20 brutal truths about life (no one wants to admit)

Happiness and optimism are often misunderstood.

Yes, happiness and optimism involve looking for positives and focusing on what’s good.

But just as importantly, happiness and optimism involve being realistic; facing up to cold, hard realities and tackling them head on when necessary.

Accordingly, there are certain truths about life we all need to acknowledge and address…

via Inc.com by Matthew Jones

It’s much easier to talk about the weather, sports, and celebrities than your fear of mortality.

Unfortunately, the more time you spend pretending that ultimate truths don’t exist, the more time you waste not being your authentic self and getting the most out of every precious second.

Time, not money, is your most valuable asset. Allow the list below to ignite the spark of motivation you need to make better use of the time you have on this planet.

Sometimes we need to head into the storm to appreciate the light and have a renewed passion for the beauty of life.

Here are 20 brutal truths that every single person needs to hear.

1. You’re going to die and you have no idea when.

Stop pretending that you’re invincible. Acknowledge the fact of your own mortality, and then start structuring your life in a more meaningful way.

2. Everyone you love is going to die, and you don’t know when.

This truth may be saddening at first, but it also gives you permission to make amends with past difficulties and re-establish meaningful relationships with important figures in your life.

3. Your material wealth won’t make you a better or happier person.

Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who achieves his or her materialistic dreams, money only amplifies that which was already present.

4. Your obsession with finding happiness is what prevents its attainment.

Happiness is always present in your life–it’s just a matter of connecting to it and allowing it to flow through you that’s challenging.

5. Donating money does less than donating time.

Giving your time is a way to change your perception and create a memory for yourself and others that will last forever…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE

How to achieve your goals … according to the experts!

Happiness is many things including … setting and working towards meaningful goals.

The satisfaction and sense of achievement we gain from accomplishing something is a very special form of happiness.

But as with many aspects of life; it’s easier said than done. So here’s what experts in psychology say really helps…

via Business Insider by Chris Weller

Success doesn’t happen by accident.

A wealth of psychological research has found the people who achieve most in life take the same deliberate steps to make sure they reach their goals.

Sometimes it means minimising the value of will power; other times it means dusting yourself off after defeat.

Here are some of the psychological strategies the most successful people adopt in their daily lives.

They maintain a ‘growth mindset.’

In the 1960s, psychologist Carol Dweck came up with the idea for two different kinds of mindsets. She called them ‘growth mindsets’ and ‘fixed mindsets.’

Growth mindsets give people the ability to see themselves as capable of change — notably, growth — while fixed mindsets cause people to view themselves as fully realised, or unchanging.

Having a growth mindset leads to far higher achievement than having a fixed one, Dweck’s research has found.

They have grit.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth has found time and again that the ability to recover after failure is one of the most common traits of successful people.

Duckworth calls this resilience ‘grit,’ and it’s often the grittiest kids who get into the best schools, get the best jobs, and, incidentally, win the most spelling bees.

Some experts have even said grit is the single-most important trait to become successful…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE

What you DON’T do is just as important as what you DO do!

by Dr Tim Sharp (aka Dr Happy)

I’ve spent the best part of 30 years studying human behaviour, emotions such as happiness, success and productivity…

…and one of the most important lessons I’ve learned, from the research, my practice, and from working with hundreds of very successful people is that it’s just as important to determine what NOT to do as it is to determine what’s important TO DO! 

So much has been written and spoken about “to-do lists” and productivity hacks and how to do more; sometimes we forget that there are times when doing less is far more efficient and effective.

And even if we do want to do more; we only have a limited number of hours in the day and days in the week (etcetera) that those hours and days should be filled with priority activities. Which by definition means all NON-PRIORITY activities should be eliminated. 

And again, this is something I’ve most certainly observed in the friends and clients I know who’re very healthy, happy or successful in some way. Quite simply, they waste markedly less time on useless tasks that return little or no benefit.

So next time you ask yourself what you need to do to be happier or better in some way; pause for a minute and also ask yourself … what do you NOT need to do? 

…So that’s today’s mailing. Take some time to reflect upon the message and how it might apply to you. Check out, also, the links below for some additional readings and resources.

I hope it helps you enjoy some more happiness. Until next time…

Keep well & keep smiling
Tim Sharp (aka Dr Happy)

Build your resilience with these 5 proven strategies

I spend much of my time, not surprisingly, talking about happiness.

And I spend much of that time busting myths and misconceptions about happiness.

Obviously, happiness involves enjoying good times.

But just as notably, happiness also involves getting through and/or coping with difficult times.

Resilience, therefore, is a crucial component to living a happy and flourishing life…

via the Ladders by Eric Barker

Every now and then, life punches below the belt. How can you be resilient when times get tough and you feel bad?

There are all kinds of strategies for feeling happier and showing grit. But most of them are very conscious and deliberate. And the truth is, most of what we do every day isn’t all that conscious and deliberate.

