I recently watched a great TED talk by Shawn Achor on happiness. As the blurb for his book The Happiness Advantage says:

“Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work.”

So we need to focus on being happy!

Shawn shares a number of ideas for increasing our happiness (and thus our effectiveness) in his talk, such as writing down 3 gratitudes each day, meditating, or undertaking random acts of kindness, each for 21 days. So maybe pick just one of these to start with and give it a try?

An important factor towards happiness is to find ways to ignore any voice inside our head that says things like: “You’re hideous!”, “You’re hopeless!”, “You’re never gonna be as good as…”

This is, of course, not easy. Just notice it to start with, start listening for it, instead of just accepting it as normal background noise. Then put a little bit of space between you and it – you can think “that’s what you think” or “thanks for your opinion”  or “STOP!” right back at it.

Or you can tell it “No, I’m not perfect, but I am fabulous!”

Life is hard enough without Negative Nancy in there bringing us down. So, try talking to yourself as you would talk to a friend, or to your daughter or sister, or to a younger version of yourself. To anyone else, really. Y’know, with kindness? Patience? Love??!

It’s a first step.

So, maybe:

• Listen to Shawn Archor’s talk or read his book?
• Take notice of how happy and positive you are. Could you try one (or more!) of Shawn’s suggestions for a boost?
• Think about the way you speak to yourself, could you stand to be kinder to and more supportive of yourself? If so, what’s one way you could do that? Give it a try right now!

I’m going with meditation for now – I’ve just recently downloaded the Simply Being app, which seems very simple and not too incensey, plus you can choose a five minute version – I’m a big believer in starting small! So I’m giving it a go. Let me know what you try, and let me know how you go with it!

{image}