Does ’true happiness’ ever seem like a far-fetched possibility to you though? Like a rigged carnival game that keeps you striving for an unattainable prize? Maybe you finally get one area of your life smoothed out when another area starts to wobble. Striving for happiness can feel like a constant battle, and no one wants to live like that. Here’s the deal — Happiness is actually a recipe, and you’re simply missing some key ingredients. There’s usually a pattern as to why happiness keeps eluding you.
Here are four essential ingredients you need to create a truly happy life:
1. An ability to enforce clear, healthy boundaries
You can name all the healthy boundaries you want, but until you actually enforce them, they won’t help you. In fact, you’ll actually feel worse as they repeatedly get trampled. You must know what you’ll say and do in response to someone stepping over the line or invading your space … before it happens. Be willing to ruffle a few feathers or lose a few ‘frenemies’ in the process. Toxic friends and family members are not part of the truly happy life recipe, and well-enforced healthy boundaries provide a good way to discover who has your back … and who doesn’t. RELATED: 7 Subtly Brilliant Ways To Get A Man To Do Anything You Want
2. Rock solid self-confidence
Enforcing healthy boundaries takes true confidence. Deeply grounded confidence to stand up for yourself and ensure you’re treated the way you want, otherwise, you’ll never feel truly happy. You may know you’re great at your job or rocking your parenting skills, and that’s great. That reflects what I call ‘conditional confidence.’ Self-confidence is different. It’s a solid belief in yourself, regardless of circumstance, accomplishments, or what others think or say. If you don’t have that sturdy foundation of self-confidence, you won’t uphold the boundaries you set. In fact, chances are, you’ll violate your own boundaries first by inviting the wrong people into your life. Bottom line, you must feel intrinsically worthy of the treatment you ask for in order to get it … even from yourself. RELATED: How To Be The Kind Of Woman Men Simply Cannot Resist — By Improving Your EQ
3. A deep relationship with yourself
When you truly know who you are: Your strengths, weaknesses to improve, dreams, talents, values, lessons learned, etc., you feel more grounded, more worthy, and much more confident. If you are like most women, you’ve unconsciously looked for approval from others your whole life. As such, you’ve likely never even asked yourself the types of questions you’d ask the first date to get to know them better. Now you can see why breakups and divorces are rampant. Most people don’t have a healthy self-relationship, yet your relationship with yourself is the standard for all your other relationships. RELATED: 5 Little Tricks To Make Him Choose You Over Her
4. A willingness to free yourself from past pain
Your subconscious mind stores every experience you’ve ever had, so if you start to repeat a painful one, it will warn you in an attempt to keep you safe in the here and now. That’s very helpful in many cases, but by the time you become an adult, there are a lot of stored-up emotional experiences that keep you stuck. The way to release them is through energy work. That entails relaxing your conscious mind and sweeping out the clutter from your subconscious mind. Or you can think of it this way: You were born with new software, and now you need to do a virus scan and load in some upgrades. Updating the mental programs that keep you safe (and replacing the ones that keep you feeling stuck and stressed) with new ones that better support your success is essential to a good self-relationship and ultimately living a truly happy life. RELATED: 13 Magnetic Qualities That Make A Woman Irresistible To A Man Kelly Rudolph is an experienced, highly trained, and Certified Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, and NLP Practitioner. She has written for PopSugar, Prevention, The Good Men Project, and more. This article was originally published at Positive Women Blog. Reprinted with permission from the author.
