The word ‘Joyful’ is explained as follows in The Positive Dictionary:
Joyful: Be joyful about all the good things in your life.
* A joyful attitude is contagious.
Work, rush, stress, worries….
What happened to being joyful?
The fact is that our outlook on life and our attitude can easily become skewed because of all the pressures in life. We worry, we stress, and many times it is about unimportant, even imaginary things. It contaminates our outlook on life and makes us negative. It limits our opportunities for enjoyment and it prevents us from being truly joyful in life.
Our lives consist of two major components, namely our lives in the workplace, where we earn our livelihood, and our lives in general where we experience family life and the wide ranging facets of the world around us. The two components are mutually interconnected and form one whole in our lives. What happens in one component can affect the other component. Our outlook and attitude in the workplace can affect our outlook and attitude in our lives in general and vice versa.
The workplace is filled with stress factors. There is the daily stress of maneuvering through the traffic to be on time at the workplace. There are sales targets to be met, performance measures to adhere to, budget constraints, timelines with deadlines, deadlines causing overtime, conflict situations, coping with change and much more.
We do, however, have a choice in how we handle the stress factors in the workplace. Instead of being affected negatively we can decide to cultivate a positive outlook and a positive attitude of action in the workplace. One way to do this is through the power of positive words. We can change our thinking and our attitude by practicing the meanings of positive words. When we have a positive outlook and attitude the problems in the workplace become opportunities to use our skills. Performance measures become personal goals, deadlines become challenges and change becomes an adventure. The workplace then becomes a place of enjoyment and fulfillment.
In our lives outside the workplace we also have to cope with a variety of stress factors. We can, however, handle these stress factors also with a positive outlook and attitude of action. Here we have other opportunities to make time in our lives for enjoyment, to stop the rush and to break away. We can make time for enjoyment in our family life. We can make time to relax and to be peaceful. We can make time to see a film or a play, to go to a hockey game, to visit friends, to hike in nature or anything else away from work. We can enjoy the pleasure of reading a good book. This is all good and necessary to keep a balance in life.
There is, however, a difference between enjoyment and being joyful. We can enjoy humour, an experience or an event. Enjoyment is a series of enjoyable moments which are refreshing, rejuvenating and exhilarating. It creates fun, smiles, laughter en energy. These moments are stored in our memories and we can relive them and again experience the enjoyment.
To be joyful, however, is to experience a continuous deeper feeling of gratitude. It is a feeling of happiness about all the good things in our lives and also in the work situation. To be joyful is an internal emotion which radiates outwards and affects others positively. It alleviates the stresses and strains of life and makes our senses more receptive to the beauty and all the good things around us.
With a positive outlook and attitude we discover how much we have to be joyful about.
The Positive Dictionary Ebook and other ebooks are available from Phil's website as shown below.
