12 Oct 5 Steps to Happiness
If you believe the hype, then the modern woman is a seething ball of resentment: overworked, underpaid and increasingly stressed out.
So what, if anything, can be done to make us feel happier? If you believe Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling Eat, Pray, Love (being made into a film with Julia Roberts), then the answer is good food, great sex and a bit of spiritual fulfilment on the side.
But is it really that simple? Gilbert’s recipe for success is a difficult one to follow without plenty of money to fuel your dream and plenty of time in which to pursue it.
Yet it is also true that for all the hand-wringing surveys, there are plenty of happy women out there, some of whom don’t even have multi-million-pound book contracts to fuel that joy.
And what is it that makes these women happier? According to Gallup researcher Marcus Buckingham, the author of a new motivational book Find Your Strongest Life, the answer is simple: happy women have decided that they will be happy regardless of circumstance and no matter whether they are rich or poor, regardless of whether they have children or are child-free, or whether they are working or stay-at-home mothers.
To prove his point – that it’s your disposition rather than the funds at your disposal that counts – Buckingham polled thousands of women asking them the following five questions:
To read Buckingham’s questions and to find out more about 5 things you can do to boost your happiness – click here