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This is the fifth step of nine, on the path to happiness.

Step # 5) Learn To Experience & Express Gratitude

Stop for a minute and think of someone that you’re grateful to have in your life. Now really focus on what you appreciate and like about them? Think of nothing but your gratitude for having them in your life and what it is that you appreciate about them. Now close your eyes and focus on what you love about them for the next five minutes.

Did you do it? Reading changes nothing – it’s merely entertainment for the mind – we must act to attain change – so stop now and go back and do the exercise.

Take Action!

More Action!

Try this little experiment. Yes you have to do it – but only if you’re serious about changing you outlook on life and making the changes that will bring you happiness. Give this exercise ten minutes. Make a list of all the things you’re truly grateful for in your life. Again only write down those things you are truly grateful for. Maybe, should be, might be – leave them out. Stay at it for ten minutes – you may need a little time to get rolling. When you are finished notice how you feel.

Don’t get down on yourself if this doesn’t come easy. This is a learned behaviour – it does not come natural – you don’t just “know how”. If you’re not in the habit of experiencing or expressing appreciation, you may have to remind yourself in some way. It would be a good idea to write down at least one thing every day. At first you may have to look for things to appreciate, but after a while, it will become more natural. Again this is a learned behaviour.

This is the fourth step of nine, on the path to happiness.

Step # 4) – How To Change One’s Beliefs

The pre-requisite to identifying one’s beliefs is to become rigorously honest with one’s self.

To begin with, ask yourself what it is you wish to achieve, in other words what’s your goal? It could be anything, from losing a few pounds, starting your own company or learning a new language.

Write down your goal on a piece of paper. Look at what you’ve written; make sure it’s realistic. You may wish to learn to fly a plane – but to fly a commercial 747 within the first year, seriously reduces your opportunity for success. Keep it realistic and doable.

Now, ask yourself the following questions as honesty as possible. Remember, no one is judging your answers, nor should you. Simply maintain awareness of your answers and accept them with respect rather than resentment.

• What’s stopping me from achieving this goal?
• Where did this belief come from?
• Who was it that gave me this belief?
• What are my feelings towards that person? Do I regard them highly and respect them?
• Does this belief do anything for me?
• Is this belief costing me anything?
• How would my life change if I let go of this belief?
• Is there any concrete evidence to back this belief?
• Is their a positive intention why I hold on to this belief?
• In what other ways can I satisfy this positive intention without relying on this belief?

Just because you’ve believed something for years, doesn’t make it true – most beliefs are passed down from generation to generation and have been adjust to meet the communicator’s needs of self preservation, mentally, emotionally and/or physically.

The previous questions help us to identify the beliefs that restrict our growth and their roots so that we can better understand how we came to believe what we do. Many beliefs become habits and those habits hold us back by nurturing the beliefs that restrict our growth.

To achieve this simple change, you must be determined to do the next right thing and that is to commit to changing as quickly as the snap of ones fingers. A decision can happen in a fraction of a moment and place you on a new path – positively or negatively. If you have the belief that it takes time to change a person’s perception – that might be a good belief to look at first.

This is the third step of nine, on the path to happiness.

Step # 3) Learn To Accept Yourself

Having self-acceptance, self-esteem, or self-love, whatever you wish to call it, means to be happy with who you are and capable of loving yourself unconditionally at this moment in time. How will you know when you have found self-acceptance? You will be consumed by inner peace and the compassion and willingness to accept and appreciate the differences in others.

In short self-acceptance, self-esteem, or self-love is an agreement with yourself to accept, appreciate, support and validate who you are, including those aspects that you’d eventually like to change about yourself.

It sounds easy to accept yourself, yet very few ever accept themselves. Why? Motivation! It’s common practice to berate ourselves to motivate ourselves to change – to improve. Watch professional sport coaches. In fact at times we even go so far as to hate ourselves for our perceived failures. We condemn ourselves for our inadequacies, we judge ourselves based upon the successes of others, and we cast guilt upon ourselves to drive ourselves to work harder and to achieve greater stature and success.

