Secrets of Happy People

50 Techniques to Feel Good

Matt Avery

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781444793895
• eBook ISBN: 9781444793901
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

What do happy people know that the rest of us don't?Do they have a secret recipe for success?Is there a special alchemy to make it work? The Secrets of Happy People reveals the 50 things you need to know to feel more fulfilled, experience more joy and spend more time doing things that make you happy. Some will surprise you, and all will inspire you. Put these 50 simple strategies together and you have a great recipe for a better life, a formula that will unlock the secrets and uncover your potential.

Forget about being happy

‘Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.’

Dalai Lama

‘Happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.’

Dale Carnegie

‘Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.’

John Barrymore

‘It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.’

Charles Spurgeon

‘Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.’

Oscar Wilde

A man died and went up to Heaven. He was met at the Pearly Gates by St Peter, who greeted him and asked him how much he had enjoyed his time on Earth.

‘It was okay,’ said the man, ‘but somehow life didn’t work out to be quite as good as I had thought it would be.’

‘Really?’ replied St Peter. ‘Why was that? You had a family who loved you, a job you were good at, a nice house, and you were able to take a holiday every year. It seems like the sort of life most people would be perfectly happy with.’

‘But that’s just it,’ retorted the man. ‘I wasn’t happy. I had all the trappings of success, and I tried hard to be a good person, but none of it made me really happy, and I don’t know why. I honestly couldn’t have tried any harder.’

‘So you always tried hard to be happy?’ asked St Peter.

‘Always,’ replied the man, ‘but it never seemed to work. I strived my whole life to be happy, and worked hard at everything I did. I didn’t even have time to do some of the things I wanted to do, I was trying so hard.’

‘What sort of things?’ asked St Peter.

‘Oh, just having the time to play with my children more, go for walks on sunny days, try my hand at painting or pottery or model-making. Just silly things really, so I put my energies into the big things, like work, and chairing a variety of worthwhile committees.’

‘But that’s just the problem,’ replied the saint, gently. ‘You were so busy trying to accomplish the big things you thought would bring you happiness, that you completely overlooked all the little things that actually would have done. If you had just taken a step back, relaxed, and allowed happiness to find you it would have, but you were always doing so much that happiness could never keep up with you.’

MAXIMIZE YOUR HAPPINESS

Happiness often occurs when and where you least expect it, and just as often it doesn’t materialize when and where you had expected it to. So is the answer to forget about being happy? Certainly, allowing happiness to arrive unbidden is a powerful tool in the quest to maximize your happiness, since it allows for it to happen any time and any place, and without any effort on your part. But to simply leave it completely to chance is unlikely to produce the best results. There is a lot you can do to improve your odds of being happy and doing as much as possible maximizes your chances, so developing a strategy that includes as many approaches as possible is the best way forward.

However, doing so in a planned and prepared manner is one thing – spending all your time on it, so you cannibalize the time you could spend being happy, or allowing yourself to get stressed worrying about what you should be doing to improve your happiness, is quite another, and a situation that is clearly counter-productive. Making the most of everything in your life – yourself, your situation, the opportunities that come your way or that you can engineer, and so on – is far more likely to produce the results you want than simply ignoring the situation and allowing yourself to just forget about being happy.

PUT YOURSELF AT THE CENTRE

Draw a ‘mental pathfinder’ map, plotting all the key areas of your life as it is now, and highlighting those that give you what you need, and are therefore positive, and all those elements that lack what you require or hold you back. Your map should be laid out to show three things: where you are at each moment, what you are doing, and when each event is occurring. Try to put them all on the same map, for ease of reference, and then highlight the positives and negatives in different colours so that you can see at a glance where the areas of greatest strength and weakness are. This will also show you what is causing them, and when and where they are occurring.

This is useful as a tool to allow you to take stock of your situation, and to see where you are currently happy and where you need to improve. Then you need to work out a solution for the latter. Bear in mind that ‘happiness’ is too broad a term to be meaningful, so you need to understand what it means for you in each situation, e.g. excitement, contentment, peace, fulfilment, etc. Understand exactly what makes you happy, and when it is occurring in your life at the moment, and where else it could be happening with a little careful planning and execution.

STAY TRUE TO YOURSELF

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I need to be happy – right now? In the future?

• What does happiness mean to me?

• What in my life makes me happy?

• What matters most to me?

• What gives me energy and creates positivity for me?

• What creates negativity, drains my energy, and makes me unhappy?

• What changes do I need to make in my life in order to maximize my happiness?

It is only by understanding exactly what makes you happy, and how best you can structure your life to maximize the chances of achieving it on a regular basis, that you can build for yourself a platform on which to attract positivity and deter negativity. This is crucial in the pursuit of long-lasting happiness, and it’s well worth spending the necessary time to ensure you make it as good as you can. Your needs and preferences may change over time, so be sure to revisit them every now and then. This structure also acts as a useful reminder of what it is that you’re trying ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1. Forget about being happy
• 2. Who are you, and who do you want to be?
• 3. Investing your time isn’t a waste of time
• 4. Plan for happiness – since you might be dead tomorrow
• 5. Slow down for the quick route to happy
• 6. Stop chasing your tail
• 7. Don’t try to be happy
• 8. Celebrating your successes
• 9. Get over it
• 10. If you can’t beat them – beat them anyway
• 11. Get real
• 12. Optimism versus pessimism – versus realism
• 13. Stop worrying about being happy
• 14. Compared to other people, you’re rubbish
• 15. It’s better to be worse off
• 16. Are you certain you want to be positive?
• 17. Motivation and reward
• 18. Do it now!
• 19. What’s the point?
• 20. Cut it out
• 21. Actively promoting passive positivity
• 22. The godsend you come to hate
• 23. Your future happiness lies in the past
• 24. Your best today is tomorrow
• 25. So you think your life sucks?
• 26. Enjoy the things you hate
• 27. Your happiness, your problem
• 28. The ten kinds of happy – and how to find them
• 29. The ten kinds of unhappy – and how to beat them
• 30. Money is everything
• 31. Write your own obituary
• 32. Peace, tranquillity and calm… Now! Now! Now!
• 33. Make as many mistakes as you can
• 34. Move to a happier place
• 35. The happiness gym
• 36. Keep things in perspective
• 37. You are happy – you just don’t know it
• 38. Don’t settle for acceptance
• 39. ‘Good enough’ is not good enough
• 40. You don’t want to be rich
• 41. Richly poor
• 42. The wealth of poverty
• 43. Buy your way to happiness
• 44. Everyday miracles
• 45. The mania of calm
• 46. Focus your focus
• 47. By yourself, you’re never alone
• 48. Don’t get boxed in
• 49. Living for now
• 50. Spying on yourself
• Copyright