madi’s place

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?