If you want to learn how to be happy then you must first accept that your happiness is not dependent on another person. The reality is, there is only one person responsible for your happiness – you.
If you want to learn how to be happy, you must take 100% responsibility for everything in your life.
You must take responsibility for your achievements, the quality of your relationships, your health, your fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings – everything.
We are conditioned to blame others for the parts of our life we don’t like.
When life doesn’t go the way we want it to, some people try to blame their parents, their boss, their friends, their partner, the weather, the trains, anyone or anything they can pin the blame on. They find it easier to blame the outside world than take responsibility for their life. They try everything but blame themself.
Every experience you have in life, whether it be positive or negative, is based on how you respond to the world around you. If you don’t like your experiences, then you have two choices:
Choice #1.
Blame the outside world for the situation you find yourself in.
Sadly blaming is a waste of time. No matter how much you blame the outside world, it will never change ‘you’. You will never be happy as long as you blame someone or something else for your lack of happiness. If you are going to learn how to be happy, you have to accept the truth, it is YOU that has to take the action, think the thoughts, create the feelings and make the choices.
You have to give up complaining.
Complaining is based on the principle that there is something better out there. If you didn’t believe there was something better, you wouldn’t complain. Complaining is a waste of time because it doesn’t produce better results.
Remember, you only complain about things you can do something about, but have chosen not to.
You can get a better job, find a better partner, make more money, live in a nicer house etc.
But all of these things require you to change.
But people don’t normally like change because change involves risks, and we are pre-programmed to avoid taking risks.
Choice #2.
Change how you respond to the outside world.
Changing how you respond to events in your life is how you learn how to be happy.
But humans are creatures of habit and we resist changing our behaviour.
We are a collection of conditioned responses programmed in our unconscious mind.
Your responses were programmed early in your life and are reinforced every day by the way you respond to the events in your life.
For every event that you need to respond to, your unconscious mind searches its memory bank of stored events to find the closest match to the current event. When it finds the closest matches it then retrieves the associated response and emotional feelings that were stored alongside the memory of the event.
This saves you time and energy because you don’t need to constantly learn how to respond to every new event in your life. You just find the closest historical event and respond to the current event in the same way as the historical event. Good or bad that’s the way we work.
But its never too late to start changing your responses.
You can regain control of your thoughts and behaviour by reprogramming your unconscious mind.
Hypnotherapy allows you to access your unconscious mind in a state of deep relaxation to re-programme those negative conditioned responses using positive suggestion therapy. You lay down new neural pathways that allow you to respond differently in the future.
Rather than teach yourself not to act in a certain way you train yourself to react positively.
It is always about the positive intention.
Everything you experience today is the result of the choices you have made in the past.
You need to rediscover what your purpose is, what your values are and what your real goals are. Then you can permanently change your responses to the world around you.
If your day isn’t going the way you had planned it, then you can either blame someone or something or change your response.
If the external world did control your life, then it would control everyone’s life, but that simply isn’t the case.
Not everyone is having a bad day.
The next time you are on a train that is running late, look around. Not everyone will be having a bad day.
It is thinking positive or negative thoughts that make the difference.
When all is said and done, it is just a matter of attitude and behaviour that create our different experiences.
To be happy you must have control over:
[1] your thoughts
[2] the images you visualise
[3] the actions you take
How you use your thoughts, visualisations, and actions affects everything you experience.
If you don’t like your experiences, you have to change your responses.
You need to take a radical approach. Don’t change just one to two things. If you want to see a difference, change everything that plays a part in your conditioned response.
Look at changing your:
- negative thoughts to positive thoughts
- what you daydream about
- your habits
- what you read
- your friends
- how you talk to people
- how you talk to yourself
Change whatever needs changing. And don’t be scared of change. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
There is a famous saying:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Some say that insanity can be defined as:
“continuing the same behaviour and expecting a different result“.
When you think about the last one, it is just bonkers!
But how many of us are guilty of it every day?
If you’re a smoker and keep on smoking, you’re not going to quit smoking.
So, if you continue with your current behaviours, your life is not going to get any better.
It will just stay the same.
The day you start to change your responses, is the day your life starts to get better.
If you want something different, you need to do something different.
To find happiness, you must believe that you either cause or allow everything to happen to you.
Realise that you don’t have to be a victim and passively stand by and let things happen to you.
Accept you permit things to happen to you or your actions cause your experiences.
Nothing just happens to you.
Every day you receive warning signals, little telltale signs, comments from others, get a gut instinct or feel something intuitively. They all alert you and give you time to change the outcome.
Many of us ignore these warning signs because it requires us to change and do something uncomfortable.
Our unconscious mind convinces us to deny there is a problem and we carry on as normal because it is easier to avoid that confrontation, to maintain the status quo, all of which prevents you from taking risks.
So if you want to be happy you need to face facts.
You need to take the uncomfortable action to create the desired outcome.
When you start to take uncomfortable actions, it gets easier to take them again the next time.
You start to see improvements in your life which give you the confidence to take the actions again when necessary.
Learn to replace the negative self-talk of:
“nothing ever good happens to me” with “I am in control and can make things happen“.
To be happy you need to be focused, disciplined, try new things and take risks.
Start with asking yourself the following questions:
- What is working and what can I do more of?
- What am I doing that isn’t working?
- Is there anything I need to do less of?
- What am I not doing that I need to start doing?
- How am I creating or allowing things to happen to me?
You need to stop judging yourself, believe that the changes you want to take will be effective and just have a go.
You won’t know if it works until you try!
And remember, no can do it for you.
Only you can do it for yourself.
The golden rule is simple: do more of what is working, do less of what isn’t working and experiment with new behaviours to see if they produce even better results.
But don’t lie to yourself.
Be ruthlessly honest and take risks.
If you want to find out how hypnotherapy can help you learn how to be happy by taking total responsibility for everything that happens in your life, get in touch to book your free consultation.