04 Apr How to find happiness: 7 timeless tips from the last 2500 years
Check out this great article from the Positivity Blog…
What do you want?
A great job?
A fulfilling relationship?
Go sailing around the Pacific for a few years in your very own luxurious boat?
Or just to get along better with yourself?
Perhaps you want one of more of those things. But beneath those and many common wishes, if you take it a step further, often lies a wish to find happiness.
One good way to find a few useful, life-improving and time-tested tips is to look back. To look way back through history. To find ideas that have arisen in minds over and over the last few thousand years. Here are seven such ideas about how you can find happiness. Maybe you´ll find them helpful.
And if you want to learn much more about inner happiness then have a look at my 12-week Self-Esteem Course.
1. You choose.
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
How your view yourself and your world are conscious choices and habits. The lens you choose to view everything through determines how you will interpret what is happening. And from your interpretation you act. And all of this becomes your life.
You can choose to find happiness in small, everyday things. You can choose to interpret what happens in a positive way. Or in a negative way.
And your choices controls much of how much happiness your will find and create in your life.
2. Focus on the present, not yesterday or tomorrow.
When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
Helen Keller
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
You only have now. And now. And now. Yesterday is a memory and you cannot change it. Tomorrow is just a fantasy in your mind right now. So live more in the now, focus on the present moment and today. Think and worry less about yesterday and tomorrow. Otherwise you might miss a great deal of happiness that is available to you right now.
3. Don’t forget to be grateful.
Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
Frederick Keonig
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust
One of the simplest and quickest ways to turn a negative and sour mood into a more positive one is to be grateful.
A few things you can feel gratitude for are for instance: The sunshine and the weather. Your roof. Your health. A good TV-show, a movie or a song. Your friends, family, co-workers and just about anyone walking down the street.
Just try if for a minute and see how it changes how you feel. And it’s a win/win solution. You feel great because you are grateful about your world and the people you are grateful for feel great too because they feel appreciated. So don´t forget about gratitude or you may forget about the happiness that is already in your life.
4. Help someone else find happiness.
Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha
…keep reading the rest of tip number 4 PLUS the final 3 tips HERE where you'll find the full and original article PLUS lots of other great happiness and positivity related stuff (that's a technical term!).
And PS: check out all our courses and events HERE where you can learn how to put these timeless tips into practice in your life.