How To Make Your Own Happiness

Happiness comes to a person when it is caused by something, such as the person achieving a much-desired goal. Happiness also comes when the person recognizes something of value - seeing children playing together joyfully makes the parent happy. Happiness can be caused by expectation of future good fortune, as the happiness of a couple in a romantic relationship. Happiness has causes. It can be had by anyone who is able to bring about and recognize a suitable cause. Below are 6 ways to bring a little more happiness into your life.

Be aware of resources that can be used to achieve your goals -

Everyone has a large number of valuable skills that are not often appreciated: the ability to communicate and interact with people, the ability to set priorities when scheduling tasks, and many other such abilities. Your abilities are valuable. They can help you get what you want. So give them the consideration they deserve. Be proud of all of your abilities and skills. Take some delight in using them and they will stay with you and likely develop further.

Feel good when you succeed -

Savor the successes that your abilities and your resources allow you to achieve. The more you enjoy your successes, the more you will strive for and achieve success. It's a self-perpetuating circle that brings rewards and happiness.

Ask for what you want -

It's a way to make your life better. If it doesn't take away from someone else's happiness, then there's no reason to not ask. It is a tool you should feel good about using because it can produce good results. For example, you can ask someone to baby sit your kids while you get an r 'n' r break. You can ask advice on how to do something. You can ask at a university or state employment center for help in choosing a career.

Be willing to take chances to get what you want -

Yeah, sometimes you will fail. Sometimes you will suffer consequences. Just make a logical judgment about whether the possible benefits are worth the risks. If you decide it's worth it, then go for it. If you fail, so what. If you fail many times, so what. You still might succeed the next time, or the time after that. As long as the possible benefits are worth the cost, keep trying. And feel good about it. 

Be alert to what is good in your life -

Try to adopt a mode of operation of giving attention to the good things. If you aren't aware of what you got going for you, then you are missing out on feeling good about those good things. Being happy requires at least some recognition of what makes life valuable and worthwhile. The more you are aware of the good things in life, the more joy and pleasure you will feel. And to help stay alert generally, do what you can to stay healthy, exercise often, and strive for variety and new experiences.

Go about making your life better -

Take an interest in self-improvement. Be concerned with ways to make your life better. That will allow you to see opportunities to make it better. Some of those opportunities won't work out. The ones that do, make your efforts well worth it.

I would LOVE to hear what you think - let me know in the comments :-) 

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How to Conduct Your Personal Mid-Year Review

How often do you take the time out to really reflect on how you are progressing towards your goals for the year?

Now that we are at the half-way point of the year, it’s the perfect time to conduct your own personal mid-year review!


Why Conduct a Personal Mid-Year Review?

Conducting a mid-year review gives you the time and space necessary to evaluate your progress towards your goals.

Without taking the time out to reflect, how do you know whether your decisions, behaviour and actions for the first 6 months have helped you move towards where you want to go in your life?

Reflection is one of the most fundamental skill-sets of successful people.

If you are serious about creating your best life and making your dreams a reality, then you need to reflect to ensure you are making the right decisions and working towards them in the most effective and efficient way.
Benefits of Conducting a Personal Mid-Year Review

There are a tonne of benefits from conducting your own mid-year review.

Some of the major benefits include:

• Determine if your actions are progressing you towards your goals
• Determine if you are progressing at the right speed (i.e. will you reach your goal on time?)
• Determine if your goals are still relevant
• Understand the challenges you have faced and what learning’s you can make
• Identify more effective or efficient methods of achieving your goal

The more often you can conduct a personal review, the more effective you will become in your life.


I would recommend that you at least do a 6-monthly in-depth review of your goals. In fact, I encourage you to do it as often as you can. When I talk about these reviews, I’m talking about your ‘big life goals’.
Conducting Your Personal Mid-Year Review

Let me guide you through the process that I go through when I conduct my own personal reviews.

It is a process whereby I ask myself specific questions which help me understand exactly what I can do moving forward to work more effectively and efficiently towards my goals.


Get Yourself Setup

Before we get to the questions, the first thing you need to do is get yourself ready for your mid-year review. No, this doesn’t mean you have to dress up nicely and look pretty, it simply means you need to get yourself in an environment that is conducive for reflection.

So, to get setup:

Find yourself a nice, quiet environment
Have your goals and any other supporting materials with you that you can use to look over
Make sure you have something to write with

One piece of advice on the environment… try conducting your mid-year review away from your ‘normal’ working environment. This would mean getting out of the office, or away from your home and out into a park or somewhere where you can think about your life more objectively and freely.

Let’s get into it!

Question 1: Are My Goals Still Relevant?

Goals change over time. Life is full of surprises!

This is not something to be concerned about, but something to be aware of.

The first thing to do when conducting your personal mid-year review is to look over the goals that you have set and ask yourself whether they are still relevant.

How have your goals changed?

Sometimes when you originally set your goals the future is murky. It’s impossible to predict the future and to know with 100% certainty that a set of circumstances will eventuate. In-line with this, you may have had some clarity on the general direction of where you want to go, but now that you are six months into the year you have realised that there is a slight alternative that you are now working towards.

