Todd Tidmore, Successful Life

Author: Winsome Coutts
Everyone wants to be happy, but what does happiness really mean? How do we know if we’re happy? Can anyone be happy all of the time? How do we find happiness? When we talk about life happiness, these are the questions that we ask.
Our perception of life happiness is as individual as the way we perceive hot or cold. For all of us, it’s sort of the same, yet it’s also different. Every individual person is different, and therefore each persons description of what makes a life happy will also be different.

Dictionary.com says happiness is:
1. Characterized by good luck; fortunate
2. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy

Webster’s Dictionary says happiness is: A state of well-being and contentment

So, if we use these definitions, in order for us to say we are happy we would be fortunate, showing pleasure and feeling content. That makes sense. Most of the people that we think are happy usually show these characteristics, so lets use this definition and go from there.

Can I have life happiness if I don’t think I’m fortunate? Hmmm, that’s an interesting question isn’t it? Most people are happy when they feel fortunate or blessed by good luck, and most people who feel unfortunate or feel like they have lots of bad luck are unhappy. BUT, perception is everything. A person can break their leg in a skiing accident (bad luck) and still be happy and smiling because they feel blessed and fortunate (probably because they didn’t break both legs!). They might be happy because they know that their leg will heal, and because they were having such fun skiing (up until they ran into the tree at 100 miles/hour!!)! Get the picture?

Or a person could have what most of us would call good fortune and still seem not to have life happiness. There is an art to happiness, and some of us know it and some of us don’t, but we all can learn.

Is life happiness the same for everyone? Probably not, even though the normal signs of happiness listed above in the dictionary definitions probably show up in every person who is happy. Different things make different people happy, so happiness and the pursuit of happiness cannot be the same. For example: I am a quiet type of person who loves to work from home and socializes only once or twice a week. You may be a very gregarious person who works in an office full of people and lunches with a different person each day and goes to a party every Saturday evening. We’re both happy, but our lifestyles are very different. Besides that, what you view as something that would produce happiness may not be a priority for me. Maybe it makes you happy to go on wonderful ski vacations twice a year. It might make me happy to go on wonderful vacations in my back yard and to squirrel my money away. Both situations are right, and we are both happy.

How do you know if you’re happy? The best way to tell if you are happy is to ask yourself how you are feeling. Really feeling. Do you feel at ease, relaxed and OK with how things are going on a pretty consistent basis? Then you’re probably happy. Feel your body. Is your body relaxed, does it feel calm? You’re probably happy. Remember, happiness doesn’t come from anywhere but inside. If you are in tune with what is right for you, you will be happy. If you are trying to live someone else’s definition of authentic happiness, you probably won’t be.

Can anyone have authentic happiness all the time? Yes! Well, OK, if a terrible tragedy strikes, you probably won’t be happy at that time. But, you can work through the tragedy and the accompanying emotions knowing that life happiness can and will return when you’ve taken time to properly allow healing. Otherwise, yes. You can be happy all the time. Maybe not jumping up and down and laughing happy every moment, but peaceful content happy, certainly, and that’s equally valuable. Life’s small irritants come and go each and every day. We have a choice whether we greet them with a calm smile or with an angry frown. Either is fine, but the calm smile will help you navigate life in a more happy state of being, and help you find happiness on a consistent basis. Remember, the art of happiness has a lot to do with perception.

Recent research on happiness shows what many of us have long suspected. Happiness, and the pursuit of happiness has more to do with an individual’s perception and what’s going on inside that person, than money, fame, or power. Even though those things may bring a feeling that is like happiness, it is attached to those things. Real happiness is much more attached to how a person perceives life. Luckily, if you are the type of person who has a “glass half empty” outlook on life, you can learn to have a “glass half full” attitude which will gain you happiness.

