Being happy is the key to a successful life

Being responsible for your own happiness means that you have to make it happen. You have to take ownership over your life. I have met countless unhappy people. They complain about everybody driving them crazy. They are always whining about something. The fact is that you have to decide to be. You hold the key to your own happiness. Don’t give people a chance to make you miserable your entire life. Below are a few suggestions on how you can take responsibility for your own happiness. Stop clinging onto unpleasant thoughts. Negative thoughts can hold you back, discourage you and prevent you from accomplishing desired goals. Fill your mind with positive thoughts. Focus more on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Focus on what you are capable of accomplishing rather than what you can’t do. Focus on your positive personality traits. Maybe you are a loving caring person, hard working, honest, dependable, and easy to work with and a good team player but you do not count that as strengths but only focus on your weaknesses. You measure your happiness on what you are not and fail to celebrate your life. Life is too short to be spent in misery. Try to be honest in your self-talk. Acknowledge your true feelings. If you are feeling upset about something, say so. This is a healthy way to live. Many people are good at packing feelings and issues in their ‘briefcase’. As time goes on, it becomes heavy and they get stuck. These are people who always look emotionally tired. Sometimes they look angry but cannot pinpoint what they are angry about. These kinds of people walk around waiting for somebody to push the right button for them to blow up. They get into fights and conflicts easily and many people avoid them. Unfortunately, this makes them unhappier in life. Stuffing yourself with unexpressed feelings is detrimental to your health and happiness. Life is about making choices. Can you live happily with the consequences of these choices? Try and make good choices about your lifestyle, relationships and career if you want true happiness. You should also learn to help yourself in life instead of relying on other people to give you a push and carry you along because they too have burdens to carry. It is okay to ask for help but you need to make an effort to help yourself. If you do not learn to help yourself, you will become overly dependant on other people and your self-esteem and self worth will be greatly affected. Even as a nation, we are responsible for our own happiness and survival. To achieve national unity, we need to learn to get along with each other. We need to celebrate diversity and stop being self-centred. Acknowledge your own uniqueness and the uniqueness in others. Unity is strength. When we stand, we shall all be happy and proud of our country. If we want prosperity, then we need to be hard working. If we want to catch up, we need to get to work and make the best choices for our own common good. dedantos2002@yahoo.com