It's all in the mind...

Today, happiness is… well it’s my birthday J Do you like your birthdays? Or do you have another special day in the year that makes you feel different? It seems so obvious that some days might just make you feel happy. But have you ever thought more deeply about what’s really going on? How do you know to feel happy on that day? How do I know to feel happy on my birthday?

For me, it’s about a day that’s just mine, and I choose not to do anything that’s like work. I usually see my children, even though they are now grown up. For some of you, a day away from the children would be more of a treat! Such facts reveal that there are two separate things going on: the external event, and the “feeling” – which is something that we generate inside ourselves. Clearly, the outside event cannot make you happy all by itself; you have to do something on the inside.

That begs that question – how do you know to feel happy? Or unhappy? Or to bring on any other feeling state? Obviously, it’s bound up with what things mean to you, individually. If you had a different meaning, then it would change the internal response that you generate.

Now that is interesting. Because most of us go about trying to change external circumstances to feel better. But how much control do you have over the people and circumstances of your life? What if you learned to change your response to them? Well, it can be done more easily than you realise. The ways and means for internal change are so varied and widely available these days – more so than at any time in our history. Happiness? It’s all in the mind. 

A moving and powerful message

A moving and powerful message in a poem by modern "spoken word" poet Steven Duncan. Listen to this and become drawn in by is simple truths. (Sometimes no picture? The audio will play.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fBQUnHsZPc

Feeling happy versus happiness?

You know when you have felt really good, don’t you? Maybe the thought went through your mind, “I feel really happy?”  Is this the same thing as happiness? Seriously – is feeling happy the same thing as happiness?

Let’s say you got promoted at work, and this led you to feel really happy; you celebrate with friends and put the money down on a new car. Great. You are really happy. Then three weeks later your workload has changed, and you have a lot more “responsibilities” and various less-than-desirable tasks to do. Still happy? Perhaps. After all, you expected the change in your job.

Perhaps like many others, you “fell into” your job years ago, and simply stuck with it. Because, well, you didn’t mind the work, had no better ideas or qualifications, or perhaps it was the family business. It has ups and downs, but you reason that you have no reason to complain; you are reasonably content. Some people might regard this reasonable happiness to be as good as it gets. Freud aimed lower; he urged his patients to accept ordinary unhappiness.

So perhaps we should average out our happiness over time, and optimise that? Actually, happiness research looks at both how often you have had happy feelings in recent weeks, and asks about your average – or general happiness with your life. They are related, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Which measurement makes more sense to you? Which have you been using to rate your life? Do you ever think about this to guide your decisions? Are you happy about that?

Bruce Lipton PhD: You are not a victim of your genes

Bruce Lipton PhD was a medical school professor and specialized in how the cells of our body receive and process information.

What he realised was that cells respond to their environments – and NOT their genes. In other words, they have a kind of fundamental awareness, to which they respond internally. This discovery overturned a long-held conventional view that our genes run the show. He was saying that “genetic determinism”, the idea that your genes govern your health and your personality traits is simply wrong.

He also showed how external influences of electromagnetic fields – energy fields - also influenced the cells, both in bad way as in microwaves and other electromagnetic fields around us, and in a good way as in energy healing techniques.  This totally undermined the whole basis of modern medicine, which says that drugs - which aim to interfere with internal cells processes - are the only way to treat the body. He was instrumental in developing a whole new field of study, now known as epigenetics, which means “control over the genes” by outside influences (including ourselves).

Lipton’s findings when he was at Stanford University have been replicated many times since. In other words he has been proved right.  Almost all of the cells that make up your body are “amoeba-like” – individual organisms that have evolved to specialize and co-operate in a mutual  survival strategy. These cells are self-determining, not governed by their genes, and act in a co-ordinated “swarm” to nurture themselves and to grow.

Humans are a collective of this cell-consciousness, and “so we are not victims of our genes,” to quote Lipton, “but masters of our own fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love. We can also promote healing of disease. And what’s more, he has left his ivory towers of academia and put his ideas into practice. He is a far happier and successful person now than ever he was before. So we are not talking “New Age” nonsense when we talk of healing and creating happy lives; we are talking basic cellular biology. There’s food for thought.

Listen to him present his ideas in these videos. But be warned, he talks “rapid-fire” like rubber bullets with messages on them! 

Part 1 - watch him present his theories and their important implications for happiness and fulfilment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLl7X5TkF_Q

Part 2 – what you can actually do in practice to make dramatic changes to your life, fulfilment and happiness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQuSY-eT02Y

The “101” on motivation

I was talking to this sales guy in DFS the furniture shop, and he was doing his routine on me. They are heavy sellers in there. However, I knew what I wanted, and planned my approach before I went to the shop – and took a friend to make sure that it was two-onto-one in my favour. I was also able to use my NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) experience to unpick his crucial moves, and to keep things going where I wanted.

Anyhow, I got my deal and he got his sale, and we got chatting. He told me how he had been through a tough six months, including a period of depression. Sales targets were tough. He brought up the topic of motivation, and so I gave him my “101” on motivation. I said that I thought there are only three things that go wrong  to do with motivation:

 

1. You set a deliberate goal that you really must have, but….
   the truth is, it’s like homework, or clearing up your room as a kid; you don’t really want to do it, in your heart. So what happens? You set your mind with a “should do it” attitude, and sometimes you do indeed find the motivation to do the things required… but eventually you fall back into your old ways. Maybe you repeat the cycle.
   
   
2. You have an aspiration – a kind of dreamy goal – that you would dearly and wholeheartedly love, but….
   the honest truth is that inside you, you don’t really believe it will ever happen. And the likelihood is, because of your inner, unconscious truth, it is very unlikely ever to happen. So your motivation towards this goal will be there sometimes, but fades away when things get difficult. Perhaps the cycle will repeat.
   
   
3. Nobody ever said you could have what you really want.
   Because it’s selfish, or because life’s hard work, or because you are not one of the gifted ones, or because it’s just a matter of lucky breaks…. Fill in your own reason. So you maybe never set a compelling goal that’s truly meaningful to you personally. In this case, sometimes you find yourself “given” tasks that you like, or “falling into them”, and for these you feel motivated – for a while. At other times, you get tasks that, well, you don’t really care for - the situation rather as in (2) above. Motivation goes up and down. Good days and bad days.

The sales guy told me that they get loads of expensive trainers coming in and teaching motivation. But this was the first time he had got something meaningful and straightforward. Which was nice  - but more importantly, it told me that I was on the right lines, since this guy lived in motivation city.

So here’s the deal: the only solution for sustained motivation is to trust you heart in setting your goals, find ways to overcome inner doubts about your “right” to have them and about your ability to get there. And that’s also a recipe for a happy life that you love.