You can access happiness today.
One of the greatest tools in life coaching is learning that you can access happiness today. No need to change your circumstances. No need to change anyone else. Just you alone can decide you are going to choose happiness today. Your happiness is determined by your thoughts & how you choose to interpret the world around you. Sometimes you don’t want to feel happy & you have good reason, but other times regardless of your circumstances you can choose to access happiness. You can find the thoughts that you really believe and that really make you feel happy and choose them.
Just follow with me…
Life is 50/50. That was a new concept to me when I heard it, but it actually makes sense and is a bit of a relief. There are times that I wonder why I’m not feeling happy when I have a wonderful husband, 3 healthy & amazing kids, my own health, family, friends, a home, 2 pups that I adore…. I could continue, but you get the point. Why am I not just happy all the time?
I wondered the same about my kids as they began going through struggles. I thought the same things. They are healthy. They have a loving family, a home, friends, etc. But, the truth is life is 50/50, so no matter how much you have going for you life will continue to be both good AND bad. Once I thought more about this it helped me deal with personal news, national news without feeling like why does this stuff continue to happen?? Well, good and bad things will continue to happen every day.
Another epiphany for me was learning that the thought “I just want my kids to be happy.” does not serve my kids or me. Just being happy all the time is not realistic and expecting our kids to be happy all the time just leads to us and them feeling more stress. They are human. They are going to encounter friends, teachers, parents & strangers that disappoint them, make them mad, are mean, rude, etc.
I want my kids to feel they have purpose. When they feel they have purpose they will find more happiness, more confidence. The pressure to “be happy” all the time is gone.
So, you’re wondering why I said you can access happiness today after I just told you that life is a combination of good and bad and is 50/50. Sometimes you want to feel badly… the death of a loved one (including pets), an F on a test, a friend ghosting you. You want to feel badly & that’s understandable.
Here’s an excerpt from Brooke Castillo in The Life Coach School Podcast #331
“The other thing that I want to tell you is that the world isn’t perfect. Humans aren’t perfect. And humanity isn’t fair. And it’s not going to ever be fair. Sometimes, babies are going to die. Sometimes, young kids are going to get cancer. There will be accidents. There are things that happen in the world that we can’t control that are not fair.
And when we start trying to believe that the world should be fair and we should be very upset when it’s not, we’re going to be miserable a lot of the time. It doesn’t mean that we don’t work to make our lives better. It doesn’t mean that we don’t work to make the world better. But when we have an intolerance for anything less than perfection, we are exhausted and miserable and upset way, way, way too much of the time.
So, what I teach and what I do in my own life is that I accept the 50-50 of life and instead of using, “Or,” I use, “And.” Human beings are not good or bad. Human beings are good and bad. The world is not good or bad. The world is good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair, better and worse. It’s “And” that gives us some relief. So, what I teach and what I do in my own life is that I accept the 50-50 of life and instead of using, “Or,” I use, “And.”
And what’s so interesting about it is when we allow ourselves to be right and wrong and we don’t judge ourselves, we feel better. We feel more connected. We feel like we can understand the alternative view.”
Here’s what I want to recommend. And this is really important. The goal isn’t to be happy all of the time. I don’t want you to be happy about life not being fair. I don’t want you to have to be happy about getting screwed over by your boss or getting fired or someone treating you terribly. That’s that whole toxic positivity where we have to be happy about everything, we just pretend like there’s no negative emotion and everything’s great.
That is mental illness. That is not healthy. We need to acknowledge our feelings. We need to process the parts of our life that we don’t think are fair, where we think we’ve been done wrong, and where we’ve certainly been done wrong, the horrific things in the world. And then what? Where do we go? Good and bad.
When you look at yourself and you understand that you’re good and bad and you can love yourself madly and you are 100% worthy within that good and bad, by design, that you don’t need to be virtuous all the time in order to love yourself and feel like you’re worthy, that’s when you start having compassion for other people as well, when you stop writing people off, when you stop looking at people as only bad.
It’s how we choose to think about events, how we interpret the world that cause our feelings, so Brooke Castillo