Happiness, A secret ingredient towards a better life:
Shawn Achor a winner of dozens of teaching awards at Harvard University, emphasizes on the idea that happiness can transform your failures into a success. If I rephrase whatever I have learned from his TED Talk, his journals and his Facebook Page. In addition to this when I relate my past events and stories with his teachings. I must conclude he is correct, the way he is preaching the happiness is exceptional.
Happiness is tremendously important and it’s also an inner thing. The core root to happiness is inner peace. If we make peace with our own selves, our situation, environment, work place, salary and every other thing then we can be a fabulous happy person. Shawn highlighted that happiness isn’t a genetic thing, it depends on our approach and attitude towards our own selves.
I can totally relate almost my entire life with the advising’s of the Shawn. I used to be an emotionally depressed person because I could not make friends. Most of the times I got rejected from the social circles because of poor grades at school level. This made be really depressed and emotionally stuck. When I moved to the college I thought that If I can get good grades may be then it could be possible that I can have happiness as well as social acceptance. I got good grades, came at the top but still I wasn’t happy and wasn’t able to achieve social acceptance. It made me even more sad and depressed. I couldn’t confront people, in addition to this I kept on asking my own self that where am I lacking? My grades also fell, so did I kept on falling and falling and more falling.
When I moved to a University level still I could not pull myself out of this depression till two semesters. After two semesters, my life changed totally. I became friend with a girl who totally changed my ideology of happiness, rather than chasing the happiness we should start looking for it into our own selves. This is what I learned from her as I observed that rather having so many obstacles in her life she always seemed happy. This has helped her a lot. I also started to work on this ideology. I started to help and motivate others, this gave an ample amount of happiness to me. I started doing small act of kindness like; helping poor people, motivating an emotionally depressed, person, saying kind words to others. All these things transformed me in to a happy person, a topper at academic levels and socially a popular person.
Now whenever sadness knocks at my door, I can let it in and deal with it. Now I can confront sadness with a happy approach i.e. to analyse it, to look for solutions, working on them and moving on. Not just getting stuck in the depression anymore.
I am already using two steps that have been suggested by Shawn that are; gratitude and random acts of kindness. I always show my gratitude to every single human being I come across and I am already doing the random acts of kindness, as I mentioned earlier.
The third step that I can possible add into my life is exercise. I already know “Pilates” but I was unable to continue it. I am going to add it again in my life.