Why your Happiness Depends on you Alone

How do we find happiness?

The first fact to know is that your happiness depends on you alone. Everything we do and everything we want to achieve is with the aim to make our lives better, and, ultimately, to have an easy and happy life. In this light, therefore, we’re truly not successful if we’re not happy.

“Success without happiness is failure.” — Tony Robbins

To achieve happiness is not easy; you should celebrate small achievements, count your blessings every day and be grateful. Happiness and purpose are often intertwined in the sense that they both create a fulfilling life.

It’s hereby important to find your purpose and start working towards living it. Happiness is transient and only in moments. It is elusive like the butterfly that flits from flower to flower, but of course a happy person is successful.

Happiness comes from a sincere smile, a sunrise, a cuddle from your dog, a headbutt from your cat, a warm sunny day. The ability to be happy lies in appreciating the small things that surround us here and now. It is a state of mind. Even when things are going terribly wrong, we can still make the effort to look for something to be grateful for.

It is strange that for so many people, happiness seems to be so hard a sentiment to feel. Your happiness depends on you, and on no one else. People can definitely make you feel good or bad, but at the end of the day, you are the one who decides if you want to be happy. A lot of people seek happiness in other people, they seek material things and approval from others and that is why they cannot be happy.

Aristotle once said, “Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life.”

The key to happiness is that we look for it every day. That we share it with those we love and those we meet. By seeking for it and spreading it, we will make an enormous impact not only on ourselves, and our families, but on our society.

Why your happiness depends upon you alone

Yeah, we do not get to choose how we start out in life, or the day we are born or the family we are born into, what we are named at birth, our ancestry or what country we are born in. All these things are predetermined by a higher power and by the time you are old enough to start making decisions for yourself, a lot of things in your life are already in place. It’s important, therefore, that you focus on the future, the only thing that you can change.

If your happiness depends on anything external to yourself, such as your career, gaining wealth, receiving recognition or love from others, you might experience lots of disappointment and life-long struggle of “chasing” happiness. This is because all of those external things can change at any given moment. You could be working in your dream company and feel like things couldn’t be any better and then suddenly lose the job for whatever reason. It could be the most wonderful love in your relationship that is making you feel happy and suddenly, that relationship ceases to exist.

The truth is happiness can only come from within yourself. From truly knowing yourself, accepting yourself and ultimately loving yourself. Sometimes the path to get there can be difficult as it may mean shedding all the external influences, messages, constructs and belief systems that have been holding you back from being who you truly are. But the journey is truly worth it. Make time to find you.

Now, apart from happiness, we should also take the following points into consideration when talking about success:

• Living your life as per your passions.
• Accepting yourself fully.
• Loving yourself unconditionally.
• Giving your 100% to life and the forgetting it.
• Identifying, understanding and challenging your assumptions.
• Treating learning as equivalent to breathing and doing it regularly.
• Having no regrets – especially of the nature “If only I had…”
• Being able to laugh at what is happening in your life however painful it might be AND then moving on.
• Ability to say no to others when YOU REALLY WANT TO SAY NO.
• Experimenting so much that you actually start looking forward to disruptions with positive expectancy.
• Recognizing your fears and still taking actions regardless of your apprehension and then enjoying the thrill.
• Helping others without expectations.
• Focusing on building a meaningful and wonderful relations with the most significant people in your life.
• Standing up for something powerful and meaningful.
• Living as per your values.

What is success?

To laugh often and much;
Win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
Earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate the beauty;
Find the best in others;
Leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded!

– Ralph Waldo Emerson