Author: Sara Healy
While cleaning my bookshelf the other day, I found a book, 14,000 Things To Be Happy About. It looked brand new, but the date inside was from years ago. This book sat beside my collection of self-help books, which in contrast were dog-eared, highlighted and clearly used. Holding the happiness book, I wondered why I hadn’t used it. I realized I thought happiness was something fleeting and incapable of improving my life.

Recently, my beliefs have changes as a result of what I’ve learned. I’ve discovered that being happy, contented, and positive are skills, which can be learned with practice and determination. Therefore, I made the decision to start my own journey to learn happiness and have been happily rewarded. Here are a couple of things that I’ve learned on my journey as well activities that have helped teach me more about happiness:

Recognize the hidden happy moments in a day.

When something wonderful happens to us, we usually know we’re happy. It’s the common, everyday moments of happiness that often elude us. One way to change this is by becoming deliberately aware of when we’re feeling happy during the day.

I found an activity that helped me and it might also help you. It’s very simple: Get a notebook or a tape recorder and keep track of any happy moments you notice during your day. By writing them down or recording them, you become aware of these moments that might otherwise have passed by unnoticed.

One such moment occurred for me when I was very late for an appointment and frustrated at getting every red light. As I sat fuming at the latest stop, I noticed a little boy in the school bus next to me making silly faces at people. Watching him made me feel happy. I wrote this moment down. It became one of many happy moments I recorded. How many happy moments are you missing in your day? Try noticing them and see if you find your day is better for it.

Make a conscious shift from negative to positive.

It’s hard to feel happy when you’re focused on the negative. Like a big pimple on our face, what we don’t like can seem to be much more obvious than what we do like. Unfortunately, the more we focus on the negative, the more likely that’s all we’ll see. Changing this means we have to consciously bring more attention to the positive things that happen to us.

This can be done in different ways. You can keep a daily journal of the good or positive things that happened in your day or you can match negative comments you make about your day or yourself with something positive. If you aren’t aware of your negative comments, give a friend or your partner permission to ask you what was positive about your day.

The idea is to focus less on what is went wrong and more on what went right. By bringing attention to positive things that happened to me, I’ve noticed the negative things seem less important.

Bring humor into your day.

There’s nothing like a good laugh or smile to trigger happiness. I like to start my day with a funny video clip. I’ve saved one on my computer about the silly things cats do. As I love cats, this clip always makes me laugh, even though I’ve seen it tons of times. Be creative about this and use whatever makes you laugh, such the newspaper comics, a favorite joke, or a silly picture.

By starting my day with a laugh, I’ve found I feel much happier. In addition, humor can be used again and again during the day, whenever you need a laugh. Try bringing more humor into your day and see if you also feel happier.

Practice, practice and practice some more!

Any new skill requires practice and learning happiness is no different. You have to work at it every day until it becomes part of your daily ritual. Therefore, try the activities I’ve suggested or create your own. Just keep practicing. The payoff is worth it! As you give more attention to feeling happy, you will also increase your overall well-being.

As for me, I look for new ways to keep happiness a constant force in my life. Of course, there are still times I feel angry or sad, and that’s okay. But now, I also pay attention to when I feel happy. I also practice happiness regularly. The book, 14,000 Things To Be Happy About, I found on my bookshelf is now part of that practice. I’m confident it will soon look just as dog-eared, marked up and used as my old self-help books. It’s another step on my journey to learning happiness.

Author: Helen F McKay

A personal story of inexplicable unhappiness.

Several years ago my husband and I left New Zealand, to travel through several States of North America and Mexico.

The flight left in the early evening, flying straight out from Auckland, leaving behind myriads of twinkling lights and dark blue velvet seas. Approximately twelve hours later, our aircraft descended at Los Angeles, through a sickly soup of greyish-yellow fog. It bumped down on the tarmac, to the kind of depressing pollution for which Los Angeles is famous.

Not wishing to venture outside, we collected our things and scurried to transfer on to an earlier flight to Atlanta, Georgia. Once clear of Los Angeles, it was a beautiful experience flying across the United States, viewing from the windows of our plane, the moving geography of a mighty country in all its beautiful colors.

