The Daily Habits Of Genuinely Happy People (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #617

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in. What would you say to the listener is there some practice, something that they can do to let's say reinforce their ability to take that decision day in day out?

[Andrew Matthews]
I think one of the first things we can do is make a conscious decision not to complain. We know that whatever we think about we tend to talk about. We think about food, then we talk about food.

But the reverse is also true. The things that we talk about, even in our quiet moments, we tend to think about and we keep thinking about things that we've been talking about. So if we are complaining about our neighbor and our mother-in-law and the government, then that is going to make us unhappy because we continue to think about the things that we keep talking about.

So if there's something that we can fix or that needs to be addressed, then of course we will talk about it. But for the sake of just complaining, then we stop that. Forty years ago I made a decision that was just a thing that appealed to me that never, ever in my life will I complain about the weather.

I'm just not going to do it anymore. And it's given me so much time. I never complain about the weather.

I mean, we can do things like that. So not complaining is a practical thing we can do. Another thing we can do is make a point of giving people compliments because in order to give people a compliment, we need to be looking for good things in people.

And so we find what we look for in life. So that's number one. Then we let people know what we appreciate in them.

They feel happier. But the extraordinary thing is we feel even happier than they feel, and we are the one that gave them the compliment. So that is really powerful.

And that also leads into the understanding that happy people are kind people. And if we notice the people around us that seem to get the most joy out of life, they are kind people. They do things that they're not even asked to do.

They help people when people aren't even asking for help. They just do it because it's something in which they find joy. So making the conscious connection between joy and happiness is useful.

And there's another thing about happiness, Aggie, and that is being kind to ourselves. People say, do you need to love yourself? Well, you need to at least like yourself because we create the life that we feel we deserve.

And if I don't like myself, then I may live with a partner who treats me badly for 20 years. I might stay in a job where I'm treated badly. I will overlook opportunities, and I will probably not look after my health or my body because I don't like myself.

It's so important that I forgive myself for not being perfect. And one thing that I would recommend is that we get a photograph of ourselves when we were maybe three years old when we didn't have all the answers and we were just living life the best way that we knew how, and put it somewhere, maybe on your desk, where you can see it every day and decide to treat yourself the way that you would treat that three-year-old child because you still don't have all the answers and you are still just living life the best way you know how.

[Agi Keramidas]
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