By

Bill Cottringer 

  Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ~Mahatma Gandhi

     Unhappiness is easy to have, but having authentic happiness is life’s greatest challenge. Here are seven solid sources to find real happiness:

1. Physical Health.

   Physical illnesses, pain and injuries often encourage us to drift us into a serious state of depression, anxiety and unhappiness which we have to overcome to have enough happiness from these other sources. To a large extend good health depends upon genetics, a little luck, and a whole lot of healthy living with proper diet, regular exercise, stress-reducing hobbies, and substance use temperance. The greatest challenge in life seems to be how to grow old gracefully, especially when the limitations start showing up. This is where you have to become the person you have been pretending to be all along.

2. Personal Development.

     Personal development is a life-long journey of learning, growing, and improving into our best self, which is a process of climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from safety and security to belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. Life has many roadblocks to personal development, and these mainly involve trying to resolve three main conflicts that continually confront us—us vs. life, us vs. others, and us vs. ourselves. Like all these other source of happiness a positive or negative approach has the corresponding outcome and progress, or regression, comes from all the input from these other sources. Mindfulness, or staying present in the now moment and controlling mind wandering back to past memories or future expectations is a worthy skill to help advance personal development.

3. Mental and Emotional Health.

   Good mental health is basically like Mark Twain’s definition of common sense, or seeing reality as it is and doing something in the way it needs to be done, with smart thinking. It also involves learning how to see past the compelling illusions in life such as time, self, and certainty. And emotional intelligence can overcome a shortage of IQ points, with the effort to increase self-awareness, empathy, self-management, social skills, and intrinsic motivation. Mental health and emotional intelligence are a major part of personal and professional development, which can help develop healthy and satisfying relationships. But then again, so is spiritual development. Also having beliefs that benefit you more than having harmful disadvantages, is a good idea to consider.

4. Professional Development.

    A significant source of happiness in most of our lives comes from finding our unique vocational purpose and then developing our special gifts to achieve competence in our chosen profession. This applies to being a waitress, single parent, teacher, doctor, athlete, factory worker, or President of the United States. Having a sense of making progress at our career quest to make a difference, can result in much happiness. Efforts towards professional competency and confidence is very much intertwined with growing these other six sources. Sometimes you can find this purpose by asking yourself what you do best and have the most fun doing or asking trusted others about this. Financial stability is a big part of professional development and depends on working towards a balance between income and spending and saving. Seeking free fun is the safety valve here.  

5. Social Skills.

     Social skills are needed to do something we must all do to be happy and that is getting along with other people. The main social skills include developing our likeability, communication skills and empathy of others’ perspectives. Likeability means being positive, a good listener, trustworthy, accepting, agreeable, humorous, real, and humble. The best communication usually occurs by intentional avoiding defensiveness in creating a supportive tone by conveying equality, acceptance, sensitivity, tentativeness, freedom, and spontaneity. Empathy is having a genuine connection with other people to understand their different perspectives from your own.  

6. Satisfying Relationships.

   Much happiness can come from having enjoyable relationships with family, friends, and domestic partners. And of course, the opposite causes serious unhappiness. But satisfying relationships don’t happen by chance. They take a lot of hard work, flexibility, mutual trust and commitments to grow and improve together in resolving the inevitable conflicts that occur when building the relationship. And relationships can flourish when all these other six sources are tapped. Good communication is also a key to having good relationships. Sometime men need to control their need to fix things and just listen. And women may need to learn to live with the limitation that you can’t always have your cake and eat it too.

7.  Spiritual Health.  

     Spiritual growth is a life-long process in growing your sense of belonging, obedience to a higher power, ability to love unconditionally and understanding and acceptance of what appears to be unacceptable. More than anything it is achieving a healthy balance between managing your ego and being humbly appreciative. More than anything else, spiritual growth requires an openness to experience without giving into the temptation of making judgments. Life is made up of polar opposites that we have to learn not to further divide into artificial opposite qualities like good vs. bad, desirable vs. undesirable or true or false. The moral principle behind spiritual health is a consistent effort to do good and avoid doing harm.

8. Miscellaneous.

      Of course, there are several other simpler ways to have faun and enjoyment and be happy.

Just a few of these include:

     The good news is that all these seven sources of happiness interact with each other to compound happiness. The bad news is that the same is true for unhappiness. For example, personal relationships can be greatly improved when we strive to achieve better personal development, social skills, and spiritual health. But unhappy relationships can quickly happen with physical or mental health problems, career difficulties or poor use of social skills.

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be. ~Abraham Lincoln.