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Michael Wigge

5 Life Changes that Made me Happy

The number of self improvement books related to happiness is probably endless and everyone seems to have a true solution how to live a happy life. After having read many of these books, I find five steps to appear in most of those literatures. I am convinced that they do a huge change to your lives — they definitely did to me.

The BIG 5 Of Happiness

Happy me!

1) Gratitude

Being grateful seems to be one of the strongest steps to take for happiness. We do have a choice. Is it just normal that we live, socialize, work, travel and so on? Or are we aware that this is something very precious? How much gratitude do we show our friends for inspiring us or to just go with us through life? Scientific studies have shown that people with a strong attitude of gratitude are often 20% happier than others.

2) Forgiveness

We can also choose if we forgive others and ourselves for wrong doings or stay mad about those experiences for a long time. I think it’s pretty logically that forgiveness eradicates negative feelings like anger in us. Avoiding angoing anger also means lowering anxiety and strengthening self-esteem. By forgiving others we automatically forgive ourselves for things we have done in our life and that makes us happy.

3) Acceptance

How much do we accept in the world around us? Is everything acceptable the way it is? Or do we tend to judge people, situations and experiences? He’s not good, that place is not ok either, etc. There are great practices to learn how to stop judging everything around us. That does also have an amazing effect on our happiness, because a non-judgmental attitude connects us with everything around us instead of being sepparated by it through judgement.

4) Compassion & Love

It already says in the bible ‘In love there is no fear’. It’s true and simple. In psychology and coaching there are two general emotions, love and fear. With enough love we eradicate fear and feel happy.

Being compassionate is the kind of cherry on top of the cake, because it’s proven that compassion makes us wiser, healthier and more attractive to other.

5) Giving

We may often tend to think that giving equals giving away. But it’s the exact opposite. Giving means receiving. There have been incredible experiments on this topic, where people received an amount of money. Those people who spent it on others rather than on goods for themselves felt after the experiment much happier than the ones who consumed the goods.

I think these BIG 5 are a serious tool to change people’s lifes. There are several meditation techniques that support boosting those characteristics. Feel free to contact me for questions related to those techniques to info@my-challenge-coach.com.

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