Your Life Coach

“Our subconscious mind is responsible for a large slice of the results that we get in life.” - Andrew Matthews “Being Happy”

I recently re-read that line in the opening of Andrew Matthews book Being Happy and it struck me just how true that statement really is. There’s another quote which Andrew cites later in the book, this one is from Abraham Lincoln, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.”

Our subconscious mind is really responsible for a lot of things, including our outlook on life. One person may see beautiful, positive things where another person sees only negative, cynical things. Your subconscious is leading you to see things in different ways.

Part of the problem is that we call this our subconscious and believe that we have no control over it. This is simply not true, we do have some control over our subconscious mind. We can train it to be more positive, to see beautiful things and to make us more happy. We are able to choose what we see and what we think about things.

There are several ways to become more happy by training your subconscious mind. One way is to use affirmations, along the lines of ” I am happy and successful”. Such a simple saying when repeated regularly and over a period of time will become ingrained into your subconscious mind and you will notice yourself, indeed, becoming happier and successful.

Allied to affirmations is the power of positive thinking. Many of us have deeply ingrained negative thinking that leads us to recognise sadness and unhappiness. We need to replace this negative thinking with positive thoughts that enable us to emphasise the positive possibilities of our daily life and to emphasise the happiness that we find around us.

Happiness is often linked with the concept of perfection. We detect degrees of unhappiness because we are not perfect. Somehow, we or our lives are not living up to our expectations and this causes us unhappiness. So we either struggle to achieve our expectations, which leads us to the belief that we shall be happy only when we achieve our expectations, or we give up on our expectations and resign ourselves to feeling unhappy. Happiness is not a goal, it is part of the process.

Looking back through Andrew’s book, I am reminded of what I liked about it when I first read it. It’s style is simple, pleasing, almost childlike in places. This gives it a wide appeal to people of all ages. There is humor in it as well as philosophy and practical tips. The book is branded an international best seller and quite rightly so. It is a book I could recommend to almost anyone.

Other significant posts about being happy;

The Life Optimizer blog offers you 17 secrets of happy people. This is well worth the read.

The LifeHack website asks you what is it going to take to make you happy? There’s even an assignment to try at the end!

Alex Shalman reckons that being happy can be dangerous!

Raymond Tan reminds us that happiness is a journey not a destination

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