10 Ways to Choose Happiness

Good evening, my friends. There was a fantastic book released back in the early 1990s titled Happiness Is A Choice by Barry Neil Kaufmann.

Since reading that book, it’s always stuck in my mind that this is a fundamental truth of life.

Some angrily rail against this idea, claiming that it’s a form blaming the victim. That’s only true if you plan to remain forever a victim in your life.

The idea that we can choose the feeling or the attitude is an absolute freedom we have over our circumstances.

In his seminal work, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl wrote:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Being a Holocaust survivor, Frankl realized the power to choose your attitude despite life’s harshest and most unjust experiences.

Neither he nor I deny that we are sometimes victimized by life’s vicissitudes. Rather that is was one of our true superpowers that we need not cede our right to be happy the circumstances around us.

Here are 10 ways to choose happiness every day.

1. Allow fewer people and fewer things to piss you off.
2. Know that negative situations are temporary and good times are on the way back.
3. Find joy in the little things.
4. Feel good about the success of others between your successes.
5. Have complete confidence that everything, everything that happens to you is a doorway to something great.
6. Remember who you really, truly are beyond the masks and the roles of this momentary situation.
7. Remember who other people really, truly are beyond the masks and roles of this momentary situation.
8. Put tough days behind you and start with the premise that today will be amazing.
9. Notice the million miracles happening all around you in every moment.
10. Know for certain, wherever life has taken you, it’s never too late to turn it all around and be the person you came here to be.

Live by these principles and I guarantee you, you’ll be able to choose happiness over and over again.

Wherever you are on your journey, remember you are awesome!

Ray