The 2021 International Day of Happiness

“What are you so happy about?”

This question has been hurled at me more times than I can count over my 53 years…

• When I tried to use humor to divert an awkward situation.

• As I shared my glass is half full perspective.

• Sometimes just because I was smiling.

But hurled it was.

As if it were an accusation, rather than a question.

The implied “what gives you the right to be happy?” was often not just an insinuation but asked outright – usually in prelude to informing me that I was naïve, sheltered, or simple-minded.

When I was young, I immediately backpedaled, ashamed that I had done something wrong. I believed those things and tried to become more serious.

It was decades before I understood that the question never had anything to do with me at all. It was a reflection of the asker’s inner workings, of a dissatisfaction with how they were feeling.

And it’s no wonder…

Have you ever gotten a lesson on being happy?

More likely you were confronted with a paradox: “I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re happy” and “What do you have to show for yourself?”

Happy was never held up as a metric of success in our culture, but rather as a reward that came from success.

In fact, happy without achievement was often associated with “stupid” in popular culture.

Enter the happiness revolution…

• Happiness book after happiness book hitting the best-sellers list.

• Research is suggesting that happiness creates success rather than the inverse makes headlines.

• Happiness has become the goal.

(This post BTW was inspired by this year’s UN International Day of Happiness Theme, Happiness for Everyone, Forever.)

But there’s a problem…

If you’re like most people, you don’t know how to get there.

We all have personality pre-dispositions and genetic tendencies that impact the way we approach happiness, but happiness itself?

It’s a skillset you can learn.

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This Week: Living Happy

Learning to live a happy life starts by removing the obstacles to happiness (spoiler alert: these obstacles don’t come from your circumstances).

There are 3 behavioral traps that get in the way of happiness.

We all fall into each of them, but tend to default to one. Once you know which trap is your default, you can start to shift those behaviors. You can learn to be happier.

The best part? We’ve (fellow coach Dana Hilmer and I) developed a quick FREE quiz to make it easy!

Your quiz results will reveal your default Trap. Plus you’ll get specific information about how to get rid of that trap and start feeling happier and more at ease.

Click below to take the quiz. It’s 100% free and absolutely PACKED with info that you can use immediately.