A Simple Guide To What Makes You Happy

What is most important in life?  What is the path to happiness?  When you live a simple life, these are very important questions to answer because you are removing the excess to get to the bare essentials, giving you time to focus on what is most important.

simple guide to what makes you happy

I do have to chuckle that a cynic like me is offering advice on how to be happy, but the truth is happiness hasn’t always came easy for me.  I’ve been in some dark places, felt that depression pushing in on me, but in the end emerged on the other side. This does give me some practical experience in beating back the dark and embracing what truly makes me happy to wake up in the morning.

For me, this really comes down to what makes me happy and doing more of it, plus figuring out what I don’t like doing and doing less of that.  Happiness is something you work towards, it’s an active process.  The hardest part for me and many others is figuring out what really makes you happy.

What Things Make You Happy?

To understand what it will take to thrive, to be truly happy and find direction in your own life, you need to examine your current life to find out what things really turn us on.  We need to identify the things that bring joy to our lives.

happiness worksheets for free

Using the worksheet above, print it out and take it with you during a normal day of life.  Every 30 minutes or so think about what you’re doing, think about everything you’ve done, every little thing.  Reflect on what you’ve done and mark down if you enjoyed it or not.

What Is True Happiness To You?

happiness

If you’re at work, don’t just think about whether you like your job or not, but think about every little task;  you may not love your job, but you may like talking with clients, building the perfect spreadsheet, or working with others to find a solution.  Conversely, you may hate filling out reports, providing customer support, or stocking shelves.

In your personal life think about the things that make you feel energized or fall flat for you.  Do you love spending time with your friends or family at the park, cooking a nice meal, or reading a good book?  Do you hate running errands, cleaning the house, or having a weekly dinner with that gossipy friend from long ago?

In each of these good and bad things, don’t just write down the good and the bad, but think about WHY they fall into the category.  Think critically about if it’s the actual activity or a factor around it that’s coloring the emotion.  In some cases it’s the situation or conditions that make something less or more pleasant.

It is in that why that we will find common threads which lead us to happiness.

How Do You Find True Happiness In Life?

finding true happiness

Happiness isn’t something that finds us, we need to go into the darkest corner of our self and drag it out kicking and screaming.

I’m not going to sit here and spew a bunch of woo woo new age mysticism at you or recite wise phrases from people long ago.  Here’s the rub, being happy isn’t easy.  In this world bad things happen, things aren’t fair and things won’t go our way.  What that leaves us with is a choice!

We must choose how we are going to react and conduct ourselves going forward despite all that.  It is in this choice that we find liberation, contentment, empowerment and of course, happiness.

The state of the world is what it is, we can either bemoan the negatives, or we can CHOOSE to adopt the most positive attitude despite it.  It is in that choice that will determine our happiness in this thing we call life.

Bring Happiness Into Your Life

HappinessHave you ever notice there are some people who are perpetually happy or optimistic?  It’s not because their life is so great, it’s because they have taken a stance to be more positive.

Many people have trained their brains to default to this way of thinking, so to us it seems to come “naturally” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A perfect example is I’ve had crappy jobs that were fun because I had awesome coworkers; I’ve also had great jobs that were terrible because the people I worked with.   Now our natural instinct would be to say one job was great, the other was terrible.

However, after some reflection we can determine that what really makes us happy is having great coworkers.  We could take that even further to say, we thrive off of having positive people around us in all aspects of life.

Go through a few days, just jotting down your likes and dislikes, keeping notes and taking time to reflect on each of the things you write down.  Once you’ve done that, look for those common threads, look for trends, look for deeper truths.

Finding Your Happy Place

finding your happy place

With these written down, think about what they mean to you.  Think about why they made their way on to the paper.  It can be a good time to just sit back and consider these things.  Think about ways you can do more of what makes you happy and what ways can you minimize what makes you unhappy.

The trick to finding you happy place is finding the deeper truths and building a strategy to benefit from that understanding.

Developing A Strategy To Find Happiness

Here is a concrete example from my own life: Continuing the job example, the deeper truth was that to be happy I needed to have positive people in my life.  That’s when I figured out the strategy!

I realized one day that if I could find a job with people I like working with and a position that was constantly presenting challenges that require creative solutions, I was very happy.  Conversely I found if I didn’t connect well with my coworkers and my position was very repetitive, I couldn’t stand it.

Putting It Into Practice

That was when I started developing questions to ask in an interview to help me determine if that job met those two criteria.  If they did, I’d continue interviewing, and if they didn’t, I’d politely bow out.

Happiness Without Sadness?

happiness without sadeness

Here is the tough truth, the answer is no, but it’s not without it’s purpose.  To live in a blissful existence might sound nice, but we would quickly become numb to the joy it brings.  Life requires a counter balance, we could point to yin and yang, good vs. evil, light vs. dark.  Whatever your metaphor is, humans are funny things, if we don’t see the counter point to happiness, we won’t enjoy it.

Can I Be Happy If I’m Depressed?

Totally.  We often think of depression as a total absence of happiness, but the truth is that it isn’t all dark, there are moments of light.  In depression the most effective strategy I’ve found is to not say “I want be happy”, it’s about saying “I’m going to be just a little bit better than yesterday”.  In those dark places we have one choice, to adopt an attitude to work towards small wins every day.

Why Everyone Should Have A Therapist

why you should see a therapist for good mental health

Yes, even you!  Even happy people!   A therapist is an ally to you in this journey we call life.  It can be hard to sit down on that couch and share things, but it’s one good way to make real progress.

Working with a therapist gives you space to talk out loud how you want to address challenges you face in your life and the steps you’re going to take to make every day better than the last.  Taking this time is simply allowing you to carve out a concentrated time to focus on you and a therapist helps you uncover truths, deal with the hard stuff and make a strategy to move forward.

The trick with therapy is that you need to show up ready to dig into things you’ve already done your best to sort out.  Take time before hand to think about the possible things you’d like to discuss and then put them in order of priority.  Take a few minutes to reflect on your top items, this will set the stage for a successful session.

It’s Your Life, Be Happy

be happy

In the end, being happy is something we need to work towards.  In this post I’ve given you some tips about how to dig into into things and find those deeper truths.

The most happy people will have most accurately identified what is most true for themselves and acted upon it.  It’s not that we will ever be able to eliminate all things that we don’t like doing, but that our lives are so rich with what we love, that those unpleasant task are just a small part of what is a great life.

Your Turn!

  • What questions help you find what makes you happy?
  • Was there something that surprised you in doing this?

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