Become Your Own Happiness Coach (My Biggest Secret)

Today, I will reveal a secret that I never shared with anyone else, about how I became a happiness coach, and how you can become one, too, whether you want to teach others or just want to be happier in your personal life.

The secret is: whenever I talk with someone, listen to what they are saying, or look at different life events, I ask myself: “what is the lesson here?”

Often, the lesson may be easy, but sometimes it isn’t that intuitive.

For example, let’s look at current events, such as the war between Russia and Ukraine, and let’s ask “what is the lesson here?”

Some of the answers I came out with are:

- Personal sense of safety is for our well-being, and

- When problems appear in my country/location is it possible to leave this location immediately?

The next question, of course, is:

- So how can I feel safer? Should I take martial art classes or be proactive by moving to a less threatening location? and

- How flexible am I today to leave my own country if I need to do it immediately? Here, the problem may be the need for money and a flexible career path that would allow me to work anywhere in the world.

Over time and after asking yourself “what is the lesson here?” you will accumulate many different answers, which eventually you will have to sort through, trying to understand what is urgent and important from what is less so.

Personally, I also have a happiness journal, where I write down what happened yesterday or today, diving into how I feel about these events. There, I highlight different lessons, trying to keep things organized, separating observations from the lessons, and later transcribing all my lessons into one place.

I guess this is exactly how I got enough material for my book Optimal Happiness, my blog, and my programs, and I even have enough ideas for a few next books I want to write.

So while you could technically hire someone who has already done all this work, you can do it yourself, by dedicating some 10–15m each day to look at your life and think through what happened, trying to understand what you can learn from it, so you can apply it in the future.

If you never did this before, this may be exactly why you are unhappy today, with the solution to all your problems sitting right under your nose.

In fact, in my practice, I regularly tell people to lead a happiness journal, which I later review, helping them to address their issues in a lasting way, using nothing else but the lessons from retrospection.

A few quotes come to mind:

“God helps those who help themselves” and

“The bigger the problem, the bigger the lesson”

Overall, to be happy, we just need to think about our problems and proactively create different ways how we can avoid similar problems down the line.

So here is an exercise for you:

Choose a problem or a life event, and ask yourself “what is the lesson here?” Feel free to share your answer in the comments, with “clapping” being also a great way to support this idea and this post.