Tips on Finding Your Happy

To create happiness you first have to create change from your current situation, and creating real change takes time, persistence and commitment. It does not happen overnight because a lot of it will involve reprogramming underlying limiting beliefs to create more positive and helpful beliefs and habits. While I know that your happiness won’t completely come from reading this one article and some of the tips I mention are a long-term action points but I want to give you a starting point. To pose to you some steps that you could take to begin to ‘the process of change’, a change perception which is a shift in mindset. 

1. Awareness. You can’t have change if you have no awareness of what it is that you are changing. You need to understand what you’re working with,  what is lying under the surface and exists in your foundations. Becoming aware of yourself with honesty, to sit with yourself and to admit;
   • What are the feelings and emotions?
   • What are the beliefs? 
   • What are the recurring thoughts?
2. Gratitude practice. This is the single most important practice a person should have. It’s one of the easiest steps to begin creating change. Your mind has a filter, and it will choose to show you the things you focus on. If you focus on gratitude, it will always search for instances that you can be grateful for and to bring them to your attention more often. It doesn’t necessarily mean that more good things are happening, but instead that you notice them more and combined with a shift in perspective, you view them from a different more positive angle.
3. Change your words. The way we speak about ourselves is very important because they act as instructions to our brain. So, if you say words and you repeat them enough, they become beliefs they become facts to your subconscious mind, and your behaviour will reflect that. It doesn’t mean that they’re true at all.  Your words are powerful statements. So we should consciously be aware of how we speak of ourselves and not to use our words to put ourselves down, because that becomes a belief. 
4. Self-care. The term is often overused and is often misunderstood. It’s about looking after your whole self, mind and body. It’s the recharge the refuelling yourself. You’re giving yourself what you need. It could be a bath, a walk, reading a book, or whatever it means to you. Whatever you feel recharges re-energises you. Whatever may help you think or those things that help lift your mood, the things that help shift your perspective. That is self-care. If you don’t look after yourself, then you have little to give to everybody else. If you’re tired, if you’re burnt out and if you’re exhausted. What have you got to contribute to those around you? So, contrary to common belief, self-care is not selfish; instead, it’s essential. It’s also essential for those around you to teach them the importance of looking after themselves. By constantly not taking care of yourself and putting your needs at the bottom of the list, you don’t help them. You’re teaching your children that it’s normal behaviour to neglect yourself, and they will also grow up to behave in this way. 
5. Learn. You can read, watch or listen. There is so much out there to choose from, so much to learn. If you want to improve, if you want to grow, and if you’re going to do more, you need to learn. Today, not all learning has to be done in big chunks or traditional methods. Technology has allowed for learning to become so accessible. There are videos on the internet that are five, ten, 15 minutes long, and ones will summarise entire books in seven minutes for you. So, not having time is not a reason to not learn. Surely, everybody can find 10 minutes in a whole day to listen to something educational or even read something that will help you grow. 
6. Find a supportive space. Going it alone is hard. It’s so easy to get stuck in your head, and not all people will understand the journey you’re on. Finding the right people to be around when you’re working on shifting your mindset and improving yourself is crucial. We thrive in environments that support us. 
7. Inner child healing. This is a crucial step to be able to make leaps in your journey.  There are so many methods to use. As children, trauma can come from something simple as been told no. It could have created a false belief that you spend your life feeding into and reinforcing them with behaviours and experiences. 

So why is it important to be happy now? We tend to attach happiness to our achievements, waiting to be happy when XYZ. When, in fact, happiness needs to come first, regardless. It’s the prerequisite to getting what you want, and it’s not the epilogue or the outcome. If it takes you ten years or twenty years to reach a status that you believe will give you happiness, and then you find it doesn’t fulfil you, what you’ve just done is spent years being unhappy for an assumption. You didn’t take advantage of all that time to live in happiness. Life is tough, and often we are thrown curve balls that throw us off course, but through all that, we can have our inner happy, the place we always return to, the inner smile and inner peace.