What if you learned that there was a way to guarantee that you would be happier a month from now than you are now?
Would you be curious about what that way was?
What if you found out that by learning and implementing this, you could also continue to guarantee being more happy beyond next month, next year and far into the future?
Would you be excited to learn more? Would you be willing to try it out and discover if it really works?
If you answered yes, then the rest of this post might be very exciting to you, because there might actually be a way to do this!
On the most basic level of our life, happiness is a result of how much the things in our life match up with or exceed our expectations.
If what is currently happening in our life meets or exceeds what we were expecting, then we feel happy on the most basic levels of life.
If what is currently happening in our life appears as worse than what we were expecting, then we feel unhappy on the most basic levels of life.
So we can think of it as a simple formula for basic happiness:
Stuff meets or exceeds our expectations = happiness
Stuff doesn’t meet or exceed our expectations = unhappiness
What most of us do is to attempt to get stuff to meet and exceed our expectations and then once that happens, we try to keep it that way.
We are just trying to use the formula.
But what happens over time when we continue to do this?
We find that sometimes we can get stuff to meet or exceed our expectations and sometimes we can’t. We also find that once things are meeting or exceeding or expectations, they often times don’t stay that way. Additionally, we often times discover that as soon as we get stuff to meet or exceed our expectations, we suddenly begin having larger expectations.
All of these create the experience of feeling happy sometimes and not happy other times and it feels like our future happiness is outside of our control; that there is no way to guarantee how happy we will be at any point. But what if we’re wrong?
What we overlook when we feel this way is a very important part of the happiness formula above. We overlook the one thing we do have 100% control of: our expectations.
We may not be able to predict or influence exactly how or what stuff shows up in our life, but we have 100% control over what expectations we bring to what shows up. We can guarantee what we will choose to expect next month, next year and 30 years from now.
This gives us a tremendous amount of influence over the happiness formula and thus a tremendous amount of influence over our future happiness!
Remember the basic happiness formula we talked about above is:
Stuff meets or exceeds our expectations = happiness
We may not always have control of the stuff, but we always have control of our expectations.
If we decide to only expect things that we can guarantee happening, then the stuff that happens will always meet or exceed our expectations.
This will create the result of us always being happy at the basic level, as long as we choose to do this!
This is one of the secrets of happiness that many enlightened spiritual leaders have learned. But we don’t have to wait until we’re completely enlightened to make use of it.
So how on Earth do we decide to only expect things that we can guarantee happening?
First we discover what expectations we can guarantee happening. Then we eliminate all the other expectations we might be holding onto.
Here is my current take on how we can do this. I’ve broken the entire process into five steps that work together to help you experience greater amounts of happiness as you take each step. I’ll share the basic idea of the first one here.
Step1) Eliminate all your expectations except that:
You are always noticing or acting on some improvement happening
If you let go of expecting anything to happen – except that you will notice or act on some improvement happening – this can guarantee that you can be happy at the most basic level no matter what happens.
You can decide now that no matter what happens, next month, next year or 30 years from now, you will not expect any particular thing to happen except that you will do your best to either notice or act on some improvement happening – that’s it.
If this feels exciting to you, try this out today or over the next week and discover how much lighter you can feel and how much more happiness is available to you that you may have been overlooking.
Then there are four other steps to this process that can help you guarantee happiness at higher levels also.
Thanks for reading and thanks for choosing to be you!
-Andy
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