happiness. I like to surf, write, design websites, coach, and speak.  A winning formula can apply to all your activities.

For Life Coaching on creating a stream of happy events inquire about a few sessions

Need a Speaker to get your organization thinking positive?

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Read    Do We Feel We Deserve Happiness?

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Jan
13

Fun Breaks Make Life Fun

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

You can take a break from routine and it doesn’t always have to be a vacation.  Sometimes the spontaneous is the most fun. When you return to your routine, you feel invigorated. Sometimes dropping a routine is just as good. For instance, try not watching TV one night and see what happens.

A friend asked me if I wanted to visit a great little restaurant in downtown San Diego that he had not tried. It turned out to be a great spot with a view of the bay, windows open all around and a selection of draft ales. It was a great break.  I had lunch with another friend yesterday and we enjoyed a roof top view of Oceanside while sitting in the sun and having good food.

Sometimes going for a run or taking time off to do something you would not normally do adds a little spontaneity and reminds you that there is life outside your life. I live at the beach and see it every day. I was surprised how invigorating a trip to Kauai was just because it was a total change of scenery and routine.

Your life can have more subtle but just as impacting changes by adding activities and taking away activities.  Do something new you had been daring yourself to try.  Try writing, painting, cooking, reading, hiking, biking, charity, or any number of things that could become passions.  Take away distractions.  Leave your phone at home for a few hours or a day. Don’t read the newspaper one day.  Leave your emails or social networking alone for a day.

The ultimate change is to give yourself more time with yourself to see if any creative thoughts arise.  Its hard to be happy if you can’t spend time with your own thoughts.  Create a little time each day that you do something just for you.  Then create more time where you pursue something just for you.Your life can get into flow where you combine work and passions.

When that time becomes a contribution to others, you are going to feel really inspired.

**

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Do you have your own Website that you can create ideas or contributions? Your site can reach several page one Google sites and may be more meaningful than social networking alone.

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Jan
10

Doing the Right Things Everyday for Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

Happiness can be at the end of the curve, but health and fitness are just as important in building a foundation for a successful life.  When I say successful, I am not talking about money and fame. I am talking about having gratitude and enjoying every day.

Good results do not happen in a month or even a few months although they can start to indicate progress.  The best results start showing themselves after years of developing the right healthy eating, exercise, and spiritual daily routines.  You chip at the stone with your hammer and chisel and pretty soon you have a beautiful statue.

Healthy eating begins with getting the right foods into your diet and eliminating the harmful sugars, fats, processed and restaurant foods.  Exercise begins with even walking and should progress to stretching, building core, building upper body strength and adding aerobics.

Spiritual work develops from engaging in activities for which you have passion and developing your skills. If they are outdoors, you start increasing your connection to Nature and yourself.  It also includes appreciating your self and your opportunity to make a difference while you are here. You don’t have to invent a vaccine, you can make those around you better enjoy their lives.

If you start developing a life that rewards you with pleasure, those around you will have more pleasure in your company and start to emulate some of your thinking and habits. The greater empathy and kindness you can show your circle of influence the more likely they are to pass it on.

Everyone can start building more happiness for themselves and those around them.

**

Discuss some paths to create happiness in your life in Life Management Coaching

Do you need a Speaker at your next gathering to build better communications in your group

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Read   Happiness is a Universal Value

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Jan
09

Why Health and Fitness Can Lead to Happiness

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

Happiness often seems like the elusive dream. It is the goal of so many worthwhile pursuits. We have dreams as children of being successful and then being happy.  What goes wrong so often in the process?

We confuse pursuit of worthwhile goals and achievement with behaviors that are the foundation of happiness. We are born happy and we can have happy anytime. We can have as much happiness as we can stand.  Gay Hendricks in a great book called The Big Leap says our biggest obstacle is mostly that we don’t feel we deserve it.

Well that’s a slap in the face. Can you imagine that we are our own obstacle to what we want? Things happen to us when we are young that make us feel guilty about success, feeling better than others, feeling happy while others are suffering, being all that we can be and so on.

