Want to know how much of a weirdo I am? Read this post, My Love Letter to Running. If you are a runner, you will understand. If you are not a runner, I hope you have something in your life that makes you feel this way. That makes you feel strong, alive, and brings you unrelentless joy. This post is more for me than for any of the readers, but if you take the time to read, I hope you enjoy. And maybe you can write a love letter to something that you are in love with. In fact, if …
Confidence is the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something. It is also defined as a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities. What is confidence? The paragraph above holds dictionary definitions of confidence. Really, confidence is your state of mind about yourself. How you feel about yourself when you are by yourself. Sure, you can also have confidence in other things besides yourself; people, or events. I have confidence in Google Maps. Confidence in my dogs barking at every noise outside. I am confident that Jose will make the …
The COVID-19 pandemic is difficult for all of us. Some are impacted more than others. But something we probably all have in common is difficulty navigating our emotions. Ed Mylett, a life and business strategist, gave a 20 minute talk on “How to Navigate Times of Crisis” during the Rise X Live event this past weekend. While this talk, and this conference, were created around COVID-19, we can apply these ideas towards navigating “normal” everyday life and feelings. So how do we navigate our emotions during difficult times? Remember, everything happens for you, not to you. Now, more than ever …
The last several posts have discussed concrete strategies to improve happiness. Now we will talk about creating habits. Here is a list of all 9 proven strategies, followed by how to be successful with these strategies and improve happiness by creating habits. Proven Strategies to Improve Happiness Spend more money on experiences vs. “things” Practice and Express Gratitude Reset your Reference Points, don’t compare yourself to unrealistic expectations Use your character strengths, including finding a job and activities that allow you to use these strengths Perform Random Acts of Kindness Increase your Social Connection Increase your Time Spent Exercising and …
One of the more difficult things in modern society is our ability to control our minds. We tend to have minds that do not stick on the task at hand. Our minds are all over the place. Is it possible to control our mindset to improve happiness? Mind-wandering Mind-wandering is a phenomenon in which we shift the contents of our thoughts away from whatever task we have going on, shifting them to the external environment. 46.9% of the time we are not thinking about the things in the here and now. Almost half of the time we are not focused …
We are continuing on with the same theme as the last few posts; what are concrete ways to improve our happiness. And prioritizing time over money to improve happiness is another strategy. Affluence Affluence is an abundant flow or supply. For example, many people have an affluence of toilet paper right now. Most people think of monetary affluence. Someone who is very rich and is standing in a pile of money. But there is a second kind of affluence. One that is usually at odds with monetary affluence. That is time affluence. Time Affluence Imagine having all of the time …
Are you interested in finding out more about “Happy Medicine“? Something that you could start right now to become happier? Something that will continue to make you happy for the rest of your life? Do you want to love your body more? Have more mental clarity? Live longer? Combat chronic pain? Improve diabetes and heart disease? Stop obesity and other life-style related disease? Would you believe this “Happy Medicine” has no side effects, is legal, and that it can be free? What is this happy medicine? I introduce to you….. Exercise! Yes, it makes you happier. It is a “happy …
So far we have learned that acts of kindness, using our character strengths, having gratitude, savoring, and spending money on experiences vs “things”, are all strategies that can boost our happiness. To add to this growing list, social connection makes us happier than we typically believe. Want to start at the beginning of this journey? Click here. Social Connection Connectedness matters much more than we might think. Honestly, given this pandemic, we may be realizing this much more than normal. I hope we remember what we have learned during this time. David Myers looked at this idea of social connection …
We saw, in our first post dedicated to The Science of Well-Being, that the things we think will make us happier, actually don’t. And maybe this is true because we are miswanting a bunch of things in our life. How do we begin to genuinely identify the thing that will truly make us happier in the long term. And how do we know what things we are actually supposed to want? One way is through the act being kind. Today we are going to discuss using kindness to improve happiness. Kindness We should be seeking out more opportunities to act …
What are the things we should be wanting, but don’t currently want? How can we want the stuff that’s really going to make us happy? Today we will be discussing, wanting the right parts of the things we already do want and using our signature strengths to improve our happiness. We will use our jobs as an example as this is easy to grasp. We have talked about things about our jobs that we think bring happiness; higher and higher salaries. But we have learned that this is not actually true, even though we don’t realize it. So if the …
