The purpose of our lives is to be happy. – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
I blog here at OCAAT not only to make myself and yourself monetarily richer. I also want you and I to feel richness in every aspect of our lives. An important part of this is emotional richness. Emotional richness is a state of mind when you feel happy about being you. It is a state when you love and cherish your existence.
When I am happy, I finish a lot of tasks, I complete long pending assignments and I do my things faster. In other words my productivity increases when I am happy and I feel good.
In every job you do, every work you do, your mind needs to be happy about it or you don’t get a joy out of your work. It’s very difficult to be always happy, at least I don’t know anyone who does that, I do believe that many a times we just don’t know the exact reason behind our unhappiness.
Sometimes it is just thinking about your sorrow that is enough to realize how silly the cause was. Whenever you are worried, feeling sad or depressed think about the reason. Is it genuine concern to be worried about?
Does it have a positive aspect too? Do you have any control over it? Is there anything good that you can think of, instead?
Sometimes getting a different perspective in thinking can completely change our mind set. Sit back, relax, give it a time and think it through.
Here Are 5 Ways To Feel Better About Yourself
1. Enhance Someone’s Life. For every rich in this world there are 1000’s poor. There is just no dearth of needy people around you. You may live in a locality of rich, but go out and watch the streets, the shelters, the homes. If you still can’t find poor people, read about how people in third world countries live.
Feel good about your situation, you have a car, a home and a family secured enough. You don’t have to think about tomorrow’s meal. Your next few month’s meals are secured.
Help the needy, do something for them now, you’ll never know the joy it can create in you. I give to my favorite charity. I am also an office bearer of a non profit which is helping schools back in India. The wishes those kids send back to us every year, is priceless!
Contributing to a good cause can make your day, can turn tears in to joy. Give giving a chance!
2. Do Some Activities. We need exercise, games, and conversation for our brain to stay stimulated and for us to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle. An early morning exercise could be biggest contributor to your productivity. I am not talking about working on something or the other round the clock, don’t make yourself a slave to your work.
When you feel low and out, Just get indulged in some fruitful activity, be it mowing your lawn, running errands or cleaning your file cabinet. Or, something as simple as windows disk de-fragmentation to improve system performance.
Completing a long pending stuff this way is a boost for your morale and it gives you energy to finish up other important tasks at hand.
3. Accept Your Weakness. No matter how great we are, we all have weaknesses, a bunch of ’em. First step is to know you have a weakness, the next is working towards rectifying that. Have a close and honest look at how your weaknesses are affecting you and the people around you.
How are they having a negative impact on your life? How are they holding you back? What are they costing you?
Sometimes it feels better to realize that the reason behind the failure is our weakness at certain aspects, rather than just thinking about that failure without any clue. It gives us a reassurance that once our weakness is rectified, we’ll not fail again
A self realization of weakness does make us willing to start working on it. The moment you start working on improving yourself, past failures would no longer seem bad, isn’t it? You consider them as just a lesson learnt.
If you have a shopping addiction, accept it and don’t pretend shopping is your birthright. Unless you accept your weaknesses, you can’t work around it.
4. Improve Continuously. Learn new skills, read books, be enriched in terms of knowledge. Education makes us humble, polite and reasonable. Irrespective of what you study or what you learn, knowledge intake makes us happy, increases self respect.
5. Find happiness in your surrounding. Look around and you will find a beautiful world. Enjoy finer things in life and feel richer every day. Exercise, meditate or just sit and think, reflect on your day to day life. What you like to do and what you don’t.
Plan your next few days in such a way that you do the things you like, most of the time.
Go out, be with your friends. Try to call someone you have been thinking about calling for many days. A nice long conversation with an old friend stimulates me to a great extent. When you are socially rich you are supposed to feel emotionally and monetarily rich as well.
Maintaining a rich and active social life along with a healthy diet and exercise can help anyone live a vibrant and happy life. There are few better ways to feel better about yourself than giving your time and effort to influence another person’s life positively.
Just remember, joy and sorrow are part and parcel of our everyday existence. One day you’re down, the next day you come back up!
Ending with a line from my favorite poet, Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky. – Rabindranath Tagore
Nice concept about increasing productivity. Thanks.
Thanks for your comment mam!
