The key to finding your inner happiness is to discover how your mind really works. We tend to feel anxiety, fear, anger, upset, and depression when the world is not meeting our expectations. Then we blame ourselves or other people.
Finding inner happiness happens effortlessly when you create a new relationship with your thinking.
The most difficult chapters of my life were when I lost hope. I believed that my life sucked and it would always suck. I felt like there was nothing that I could do to change it or improve it. And I believed that I couldn’t feel better unless something did change. I believed that finding inner happiness was impossible
Even though I’ve been a certified coach since 2000, all of my coaching skills and practices failed me when I discovered that the man I had been married to for 17 years was seeing other women and drained all of my finances. Psychology and self-help failed techniques failed me.
Here are some insights into the Health Realization Principles that were the key to my finding inner happiness. I was drowning in a sea of hopelessness and despair before I discovered them.
I share my story and these principles in my new course. Get a sneak preview here: Face the Sun: 7 days to finding inner happiness.
1. Want to change your life? Change your relationship to your thinking!
How did I find inner happiness? By realizing that we all live in the experience of our thinking, not the experience of our situation.
We are taught that what happens in the world creates our experiences, especially our thoughts and feelings. I see this when one of my daughters is upset, and I automatically ask, “What happened?”
“What happened” is the most disempowering of questions because it points to the outside world as the creator of our experience.
You are 100% the creator of your experience. Through your thinking.
2. You are seeing life through the filter of your thoughts.
We have been trained to live through the filter of our mental activity. It’s like our life is a baseball game and we have an announcer who is giving us the play by play of our life with continual judgments of good or bad.
And we believe the life announcer or life narrator. We actually think that this narration is real and is an accurate account of life.
It is not. It’s all made up.
Our life announcer is not reliable or trustworthy, no matter what the content of those announcements. It doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative.
Available now! Face the Sun: 7 days to finding inner happiness.
3. Inner Happiness comes from realizing that NONE of your thoughts are true.
We know that none of our thought are true when we realize that two different people can have the exact same experience and interpret it completely differently.
Our views of people and situations change all the time — if we get new or different information, if we get a crappy night’s sleep, if our hormones are out of whack.
4. It’s not about positive thinking or affirmations
If you were programmed with negative thinking about yourself by a critical parent or teacher, trying to say, “I’m awesome! I am a winner. I am a millionaire.” just won’t work.
Tapping, affirmations, vision boards, visualizations, none of that did anything for me. They just made me feel more broken. Like these techniques work for everyone else, why not me?
By this, I don’t mean for you to overlay positive thoughts on top of negative thoughts.
5. You are not who you think you are – you’re far greater!
You regain hope and begin to find inner peace by realizing that you are not who you think you are.
Who am I?
- Appearance: woman, light skin, brown hair, brown eyes, 5’3” tall, average build.
- Roles: mother, daughter, sister, friend, coach, consultant, board member.
- Education: BA in anthropology and MBA in finance.
- Work: transformative coach, author, entrepreneur, founder of self-directed schools, strategy consultant.
- Personality: INFP, Merchant-Innovator, and an ambivert.
But wait. None of this is who I am. These are just ideas or concepts about who I am and they change all the time.
Some days, I’m fabulous and am winning the game of life. Great mother. Surrounded by awesome friends. Doing work that I love.
Other days, I’m a total loser and can’t seem to do anything right. I need to lose weight, completely redesign my wardrobe, and find a soulmate.
And all of this is completely made up. I’ve hobbled together opinions that I got from people in my past, judgments about my appearance and accomplishments, assessments about my personality, ideas that I hold to be true about my strengths and weaknesses. I created this persona, Caprice, who I take very seriously.
6. What if the “Me” I’ve created doesn’t really exist?
Okay – my daughters will tell me that I’m not just a figment of their imagination. My dogs really appreciate it when I feed them. Yes, a person who goes by the name of Caprice does exist on this physical plane, but all my ideas of who this person is are all made up.
I invest most of my waking hours trying to be a better Caprice. I want to be more. I want to be better. Because if I am more or better, I will be happy and content and then I can finally relax and love myself.
But am I really my “thoughts of Caprice”? No. I cannot possibly be because my thoughts are continually changing. They ebb and flow as my mood and mindset fluctuate.
- If I believe that I am insecure, then I am.
- If I believe that I am lovable, then I am.
- If I believe that I am unworthy, then I am.
- If I believe that I am valuable, then I am.
It’s just a big shell game of ideas. How I perceive myself depends on which belief I hold to be true. And none of it is true. It’s just all made up.
7. Your natural state is inner happiness, you don’t need to meditate or do yoga.
If you search for “how to find inner peace” on the internet, millions of articles will pop up telling you what to eat, how much exercise and sleep to get, how to meditate. It’s all about the doing.
It’s our greatest cultural myth – that we need to do something to achieve inner peace.
The truth is that you need to un-do things to find inner peace. It’s the school or subtractive psychology.
For the next few days, I invite you to just watch your thoughts about yourself come and go.
Notice that they change. A lot. Do you see yourself differently when you wake up than when you are getting ready for bed? Do you see yourself differently after you work out? If you get a lousy night’s sleep? If you get in a fight with your boss, kids, or partner?
Send me an email and tell me how this little experiment went. You can just reply to this email.
And if, you want to explore this further with me, join my new 7-day online course. Available now! Face the Sun: 7 days to finding inner happiness.
with love, Caprice
p.s. never lose hope! Your birthright is inner happiness. If you feel hopeless, reach out to me. We’re in this together