Everybody wants to be happy. No matter who you are or what you believe in. Happiness is one thing we all desire. Whether it is in our relationships, our work or in life in general.
There is just one little snag, unfortunately no one can make us happy but ourselves. Your happiness is in your own hands. Now I know there are a lot off people who disagree. People often think that God is responsible for their happiness or that happiness is something you get from you friends and family.
They are the people close to us and the ones that hurt us. God, well He let bad and good things happen to us that determines our happiness. Unfortunately that is not true. God gave us talents, emotions and decision making abilities. The most important thing that we receive is free will. The will to make decisions about our lives and our happiness.
If you are in a work situation where you are very unhappy, and you want a way out, you might have prayed about it and asked God to give you a way out. Yet, you feel like He is not hearing you, because you have not yet found another job, or that promotion that will help you out of your missery.
I know we cannot just pack up and leave our jobs when we feel like it, because we have to provide for our children and families, but we do have a God given ability to change our situations. If you are unhappy in your work situation, ask yourself why? Why are you doing the work that your doing? Is it because of the money, the perks, the status that comes with it, or is it just a job to have one.
If you are unhappy at work because of your boss that is always in a bad mood and picking on you, maybe you must not look outwards for a solution but look inwards. We cannot all like each other but there are ways for us to get along. Jesus once said look for the log in your own eye before you look for the splinter in your brothers eye, and I like to live my life by this.
Charity does begin at home and in most cases I found that if someone makes me unhappy I look at my actions and change them. Most of the time I am the one that makes me unhappy by the things I do and think. I personally have the bad habit of always thinking that people don’t like me or that they are angry with me and yes this makes me very unhappy. It was only once I started looking inwards to myself that I realised that I dont like myself and that I am upset with myself. That is why I experience this from the outside as well.
Once I started changing my mindset the people around me changed. I know change is not easy and it is very hard to admit that you might be wrong.
The great secret about true happiness lies within us. We all received talents. Thing that we are great at and things that we enjoy. These talents determine who we are in life. Most of us however ignore our talents.
When I went to university I had to work to pay for my studies. I decided to study law. It is a job where you can make a lot of money. That was the thing that motivated me. Meanwhile I was doing very well in my job because what I was doing at that stage was aligned with one of my talents. I love creating things and I was in a job where I could be creative and technical, but I did not make money.
I quit my job and started working in court. This was the worst time of my life. I was very unhappy in my job, I did not get on with my boss and my colleagues, and I never seemed to enjoy the work I was doing. Yet I was doing what I was qulified to do. It was only when I faced retrenchment and I received work at a high school as a teacher, that I realsed that although I was not making a lot of money I was always happy. It was a talent that I received and I was good at it. I then became a teacher and did not regret one day of it.
I am not saying that it is wrong to make money, but you can make money and be very happy in life when you do the work and live the the life you are made for.
Our Talents makes us who we are. When we are good at something we enjoy it and we thrive on it because we succeed. We succeed because we received the manual for our success at birth when we received our talents from God.
True happiness involves the full use of one’ s power and talents – John W Gardner
If you find yourself unhappy in life today, are you are doing what you were born to do?
Someone asked me the other day why I think people get divorced so quickly? I know that there are many reasons why people get divorced, but I think one of the main reasons is the little black book we secretly keep.
Most of us don’t even know that we have such a thing, but let me tell you this much – we all have one. Now I am not talking about us keeping dirty little secrets from our partners. I am talking about all the grudges we hold against each another. The worst thing about having an argument is that we always drag all the baggage of the past into it.
This becomes so bad that we end up separating because, I do not want to live with someone that constantly reminds me of the mistakes I made in the past, especially if I asked for forgiveness and that person told me that they forgive me.
The reason we do these things is because it hurts us and no human being like to be emotionally scared. There is nothing in this world as bad as emotional abuse. We all do it all the time and every day. Ever heard the expression hit him where it hurts? People know that if they really want to tick me off they must say something about my children or my weight; because those are the things I am most sensitive about.
One thing that we must understand about the past is that it is a done deal. There are so many people that loose their chance on true happiness because they dwell on the past.
One of my friends has a really terrific girlfriend, she is everything he ever wanted in a woman. There is just one very small problem. She was married; there were no children however my friend is devastated and very frustrated in this relationship, because she always compares him with her ex-husband. I know why she is doing it, she got hurt and she is trying to avoid that pain. Because of this hurt she is now loosing a great boyfriend.
All of us do that. We carry a big bag of the past on our backs that is so heavy. We walk into the future all bent forward and not able to see all the great opportunities that surround us. The sad thing about this is that we carry this baggage and we cannot do anything to change it.
The secret about forgiveness is it has to start with ourselves. We cannot forgive ourselves for the things we did in the past yet we expect God and others to forgive us. We keep on reminding them about it because we remind ourselves about it so often. We cannot change the past. The only thing about the past that we can take into the future in our memories and we cannot change memories.
True love forgives each other without keeping a record off all the bad things that happened in the past. The past is behind us and there is nothing we can do about it no matter how hard we try and how tight we hold onto it.
By orsillam | 6th May 2009 | Filed under
Dreams,
Life“Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value” – Albert Einstein
We all live for success. If we did not have success or the will to succeed in life, things will be pretty boring. We all define success in diffrent ways. Some people measure their success in monetary value. It is about the car you drive and the house you live in that determines to if they are successful. For others it is about how fast they can reach their goals that makes them successful.
No matter how we define success it keeps us going. I feel good if I achieve my goals and reach my dreams. It is a wonderful feeling when I drive past people and they look at my car or when they make a remark about the lifestyle I am living. It is a wonderful feeling.
There is no feeling like worthlessness. When we fail we feel like we are nothing. We do not tell people that we didn’t reach our goals or that we could not cling that big business deal that we boasted about awhile ago.
To be successful is not wrong at all but there is something greater than success. The fact that we can all be significant. The difference between success and significance is the focus.
It took me a long time to realise that there is more to life than just being successful and making a lot of money. I had the oppertunity as a young person to be very successful, I made good money in my job, travelled the world, but I was not happy. My sole purpose was about me. Years later when I started teaching , I realised that there was more to life than just success.
Teaching is not always about just giving children the foundation and the knowledge that they will need for the future. It is also being there for them as an advisor and sometimes even be the parent. Being in this position I realised that there is nothing in life more satisfactory than knowing that you could do something for someone else that meant something.
The best part is that it does not matter if they don’t say thank you for what you have done because their reaction is already the greatest reward.
Being significant is not about me. My focus moves me to what I can then do for others rather than what is in it for me, and once you realise this you will become what Einstein said – not a man of sucess but a man that lives for others.
On facebook they had a quizz recently asking how do you want to be remembered………… I want to be remembered as someone who made a difference.