We crossed the mountains, their tops gleaming with the last of the winter’s snow and flew over the chequered plains beyond. Below us, we saw the mighty Mississippi River, with its many boats scurrying up and down that mighty waterway like ants carrying cargoes and building their nest. After sitting for a while in a holding pattern, over Georgia, we eventually landed in Atlanta, an airport about four times the size of Sydney airport.

Apart from the shopping, our stay in Atlanta was relatively uneventful - I did the usual tours and shopped, while my husband attended a conference. Two days later, with heavier bags, we headed north on a flight to Buffalo - en route to Niagara Falls, Canada.

Circling Buffalo airport five times, (something that is considered exceptional over there), during which, there were several emergencies with defective landing gear, the crew eventually put the plane down on to the tarmac. As we slewed round to a halt on the snow-covered runway, the relieved American travelers, more aware of the emergency than we were, showered the crew with tumultuous applause.

By this time, it was dark and we shivered, as we emerged from the plane, to the wintry chill of minus fourteen degrees. Warmed by hot coffee from the airport café, we began the twenty-two mile drive from Buffalo to Niagara Falls in a cab. It was the beginning of March, just around the time of the spring thaw, although to us it felt like being in the middle of a hard winter in Queenstown, New Zealand.

The cab driver, a New York State man - born in the Bronx - and his non-stop humorous patter, kept us entertained on the long, cold drive to the Falls. Fortunately, my husband had the presence of mind, to tape the conversation, so we have since enjoyed reliving that ride, many times over.

On entering Niagara Falls and before being dropped to our hotel, on the Canadian side, we called to see the tail end of the Niagara Falls evening illuminations.

Although slabs of ice, crashing onto the river below, seemed enchanting, the colors playing on the cascading water and illuminating the fine misty spray, which rose several hundred feet into the air above the river, left us breathless. We were entranced to see frozen spray dropping down on to the trees below, to form perfect icicles. At that moment, were in wonderland. But, oh it was so cold!

Next morning, we awoke to temperatures of minus eight degrees, which quickly plummeted to minus twelve. Weak rays of pale sunshine, valiantly tried to warm the frozen landscape, through which we toured the famous sights around the falls.

Looking out at the frozen spectacle was like stepping back in time. I was reminded of my mother’s battered photo album with its many sepia-toned photographs.

The trees in North America are deciduous, losing their leaves in autumn, before the bitter winter’s chill attacks them. The sepia colors I was encountering in that wintry panorama seemed the same as in the album.

Two days later, we left again for Buffalo, to fly on to Cleveland in Ohio. A sharp frost had left an icy terrain in its wake and, as we drove to Buffalo, through miles of snow-covered landscape, I began to feel a decided unease that I blamed on jetlag. I was depressed; although depression is not something I have previously suffered.

Our stay in Cleveland was unusual; we arrived for St Patrick’s Day and witnessed a huge St Patrick’s parade, where thousands of genuine (and would-be), Irishmen, turned out for the celebration. It was interesting to see dyed green hair and to drink green beer. Everything that day was Irish!

A day later, after exploring the tourist haunts and Art Galleries of Cleveland, tempered overnight, by a whiteout blizzard, which dumped deep snowdrifts on the cheerless city; we set out, once more, for the airport.

But that sense of loss and discomfort had grown much stronger and I struggled to identify its cause. I was becoming seriously depressed, even though I was on a wonderful holiday. Whatever could be wrong? I’d slept comfortably; so it couldn’t be jetlag. I was luxuriously accommodated, so it wasn’t discomfort either.

We moved on, flying from Cleveland to Chicago, Illinois, where we stopped overnight, before travelling up next afternoon, to Milwaukee by railroad. During the morning, we visited the Chicago Art Museum and I was fascinated to spy a family of grey squirrels, frolicking among the frosty, bare-branched azalea bushes in the garden, fronting the Gallery, on Madison Avenue.