Take Back Your Power – Be Happy

For way too long I’ve been guilty of seeking my happiness from external sources. It’s so liberating when you rediscover that your happiness lies within you. Your happiness is not in a lover, your children, a job, or even your friends. It is within you and only you. I know sometimes we get pulled into things that make us feel that this is the source of our happiness. i.e., a romantic relationship, a new job, a new car, winning the lottery, etc. but it’s really not. It just seems like it is. Because it makes you feel good, but that feeling will dissipate just as quickly as it came because it was an external stimuli.  You are the only one who can determine if you’re happy based on your external stimuli. If you only allow your happiness to be determined by external stimuli, then you run the risk of only being happy for as long as that experience last. Then you go back to being unhappy until the next external experience occurs. Because of that your bout of happiness may be like a rollercoaster ride and that can be exhausting.

If your happiness is based strictly on external stimuli, then it could also be diminished when your self-worth is not validated by external experiences.  There may be times when your best effort will go un-noticed and your value diminished in the eyes of others because they are too blind to recognize/see your worth or the value you bring to their life.  As people continue to ignore your value and self-worth you become depressed and unhappy and may seek for ways to encourage people to validate you thus restore your happiness. Again, this can be exhausting as well as time consuming. This emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows becomes like a full-time job that pays you dividends in bouts of short lived happiness that will eventually take its toll on you both physically as well as mentally. The dependence on external stimuli to maintain your level of happiness is not the best way to manage your happiness. You need to find ways to stimulate your happiness from within. 

Truth is the best kind of happiness is one that comes from within. Happiness generated from internal stimuli is one that is not dependent on anyone or anything outside of you. It is a feeling of self-worth and self-appreciation that consistently causes you to smile for apparently no reason. It is overall approval of who you are and needs no external validation to promote or ignite a feeling of good feeling. In fact, when you are truly happy from within, external stimulus only serves to enhance your experience of happiness. 

So how do you uncover your internal happiness? I’m glad you asked. First, take some time to evaluate yourself. Look at all the things that makes you YOU. Make a list if you need to in order to help you have a visual of what that looks like. Write down all your great qualities – all the things you like about yourself. Include all your blessings too – things that are going well for you. Have a sense of self-worth and feel good about yourself, by so doing you gain confidence and increase your self-esteem. You may run into a few mental road blocks that may include how people make you feel. Don’t list those. The trick is to keep reminding yourself that no one else’s opinion of you matters unless you chose to give it validity. How someone treats you is not a reflection on you or your value but a revelation of who they truly are and a reflection of them.

The truth is most times than not people don’t feel good about who they are and are unhappy with themselves and they project those feelings on you. The ugly truth is that the only way they can feel good about themselves is to degrade others in an attempt to elevate their own self-worth. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met people who pretend to be someone other than their true self. But eventually they drop the persona and their true self is revealed.   If people cannot accept you for who you are and continue to feel the need to devalue you to make themselves feel better, then they should not have a place in your life. Quite making people’s opinion of you dictate the way you feel, live or love. Take back your power and rediscover the happiness that is in you. Your only job/focus should be to feel good if not great everyday despite what is going on around you.  I’m just saying – I got issues. What about you?)i(