I found my path to happiness by building it anew from my own foundation. I had been pretty good in my life about achieving, making money, buying lots of toys, but happiness seemed to be hiding behind the next thrill. When I started eating healthy, I began a road of establishing a connection with myself and nature that delivered the goods.

Finding the beauty of health and fitness in our bodies that Nature, the Universe, or God gave us makes us appreciative that we weren’t just created to live a life of separation and toil. We are at one with all that is around us and we only need appreciate that after 3. 5 billion years of life, we have arrived.  This is our day in the sun.

Be appreciative. Have gratitude that your mind, body, and spirit can achieve great self expression of what you believe, feel is important and/or want to contribute.  The discipline, openness to risk, and courage I developed along the path gave rise to a life more in flow.

Flow is the engagement in activities that are your passions and yet are still challenging. In the process, you are lost in your own world without regard for time, judgment or reward. This produces dopamine which is the brain telling you in a natural process that you are on the right track.

Don’t buy more stuff. Get in touch with your own body and make it clean and exercised.

**

Life Coaching might help you get on the right track in a few sessions. I offer three sessions in an introductory program.

If you would like a group to get started on their process, consider a Speaker at your next gathering.

Be bold and express your self with a great blogging Website that you control.

Read   Fitness as a Foundation for All Activities

Return to Inspiration is Freedom

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Categories : Happiness
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Jan
08

Do We Feel We Deserve Happiness?

Posted by: Mark Kaplan | Comments Comments Off

The one experience philosophers from the beginning of time have said we seek is happiness.  The Greeks said we seek it above all other experiences. Thomas Jefferson said we are entitled to live in happiness. Is it possible that we sabotage our happiness when we reach it or come so very close?

I feel that in my younger days I may have ruined perfect occasions when the feelings that I didn’t deserve it cropped into my subconscious.  There are times when we have earned money or achievement or have a great relationship that we will do something to test it.  If someone loves us we might test it with s0me negative behavior. If we  have a great job, we might risk it with something unexpected.

Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap says even the most accomplished individuals hit a ceiling. At this limit point that pops up in their subconscious, they feel they don’t deserve any more good fortune. He points to the several reasons people often create to deprive themselves of the opportunity to move higher.

It is all too easy to point to the people we read about who achieve everything we would dream and then they totally self destruct.  So many psychologists and authors love pointing to the lottery winners who get free money and soon destroy their lives.

I now feel I have created a state of sustained happiness that I deserve because I have built it from the ground up. It is one thing to live our lives and through our efforts reach a plateau and the think we don’t deserve it. It is another to design your life on some principals that are based on your connection to Mother Nature, the Universe, God or what ever you would like to call it.

Coming from the region of I didn’t deserve happiness, I started a program of healthy eating and exercise. My purpose was to lose weight.  I don’t think lean was even in my forecast.  As my program slowly developed results, I saw the potential. As healthy eating created so many fantastic benefits I wanted to add more exercise to build on the results.

The discipline and mind control I enjoyed in the process showed me the potential of creating any reality or goal with daily engagement.  I learned what a fantastic and well oiled body nature gave us if we treated it right and how well our mind functions as a result of food, exercise, and appreciation or gratitude.

Once you have gratitude, you want to contribute and see others find the same results. Unlike losing money, its harder to lose gratitude. Its the gift that keeps giving. Once you start giving, there is daily reward that incites you to keep up the behavior. The attitude starts creating the feed back that is nourishing. You can’t get enough. Its hard to sabotage this type of experience.

**

Let’s talk about Life Coaching to find your peace and reason to be grateful.

Your group might enjoy a Speaker who addressed their reasons to be happy and work together.

Start expressing yourself or promoting your business with a Website like this that is designed to get you to Page One Google

Read another post  Happiness is in Front of Our Face

Return to Inspiration is Freedom

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Categories : Happiness
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