The Happiness Mindset

Happiness — believe it or not — is a learned skill. It’s not something immediately innate at birth. Children learn to smile through experience. And they do so before even knowing what it is or what it represents. Yet, we don’t seem to cultivate it with that in mind. As youth, our first educators might not even really understand it. Because being happy isn’t something that is commonly taught. Though most of us certainly try.

To be honest, I started writing this post in attempts to re-educate myself. These past few weeks of my personal life have been extremely stressful. With my intense teaching/coaching schedule; with the disappointing election; and with the seemingly endless quest for financial stability, I’ve been feeling down in the dumps. So I did what I always do and made time to write about it. That’s all I know how to do. I started researching this to help me find my sense of smile again.

I hope you might find some useful takeaways too.

As a starting point, I went back to one of the first things I remember helping me discover happiness as a young person: music. Growing up a beach kid, stuck on the east coast of New Jersey, I’d found positive influence in what many of my college friends referred to as “beach music” — better known as reggae-rock. Think Sublime or Rebelution. Beside the questionable vices that stem from this particular genre, there are some really good underlying messages that should be a staple for the human condition. One of the most commonly expressed is positivity.