How to Do Everything and Be Happy

Your step-by-step, straight-talking guide to creating happiness in your life

Peter Jones

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007506712
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Do you ever feel that you could be – well – just that little bit happier? This simple book reveals how you can be happy every day, through these surprisingly easy tips and advice.

Whoever you are, whatever you do, and whatever is holding you back, you can do it AND be happy.

Making Life What You Want

You Can Change Your Life

Does this sound familiar?

6am. The alarm goes off.

Surely it can’t be 6am already? Surely not!

You reach for your watch. It too says it’s 6am. Amazing. What were the chances? Both your alarm clock and your watch are running several hours fast.

Your partner nudges you in the ribs.

‘It’s six o’clock.’ It is? It really is? And that’s not good news because you know from experience that your partner is never, ever wrong.

An hour or so later you’re sitting in your car. The radio burbles in the background, but you’re listening to the rhythmic sound of the windscreen wipers whilst you stare at the brake lights of the car in front. After a while those lights go out and the car moves forward a couple of feet. You move your foot from the brake, squeeze the accelerator, take up the slack, and then stop again.

It’s at this point that a thought floats through your mind. A thought that you will have several more times before you get to work, and numerous times throughout the day. It’s a thought that you have so often you barely even notice it any more: ‘There must be more to life than this.’

Here’s something that you might find hard to believe:

YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

One caveat: ‘You can change your life’ isn’t quite the same as ‘You can have the life you want.’ I’m not saying you can’t have the life you want – I’m just saying that it might take several ‘changes’, perhaps even many, many changes, to finally get to where you want to be. But so long as you have ‘choices’, you can make ‘changes’, and if you can ‘make changes’ you can move your life in the direction you ultimately want to go. And whilst the last section was all about the ‘figuring out what you want your life to be like’, this section of the book is all about the ‘moving’.

Turning Wishes into Goals

Grab your Wish List from the last section. In fact, don’t even bother with the whole list – the only thing we’re interested in (for now) are those top three wishes.

What we’re going to do in this section is to take those wishes, and turn them into goals.

A lot of my friends dislike the idea of setting themselves personal goals, like it somehow takes the private part of their life, the part that is supposed to be about relaxing and having fun, and turns it into ‘work’. Which, as we all know from General Unhappiness Reason Number One, is the mortal enemy of fun and relaxation. There will be those of you who are already resisting this part of the book. You’ll be telling yourselves that you’ve ‘tried setting goals before’. That ‘it didn’t work’, or it ‘could never work’, or that you’re simply ‘too busy’.

If this is you, then you have my sympathy. I too used to sit in traffic on the M25, morning after morning, listening to those self-help Tony Robbins CDs and wondering whether I’d enjoy them more if I wound down the window and tossed them, Frisbee-like, over the edge of the bridge and into the River Thames far below me.

If you’re considering doing a similar thing with this book let me strike some sort of bargain with you. Stick with me for a few more pages. Chances are you will have never set goals in quite this way before – even if you’ve listened to Tony Robbins or countless other gurus. And even if you have, ‘setting goals’ is only the first step. Crucial, yes, but only in the sense that getting into your car and knowing where you want to go is the crucial first step to any car journey. Later in this section I’ll introduce you to a slew of tricks and tools that’ll help you turn those goals into reality and prevent them from being nothing more than a pointless list of ‘nice to haves’, but first we need to talk about ‘wording’.

The vital importance of ‘wording’

So you have your top three wishes. Surely to make them goals we just declare them as such and hey presto! Job done!

Not so fast, Buster.

To be goals, real goals, we need to infuse them with power. We need to give them the ability to inspire you, move you, prod you, poke you, irritate you – whatever it takes, in fact, until they’re no longer goals, but Statements of Fact: descriptions of how your life has become.

And how do we achieve this magic?

With words.

Let me introduce you to my friend Anne. She’s an odd person. She actually liked the idea of setting goals! There wasn’t any arm twisting involved. No sooner was she introduced to the concept than she came up with this list:

1. Be nicer to the kids

2. Listen to more live music

3. Lose weight

These are, on the face of it, very worthy goals. Worthy. But not particularly useful. Let’s make them better.

