How to Choose Happiness in Your Daily Life

What would make you a happier person? More money? A perfect spouse? A nicer car? Well, according to Dr. Davidicus Wong, it's the INTENTION (where have we heard this word before???*bootcamp* maybe?) to be happy that MAKES us happy on a daily basis. This is a great little article, and maybe a refresher from BootCamp for you on how to BE committed to DO what it takes to HAVE what you want.

Enjoy!

"We usually thing of the causes for both our happiness and unhappiness as something outside of ourselves.
We are unhappy because we're having car troubles or we're so broke that we can't afford a car, we've got relationship problems or we're between relationships, we're out of work or we don't like our work, we don't seem to have any choice in life or we have too many choices and we can't decide.

With life's ups and downs, there's always something to make us unhappy.

And when we're unhappy we often look to the world or someone else to blame.

Life will never be perfect, but does that mean that we are all destined to be unhappy?

The happiest people I meet in my practice do not have the fewest medical problems nor do they have the most money. They do tend to have happier spouses and children.

Rick Foster and Greg Hicks studied the characteristics of ordinary people who enjoyed a consistently high level of happiness defined by their own self-assessment of a sense of well-being. In their book, How We Choose to Be Happy: The Nine Choices Of Extremely Happy People: Their Secrets, Their Stories, they describe happiness as a set of attitudes, beginning with the intention to be happy.
We all want to be happy, but most of the time, we go about it the wrong way.
We consume a lot of time and energy pursuing things we think will bring us happiness: the dream job, a perfect mate, more money, more things. When we don't get them, we remain frustrated. When we do get them, we can be disappointed to discover that our happiness is fleeting.

Foster and Hicks discovered two overarching themes in their research with extremely happy people. The first was that happiness comes from within. It doesn't come from something outside yourself.
The second was that you can choose to be happy. You don't have to wait for the bluebird of happiness to land on your windowsill.
That's not to say that we are responsible for misfortune, ill health or the catrastrophes in our lives.
In fact, Foster and Hicks' book is filled with examples of people who chose to be happy in spite of terrible circumstances. We can't choose what life throws at us, but with awareness and courage, we can choose how we will catch and respond to whatever we get.
Foster and Hicks identified the nine choices of extrememly happy people: intention, accountability, identification, centrality, recasting, options, appreciation, giving and truthfulness.
...
It all begins with intention, which Foster and Hicks defines as "the active desire and commitment to be happy and the fully conscious decision to choose happiness over unhappiness."

Choose to be happy everyday."

-taken from "Healthwise, Dr Davidicus Wong, in Burnaby NOW, Wednesday, April 20, 2011 pg A32