This is fine and goals are to be constantly tweaked and refined… this is all part of the process!

The key is to ensure that your goals are still linked to the things that you are passionate about.Passion creates the drive, energy and enthusiasm necessary for success.

When looking over your goals, it’s also good to remind yourself of WHY you are working towards them. Your goals and your life need meaning. Answering the question of why will reinvigorate the drive for making them a reality.


Question 2: What have I achieved?

Do you fall victim to ‘setting and forgetting’ your goals? Hopefully not now that you’re part of The Start of Happiness!

Now that you have confirmed that your goals are still relevant, the next step in the process is to reflect on what you have actually achieved.

How are you tracking towards your goals? What ‘mini-goals’ have you met or what smaller steps have you done to help you reach where you are?

Taking the time to reflect on what you have achieved will help you to determine whether your actions and progressing you towards your goals and whether you are likely to achieve them on time.

One of the best things about asking yourself this question is that it will highlight the behaviours and actions that have worked. This is super-important to being able to progress further in the back half of the year.


Question 3: What challenges have I faced?

When you are looking back over your progress for the year, it’s important that you also look at the challenges you have faced.

Very rarely can you reach your most important goals without a challenge being thrown your way.

Reflect on what these challenges have been. Why did these obstacles or challenges occur? How did you feel when they were presented? What did you do to overcome these challenges?

Resilience is a key factor in overcoming challenges. Understanding how you have faced these challenges and managed to overcome them helps you to build this resilience. It helps to embed the confidence in yourself that no matter what gets thrown your way you will be able to continue moving towards your goal.

The other thing that this question can raise is what can you do in the future to prevent these challenges from happening again?

Question 4: What have I learned?

Life is one big learning experience.

When you’re making progress towards your life goals you’re going to make a million decisions. Some good and some bad. One of the key ingredients that separates successful people is the ability to learn from their actions.

Looking back over your answers to the previous questions, now is the perfect time to ask yourself what have you learned from these experiences?

That is, what have you learned about your goals in life?

What have you learned from your achievements?

What have you learned from the challenges you have faced?

Taking the time to understand the key things that you have learned will help you get set-up perfectly for answering the next question.


Question 5: What can I do differently?

Now is when your mid-year review has its biggest impact. Your future.

Based on everything you have learned from answering the above questions, it’s time to think about the actions that you will put into place to make sure that the back half of the year is even more effective than the first half.

It’s all about continuous improvement! Never get complacent.

What habits do you need to change?

What extra support do you need?

What processes do you need to put in place to be more effective?

How will you address your next challenge?

This is a perfect opportunity for refining your goal and working on a specific strategy for the next 6 months of the year. You can start to map out the exact things you will do in this time to get you there.


Next Steps

There are 2 things you need to do first and foremost as next steps:
Set yourself a date for your next personal review
Write down 3 things that you can do immediately (or sometime today) to start building momentum in your life…. and go do them!

Your personal review should be a regular thing. If you can make it habitual then you’re well on your way to success.

I know of many people who write down their to-do lists or goals for a specific day, but how many people look at how those specific things on their to-do list help them progress towards their bigger goals in life?

The more regular you can review your progress towards your bigger, life goals, the more effective and the more speedy you will get there.

If you’re yet to create goals or want to go even a step back and start to look at the bigger picture in life (that is, understanding yourself and where exactly you want to go), then I highly recommend you check out our Launch Your Life Academy which guides you the proven process of making positive change in your life.

So, what are you waiting for?

Let’s make the next 6 months a ripper!

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7 Ways Smart People Deal With People They Don’t Like

Wouldn’t it be great to interact exclusively with people you like?

It would, but the truth is, you will often encounter people who rub you the wrong way, who say or do things that irritate you.

It could be that someone is habitually late or doesn’t do what they say they’re going to do.

Perhaps it’s someone who is rude and disrespectful. It could be someone who doesn’t listen or who is very arrogant and full of themselves.

How Smart People Deal With People They Don’t Like

Whatever the situation, whether this person is a family member, a colleague, or simply someone you encounter at the grocery store, here are some tips to help you feel better about any interaction with them.

1. Accept them

There will always be people who don’t see things the way you do and who don’t behave the way you would.

When you have high expectations of yourself, most likely you’ll have very high expectations of others as well, and the higher your expectations, the more you risk being disappointed.

Before you judge someone else though, recognise that you don’t fully know them or their situation (even if it’s someone you’ve known for a long time). You’re simply seeing their behaviour in this moment.

You don’t know, and can’t know what’s really behind that. Everyone has a unique story.

Everyone has challenges and difficulties that can cause them to behave in ways that you might find unacceptable. You don’t have to like everyone and not everyone will like you. Nor will everyone think or behave the same way you do.

You’ll find people much easier to deal with if you accept this.

Then, depending on the situation, you can make a choice about how you want to deal with them. It’s easier if it’s a casual interaction and you can choose to simply walk away.

