Step 1 – The Happiness Vision

It’s Monday morning. Let’s get smacked off our tits on happiness.

Happiness used to be something that happened to me.

It was a raucous laugh, a giggle, a smile, a grin, a warm feeling in my heart or a butterfly in my stomach. It was just something that I thought, or felt or said or did and I didn’t really think too much more about it.

And I’d probably say that on the whole, I was a very happy person for a very long time.

Around when I turned 29, the pillars holding up my whole world began crashing down around me and it wasn’t long before my sadness started to overtake my smiles.

My thoughts spiralled slowly out of control and a year or two later, there came a point when my happiness, or at least my ability to feel happy, had gone completely. All hope had been lost; I was totally and utterly broken.

And I admit that for maybe a year or more I actually did choose to give up. But then one day, somebody or something seemed to turn the lights on inside my head.

I shook off the self-pity and decided I had a decision to make; I can choose to be sad or I can choose to be happy.

And I chose happiness.

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Since that moment, I’ve gone on to get myself some sort of homemade PhD in How To Be Happy and everything I’ve come to believe has found its roots in two things.

The first is the wisdom that I’ve accumulated through introspection – or knowing through feeling. And the second is the teachings of Buddhism – a philosophy, not a religion, that I find it very difficult to contest with.

According to Buddhism, in its natural state our mind is vast and pure, but we contaminate incessantly it with never-ending chatter. And that chatter is only ever in one of two things; positive or negative.

The result of this is that we live in a perpetually fluctuating state of happiness and suffering.

We think stuff, we say stuff we do stuff. We rejoice in the happy moments, battle on through the sad and we plod our way through life paying very little attention to anything below the surface of our perceptions.

And therein lies the dysfunction of the human mind.

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This week, more as a reminder to myself than anything else, I’ll be recapping on everything I’ve learned and how I put it all together in my head.

I’ll be bringing this to you in the form of what I hope to be a titillating tutorial, and perhaps the wireframe for a future book.

And so, named after weird silly life hacks I used to scribble down onto paper napkins for friends when I was drunk at a bar, here it is….

Laurie’s Deadboss Guide To Being Happy – 7 Steps To Sustainable Smiles.

You don’t just wake up one morning and say to yourself “Right that’s it, I’m going to be happy forever”, do a few self-improvement tick box exercises et voila you’re unshakeably ecstatic until your dying day.

No.

Reaching a true state of prolonged happiness, or inner peace, takes hard work and relentless determination. You have to want that happiness more than anything else in the whole wide world. It has to be your all-consuming desire.

In the business world, before a company can create a strategy, map out a plan or get to work, it has to have an ambition; a vision of what you set out to achieve.

It’s your Why, which according to Simon Sinek (and me) is the best place to start.

Step One: The Happiness Vision