Inside The Edge
About
My
Four Cents
Jamie O’Neill’s “My Four Cents” articles offer a great change of pace from the typical literature you may find on a management consultant or leadership development web site. Most of the time, self-improvement is about assessing and amending your personal skills; however, every once in a while it is necessary to take a step back from it all and consider broader topics like your personal values and goals. “My Four Cents” forces you to do exactly that.
With her down-to-earth and practical perspectives, Jamie offers a view of the world that everyone can derive some value from. The articles in this section allow you to remove yourself from day to day trails and focus on what you consider to be truly important in your life. So take the time to read a few; we think they will really help… but hey, that’s just our four cents.
| If You're Happy and You Know It, Don't Be Afraid to Show It! |
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Are you happy? Now hold on, before you hit the back button on your web browser, I want you to seriously consider what I am asking here: are you happy? If you were to ask most people if they were happy, I would speculate that most would not know how to honestly answer the question. Happiness is intangible and can be based on so many things, how does one really answer that question? My daughter Jordyn, aged 3, is in preschool. Lately, when I pick her up at night, the first question out of her mouth is “Hi Mama, are you happy?” At first I was confused, what do you mean, am I happy? So day in and day out, I always answered her question with, “Yes baby, I’m happy.” As the weeks went on, so did her propensity to ask me the same question every night – are you Happy? Her question got me thinking (and a little annoyed to tell you the truth, kids just seem to keep asking the same darn questions over and over). Was I really happy? So one night last week, she asked me again and instead of just providing her with my cookie cutter response, I said, “You know what, right now I am not very happy. Mama is sad.” To my amazement she said, “I thought so Mama, I just wanted to make sure.” Come to find out, in her preschool, they were teaching the kids all about emotions and each day they were drawing out what different emotions looked like. It was all about understanding how to read people and for weeks my daughter was reading me right. I wasn’t happy (hence why she kept asking me)! A lot of personal stuff was going on and my mood was obviously shining through. And the worse thing about it, I was lying to my daughter. Talk about sending mixed messages! Here she was trying to understand emotions and here I was masking how I really felt in an effort to protect her. The truth is, happiness occupies the minority emotion in many of us. Most of us would rather lather up in pessimism, focus on what is not right in our lives. If we catch someone smiling too wide or laughing too loud we often wonder, “What’s up with that person? What are they smoking?” You know who these people are, always so annoyingly happy! How can they be so happy all the time? My hypothesis: I believe that many of us are embarrassed to be happy. Remember when you were in school, and you got an A on your exam but all of your friends got C’s, how you hid your score so no one would think of you as some brainiac nerd? I believe we carried that logic into our adult years and have learned to downplay our happiness in fear that our happiness could threaten those around us. How backwards is that? I believe that if more people actually admitted their happiness instead of trying to find excuses to be so darn negative, we’d all be better off. Now don’t get me wrong, everyone has things in their lives and some people are dealt some pretty ugly cards. I find though that it’s often the people with the most difficult challenges that have the most positive outlook on life. They have seen the darkest of all dark days, they can appreciate what happiness really is, and they do everything they can to get back to that place. Happiness is a choice. No, not every day is filled with winning scratch tickets, raises, and rose pedals, but we all have a thousand things to be thankful for. My daughter was right. How I was feeling on the inside wasn’t showing itself properly on the outside. Life is all about ups and downs, but we need to be able to share this ride with our friends, family, and co-workers. When you are down in the dumps, admit it, and when the world is your oyster, don’t be afraid to shout it out. Take a stand. You deserve to be happy, and your family and friends deserve to see you happy too. Who knows, this new logic could become contagious - but that’s just my 4 cents!
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Yes, you're right. Happiness is a choice. There is a difference between happiness and joy though. Sometimes happiness depends on our outer circumstances whereas joy comes from our inner attitude.
Life has its' ups and downs, good times and bad times. If it were all ups and good times we would not appreciate the bad. This gives us a greater reason to put things into perspective and appreciate the good stuff.
Creating positive attitudes, creates a nicer environment and get better results.
Better attitude= creates more joy= a more consistent feeling of happiness.