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Category “happiness & fun”

How to Want Less and Be Happy About It

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“Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.” ~Channing Pollock

The vast majority of my life has been a giant race to get things I’ve assumed would make me happy.

More money so I could do what I want when I want. A more meaningful career so I could feel both fulfilled and proud of myself. More connections so I could feel loved and worthy. And mostly, more distractions so I could avoid acknowledging why I was unhappy with myself.

“I’m making progress,” I’d delude myself. “I’m pushing myself to accomplish big things that will help people …

20 Ways to Let Go of Regrets

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“Every new day is another chance to change your life.” ~Unknown

You know the moment. It happens right after you realize you did something you wish you didn’t do. Maybe you broke someone’s trust and now the guilt is overwhelming you. Maybe you compromised your job in some way and now you’re terrified your world will come crashing down.

Regardless of what you did, you can feel your anxiety like a stack of red hot bowling balls surgically implanted in your stomach. (Dramatic? Yes. Regret is rarely reasonable!)

It’s that dreaded “Good God! Oh no! What was I thinking? Why …

4 Self-Defeating Attitudes That Stand in the Way of Happiness

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“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” ~Unknown

I grew up believing that nothing I did was ever good enough, and this is something that I still carry with me.

It affects every aspect of my life: my hobbies, skills, my relationships, and even the understanding I have of my body, physical appearance, and my mental health. I often think that I must have done something quite terrible in a past life to go through any of this, to not be good enough.

As certain as I’ve been of this, I’ve been sure I wasn’t responsible for these attitudes …

10 Ways to Let Go and Overcome a Bad Mood

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“Every day may not be good, but there’s something good in every day.”  ~Unknown

We all get in bad moods, no matter how positive we try to be.

Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep last night. Or you feel overworked and overwhelmed. Or perhaps something happened and you keep dwelling on it, going over and over in your head how you froze up in a meeting or spoke too aggressively to someone you love.

Whatever the case may be, you feel something you don’t want to feel and you’re not sure how to change it. You just know you need …

40 Ways to Live Life Without Regrets

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“The saddest summary of life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.” ~ Unknown

We all have something stored in our memory banks of the past that we wish we could have done differently, or something we wish we didn’t do.

As we get older we learn and grow, but that doesn’t mean we have to regret what we did before we learned how to do things differently. If we didn’t go through those experiences, we might not have grown into the strong and knowledgeable people we are today.

What I’m proposing is that we get rid …

Challenge Week: Kill Your Stress, Befriend Yourself & Dominate Positivity

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“Challenges are what make life interesting, overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.” ~Joshua J. Marine

Hey, I know you’re busy. Aren’t we all? But it’s time you did yourself a favor. Investing in yourself is a surefire way to give your mind a growth spurt without any stretch marks.

Take a week to reinvent your mindset. Each of these steps requires minimal effort but yield maximum reward. What are you waiting for? Let’s do this.

This “cleanse” is laid out over the course of a week, but you don’t have to follow each day in any particular order. Tailor …

How to Release the Fear of Failing: 20 Inspiring Definitions for Failure

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“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.” ~Buddha

You didn’t get the job. You couldn’t raise the money. You missed the deadline. You hired the wrong person.

You didn’t ask for help. You let someone you love down. You failed to plan in advance. You bit off more than you could chew. You forgot something important.

Worst of all, whatever the case, you set the stage for a million questions about what it means and what you should have done.

When you don’t do something …

10 Things That Are Real: How to Take a Break & Connect with Yourself

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“The world doesn’t happen to you, it happens from you.” ~Unknown

It’s easy for me to drown in the sea of day-to-day things. How can I not when technology, social networks, phone calls, and the pressure to be successful in spite of the economic downturn constantly bombard me?

It’s almost as if catching a breath of air, and not a forced one, has become increasingly difficult. The world as we know it is constantly evolving before our eyes. How are we to keep up? Must we keep up if it means losing sight of the simplicities we cherish?

Some of …

How to Enjoy the Journey More by Eliminating the Word “Should”

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“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” ~Proverb

A friend of mine once said, “If there’s a word in the English language I detest, it’s ’should.’ What a pointless, useless, waste-of-space (euphemism for other choice adjective) word.”

I think he’s right on the money. At the risk of sounding hypocritical, you should consider the definition of should, as defined by dictionary.com:

Should: must; ought (used to indicate duty, propriety, or expediency): You should not do that.

There is always something we feel we cannot and should not do for fear of humiliation, regret, having …

50 Things You Can Control Right Now

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“Why worry about things you can’t control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?” ~Unknown

CNN reports that psychic businesses are thriving in this challenging economy, and the clientele has expanded to include more business professionals who are worried about their financial future.

According to Columbia Business School’s Professor Gita Johar, who studies consumer behavior, the greatest motivation for visiting a psychic is to feel a sense of control.

