The 3D-Secret of Happiness

About six months ago I read a very well-written and positive review about  Paul Dolan's book called "Happiness by Design", so I decided to buy it. As I not only enjoyed reading the book but found it extremely useful as well, in this article I would like to share one of the many smart and easily applicable strategies that the writer introduces to the readers of this handbook about creating your happiness.

Paul Dolan says that we could be much happier if we paid more attention to the “Three Ds”; namely Decide, Design and Do. According to the author:

"Decide will help you answer whatever question it is you have about your happiness, design will make it easier to implement the answer, and do will ensure your attentional resources are running smoothly."

picture: http://www.designzzz.com/

As soon as you are inspired, take the time and effort to brainstorm a bit by doing some research, dreaming, meditation, etc. Simply, just let yourself go with the flow: read, draw, write, take pictures, ask questions, listen to music, exercise; do whatever makes you feel good and use your energy to create a bunch of ideas that you could use for finding your passion and purpose in life.

Once you have plenty of plans, try to organise them and select one aim that you want reach first. Be specific, go into details and make a strong and determined decision; if you want, you can write down a similar sentence to yourself:

“I want to … by … (a date) in order to …”

Now, you need to plan or design the process that will lead to the successful and efficient completion of the task. Ask yourself what you can do today, tomorrow, next week or next month to reach your goal. Write down the steps that you want to take in order to carry on with your project. If you think that you need some help, do not hesitate to contact other people who can help you realise your dreams. 

Finally, just do it! Take actions to your aim every day. Create new habits, certain routines that make you work towards your goal regularly. Start small, do not overwhelm yourself with too difficult tasks or extreme changes in your lifestyle. Be realistic but do not give upon your dreams for a minute!

Tool-Kit to Surviving Crisis

On the way to living the life of your successful and happy self, you will experience critical moments from time to time in spite of any careful planning or preparation. Every day is a new one and your circumstances may change occasionally. The weather, a bad-hair day, catching the flu, your period, your colleague’s remark, your friend’s unexpectedly long call, an e-mail with bad news, etc. might all affect your mood; it is up to you in what way. It is hard to resist and stick to your newly created habits/diet and daily/weekly routine if some unpleasant events appear in your life. However, it is not impossible, especially if you saved up some motivation and willpower from the times when you kick-started the whole process and felt energetic, powerful and unbeatable.

In the beginning of your lifestyle changing project you are armed with a strong and solid intention and due to this, your motivation levels are above the clouds. Yet, they can easily drop, especially in case of some unfavorable happenings. Whenever you feel stressed, overwhelmed and are about to give up, stop for a second or two. It is so easy to get lost in the rat race. Due to the challenges of your job and/or private life, you are likely to forget about what you really want in life. You need to slow down sometimes and ask yourself, what makes you really happy? Take your time to remind yourself of the reasons of your aims.

• Why did you want to change?
• Why did you start the whole process?
• What have you done so far in order to reach your goal?
• Were your efforts successful?

Be objective and make a list of all the successes that you have gained since you started to put your plans into action. Try to overcome failures quickly knowing that these are just part of your development. Show gratitude; accept what you have reached so far and what you have got at the moment; no matter how few you think you own. Being impatient and greedy will not help you. On the contrary, appreciating the moment and practicing self-love will support you in surviving the difficult periods when you lack motivation. Actually, a small inventory of your recent successes, a quick reminder of your original plans and a little revision of your strategies can keep you going. Relax, take a deep-breath, think a little bit and don’t forget to re-charge your batteries and Voilà: Welcome, my good old friend, Enthusiasm.

Now that you are freshly inspired by your own happiness about your recent results, keep in mind what Maria Brilaki suggested in her latest article. She presented some of the features that differentiate successful people from those who will never succeed. The essence of this video could also be related to this subject. A short summary of the main characteristics of successful people based on these two sources:

1. they stick to their passion
2. they never complain
3. they avoid being negative
4. they don’t give up

Easier said than done, right? Yet, this is their secret, it is so simple and you can do it too.

Until you reach this level where you are in the flow of happiness and success, you are going to work hard on yourself day by day. You can choose the difficult way with fears and insecurity by setting up unrealistic goals and overwhelming yourself with complicated tasks OR you can try easy: you can create a motivating, supporting and loving environment with using positive and inspiring triggers that help you stick to your goals. If your plans are realistic and you are willing to start with small steps, you just need to follow your strategy but don't forget to be flexible and adaptable in case of inconvenient conditions. Now, all what you need is to be social. Share your ideas, plans and latest results with friends and family, so that they can act as mentors or supervisors and can celebrate with you as well. To get you going, you can actually “use” human triggers apart from the tools mentioned above. They can check-in on you regularly and give you some support in the most critical moments.

Summary: Accepting what you have, being patient and showing gratitude can increase your motivation levels in difficult times when you are about to give up. If you create a supporting environment and always choose positivity, success is guaranteed. Prepare for the worst: when you are enthusiastic, spare some motivation for times when you are close to throw in the towel. Finally, ask your friends or family members to help you when you need some extra inspiration. That’s it! 

Sources:
Brilaki, Maria: Surprisingly Unstuck              Kaiser, Shannon: Find Your Happy!

Make a Habit of Positive Thinking

Positive thinking is a habit and you can create it for yourself. It will take some time and you will have to practice it regularly until it becomes automatic and part of your everyday life but it is worth as it can really set you free and move you towards your real purpose. There are plenty of experiences, impressions and assumptions that usually influence your thoughts. Other people’s opinions, criticism, feedback from your supervisors, social expectations, media, etc. all affect the picture that you have in mind about yourself.

image: Pinterest

We all have beliefs; however beliefs are tricky because they are just psychological barriers and have nothing to do with reality. Our assumptions about ourselves are mostly based on other people’s reactions to our existence in the world. If you try to be objective with yourself and decide to test the beliefs that you have about your personality, skills or ability, you will see that your true self has not so much in common with that person who appears as “you” in front of your family, friends or colleagues. Remove the “noise” (negativity, fears, false beliefs, etc.) and try to examine your thoughts as if they were another person’s views about herself. It is hard to see yourself as an outsider but this way and with some time and practice it is possible to be positive and objective about yourself.