Step 1: Getting Personal

Right now Anne’s goals are a little anonymous. They read like slogans. And whilst creating posters that read BE NICE TO YOUR KIDS might work, it’s a little extreme. Let’s save the World War II style advertising campaign for when we’re desperate. Instead, we can boost the effectiveness of the goals just by adding two simple words – ‘I will’.

1. I will be nicer to the kids

2. I will listen to more live music

3. I will lose weight

Now when we read these goals out loud they’re no longer meaningless slogans, or commands, they’re commitments. By saying them, even in your head, you’re making a promise.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it out. What’s the one thing in your life that you would really like to change but you know in your heart you probably never will? Quit smoking? Walk the dog each evening? Phone your mother once a week? Now, plug the words ‘I will’ in front of whatever it is you’ve just thought of and say it out loud.

Do it now.

Ok, ok, you don’t have to say it out loud – just say it in your head, but put the device you’re reading this on down for a second and do it.

Done it? Ok. But did you notice how uncomfortable it makes you feel? Did you notice that little knot in the pit of your stomach, or the niggle at the back of your mind, or the voice in your head that’s saying ‘Yeah right’? That’s the kick back. That’s the part of you that’s resisting the change. That’s the little kid in you who used to lie on the floor screaming when you didn’t get your own way. All we’ve done is add two words and suddenly there’s a part of your psyche that wants you to quit right now! Believe it or not, that’s progress!

I have a friend who says, ‘Behind every no entry sign there’s a door.’ By placing those two words in front of your goals you’ve created a door.

Step 2: Being in the Moment

If you think your psyche had a problem with ‘I will’, just wait and see what kind of fuss it’ll make if you replace ‘I will’ with ‘I am’.

When we do this to Anne’s goals they look like this:

1. I am nicer to the kids

2. I am listening to more live music

3. I am losing weight

Perhaps the first thing to notice here is that you can’t just swap ‘I will’ for ‘I am’; other words have to change too, and that’s because we’re changing whole sentences from ones that talk about this dim and distant point in the future when we’ll be nice to kids, where we’re surrounded by live music, and our excess weight is a thing of the past, to sentences that describe things that have happened or are happening now.

Suddenly our goal about being nice to the kids isn’t an aspiration any longer – it’s a reality. It’s happening in the here and now. We’re no longer dreaming about how our days will be spent listening to live music, it’s something that happens regularly. And we’re no longer looking forward to shedding those pounds, we’re … hang on a second. I still don’t like that last goal. ‘I am losing weight’? We can do better than that.

3. I have lost weight

Much better. Nobody wants to be losing weight. Losing weight is a drag – we want that weight gone!

‘But,’ Anne might say to me, ‘it isn’t true.’

‘What’s not true?’ I would reply.

‘The sentence – it doesn’t make sense.’

‘How so?’

‘I haven’t lost weight! I’m not nice to the children! And I’m not listening to live music!!’ And then she’d probably shake me by the shoulders and I’d be forced to slap her to calm her down.22

Of course it’s not true. Yet.

What we’re doing here is borrowing a principle from hypnosis which says that the subconscious is a highly suggestible portion of your psyche. If you’re told something often enough, and with enough sincerity, you will eventually believe it. This in turn will have a knock-on effect on your behaviour, and the choices you make.

You may have heard this referred to as ‘brainwashing’, which sounds a lot more sinister than it really is. In reality we do this to ourselves all the time.

Can you really brainwash yourself? Yes, you can. By setting our goals in the present, as if they’re already fact, we’re programming our subconscious to align our reality with what we want.

Resistance Is Futile

Still struggling with this? Who’s still feeling some pangs of resistance? Let’s talk about that.

Another peculiar function of the large, walnut-like sponge in your head is the job of maintaining the status quo and keeping you exactly where you are. It’s a defence mechanism. A kind of inbuilt ‘If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’ process. Everybody, to a lesser or greater degree, has an in-built resistance to change.

My personal resistance to change is incredible. ...