So do you think you berate yourself it works? Do you feel better after you’ve called yourself a loser, an idiot, a failure? Obviously not! In fact, feeling bad only reduces your desire to keep moving forward. In most cases you end up saying to yourself, “What’s the use?”

Mandy Evans provides a nice description of the results of self-acceptance. “Acceptance allows change. The “acceptance mode” includes everything, even my judgments. It allows me to be okay now, even before I reach my goals.” …“When you begin to accept yourself the way you are right now, you begin a new life with new possibilities that did not exist before because you were so caught up in the struggle against reality that that was all you could do.”

So if this approach doesn’t work, why would we keep doing it? Because we believe and we hope our belief will workout. Remember a belief is not a truth, but a learned view. We’ve been trained to believe that in order to change, we must first feel bad about our current situation. We’ve also been taught to believe that if we’re accepting and loving of our perceived weakness or short coming, that we won’t do anything to change the situation, which couldn’t be any further from the truth! We don’t need to be unhappy with our self to know the things we would like to change about our self. However once we accept we need to make change – we no longer resist the change and are more willing to look at how a change may benefit us.

The key to eliminating the pain of resistance is to accept “what is as is” and to remove our judgements of people, places and things based upon our limited experience of life. Our limited experience of life – get it – we don’t know didilly squat. Remember if we are judging others – chances are we are judging our self and the less we judge others, the less we will judge our self and the less we judge our self the more forgiving, understanding and compassionate we will become of our self and of others.

This is the second step of nine, on the path to happiness.

Step # 2) Happiness Is A Deliberate Intention

Take a moment to reflect – How often do you base your happiness on the circumstances and conditions in your life? “When I have this I’ll be happy. When this happens I’ll be happy. If they just did this, I’d be happy…”

BUT – What if your happiness was… more important than changing your current situation, getting what you want, making more money, being healthy, having friends, being respected, having the right career or being in a great relationship?

What if happiness was the journey rather than the result? Can you think of any logical reason why happiness can’t be experienced while creating the life you want?

In our life, whatever we place our focus on becomes our primary objective. Therefore if we focus on happiness or feeling happy, it’s pretty much a guarantee that we will feel happier.

Don’t just believe me, this is not about belief. Try it and see the results. By deliberately making happiness important in your life, you will become more effective at creating what you want!

AND – if you are unhappy – take a moment to become aware of what you are thinking about and then make a choice to either continue to think about what is making you unhappy or to think about something that will make you happy.

This is the first step of nine, on the path to happiness.

Step # 1) Owning Our Emotions

If you ever hope to find happiness, you need to know who controls your happiness.

Many of us believe that one person can make another person feel bad or upset. “He pisses me off!” “She really upset her.” “He certainly got under her skin.”

So here’s the challenge:

Is it possible to make another person feel anything? I say you can’t ever, make another person feel anything.

Ok let’s look at this. I’m sure we can all think of a time when we “Believe” someone upset us or made us angry. Example: “If that person had not said that or done that, I wouldn’t have gotten angry.”

Here’s where we start to look at our beliefs and how we as human beings have a tendency to apply them in general to most situations. First let’s look at cause and effect and how we apply it to the physical world. If I pull an object and it moves. If I drop a vase on a hard surface, it breaks. But cause and effect doesn’t translate the same when pertaining to our emotions.

When a person says something to us, do the words in of themselves trigger a specific response? When a person gives us a look, does their look in of itself trigger a specific response? When a person expresses emotion in there voice, does their tone in of itself trigger a specific response?

No, of course not!

So what is it that changes these sound waves or looks or tones into a feeling of pleasure or pain?

Simply put – it’s our interpretation of the words or looks or tone and then our application of a feeling, that we chose to add to our interpretation of what we believe to be applicable for this situation or response.

So here lies the challenge most people face when accepting responsibility for their emotions and subsequent responses. The majority of people make no distinction between being influenced and being in control.