Fear and false assumptions distract you from being able to focus on the thoughts that can really move you forward. Change your inner dialogue and approve of yourself. Celebrate your results every day, no matter how small or big they are. Give some more support to yourself by letting negativity go. Practice positive thinking every day and create a new habit that will help you to see and enjoy the whole process called LIFE.

How will you start praciticing positive thinking?

Scarred of Difficult? Try Easy!

What is the connection between small details and great progress? You will see in a minute. You might have realized that whenever you really want to achieve something (=you are extremely motivated to get a certain thing) you can be very creative and are able to come up with several plans in order to realize your dream. Your goal can be either big or small; it does not really matter whether we are talking about losing weight, getting your dream-bag or dream-job. Due to your increased level of motivation, you are enthusiastic and pro-active: you are working on your little project whenever you can; you try to do everything to get what you want.

It is important to catch yourself as soon as you are the most motivated because then you can really work hard and you can save energy and willpower for times when you are not so enthusiastic or are a bit down. For this reason, it is ideal to separate your big aim into small steps. It is always better to start with small and easy because you are more likely to be successful if you have a realistic and achievable mini-project. For example, if I want to lose a significant amount of weight and decide to reach my dream-body in a month’s time with working out 5 times a week and being on a strict diet, I am very likely to give up the whole plan after two weeks because it is simply extremely hard. Especially, if I did not exercise for years and was eating junk food for a while, it is not possible to change my whole lifestyle in one month.

If you want to change something, you need to come up with a detailed plan. Either we talk about losing weight or getting a good job where you can feel useful and appreciated, it always helps if you sit down and think about the followings:

• What do you don’t like in your life and why?
• What do you want to change and why?
• What do you want to achieve and why?

Take a nice notebook and your favourite pen and write down your answers to these questions. You will see, how much a little journaling and self-analysis can help in defining your aims. Break your big plan into small increments and list all the steps that are necessary to reach your goal. It is much easier to focus on small and easy tasks and you are more likely to repeat the steps every day. You are not going to give up exercising or studying after few weeks if you aim to fulfil small and easy challenges. The secret is to do regularly what you planned. If you repeat the steps often, they will become automatisms very quickly and you will not have to use your willpower for these as they are habits already. All the small steps will lead to a huge success in the end. You will be very happy whenever you manage to do what you planned. If you make an exercise-plan, for example, every Sunday, you can easily prioritize and organize your other responsibilities for the whole week. A useful hint: always start as soon as possible because early in the week you are less tired and you are more motivated. As you start using your willpower for duties that you have to do but do not really want to, your level of motivation will decrease and you are more likely to feel too exhausted to exercise or study, e.g.

picture: Garance Doré

So, take a moment to think about your life, decide in what areas you want to change and make a plan. Then separate your big goal into small and easy bits that you can repeat as often as possible. Also, reward yourself and practice self-appreciation! You can be really proud of yourself! You did that 15-min training, wrote the planned 10 pages or read those 5 chapters. Be objective and do not come up whit things that you should have done according to you. Every beginning is a new chance to succeed. It is as good to be a beginner as nice it feels when you achieve your goal. Do not feel ashamed of being a beginner or being fat, slow or unorganized. Guilt and other negative feelings will not help your progress. Be positive and do small and easy tasks regularly. Soon, you will be happy, satisfied and successful.

based on Maria Brilaki’s book: Surprisingly unstuck 

Why Motivation is not the Key to Success?

Today, I would like to show you an amazing video that I watched recently and it really affected me to the core. Have you ever felt that you just need more motivation or willpower to finally start something new in your life? Personally, I have been blaming myself a lot because I have not really lived the life that I wanted and I have been planning to change this for so long. However, even if I had taken few steps in order to achieve something, I only got limited results or no results at all. Until I watched the video, I thought that the main reason behind my recent failures and lack of success is that I am weak, lazy and not motivated and qualified enough.

As I am a jobseeker at the moment and have faced lots of stressful and unsuccessful job-interviews in the last month, I have had a feeling that I need to change something in order to get the job that I really want. In the video below, one of my favourite life-coaches, Caroline Zwick interviews her friend, Maria Brilaki, who is an engineer, entrepreneur, psychologist, head of the “Fitness Reloaded” project and author of a wonderful book called Surprisingly Unstuck.  Maria talks about habit-creation and the role of motivation and willpower in achieving your goals. You will be surprised to hear Maria saying that motivation actually has almost nothing to do with your success or failure. 

It was a relief to understand that motivation is basically only a tool for finding your inspiration. When you want to change something in your life or want to start something new, in the beginning you are always very enthusiastic and energetic. Due to the high level of motivation you truly believe in yourself and your success. However, as most of us might have experienced in case of New Year’s Resolutions, for example, motivation can easily drop or disappear completely. The reason for this is simple: your level of motivation decreases right after it made you kick-start your new habits.

picture: Fengshuidana

Habits are part of our everyday life, as well as making decisions that is actually a kind of thinking habit. In one of the up-coming posts, I will tell you more about thinking habits, such as the power of thoughts, positive thinking and self-fulfilling prophecies. But now, let’s see why do we create habits at all and what are they for? How can we establish a new habit and why do we struggle to keep on dieting or exercising regularly? If you are interested in these questions and also want to know what planning and organisation has to do with success, click here to watch the video.