10 Tips to Brighten the Day
Just as we can decide to be positive or negative about life, work, and others, we are also empowered to choose between happy and sad. Recalibrating happiness doesn’t require moving mountains—all it takes aresimple reminders to make a major difference in both “real life” and our chosen career.
Since it’s almost impossible to make others happy if we aren’t, until we are in a good place—aligned between head and heart—it is presumptive and arrogant to think we can coach others to excel in something we have not mastered ourselves.
Here are ten suggestions to positively impact happiness:
1. Wake up expecting to find whatever you decide to look for.
Life tends to live up or down to expectations, so make your first thought a good one. If you expect something good to come from the day, guess what? Something good will happen. If you expect a Groundhog Day of pointless drudgery, guess what? You’ll grind your way through Groundhog Day.
Successes come in varying degree. Worry less about pipe dreams and more about gratitude, which has a funny knack for recalibrating the good we look for in life. Seek it each morning and you will find it.
2. Plan and prioritize.
The world is full of busy people but short on efficient, productive ones. Terminal busy is a growing source of stress from pursuing too much: too much to do, too much remaining even after we’ve finished, and too much still on the horizon with an insufficient amount of time to hope to get it all done.
Rather than fuss about too much, systematically plug away on the most important thing (or things) that will move you closer to your highest business and personal goals. The old adage “Plan your work and work your plan” applies beautifully to a prioritized list of A, B, and C activities.
Do the biggies—the A priorities—first. Make the rest wait. Operating in a disciplined, prioritized sequence eliminates haphazard multitasking. Doing so helps you finish more things while generating a steady stream of positive feelings of accomplishment—which helps keep you happy.
3. Give a non-material gift to everyone you meet.
Wherever you go, be a merchant of goodwill. Since non-material boosts are free, gifts can come in the form of a smile, a word of thanks, sincere encouragement, a gesture of polite respect, or a friendly nod. People are beaten down these days—starved for positive gestures. Be a merchant of good feelings.
Make situational kindness a trademark of your personal brand. Making others feel good makes us feel good too.
4. Deflect partisan conversations.
People who funnel their political and religious views into conversations or onto Facebook are long on opinions but short on answers. So too are the insipid talking-head rabble rousers of TV and radio — blabbermouths who are paid to draw an audience by rattling sabers and inciting others.
Don’t fall for this. Don’t watch that stuff on TV, don’t listen to it on the radio, and do not engage in digital or vocal debates dealing with religion or politics.
These inciting interactions are swamps of negative emotional energy. Avoid negative wastes of time that, by nature and design, are opinions without answers.
Pity the fools who engage. Do not be one of them. Ignore the noise. Stay on the high road, above the fray.
5. Assume people have good intentions, not hidden agendas.
If we look for the good in others, we see the good. If we look for the bad, we can justify and cling to some hypothetical thread of bad — regardless how thin it may be.
People are inherently good! Assume their intentions are good, not bad.
If we assume the opposite, that evil motives drive others’ behavior, we supply a layer of negativity that need not exist. We also slam the door on understanding why someone is acting the way he or she does, which does no good because informational blind spots create misunderstandings.
We all know someone who churns and burns personal associations, forever condemning others as an evil jerk or worse. These people permanently destroy connections, which is a sad and sour way to live. Everything, it seems, is someone else’s fault.
Instead of drawing negative assumptions, do the opposite: assume good intentions. If a disagreement arises, we are still in a positive emotional place that leaves open a possibility of shared ideas and reconciliation.
Build bridges—don’t burn them. Building makes you happy. Burning makes you sad.
6. Eat better food slowly.
Fuel matters. If money is tight, eat less of better things. Chew your food longer and savor what you’re having. Don’t go through life bulldozing more of whatever’s close, cheap, and fast. High performance engines do not run on cheap fuel.
You will be shocked at the differences food quality and attentive dining will make in how you feel physically and emotionally.
Skeptical? Do it for a week and decide for yourself. (hint: You won’t revert!)
7. Avoid the hypotheticals.
Worry is the enemy of happiness and worry maximizes its negative spiral by dwelling on things outside your immediate control.
Do not live in a hypothetical “what if” world! Focus on concerns that your thoughts and actions can control. Block out thinking about what might happen. If you catch yourself thinking about hypotheticals, catch yourself and consciously stop. Kick those ideas out of your head. Just because someone or something has access to your mind does not mean he, she, or it has the right to be there.
If you or someone you care about worries too much, get your local library to purchase a copy of my book “Managing the Worry Circle” (How to Improve Your Life by Worrying Less). The book explains how the mind deals with worry; and it teaches immediate techniques to change a cluttered and stress-filled head into one in better balance. The book also teaches immediately usable techniques how best to stay there.
Managing the Worry Circle has helped chronic worriers around the world learn how to regain control of their minds, worry less about the wrong things, and manage their personal air space to maximize happiness. If you worry a lot, read it and trust it. If a friend or loved one worries to much, suggest they get it from their library and invest some time cultivating a happier self.
8. Minimize “background” TV (especially commercial programming), commercial radio, and surfing the Internet.
Too many homes leave their TVs on as “background noise” while doing other things. The primary point of broadcast radio and TV is to transmit advertisements, which are scripted, recorded, and broadcast to make you dissatisfied enough to buy more stuff.
Which begs the question, “Why willingly absorb relentless targeted negativity?”
The Internet is worse by the day. It is evolving into an ad bazaar worse than commercial television. Where TV throws 13 commercials at you during a half-hour network sitcom, the Internet is unregulated against advertising saturation and bombs you with ads at every opportunity—even if you’re simply trying to jump to a link to read a story.
Ads now track and follow you, displaying relentless sidebar prompts for things you’ve previously investigated or considered. There is no safe haven to click — the ads have us surrounded.
Because of its lack of regulation, skimming the Internet now is like being pestered by relentless street vendors hawking unwanted products shoved in our faces at every turn. We have little recourse, aside from logging off.
These forced ads are annoying at best, but especially unhealthy for those with stressed, cluttered, and overloaded minds. The reason why is the sheer volume of cerebral intrusions we are forced to weather. Most of us are now subject to more than one million ads per year!
One million is too many, so do yourself a favor and turn stuff off. Block the garbage and protect yourself against head pollution. After all . . . if you don’t protect your cranial castle, who will?
9. Do not duck inevitable confrontations. But when possible, minimize or avoid things that make you sad or create negative emotional energy.
People, places, or things can trigger negative interactions, which detract from happiness. From a happiness perspective, we are better off dealing with confrontation than we are ducking it ad infinitum. If we duck it, the inevitable confrontation still lingers. If we deal with it, it goes away — and sooner is better than later. Delaying the inevitable keeps the storm clouds directly overhead.
It is important to cognizantly manage as many negative influences out of your life as you can. If you can’t manage them out, strive to minimize emotional access.
By becoming the custodian of your mind, you can direct negative thoughts to Visitor Parking and limit access. When necessary interactions are finished, kick the negative thoughts out of your mind .
Be disciplined about dealing with confrontation. It is fun and satisfying to feel the power of emotional self-policing in action.
10. Be grateful.
As you get ready for bed each night, play a quick game of “high/low.” Decide on, and be grateful for, the day’s highlight.
Then ponder (but don’t dwell on) the lowlight. If the lowlight is something you can learn from, be grateful for it. If not, be grateful it is now in the rearview mirror, soon to fade to ancient history.
In summary
Hopefully one, two, five, or all ten of these tips will help you maintain a steady feeling of positive, grateful happiness.
If so, the next time someone asks how you’re doing, tell him or her the truth: “I’m doing great! How about you?”