Sure, there are lots of things we can’t control: businesses may fold, stocks may plummet, relationships may end—the list is infinite, really. But wouldn’t we …

Embarrass Yourself

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“To get something you never had, you  have to do something you never did.” ~Unknown

You’d like to start presenting to clients, but you’re afraid of looking like a deer in the headlights if they ask questions you can’t answer. So you keep thinking about it, waiting for a time when you feel more prepared. More ready. More in control.

You’ve considered telling your friends you want to publish your novel, but you can’t stand them knowing you failed if things don’t pan out. So you keep it inside, protecting your ego but reinforcing to yourself that you likely can’t …

Undecide

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“Open minds lead to open doors.” ~Unknown

We start forming opinions at an early age and continue all through life.

We decide what we think is right and wrong, what’s good and what’s bad—not just on a larger scale (religion, politics, ethics) but also in every-day interactions.

How people should act. What people should think in certain situations. What it’s okay to feel and express, and when it’s smart or polite to do so.

We develop ideas about how the world should be to support our beliefs and views—things we learned from our environment and experiences—and inevitably feel a sense …

Why You Should Prosper Even Though There’s Suffering in the World

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I write a newsletter every week, and last month a subscriber emailed me with a question I thought was worth exploring.

… I guess what I’m getting at is if everyone had a choice, treating sewage would be the last thing one would want to do. Isn’t it? Well, yes, I’m making that judgment. If everyone was Wayne Dyer or that money guru lady Suze Orman, we’d all be reaching fantasy levels of achievement. That is what they seem to be proposing is possible.

But someone still has to take out the trash. If we’re all living big, then who’s …

50 Ways to Be More Peaceful and Mindful Throughout Your Day

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“Peace is not something you wish for. It’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.” ~Robert Fulghum

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting 1000 Awesome Things, a blog devoted to the many simple pleasures in life. Some of them remind me of being a kid, like this one about celebrities on Sesame Street. Others remind of me I’m stronger than I think, like this one about getting through difficult situations.

With that in mind, you can imagine how excited I am to receive a copy of Neil’s …

One Simple Way to Make a Big Difference in Someone’s Life

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“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”  ~Samuel Johnson

Just after my mother’s colon cancer surgery, my father was laid off from work.

I was sixteen years old and felt silently helpless and terrified. My mom had been attending church but, on this certain day, she didn’t feel well enough to attend. After this particular church service, an exceedingly thin, frail, elderly woman approached me. She requested if I would please accompany her on an errand.

I felt too afraid of being disrespectful of the elderly, so shyly I …

40 Ways to Use Time Wisely

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“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ~Annie Dillard

Time. It is arguably our most valuable commodity.

Unlike treasured gems, precious metals, and any other prized possessions, time can’t be hoarded, collected, earned, or bought with hard work, money, dignity, or our soul. It slips away whether or not we choose to pack meaning into it. Use it or lose it, so goes the saying.

Though we all know how limited our lives are in the time-space continuum, we sometimes act like we don’t know the value of time. We use words like spend…

Compare Well

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“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” ~Lao Tzu

Conventional wisdom suggests that if you want to be happy you shouldn’t compare yourself to other people. Conventional wisdom isn’t always realistic.

Try as you may to completely stop making comparisons, you’ll likely come back to the instinct at least on occasion.

Discontent is part of the human condition—the nagging sense that something’s missing, even when you seem to have it all. We’re constantly evolving, growing, and looking for new ways to expand our impact on the world, new ways to …

Get Luckier

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“Care and diligence bring luck.” ~Proverb

When things aren’t going well for you, it’s easy to blame it on bad luck—to assume other people who are doing better had more help and advantages.

Nothing could be less empowering. This line of thinking just confirms that the world is unfair and you have limited control.

While both those things are true on some level—life isn’t fair, and in many ways, we’re not in control—happy people take responsibility and create their own luck, while their unhappy counterparts sit around blaming misfortune, feeling bitter that other people appear to get all the breaks.…

8 Ways to Increase Your Joy Factor

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“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

When I lived in Santa Monica a few years back, I developed a friendship with a woman I learned a lot from. She was a yogini, writer, and actress.

One day she asked if I wanted to take a ride to her dentist’s office with her.  She said it was fifteen minutes away but would take forty-five minutes to get there. Noticing the difference in the times, I asked the obvious question.

“Oh,” she said, “I always …

On Learning to Set Priorities

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“Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.” ~Sogyal Rinpoche

Sitting in the ICU waiting rooms during recent months waiting to visit Mama, my life slowed down more than I can remember in recent memory. I had a lot of time to think about what I’ve done with my life in recent years.

Many things that seemed important at the time all of sudden seemed trivial. I realized how much my life had gotten out of control. I wasn’t a drug addict or alcoholic, …