Being Influenced & Being in Control

So what are the differences between being influenced & being in control: First, Influence has the potential to impact, meaning it has an indirect impact on the situation. Control on the other hand has a direct effect on the result of the situation.

Here is an example, providing a better understanding of influence and control. Please keep in mind we are applying wisdom to this example. Wisdom is the ability to look at any given situation from a multitude of various possibilities and perspectives.

Brian is Pat’s partner. They are facing some financial difficulties and so together they agreed not to make any large purchases until they are out of debt. That said, while shopping, Brian spotted a new leather jacket and purchased it for $199.00. When Pat saw the credit card bill, he exploded in anger. “What’s this? We agreed!” he screams at Brian, “you knew we can’t afford this, we are over our head in debt!”

So what was it that caused Pat’s anger? Was it the purchase? Was it their debt? Was it the jacket? Or was it Pat’s interpretation of the situation and subsequent response.

As human being’s the first thing any human being thinks about is themselves and how any given situation relates to them personally. Therefore in this case, chances are that Pat saw himself as a poor provider, poor with money, not a good partner, and disappointed in himself that he couldn’t afford to buy Brian the jacket. Overwhelmed by the prior internal thoughts and sensations, he looked for the cause of his pain and rather than own this pain chose to project it onto Brian. Why, because he believes Brian’s actions made him feel this way.

Brian and Pat’s financial situation and subsequent stress and frustration are all influences on Pat’s belief about what it means to be a good partner. Can people and circumstances influence our beliefs? Yes! But remember beliefs are learned from others and carry the experiences of others. A belief is not a guaranteed truth. A belief is not set in stone and a belief can be changed. Therefore we as human beings have control over what we believe and can adjust those beliefs at any given time, if we so choose.

Outside stimuli like people, places and things can influence our beliefs, but only we can give meaning to those influences. Therefore no one can make us feel anything. Sure, others can have an influence on our beliefs, but only we can control our responses and actions pertaining to those beliefs.

Are you still unsure? Let’s change Pat’s beliefs about what it means to be a good partner.

Pat no longer believes he has to provide financial support for Brian to think positively of himself. (From Pat’s perspective being a good partner involves a list of other things, but assisting Brian financially isn’t one of them.)

OK, so now let’s look at the same situation, where they are still struggling financially, and Brian has purchased the jacket. Pat looks at the bill, he doesn’t become angry because he doesn’t question his value as a partner, but he still wants to know what happened since he and Brian had agreed to hold off on any major purchases until they were out of debt.

He calmly asks Brian about the bill, because he hasn’t attached any internal negative emotions. Brian explains he needed a new jacket and really felt he had been doing a great job being thrifty over the past six months and decided if he was going to buy a jacket he may as well buy a quality jacket so it would last. In addition, Brian didn’t dispute Pat’s concern that he had broken the agreement, he apologized for not discussing this with Pat and from there they discussed the need to remain thrifty until their debt was cleared.

By changing Pat’s belief, the emotional response also changed. If the purchase was truly the cause of Pat’s anger – Pat would have become angry regardless of his belief.

TRUTH – No One Can Make You Feel Unhappy
TRUTH – You Can Not Make Anyone Else Feel Unhappy.

That’s good news, right? Well it gets better because – you can make yourself feel happy by simply adjusting your beliefs away from those beliefs that are creating your unhappiness.

That said some people are addicted to the victim role and feel more comfortable living in an unhappy situation. When we observe these people there really isn’t much we can do to help them unless they themselves become willing to change their perspective of their beliefs and become completely honest with themselves.

But the underlying key to all of this is to claim your actions, beliefs and feelings as your own. Once you take ownership and responsibility you gain control. Keep it positive – ownership doesn’t mean to blame yourself, cast guilt upon yourself or pass judgement upon yourself – ownership gives you the opportunity to look for the appropriate answers you seek and the self growth you deem required. Again this varies in all of us.

Victor Frankl summed it up nicely with the following quote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”