How to Experience More Happiness & Why You Feel Unhappy
Happiness. Everyone wants it and yet it remains elusive for so many.
But why?
Most people are waiting for a thing called happiness to strike them - not understanding why they “can’t just be happy”. If you have any degree of education or abundance in your life, you might even have been led by others to feel a sense of guilt if you’re still “unhappy” or discontent despite your relative successes. You might be thinking, “One day, I’ll be happy”. Or, “When I accomplish _____, I’ll be happy”.
Most people have never defined what “success” would look like or feel like for themselves and likewise, they’ve never defined what “happiness” would look like or feel like either. They’ve left it up to chance. They have no intention or vision for success or happiness.
This is unfortunate because most people will resort to comparing themselves to others, accumulating achievements, or to getting external validation to affirm happiness - if that’s been your path, a beautiful growth opportunity awaits you. One where you get to discover and define happiness for yourself once and for all.
However, since many people are suffering from unhappiness - I wrote this blog to give you inspiration to get started and to give you a foundation to build on. Whether you build a happiness hut, house, mansion, or castle - I hope you find happiness. So I’m going to help you! Let’s get started.
What is Happiness?
Happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.
If you’re thinking that definition didn’t give you anything you didn’t already know - I agree with you and yet, that’s what’s out there when you Google in search for the “definition of happiness”.
Just the fact that the definition of happiness states that it has “many definitions” should be an indicator as to why finding happiness is so elusive for so many people. So as stated previously, I’ll be giving you a solid foundation to build your happiness castle on top of.
“Lacking a solid foundation on which to build happiness is the primary reason for unhappiness and discontentment in your life and relationships.”
Principles of Happiness
Before we start on your happiness journey, it’s important to understand three primary principles of happiness:
1) Before you can experience happiness, you have to want to be happy. It’s a decision you make once and commit your life to. Happiness is an identity. Choose to BE a person who is happy no matter your external circumstance.
2) Happiness is personal. It’s an inside job - while another person could inspire feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, or even fulfillment within you - no one and nothing outside of yourself can “make” you happy, sustainably, in the long-term.
3) Happiness is experienced in a series of moments. Not experiencing these moments every single day doesn’t mean you’re an unhappy person - but it does indicate that you’re underutilizing opportunities to create your happiness on a solid foundation - and that’s because you don’t know how. You need to know where to seek happiness.
THE FOUNDATION FOR HAPPINESS
Ok, I’ve kept you waiting long enough for the secret to experiencing more moments of happiness by establishing a solid foundation to create your happiness. So here it is….
The foundation for happiness is Inner Peace. You can’t be happy without inner peace. Therefore, the secret to experiencing more frequent moments of happiness in your life and relationships is to restore your inner peace.
The word restore implies that over time, your inner peace got away from you. You’ll see why this is in fact the case by the end of this blog.
Only when you do that, will you inspire more feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment within yourself - more often. So the next big question you should be asking yourself is , “How?” I’ll be discussing that in the remainder of this blog.
When you restore your inner peace, you’re guaranteed to become a person who values engaging in practices that protect your inner peace and that lead you to experience happiness more and more frequently.
How Do I Restore My Inner Peace?
Ok, let’s get real… most people are quite unhappy in their life and relationships. That’s not news to anyone. However, it’s much easier to blame the circumstances and people around us for our unhappiness than it is to take ownership over restoring our inner peace. That’s because restoring your inner peace will require you to make many hard choices and to move through the consequences of those decisions as gracefully as possible.
Restoring your inner peace would require you to remove yourself from certain environments or to stop participating in relationships or poor habits that are no longer serving you.
More importantly, restoring your inner peace will require you to address that thing inside of yourself that kept you stuck in negative environments, disempowering relationships, and poor habits long past their expiration date and when you really did know better - you just didn’t want to face the perceived negative consequences of the hard decisions that would have been required of you.
That was a choice. I’m offering you an opportunity to choose something different now.
I say this will loving compassion and ZERO judgment because I’ve been there many times and it was that hard wake-up call that led me to realize that I was sacrificing my inner peace in order to avoid conflict - and that’s not ok!
