Part of the guide: Personal Brand
Let’s be real here. Circumstances can definitely make someone unhappy, or at least play a role in one’s unhappiness. If you’ve been dealt a bad hand, sometimes you can’t help but feel unhappy.
With that said, a LARGE part of our happiness comes from within. It comes from our thinking, talking, behavior, and actions. It’s very easy to generalize unhappy people and happy people. They share common traits and habits.
If a Buddhist monk can be happy with nothing but the clothes on his back; you can be happy with whatever your circumstances are right now. Here are just 4 disastrous habits that will make you unhappy. If you’re guilty of any of them; you need to stop them now.
In this guide
1. Surrounding Yourself With Negative Influences
This is probably the worst ‘habit’ of anyone trying to be even remotely happy or successful. Who you talk to, what you read, listen to, and watch has a massive impact on your life. Your input, whatever you put into your brain, controls your thoughts and speech. Together they form your beliefs and values.
If you surround yourself with negative chatter… With people who tell you “life is unfair”, “you can’t always get what you want”, “your business is a pipe dream” and “you need a safe & secure job”; you will most inevitably become unhappy.
These influences will form beliefs deep within your subconscious mind underneath your awareness. With negative influences, these will be limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs are the sole reason 99% of people don’t get what they want out of life. They have these ridiculous beliefs like “I’m not capable of building a business”, “I’ll never find a spouse” or the classic “you have to work hard to make money”.
Change your input, your influences; and you will change your entire belief system.
2. Living In The Past
This is a deadly habit! Accidents happen, mistakes are made. You can’t live life thinking about how you could have prevented a disaster in the past. Lost all your money? Lost your wife to another man or screwed up a relationship? You have to move on; there is zero point spending any energy whatsoever thinking about bad past experiences. It can damage you, significantly. It can tear you apart.
To be truly happy, you have to focus on the now. If you don’t, life passes by and you’ll miss a whole load of opportunities.
3. Focusing On What You Don’t Have
I’m not sure what’s worse; focusing on what you don’t have or surrounding yourself with negative influences. Both are near equally as bad as each other. If you go through life thinking about what you don’t have; you will only attract exactly that; what you don’t have. You will attract the same life, nothing will change for you.
You can’t go through life comparing yourself to others. Most people compare their jobs, incomes, cars, houses, and social statuses with those around them. All you’ll accomplish doing this is lowering your own self-esteem.
You have to realize that you are excellent. You are powerful beyond belief and you have come so far and overcome countless obstacles in life. Life isn’t a competition, if you think you’re competing you’re limiting your success. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, focus on what you do have.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Gratitude is essential for attracting what you want and being unconditionally happy. If you’re grateful for what you have, appreciate how far you’ve come; you’ll only attract more positive things. You’ll expect more of the positive in your life and more will come. Gratitude is a universal law always in motion.
4. Procrastinating
Unhappy people procrastinate. They don’t act on their instincts, they don’t listen to their intuition. If you’re one of those people who procrastinates before you do anything; make a conscious effort to be more spontaneous.
Write down a list of 5 things you can quite easily do each week. A trip to another country? Go-karting? Starting a business? Whatever it is, act on impulse, instinct and intuition. It’s difficult to be more spontaneous. The best tactic is to set a date for something you know you’ll procrastinate about.
When the date arrives, you’ll feel that tug, that feeling of procrastination. Simply practice overcoming that feeling and doing what you want to do. Practice overcoming that feeling.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also, opt-in to the email list for more tips, tricks, and secrets on being insanely productive and happy.
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Comments (carried over from the previous site)
KatherineD_IEM, March 14, 2013, 01:33
Hi there. Great post, and thanks for the ping back. I really enjoyed reading your advice, these are great tips that will truly help people who are aiming for a happier life. 🙂
Katherine D (spam link removed).
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The ‘cut out negative influences’ advice reads different in a town of four thousand people. The guy telling me a business is a pipe dream is also my hardware supplier and my neighbor. I can’t just remove him from the input diet, so mostly I’ve stopped talking business with him. Same effect, without becoming a stranger in my own town.
Lonnie, I don’t have the option to add negative influences to a to-do list. I don’t have hours left to build new anything.
Nia’s right that the piece assumes an energy you may not have some weeks, and that’s worth naming honestly rather than around. Where I’d push back gently on the article itself is the idea that focusing on what you lack ‘attracts’ more lack — that’s not a moral failing, it’s just being tired and honest about your circumstances, which is a different thing entirely.
Hollis, agreed, and I’d separate the gratitude framing from the actually usable part underneath it. Instead of a gratitude list, try naming one thing you did today that took real skill, not luck. It reframes ‘what you don’t have’ without pretending being tired is a mindset problem. What would that one thing be for you today, Nia?
Nia, we called this same list ‘attitude is everything’ in the 90s, then ‘law of attraction’ in the 2000s. Same four points, new decade. The tired part never gets fixed by any of them.
Tried the ‘write down 5 things you’ll do this week’ list from the procrastination section. Week one, three done. Week three, zero — the list itself became the new thing to procrastinate on. Setting one specific day and time for one thing worked better than five vague intentions ever did.
Twenty-two years of corporate life taught me that ‘gratitude is a universal law always in motion’ is exactly the kind of sentence that would have gone on a poster in the break room, right next to the one about synergy, underneath a stock photo of a sunrise nobody in the building had actually seen. The procrastination section underneath it, though, is the one part of this I’d defend — the advice to pick a specific date rather than a vague intention is genuinely how the better project managers I worked with got anything shipped. Odd thing about these posts: decent, usable advice, wrapped in enough universal-law language that half the audience tunes out before reaching the useful bit.
‘99% of people don’t get what they want’ — based on what measurement? That’s an assertion dressed as a statistic.