But what if it’s a family member or someone you have to work with?

Even when you’re forced to interact consistently with someone you don’t like, it’s much easier if you can accept that you don’t like them and be okay with that. This can help you make an informed decision about how you will interact with them going forward.

2. Identify what bothers you

Get clear on exactly what it is about this person that bothers you.

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Stick to the facts and do your best to keep the emotion out of it.

For example, this person might be a total narcissist, making everything about them, taking credit for everything good and blaming others for everything bad. You might find that this really bothers you, and you may wonder why everyone else is not able to see it.

Getting upset about it won’t help you. It’s never going to change who this person is. This is simply what narcissists do. Now that you know this, it’s up to you to decide how you want to interact with this person.

Perhaps you make sure, wherever you can, that other people receive credit for work they have done so all the credit doesn’t go to one person. Perhaps you can train yourself to ignore the behaviour or at least not let it affect you emotionally.

It may help you to know that narcissists behave the way they do because it covers up their insecurities and low self-esteem. They are extremely vulnerable to criticism, and have a deep need for admiration from others.

When you identify what bothers you and dig a little deeper to go beyond the behaviour, you can arrive at a strategy that helps you deal with the person and their behaviour in the most positive way possible.

3. Focus on the benefits

One technique that can help you is to think about their positive aspects.

Everyone has good in them. What do they do well?

For example, the person with the narcissistic personality may be an extremely good organiser. He or she may have a talent for organising people and making things happen. They may be very committed and show up when and where they’re supposed to.

Look for the good and focus more on that than on what bothers you. You can even sincerely compliment them on their good attributes. This can help to put you in a more positive emotional state when you need to deal with them.

4. Release the need to be right

The more attached you are to being right, the more you will struggle with people you don’t like.

If you need to be right and you feel a need to prove it, you will waste a lot of time and energy in conflict. You can know that you are right without having to argue the point or prove your case.

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In fact, in a heated discussion, letting the other person be right (even if you know that you are the one who is right) can take away all the negative energy and antagonism. You can make your point and simply walk away.

You don’t have to prove that you’re right. When two people have an intense need to be right it can escalate any simple discussion into a heated argument which can result in long-term disagreements and antagonism, just because both are determined to be right.

Ask yourself: Is being right worth the time and emotional energy expenditure?

5. Remain positive

Do you find yourself thinking about the person you don’t like and having conversations with them in your head or find yourself going over and over what it is you don’t like about them in your mind?

When this happens they have taken over your thoughts. You have given away your power to that person. The only thing this does is to negatively affect you. It does nothing to or for the other person.

Try to stick to the facts of the situation and disconnect emotionally.

When you are connected emotionally it becomes your problem. It can take over your life. Don’t let it. Focus on what you need to do in order to be able to detach. Find positive ways to think about the situation. Think of positive ways to deal with the person.

Look for something positive and make the decision that you will not let them take over your thoughts or steal your present moment awareness and peace.

6. Become an observer

If you find yourself reacting to someone you don’t like, you’re giving your energy to them.

Sometimes you may encounter people who try to manipulate your energy or who try to project their issues onto you. When you react to that, you feed them energetically. This leaves them feeling stronger and you feeling weaker.

They start to feel better about themselves and you start to feel worse about yourself.

Next time you encounter such a situation, see if you can simply observe their behaviour without being triggered or getting pulled in. You’ll notice something interesting.

When you don’t feed them or the situation with your energy and when you refuse to take on their issues, they are left with it all to themselves.

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This leaves them feeling more and more uncomfortable because they’re having to deal with their own negative energy all by themselves, since you’re not engaging. You don’t need to take on their stuff, and you don’t need to let them take your energy.

Become an observer and stay empowered. They will soon learn that you are confidently grounded and can’t be messed with, making your interactions with them much more positive for you.

7. Be willing to learn

There is always something to be learned from any difficult or negative person or situation.

You can learn a lot about yourself, as well as others. Whenever a difficult person enters my life I ask myself what they are teaching me about myself. I know that once I learn whatever I’m supposed to, then that person won’t be a problem for me any more.

Either they will move out of my life, or our interactions will be positive. If they remain in my life, it doesn’t mean that I have to like them, although that may be a possibility. But I can learn how to deal with them in a positive and empowering way.

I can learn to interact with them in a way that feels good to me, and ultimately that is my main objective, to feel as good as I can, as often as possible.

When you are willing to learn and to actively look for the lesson this person can teach you, you take control of your life. This is a proactive and very powerful approach. It will teach you how to respond, as opposed to reacting to them.

Summary

Recognise that there will always be people you don’t like and that don’t like you – and that’s perfectly okay.

It’s all part of life and its many lessons for us.

What I have learned is that the more positive you are, and the more you apply the techniques mentioned above, the fewer encounters you’ll have with people you really don’t like, and when you do, you will have the tools to deal with them in the most positive way possible.

And remember to be grateful for all the difficult people and situations that challenge and frustrate you, because often they are our very best teachers.

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