Category Archives: happiness

Hi, so glad you are here.

Well, as long as we talk about happiness, joy, and purpose, life goes on. What happens to the feelings that turn us down?

If we are only our successes and our happiness, who are we when we fail?

Who are we when we are gloomy, disempowered, confused?

Check what gives you power first and then ask yourself: What takes power away from me and leaves me disempowered?

Chances are that you think what takes energy from you is the opposite of what gives you energy. Only by analyzing it independently we realize that what gives us power is not the opposite of what takes power away from us. It is different.

Think about your successes and failures, they are not opposite, they are different. The opposite of both success and failure is inaction. When we take action, we always win, because we learn. That is what defines us: what we become, not what we are. In that sense, any failure leads to the possibility to change, to improve, and it is not wasted.

What gives you a sense of disempowerment rises from a sense of lack of control, usually a shared sense of lack of control. When someone tells you: you can’t do that, they really mean I wouldn’t know how to do that. Or worse even: if you do that, I can’t justify that I couldn’t do.

Disempowerment lives in your brain, not in your reality. It is a learned behavior. And the best way to overcome disempowerment is to turn it into a gift. If life was about learning something quite peculiar and important to you individually, wouldn’t your life long goal be to overcome that challenge?

We usually don’t feel brave enough to confront what disempowers us, because of fear of pain, without realizing that it will haunt us back until we learn that lesson. We might as well, get it over with and move to the next challenge.

In the mean time, let’s just reflect upon what takes power away from you. What is it? Is it related to something real or imaginary? Can you THINK about what takes power away from you, without feeling disempowered?

On to you, Alicia

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Hi, so glad you are here. We are covering the dark side of life…

Life without pain would be boring. We get sick… we suffer… we are alive. I can’t but imagine our son in law battling cancer. Or the victims of war, earthquakes, tsunamis, and acknowledge that “s” happens. Furthermore, if we are healthy we give it to the world, every single day. And in turn the world makes something with it. Plants need our manure, to create flowers and fruits.

… and I wonder, can we make something useful of pain?

When I was 13, I felt of a horse and broke my appendix. I fainted with pain several times but was too scared to tell. I barely made it. At one point I felt floating above my body, connected through a thick thread, looking at my body on the bed with pity for dying so young. Then a nurse came and realized that the saline solution drip had punctured through my vein and my arm was swollen. Mum had fallen asleep next to me. The excruciating pain of the massage woke me up. I had been in coma for 4 days. It took me several weeks to recover, and I was quite scare of feeling that pain again.

Unlike happiness, pain leaves a strong imprint on our brain, and flashes out – danger, danger, danger: so we change, are careful, stay alert, learn, slow down, run, and so forth.

Without a strong memory of pain, we would have not survived, or maybe those who had such connection with pain where the ones able to survive long enough to reproduce.

On many occasions though, it is not pain but the memory of pain that runs the show. That is also why we can connect with other’s pain and why the best movies and books have some sort of drama. That is also why news are most likely ‘bad news’ so we are glued to our pain and we share it and talk about it. Happiness doesn’t have that glue.

Understanding the mechanism of pain helps us use it: how is this pain useful?

We can turn our darkest moments taking pain into a space that we can manage it: what is the lesson?

In the overall scheme of things, can you re-evaluate your pain in ways that leaves you empowered to change? Can you find a purpose of your pain and fears? Can you help others that are in pain?

Your turn, Alicia
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Hi, so glad you are here.

Are you powerful? Do you want to be powerful? What does power looks like?

The concept of power includes areas as diverse as physics – the transformation of work into action –to philosophy – one’s capacity to control destiny- to psychology – one’s perception that one’s actions are useful.

On my talks I ask often: What gives you power? It is a much healthier question than: Are you powerful?

The answers, as diverse as we are, are all related to control: which leads me to the reflection point. When we feel that we control our lives, our happiness increases. We don’t get to tests that capacity often. You guess right, challenges give us that opportunity. Only that without power, we are victims; with power, we are heroes.

The main conclusion is that challenges are not an impediment to our happiness, lack of control is. That is why it is so important to think about what gives you power and keep alert to it when you need power.

I got a glimpse of what power was when I was giving a lecture at Effat University in Saudi Arabia. I asked a group of young women: What gives you power? And one answer struck: “my grandmother, said this young professional, she manages her life with so much wisdom and clarity. Whenever I have a challenge I think of how she would solve it.” In her face, the power of inspiration shone through. Her grandmother was powerful beyond belief.

We might not control our circumstances but we control 100% of our attitude.

What do you think? How do you grab your power? Do you look for it inside of you, or is it a song, a walk, a person, a drug? Should we talk about power or leave it aside? Have you shifted from victim to hero?

On to you, Alicia

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Hi {!name}, so glad you are here.

We’ve walked through power and joy and how the anticipation mechanism is stronger than the achievement. Now we know that the highest peak of happiness comes before we achieve our goals, more so when we realized that something we weren’t sure we could do, is going to happen. But then what? Are we bond to keep jumping from one challenge to the next? What is missing here?

Pleasure and joy an inherent in all living creatures: Pleasurable kingdom

But one thing is different for humans, and that is spirituality. Spirituality is not religion, it is the perception that we are more than what we can physically be.

If you think about it, we are all part of the world. That iron in your blood cells were once part of a planet, the calcium that builds your bones, could have been floating in the universe millions of years ago. In the overall sense of time and space, you are by a dot. Yet, without that dot, the universe could not exist. That is spirituality at its core.

When you take joy and pleasure into a larger scheme of things, you realize the value of the pieces of that dot: your experiences, and more so, your reaction.

Our circumstances don’t define us, our attitude does. We start with something and we end with something, it is what we do with it that creates magic. Whether you want it or not, whether you realize it or not, you leave a legacy. This turns joy into a higher level, known as the hedonic level of joy. It expands beyond what you can physically measure.

Do a test and add purpose to your next conversation. Bring the thought of legacy into it, without necessarily speaking about it. Suddenly, what is meaningful to you and those involved in the conversation comes up.

That is how we shift joy to purpose. That is a larger sense of happiness, and the kind that does not disappear after we are done. It transcends.

Think about what has made an impact in your life, think about how you make an impact in other’s lives, humans or not.

Can we expand our happiness to a sense of purpose and legacy? Do we need to know what we are to do in life? Can we live without affecting the world?

On to you, Alicia

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