Let Happiness Find You

As you may know, my philosophy on happiness is that "Happiness is a Decision." This may be a little simplistic, but never the less, in my opinion, true. That does not mean that there can't be other ways of attaining happiness. A fellow blogger and Friend Allison Cabral has recently written a post on happiness with a philosophy and a set of rules that I believe is also sound. She granted me permission to reprint it:

Let Happiness Find You

So many of us are “searching” for happiness. But if you follow these simple three rules, you might discover that you don't have to work so hard. Happiness will find you instead!

RULE #1 - Know Who You Are
So many people do this backwards! We often look for something to give us our sense of identity and self-confidence! Wrong!!! You need to understand yourself before you can know how to be happy.

Do whatever it takes to know who you are, what you love, what you can’t live without, and what you value… maybe this requires therapy, time alone, journaling or just making a list of your likes and dislikes and getting clear on who you are.

RULE #2 - Value Who You Are
YES! You should be picky. Why settle for anything less than extraordinary. Everyone should value who they are and what they bring to the table. There are plenty of people, places and things to settle down with that fit the average, mediocre profile that you could be relatively happy and compatible with. But, that is boring! Yes, you could be happy but for how long and then what? Hold out for the best, set your standards high, there is something out there to match it – it just might take longer. It is hard to find quality, but well worth the effort.

RULE #3 - Engage In Life and What you Love
Fill your calendar with what you love. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to do things with or something fun to find you. Make a list what of YOU want to do and go do it. Surround yourself with people, places and things that reflect the real you. Lose yourself in something you love – that will instantly attract happiness. Be so engaged in what you are doing that you actually forget to look for happiness and … and like magic… it will find you.

Please leave any comments that relate to this post with Allison Cabral's original post.

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Achieve Your Ambition & Belief in Yourself

Another article of interest that discusses the subconscious mind and how controlling the input can unlock it's power fuel achievement.

Achieve Your Ambition & Belief in Yourself
By: Stephen Campbell

Fundamental to success in any vocation whatever is self-confidence. Unless a man believes firmly in his ability to succeed he can not achieve much. And, unfortunately, the tendency of many people is to personal underestimation. Looking about them, in fact, the generality of men fix their gaze wonderingly on some outstanding figure in their line of work, some acknowledged leader.

"I wish I could do what he has done," they say to themselves. "But it is of course impossible. He had advantages I have never had. He was better endowed by inheritance than I, enjoyed a better education. Mine is a pygmy mind compared with his. He is a born genius. That is why he has prospered."

This is the attitude consciously or unconsciously taken by most people. Nor is it surprising, in view of the belittling influences to which many are subjected from their earliest days. In childhood, their natural aptitudes unstudied, they are pitch forked into a rigid educational system making next to no allowance for individual trends. Parents and teachers, finding them "misfits" in such a system, but not appreciating the desirability of modifying the system, combines not so much to help them as to fill their minds with ideas of inferiority. They are reproached for their "dullness." Other children who happen to fit better into the school curriculum are extolled as superior beings certain to travel fast and far, while they, the inferiors, lag behind.

Later the terrible teachings of the heredity fanatics impinge upon them with crushing force. They now know what the matter with them is. If they did not get along in school and they unmistakably did not it was because they were born in some degree mentally defective. The best they can hope for is to earn a difficult living in a subordinate role. Thus influenced to disbelieve in themselves they are fated to mediocrity and obscurity unless a happy chance intervene as it often does to awaken them to a belated realization that they can accomplish more than they have thought possible. Otherwise they continue to flounder, continue futilely to marvel at their more successful fellows more successful largely for the reason that they have refused to acknowledge inferiority, and have, through good fortune and ill, clung to the belief that they have it in them to succeed.

"I can and I will," has been the creed of the victorious, whatever their origin, whatever the blessing or the blight of their heredity. With "I can and I will" they have climbed to the heights, even despite the handicap of a family history that would fill a eugenicist with dismay.

"Of course there are limits," as the wise William James once pointed out. "The trees don't grow into the sky. But the plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use." This doctrine of unused resources, of hidden powers, accessible to all if all would but learn to make use of them, is indeed one of the most important of modern psychological findings. And it is not based on theory merely.

It is borne out by an abundance of facts of every-day observation and by the results of scientific researches which go to show, more specifically, that there is in the depths of every person's mind what may figuratively be described as both a storehouse wherein are lastingly preserved all of life's experiences, and also a factory for the creation of ideas. Psychologists call this wonderful region of the mind the subconscious, and for the past quarter of a century many of them have been industriously exploring it.

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