Happiness is something we all want, and learning how to cultivate it for ourselves is deeply empowering. When we feel like our happiness is mostly dependent on external circumstances— how other people respond to us, whether things are going our way, the weather, the traffic—we can feel helpless to create and sustain our own inner sense of wellbeing. It’s when we learn how to source our own joy from within by cultivating an empowered mindset that we begin to feel happier in our experience and more aware of how we can have some measure of control over our own baseline state.
The way we think is extremely important. The mindset you choose to cultivate will affect your entire life experience. Happiness is not a destination but rather an attitude that you choose to travel with.
Here are a few simple mindset tips for creating more joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment in your life:
1. Remember that life is not happening to you, it is happening for you. When we interpret challenging things that happen as punishment or as being some indication of our worthiness, we put ourselves into a victim mindset that makes it very hard to be happy. However, when we ask ourselves, what might this experience be teaching me?, we enable ourselves to grow through life’s challenges and enjoy that process of evolution. In every experience there is a golden nugget that has the possibility of improving our life in the future—always look for it and allow yourself to navigate life’s ups and downs with curiosity.
2. Think of things the way you want them to be. So many of us pay attention to how things are in this moment and then spend our energy evaluating how much we like them or don’t. Rather than doing that, ask yourself what the ideal situation looks like in this area of your life. Instead of belaboring your painful breakup, spend your mental energy imagining what being with your ideal partner would feel like. How would the relationship of your dreams feel to you? Start using your imagination to create a future in your mind that you’re excited about. This is how we begin to create a life we actually love living in.
3. Pay attention to abundance, not lack. Every subject is really two things: The presence and absence of that thing. When we think about money, for example, we could think about the money we have and feel grateful for what it provides us, or we could think about what we don’t have. By feeling abundant (or rich) in an area of our life, we attract more abundance to us. Spend your mental energy being appreciative of all that you have in the specific area of your life that you would like to attract more (love, health, success, money, support, friendship). When you do this, you begin to make yourself magnetic to what you want.
4. Be your own best friend. The longest conversation we are ever going to have is the one we have with ourselves inside our head. That conversation is like a radio station that plays all day and forever—so make it a feel-good station, not a highly critical news program. Whenever you become aware of your inner critic being harsh or unkind, choose to come back to self-compassion. So many of us can be so compassionate with everyone else and so hard on ourselves. We create our own unhappiness with our own self-judgment and self-blame. When we choose to speak to ourselves more supportively, we enable ourselves to feel happy and succeed in our lives. When we choose to practice this regularly, we empower ourselves to create and sustain an inner wellbeing that we can take anywhere.
Practicing these mindset tips is a moment-by-moment choice, and it’s like building a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it gets. As you begin to consciously reorient your mind in these ways, you will start to notice your life experience becoming lighter and happier. You will begin to see good things come into your life, and you will feel like you have more spaciousness and joy within you. Happiness starts with us, and it’s deeply empowering to be able to create it for ourselves.
For information on Katie Wee’s Happy Camper retreat, check out Palmaia—the House of Aia in Playa Del Carmen Introduces a Happy Camp Retreat with founder Katie Wee.