After you’ve allowed that to sink in a bit, allow me to walk you through a self-analysis to support your honest awareness of what restoring your inner peace might entail.
Be honest with yourself and remember, you own your happiness! And if you own the ability to create your own happiness - you also own the ability to create your own unhappiness.
Only you can decide when you’re ready to end the cycle of unhappiness. The only reason you’d end up in a cycle of unhappiness, is because you don’t realize that you have full ownership and influence over it. This is learned - it’s not your fault - but it must be unlearned before things can change.
Self-Analysis: What’s Robbing You Of Your Inner Peace?
1) Your Mindset
Do you value the experience of happiness enough to actively engage in the work necessary to restore/reclaim your inner peace?
Do you identify with your limiting thoughts or critical internal dialogue as being true about you?
Does your mindset support your ability to stay in consistent meaningful action while also feeling in your most resourceful and creative frame of mind?
2) Your Heartset
Do you believe others are at fault for how you feel and should take responsibility for how they made you feel?
Do you consider your feelings / emotions to be commensurate with facts or the truth?
Do you have expectations that others will tiptoe around your emotions and not touch on subjects that they should know would impact how you feel?
3) Your Soulset
Do you have deeply held spiritual beliefs or personal convictions you can look toward for spiritual groundedness, support, and peace?
Do you have a belief system that supports your ability to move through grief and detach yourself from outcomes while maintaining your sense of hope and wellbeing in the long-term?
Do you have clarity on your life purpose to the extent that you can see how your past life experiences, even (or especially) the difficult ones, have prepared you to actively engage in pursuing a spiritual calling on your life?
4) Your Healthset
Do you have a long-term vision for your physical wellbeing that addresses your nutrition, exercise, and sleep?
Have you made a decision to prioritize your sense of vitality, energy, and a sense of aliveness on a daily basis?
Do you recognize a sense of duty and personal responsibility to take good care of your health, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of others who care about you and/or rely on you for support?
5) Your Community & Influence
Do you have people around you who care for your wellbeing or whom you could rely on to intervene in your support/care if you became ill?
Do you feel connected and trust that you are part of a larger family unit or community of people who have common interests, are moving in a similar direction together, or otherwise whom you could safely approach to share or collaborate - and be well received?
Do you recognize what and whom is within your sphere of influence and focus on cultivating what’s in your sphere in meaningful ways?
6) Your Environment
Does your environment look and feel chaotic or does it look and feel orderly and clean? Do you feel mostly agitated or mostly peaceful when you are in that environment?
Do you have the ability or autonomy to enact some degree of influence or control over your environment?
Do you have the ability or autonomy to enact some degree of influence or control over how you use your time/energy/mental focus?
If you completed this Self-Analysis - Congratulations! You might be feeling like a cold bucket of water fell on your head. Consider this a good thing! It takes a lot of courage to face the truth about yourself.
You now have a new-found sense of awareness and valuable information that you can take immediate action on because specific factors that are robbing you of your inner peace and creating obstacles to your happiness have just been revealed to you through this self-analysis.
I suggest revisiting the questions to which you responded “no”. For each question, make a list of what it would take for you to wholeheartedly change your response from “no” to “yes” or into a positive response that affirms your sense of inner peace.
Would you like to BE a happier person? Then focus on restoring your inner peace.
Who would you become and how would you be different if you were a person who prioritized their inner peace even 50% more often? How would you behave differently in each of these six areas of your life? Do you think you’d be a happier person? Let me know!
If you’re looking for a place to find like-minded individuals to collaborative with and get support for your relationship and business pain-points, we invite you to become a member of the Edgy Entrepreneur Community on Facebook and join us for Unf*ck Your Mindset Friday at 12:30pm ET on July 15th where we’ll discuss this topic in more detail, answer your questions, and help you unpack this topic further.
Stay Edgy-
Coach Oriana Guevára, MHR, MBA
Co-Founder, The Edgy Entrepreneur
© Edgy Entrepreneur, LLC. • 51 E. Jefferson St. #3292, Orlando, FL 32802 • www.edgyentrepreneurs.com