That’s a good point: often people use stress, fear, or necessity to be a motivator; however, being happy can be just as powerful of a motivator. Now, I am thinking of how many companies that try to create a culture of happy employees. Thanks for the tips SB and for offering great food for thought!!!
Being happy is nothing but changing way of thinking. We have every reasons to be happy always, isn’t it? Thanks for your encouraging comment!
Roshawn, on companies that create a culture of happiness, you should read the story of Zappos (before it was bought by Amazon).
Great points SB!
One of the best ways that I’ve found to be productive and happy is to be mindful of my attitude and my reactions to situations. I’ve found that each time that I think about what my reaction will be, I tend to choose the better of the solutions. My first solution usually involves tearing it down – the second solution, or the better path, tends to consider other people.
Thank you for this post! 🙂
Emily that’s a very effective approach you are taking.
Recognizing that I have a weakness is difficult. I try to be the best at everything I can do. I think one important trait left out of your post is to have motivation. You have to challenge yourself to be successful. Set the bar a little higher than you think you can achieve, and then attempt to reach that higher bar.
Actually the intention behind this post was only keeping your soul happy. A motivation actually might not bring happiness, it sometimes brings competitiveness and jealousy and both are on bad side of things. a motivation is sure enough to keep you ahead, but this is all about being happy with what are.
One of the pitfalls of overdoing the whole productivity, personal finance and lifehacking route is that you tend to turn it into an obsession that slowly eats into your real time with people. Nice post to put things in perspective, that the only wealth of any consequence is love, peace, meaning and happiness.
Thanks Subhorup I will keep this in mind.
Awesome post!! As someone who has gone through a substantial personal growth stage the last few years, I can say I can relate or have first hand experience with everything you have said. I definitely vouch for enhancing someone’s life. I do a lot of volunteer work and it is very rewarding to know you are making a difference. I have also learned to accept my weaknesses. Instead of trying to change them all the time I now just try to control them and be aware of them so that I can adjust my behaviour. It works so much better and I am not nearly as discouraged as I used to be. Plus I feel a lot better about myself knowing that I don’t have to be perfect.
Your emotions are well captured in your comment, Miss T.
I do find myself being extra lazy at work when i’m tired or depressed about losing money in the stock market. when I’m happy and feeling good about something, my productivity goes up a lot! So there definitely is some correlation between the two.
We both are in the same boat Charles. I am definite its same for rest as well.
I never really thought about the direct link between productivity and happiness before, but you’re right that when you’re happy you get more done (and of course feel better about it in the process.)
Yeah, the theory is developed by closely monitoring my productivity over months. I read a related article in the summer and since was thinking about it.
I wish I can find some ways to increase my activities especially exercising. My doctor keeps telling me to exercise regularly but I continue to fail in this area. My excuse is I am too busy with raising my kids and taking care of my family. But, I know it’s just an excuse. Why is it so hard?
Yes loosing weight and saving money are similar, very easy to implement but, difficult to start and maintain. I am sure you always think about starting your exercises tomorrow, isn’t it? You just need 10 -15 mins of tomorrow time, so easy..let’s start tomorrow then. 🙂
Am i wrong?
I think the area most people need to feel better about is there job. Thanks to compensation, it is easy to work a job you don’t really like. Some of your list would easily carry over to the work world too. Improving continuously, for example, you can immerse yourself in your job, even if you don’t like it. Sometimes increasing our knowledge of a topic helps us to enjoy it more.
One effective way to do the job you don’t like is to think about the benefit it can provide to other people.
Awesome post! People are always looking for ways to be more productive. Setting goals, making a plan, doing tasks, but if you just make yourself happier, that is a huge boost for anything you need to tackle. Knowing your weaknesses and always improving, great stuff!
Yeah, just be happy about yourself and everything around you, that’s the mantra
I have found that donating to charities really does help improve my state-of-mind. Volunteering does, too. I volunteer at an animal shelter and it makes my day every time I’m there. Doing things for others really is the best way to feel better about yourself. It works.
I too found it amazingly true. When we give things to others it gives us more satisfaction than buying a fresh new things from the store.
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Thank you for sharing with us. Keep it up
SO where exactly is the connection between the article and your comment?
Its really incredible to me. Now a days it can make easy to promote the business as easy as possible. Yes now-a-days facebook is most popular social network site and it promote multidimensional activities. I like this post. I think it would be effective for all community.
Who else thought of yes man when you saw this?
not quiet sure if I get this