Ever since Freud, we’ve known that a lot of our behavior is unconscious. If that’s the case, shouldn’t you leverage your unconscious mind to get through the tough times? Only makes sense, right?

Now I don’t know much about my unconscious mind. (I mean, it’s unconscious, right?) So I called an expert on the subject. Tim Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By.

Tim has some, well, mind-blowing insights about how your brain really works. You’re gonna learn a lot about how that grey matter functions, how to fix it when it can’t cope, and you’ll even find out how to get to know yourself better to avoid future messes, how to stay happy when things suck, and even how to become a better human being in the process. (Now how’s that for value?)

But I do need to make a disclaimer first: I’m gonna have to shake your confidence in yourself a bit before we fix it. We need to correct some myths — and some of the truths are a little disturbing. Hang with me. We’ll get you back to the Shire, Frodo.

Alright, forget what you think you know about how your mind works. You’re wrong about a lot of stuff. In fact, you’re wrong about you…

Your conscious mind is an overconfident storyteller

Okay, tough love time: you don’t know yourself as well as you think. Who you think you are, your personality traits, why you do things… your perception of yourself can be way off.

Think your friends would agree with you on what you’re really like? Actually, they would agree more with each other on your personality than you would agree with any one of them.

From Strangers to Ourselves:

First, the correspondence between people’s ratings of their own personality and other people’s ratings of their personality is not very high. It depends somewhat on the trait; for example, people tend to agree with others about how extroverted they are, but on most other personality traits the level of agreement is modest (correlations in the range of .40). Thus, Suzie’s judgment of how agreeable and conscientious she is correlates only modestly with how agreeable and conscientious her friends think she is. Furthermore, other people agree more among themselves about what another person is like than they agree with that person’s own ratings.

Some people would immediately push back on this, “I know what I’m really like! I can see me from the inside! Nobody else has that information!”

Yes, you have a lot more info about yourself than a stranger does but your conscious mind is kinda like the internet: tons of great information and an awful lot of inaccurate information as well.

In some areas you’d have more insight into yourself, but in others you’d be way off. When you average it all out, the information you have about yourself is about as accurate as a stranger’s read on you.

From Strangers to Ourselves:

Averaging across several studies, there seems to be no net advantage to having privileged information about ourselves: the amount of accuracy obtained by people about the causes of their responses is nearly identical with the amount of accuracy obtained by strangers.

I know: pretty shocking, isn’t it? Why is it so shocking? Because your conscious mind is basically an overconfident storyteller.

Your conscious mind doesn’t have any direct access to everything going on in your unconscious mind.

How do you determine what others are like? You watch and guess and make up a story. Well, your conscious mind does the same thing with your unconscious mind. Except your conscious mind is very overconfident about its stories.

From Strangers to Ourselves:

The analogy I favor is introspection as a personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives, much as a biographer would. We weave what we can observe (our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories, our own behavior, the reactions of other people to us) into a story that, with luck, captures at least a part what we cannot observe (our nonconscious personality traits, goals, and feelings).

Think about it for a second. You lash out at someone. You say they deserved it. Then you have something to eat. And you feel much better. You realize they weren’t being awful, you were just cranky because you were hungry. We feel emotions and our conscious mind scrambles to figure out why. And sometimes it’s wrong.

You think the voice in your head is in charge, that it makes every decision. But that’s true a lot less often than you think. Ever been so wrapped up in your thoughts while driving that you barely remember the ride home? You didn’t crash the car. You made the decisions that allowed you to arrive safely without consciously thinking at all about them. In fact, you’re on unconscious “autopilot” most of the day. But your conscious mind really loves taking credit for everything.

Some people are gonna get freaked out at this realization: “AHHH! I can’t trust myself! I’m not in charge! Why is my brain like this?”

It’s okay. Your unconscious mind is still “you.” But it’s not the “you” that is the voice in your head. To be fair, the voice in your head, your conscious mind, has a really really tough job. Actually, it has two jobs — and they’re often at odds with one another:

• Job 1: Provide as accurate a vision of yourself and the world as possible.
• Job 2: Keep you happy.

You can compare this to giving advice to a friend about their bad behavior. You want to be accurate enough that you can help them course correct but you don’t want to make them feel like a terrible person. It can be a tricky balancing act.

Sometimes you need to hear, “You’re right. Everyone else is wrong.” But other times you need to hear, “You are being a jackass and should get your act together.”

Seeing yourself with rose-colored glasses —  within limits — is a good thing. Keeps your self-esteem up and depression away. But too rosy and you start saying things like, “I bet I’m a natural at skydiving! I don’t need lessons!”

Your conscious mind doesn’t have perfect information about your unconscious mind, so it guesses. On top of that it also needs to try and keep you happy. So at times it comes up with very inaccurate stories about you and the world. Stories you often unquestioningly accept as “truth.” And that’s why sometimes you give its tales more credence than your underlying feelings and end up in the kind of job you think you “should” love — but don’t. Or you end up involved with the kind of person you think you “should” love — but don’t.

