Be someone who makes you happy.

How often do we blame someone else for making us sad or angry or frustrated?

How often do we say that somebody is driving us crazy?

How often is that true?

I would argue that the answer to the last question is never. Nobody has the power to control how you feel – that’s up to you.

Now, before you all start shouting at me, telling me ‘it’s not as easy as that’, let me say – I know. Letting go of the things that upset your happiness is hard, it takes work and practise and can sometimes feel impossible, but it can be done.

The first thing to do is to be honest with yourself, accept the fact that you a flawed person who is not perfect, and actually believe that that’s OK. You don’t have to be perfect. Nobody else is either, and that’s OK too.

Next you have to try to do the things that make you happy, and to not do the things that make you feel guilty. That’s not to say you have to be perfect (see the first point I made) but that you have to be OK with your imperfections.

Thirdly, you might want to try meditation, particularly Mindfulness. It shows you that you are not your thoughts and emotions, and you can separate yourself from them. Just because an angry thought flits across your mind, you don’t have to become angry – you can let it go.

On paper, that all looks relatively easy, but it’s not. It takes time, persistence, patience and diligence and many people give up along the way. My advice would be to get help. Join meditation classes, try a little therapy (in my opinion CBT and Hypnotherapy would be most effective), spend time with people who have the same goals as you.

Whatever your path to happiness, you’ll find that other people or things can make a difference in the short term, but true happiness comes from you.

I hope you find a way to make you happy. I’m still a work in progress, but maybe I’ll meet you on somewhere on the journey if our paths cross 🙂