Is Happiness Hard?

In August I was sitting around a camp fire with some family having a conversation about happiness. Yes my family ROCKS:). My younger cousin said something that I have been thinking about ever since, what she said was that “happiness is hard” to which I replied “happiness is a choice.”

And I feel like I owe her an apology.

The reason I want to apologise is because my saying that may have implied that because I believe happiness is a choice it means it's not hard. And so I want to say to her "I’m sorry, you are right, happiness is hard"

Happiness and joy are some of the hardest things for us to feel and it’s what we are all searching for.  I do not believe there is one person in this world that is always happy in every moment, everything would just be the same all of the time no ups, no downs. So instead we seem to find fleeting moments of happiness and joy and spend the rest of the time searching for more of these moments... 

The reason happiness is hard is because we believe it is something that happens to us and not something we can create for ourselves. 

I think we need to learn to shift from feeling the victim of a life that only gives us a few moments of joy to feeling like we are capable of learning and adopting the tools that cultivate happiness and joy in our lives. 

I do believe happiness is a choice; it’s a conscious decision to create and cultivate more of what brings happiness in your life.

It's a PROCESS of learning how to live a wholehearted life (a life that cultivates joy and happiness).
Watch Brene Brown's video about Wholeheartedness

Just like learning to play a musical instrument is a process.

You can see an amazing guitar player and wish and hope and pray that you could play like that but those wishes and thoughts alone will NOT make you a guitar player. That is only the FIRST step. The NEXT step is to take action toward your goal… it’s when you decide to pick up a guitar and invest time and/or money into lessons.  The 3rd step is a commitment to practice, practice, practice, to create the space in your life to learn this new skill you so badly want. And WHEN you want to give up because it is HARD to learn a new skill and everyone comes to a point when it feels “too hard to keep going” when it feels like “maybe it’s not worth all the fuss.” Some of us will stop at this point believing it is worse to try and fail than to stop trying, give up, hide, or numb. (Here's where we can learn to cultivate the Courage to Dare Greatly.)

To keep moving forward the last step in this cyclical process is to PAUSE and REFLECT on your WHY...you remember how important it is for you to have this skill, you think about what it will cost you if you don’t gain this skill and then you think about what you will gain if you do.  You go back to the time when you could only pluck a few strings, and you see how far you’ve come and this shows you how capable you are to do this, you find a renewed sense of motivation and inspiration and you start again.

This is how bringing more happiness into my life has worked. I've learned that happiness is not a destination but a life skill, actually a whole set of life skills.

This is the the cyclical process that I will use as a Serenity Life Coach. To help people discover where they want to be and support them and guide them as they create a plan to develop the skills they are looking for. I create a safe place to pause and reflect when it gets hard and I help them remember their WHY so they can be inspired and ready to start again.
They move forward feeling empowered instead of feeling stuck and overwhelmed.

If you're like me you might like things in list form here's my Process:

1. Inspired and Motivated to Make a Change
2. Take action toward change, Invest time and/or Money toward learning a new skill
3. Commit to Practice, Create Space to Learn
4. It Get's Hard
5. Pause and Reflect, Remember Your Why
6. Start Again Inspired and Motivated.

***Notice "It Get's Hard" is part of the process, it is a very important signal for us to stop, to rest and to reflect.

Below is a List of the Life Skills that cultivate HAPPINESS in our lives created by Brené Brown.
 

In  her book Daring Greatly she lists 10 “guideposts” for Whole Hearted Living, that point to what wholehearted people work to cultivate in their lives and what they work to let go of in order to live a life that creates space for happiness and joy.

1. Cultivating Authenticity:  Letting Go of what People Think
2. Cultivation Self-compassion: Letting Go of Perfectionism
3. Cultivating a Resilient Spirit: Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness
4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark
5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
6. Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison
7. Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting go of Exhaustion as a status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth
8. Cultivating calm and Stillness: Letting Go of Anxiety as a lifestyle   
9. Cultivating Meaningful Work: Letting Go of Self-Doubt and “Supposed To"
10. Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance: Letting Go of Being Cool and “Always in Control”

(Most days I'm great at 5 and 10 the rest I am getting better at everyday)
 

I am sharing this list because of all of the lists I have seen out there on “Habits of Happy people” or “10 things you need to do to be happy” This list is the most REAL to me, it is the one that I resonate with the most and the one that I go back to time and time again for inspiration and motivation STEP NUMBER ONE in my process….I hope it might be able to do that for you too.


 (If you like the list I would recommend picking up her book Daring Greatly- Brené Brown and watching her TED Talk video The Power of Vulnerability.)

Much Love,

Alanna

Serenity Life Coach, Reiki Practitioner, Speaker

Check out my website: www.shiftingperceptions.ca
Contact shiftingperceptionsalanna@gmail.com