So what does all this have to do with resilience? (In fact, you may be feeling a lot less resilient now that you realize the voice in your head can’t always be trusted.)

(To learn the 7-step morning ritual that will keep you happy all day, click here.)

When life gets hard and you’re feeling really bad, knowing how inaccurate your conscious mind can be is actually a big help…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE

This one’s for parents who want to raise happy kids!

As a parent, they say you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child!

And it’s so true.

As a parent, also, we all want our children to be happy and healthy, successful and satisfied.

But as a parent, we all know this is easier said than done; so here are some tips from a 70 year study…

via Inc.com by Jessica Stillman

You may have read about Harvard’s Grant study, which followed 268 Harvard students for more than 70 years to figure out the keys to health and happiness (hint: the answer is just one word). The media has made a lot of hay out of the long-running research, oohing and aahing at its length and scope.

But I’ve got to tell you, the Harvard study is peanuts compared to the British birth cohorts.

After World War II scientists in the UK began what became a truly gargantuan undertaking. Interested in the conditions for mothers in the war-ravaged country, researchers decided to survey every woman who gave birth over a one week period in 1946. The result was some 14,000 detailed questionnaires about every aspect of birth in Britain at the time.

Then a generation later, they did it again, and again and again, surveying around 70,000 kids as they moved through their lives over a 70-year time period to see how they were doing in terms of health, education, and overall thriving. You can imagine the reams and reams of data generated.

What does it all boil down to? That is an enormous and ongoing question, but author Helen Pearson has a few powerful conclusions to share. In a TED talk last year (full talk below, hat tip to Swiss Miss) she explained what she learned as a scientist and mother from the experience of writing her book, The Life Project, on the cohort studies.

What does 70 years of data say about how to be a good parent?

Her first takeaway is both the least shocking and the most depressing: if at all possible, try not to be born poor. As just about everyone would expect, kids born into disadvantaged families grow up, on average, to do less well by any measure.

The trouble, of course, is that we can’t choose our parents. Some of us win what billionaire investor Warren Buffett has called “the ovarian lottery” and some of us don’t. And if that were all there was to it, the world would be unbearably sad. But thankfully, the cohort studies also reveal another profound truth.

“Parenting matters,” Pearson declares.

By comparing kids born in similar troubled circumstances and then following them to see which ones beat the odds, the researchers are beginning to tease out which parental behaviors have the most impact when it comes to promoting kids’ success and flourishing. And here’s the happy news — most of them are entirely within the reach of any parent, no matter their means…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE

It’s the quality of your social interactions that will boost your happiness

via Psychology Today by Art Markman

Human beings are a social species. Connecting with others is crucial, because that is how we learn about how the world works. That is how we accomplish tasks that require more effort than a single person could put in.

Because of the importance of our social interactions, it would make sense that engagement with other people would generally be satisfying and enjoyable for people. But, what kinds of interactions would make people happy? Is it enough just to be around people and to have casual conversations? Or is it important to be engaged in deep and meaningful conversations?

A prominent study by Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Shannon Holleran, and Shelby Clark in 2010 suggested that the quality of interactions matters. They had college undergraduates walk around with a device that would randomly record the audio environment over the course of a 3-day period. After the undergrads removed any content they didn’t want other people to hear, the researchers analyzed how long each participant was in the presence of other people and whether they were having casual conversations or were talking about more substantive matters…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE

Try this to build more self-confidence

via Inc.com by Scott Mautz

Each and every day, you give away your personal power in more ways than you realize. You undermine yourself with destructive behaviors or behaviors that simply make you look insecure.

But the most all-encompassing way you give away your power, because it insatiably devours so many wonderful souls and because it shapes your worldview, is when you strive for approval versus authenticity.

Stop focusing on gaining the approval of others and start improving who you are

When you seek approval, you’re seeking external validation, which is an empty victory at best and elusive and confidence and soul crushing at worst. When you seek approval, you worry about what the universe wants and thinks, especially if you’re a people pleaser (which is something I still have to work on to this day).

But when you seek authenticity, you don’t worry about the universe, you worry about the Youniverse–and I don’t mean this in a selfish way.

I mean you focus first and foremost on the North Star in your galaxy–living in accordance with your values and authentic identity and living up to your own standards, not someone else’s.

When you focus on the Youniverse, you focus on getting better than you were yesterday, not better than someone else, and you strive to serve the broader universe with your unique talents.

Now, if you struggle a bit with seeking approval too much, I can help. I want to share with you a simple rule, two numbers really, that can change your life. Two numbers you can, as a reminder, write on a sticky note and keep at your desk, or write on a whiteboard in your office, or even tattoo on the back of your hand, like one of my coaching clients did.

They are the numbers 90 and 10.

This stands for a ratio of 90 to 10–or the 90:10 Rule. This is the simple formula for how you should calculate your worth: which is to say it should be based on 90 percent self-worth, 10 percent assigned worth…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE