Happy for No Reason - Q&A with Marci Shimoff
From:
Jill Daniel
174 days 7 hours 58 minutes ago
If you could spend all of your days being truly happy, wouldn’t you want to? According to Marci Shimoff, a life of inner joy is not only possible, it is also readily accessible and within your reach.
Over the past 25 years, Shimoff has inspired millions of people around the world by sharing her breakthrough methods of personal fulfillment and professional success. Co-author of six of the top-selling titles in the
Chicken Soup for the Soul series and a featured teacher in the movie sensation
The Secret, she has also written the
New York Times bestseller
Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy From the Inside Out. Here Shimoff shares some of her happiness discoveries. ~Jill Daniel
gratitudegroove.comIs it really possible to be happy for no reason 24/7?Being happy for no reason doesn’t mean walking around 24/7 with a silly grin on your face. Life has its waves—and one of the waves is …
PMS.[laughter] Okay, this is a good practical example—how can you be happy when that is going on? You have a choice of letting it take you over and ruining your day or having a sense of humor about it and letting it be one of the passing things of life. There’s the rest of the month, you know.
Right, of course, it’s all a matter of perspective. In the book, you say that many of us spend a tremendous amount of energy being upset and resisting life, but when we take the view that there are no mistakes and accept what is, we can use our energy to deal effectively with the situation now. Do you have a personal example of this?Oh, yes! For years I was plagued by self-doubt—and still am. I think the same life issues you have when you’re young really are your life lessons, and they come back at you at higher and higher levels. For example, maybe I’ve mastered my self-doubt about speaking to 10 people, but I haven’t mastered my self-doubt speaking to 100,000
people. So it’s just a matter of looking at those areas and not resisting that you perhaps need growth, but you work lovingly with wherever you’re at.
You still make it a point to like yourself in the process.Absolutely. There is a really great technique—and this may sound totally off the wall—called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). It’s a simple procedure of tapping various acupuncture meridians—you can learn it in five minutes at emofree.com—and, as you do, you make a statement like, “Even though, I have self-doubt, I deeply and completely accept myself.” It rewires in you that feeling that “even though I have this thing that is my Achilles’ heel, I still deeply and completely accept myself.”
That’s the idea. It’s not to get rid of everything that we don’t like about ourselves or about our lives—that would be impossible. It’s a whole lot easier to take care of creating an inner state of peace and well-being that’s not dependent on outside circumstances.
People who are happy for no reason orchestrate the events in their lives when they’re able to; and when they’re not able to change the events, they change their responses. They bring their happiness to their life’s circumstances rather than try to take their happiness from them.
What is one of the biggest mistakes people make while trying to be happy?We catch the emotions of the people around us just like we can catch someone’s cold. It’s called emotional contagion. It’s been
found that we become the average of the five people that we associate with the most. So I tell people to watch who you hang out with.
All right, one last question that many of us would like to know: What can you do in a relationship with someone who is far less positive than you?There are a few things you can do here. First, always be grateful for what is working. Put your attention on what he is doing right versus what he’s doing wrong. Second, be nonjudgmental. Be as accepting as you can. Third, deal with yourself as much as you can by raising your own happiness level. And fourth, say something to him along the lines of “you have every right to be negative, but I’m on a kick to not be, so I ask that you limit that around me.”
Establish healthy boundaries. If he doesn’t change and you feel it’s no longer right, it will be the best thing for both of you to move on.
For more information, go to HappyForNoReason.com. Respond to the free Happy for No Reason questionnaire and see how you rate on the happiness scale.
