Happiness With Others 5: Expect Misbehavior. Ah, expectations, the killers of happiness with others. We are incredibly well trained to expect other people to behave themselves – the driver of the car behind us to follow at a reasonable distance; our neighbor to keep his dog from doing his duty in our yard; our sweetheart to, well, act sweet when we connect in the evening. Then, when our expectations are thwarted, we are surprised. We react with anger, hurt, and righteous indignation, contaminants of happiness one and all. It is not surprising that we hold these expectations, because, for most of us, our entire socialization process trains us to expect the best and the brightest from both ourselves and others. At home, our parents insist we keep our room clean, eat our broccoli, do our chores.
But what if we’ve got it backwards? I remember one evening when my older son, Todd, was a teenager. He stopped me dead in my tracks when he said, “Dad, sorry for interrupting, but you've got to get real. Think about it. Let's Get Real Why? 1. Learning to be happy - The Happiness Hypothesis. The darkness before the dawn “Being happy is something you have to learn.” Harrison Ford Ford certainly has known plenty of unhappiness. He was shy as a child, bullied at school for not “fitting in.” According to Laura Silva Quesada, in her article A reminder from Indiana Jones, “Every day, they’d tease the future Indiana Jones, beat him, and roll him down a hill… Though furious inside (an anger he would hold onto for years), he kept up a ‘Gandhi-like’ policy of non-violence — not fighting back and enraging his tormentors even more.”
Later on, he “studied English in college, and hated it. “Once, he remembers, he awoke after a 3-day ‘nap’ and decided to attend a class. She goes on to quote Ford: “You have to experience the darkness before the dawn can come. What is happiness? But is Ford right, that happiness is something we learn? A Yiddish word for happiness is “naches” – also translated as “joy.” And maybe serenity is really what happiness is about, not peak raptures and ecstasies. Why you shouldn’t work 9-5 - Matador Network.
The average American today works 8.8 hours per day (Bureau of Labor Statistics), but how effective are we really working 8 hours per day? Before we dig in, I decided to do some background research about how the 9-5 came to be in the first place. The answer comes from a man named Robert Owens, who started a campaign during the Industrial Revolution. Back then, 14-hour days were the norm in order to maximize the output of the companies’ factories. Owens bravely advocated the notion that people should not be working for more than 8-hours per day. His famous slogan was: “Eight hours labour. The 888 rule soon became the standard when Ford implemented the 8-hour day with Ford Motors Company in 1914.
“With fewer hours worked by the employees and double the pay, Ford managed toincrease his profit margins by two-folds. That’s right. Know When to Walk Away. Growing up, few of us learn when to keep going toward a long-range goal and when to consider stopping. Knowing how and when to quit involves initiating a set of steps, a process known as goal disengagement. Maybe you assume that “just stop” is all you need to know. But it’s more complicated than that, according to Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work, by Peg Streep, the author or coauthor of 11 books, and Alan Bernstein, LCSW, who has served on the faculty at New York Medical College and New York University. One of Streep and Bernstein’s more helpful suggestions is to understand and recognize intermittent reinforcement.
This anti-quitting motivator arises when your efforts toward some distant goal pay off once in a while. You’re likely to continue to pursue a goal when you occasionally get some positive feedback, even if the overall trend of your progress is clearly negative. According to Streep and Bernstein: Copyright (c) 2014 by Susan K. The 4 Questions To Ask Yourself When Faced With A Difficult Decision In Life. I think we can all agree that life can be a real b*tch at times, as it puts us in situations that require us to make difficult decisions – decisions that, no matter what, would entail heartache, headache, or both. Some of them require a true sacrifice, while others involve big risks. To help you deal with such trying moments in your life, here are four questions you could and should ask yourself before making the final decision. I hope at the end of the list, you will find the answer that is already in your heart and make the right and best choice.
So here we go: 1. Listen to your heart. Always trust your instinct. You are the one who truly understand what you want and what you do not want. This is your life. It is not always easy to listen to your heart, and it works differently for different people. 2. Difficult decisions come with high stakes. Or is it because you’re afraid of disappointment, to lose hope in yourself if you fail? No one is perfect, or 100% right all the time. 3. 4. 10 ‘Smart’ Easy Ways to Get Yourself Motivated Today | SmartChic. We all have days that we need a little extra boost of energy to GET THINGS DONE during the day. There are so many different ways to get motivated; you just need to find the right one for you, that will inspire you; get you to a place that you’ll be inspired and feel like you can take on the world in a day.
So let’s get inspired together with different ways to get and keep motivated today! 10 ‘Smart’ Easy Ways To Get Yourself Motivated Today! Exercise – Start your day by stretching, going for a walk or run, or doing some weight training. We all have lots to do in life and it’s time to get things done today. Which ways are you going to use to get and keep yourself motivated during the day? I am absolutely passionate about YOUR success and happiness. Success and Happiness: It's Your Heart vs. What the Others Think. How do you know you are successful in life? You can either judge your achievements by other people’s standards or by your own definition of success. So the first step to success is knowing what success means to you. Otherwise, you won’t even know it when you get there, right? Say your environment seems to expect you to earn lots of money in a corporate job, or stay at home with the kids, or be thin. You have tried and failed to live up to these expectations, and now you feel like a loser and beat yourself up for not being the way they want you to be.
Or you have tried and succeeded, now being the perfect corporate employee, the perfect mom, the perfect girl, but you still feel somehow discontent. In both cases, you are experiencing the same thing: You feel unsuccessful and discontent, because you have not yet given your own definition of success a fair chance. What if you went after what you most value deep inside? Wouldn’t it be much easier to go after goals you are on fire for? [Love, Sex And Relationship] What Makes Men Fall in Love — PART 2. There’s into you, and then there’s head-over-heels gaga. These little things tip a man over that edge. It’s a baffling question: Is there some specific moment or event that makes a guy suddenly decide “Yes, I think I love her”? Well, the answer isn’t clear-cut, but there are some general principles. “Men have certain innate needs that must be met before they truly feel connected to you,” says Paul Dobransky, MD, author of The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love.
“When a guy realizes, consciously or not, that you’re ideal on all these levels, that’s when he’ll commit.” Boiled down, guys have four primal relationship desires that are sometimes sated by the tiniest of moves by you. The Desire: To Shine Maybe he’s cocky, but he’s still insecure. Make him happier. Be a social butterfly. Play mind games. Act like the grand prize. The Desire: Comfort Let him see you primp. Cook together. Stock your pad. What Yanks Him Back from the Brink Some factors can derail a guy who’s about to fall. Fear of Happiness Underlies Some Mental Illnesses. Unhappiness is often viewed as something to be prevented, avoided or eliminated. Yet recent studies reveal that for some people, feeling good is what scares them. Recognizing this fear and targeting it with therapy may be a critical first step before other mental illnesses can be treated.
People fear positive emotions for many reasons, such as feeling unworthy or believing good fortune inevitably leads to a fall, according to two new studies. Mohsen Joshanloo, a psychology graduate student at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, developed a Fear of Happiness Scale, on which participants indicate their level of agreement with statements such as “Having lots of joy and fun causes bad things to happen.” Such beliefs can plague people in many countries, according to a study by Joshanloo published online in October 2013 in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. The study found the scale to be reliable in 14 different cultures. » Are You Afraid of Happiness?
An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence. By Maria Popova Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity — a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year’s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible? This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness — the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience — largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973), who also gave us this fantastic meditation on the life of purpose.
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” Thanks, Ken.