Happiness

You have to BE happy

This is probably what most of us strive for in life. But you can't go looking for things to make you happy all the time; you have to take happiness with you wherever you go. You have to BE happy. This is one of the most attractive personality traits a person can have. Some people seem to have a very happy disposition and others do not. How do you create this in a child?

What other people observe as our personality is simply our consistent pattern of behaviour and especially the way that we respond to and interact with other people. Whether we are predominantly happy most of the time is part of our personality, it comes from the way we think and behave, and it is habitual. It's not something that we consciously think about too much; it is just one of the hundreds of habits that we have developed into our personality.

We are all creatures of habit. By definition a habit is “an acquired behaviour pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary”. For adults, old habits can be hard to break and new habits are often hard to form. That's because the behavioural patterns we repeat most often have created a very large number of neural pathways in our brains.

But this is not true for a young child. In the first few years of their lives their brains are creating all these neural pathways from scratch. And it must be easier to create a new habit where another one does not already exist.

The formation of a habit involves repetition, and habits are most easily formed when there is some sort of reward, something that your brain likes that encourages it to recall the same behaviour in the future. Once you have developed the habit your brain runs on auto-pilot for this behaviour. You don't have to consciously think about it at all.

The reward you get from being happy is pretty simple - you feel good! Try this exercise. Force yourself to smile for two minutes, and see how you feel. You cannot do this without feeling happy. You can't hold a smile for any length of time without feeling happy, and we all feel good when we are happy.

So if you can make your child happy when they are very young, then there is a good chance that you will be developing this trait in their personalities. Help them as much as you can to have fun and make them happy.

This usually means you will have to make sacrifices in your own life. You will have to spend time with them, doing things that make them happy, when you would probably much rather be doing something else.

In the first few years, when they are too young to play games, you just shower them with love, and do things to stimulate their brains. You carry them around showing them anything and everything inside the house and outside the house. Take them to the beach as soon as they can walk; let them feel the grains of sand between their toes, and the sea water wash up around their ankles. Take them for a walk down the street in the pram, and then later the baby stroller. Show them the world outside.

You can read to them from a children's book even before they can understand a single word you are saying. Just let them get used to the sound of your voice. There are hundreds of things you can do.

As soon as they are old enough to play any sort of games at all, then you play games with them. Again, this will sometimes require that you sacrifice your time. But now you can start to take advantage of friends who have babies or young children about the same age. Get together with these other parents and let your children play together. You want this "socialising" to continue for the rest of their lives, and hopefully they will also make friends from these connections some of whom will go on and be friends for the rest of their lives.

Watching TV and doing the ironing while they play with a toy on the floor, doesn't cut it. Unless this is your break from spending time with them, or unless the toy on the floor is the most amazing toy that it will provide them with mental stimulation better than you can.

As your children get older and begin to understand most of what you say, then you can start to talk to them about the things that you believe are important. For example, it doesn't hurt to have a constant reminder to just be happy. Whenever I was home and my kids were going off somewhere, including to school, I would tell them "have fun, be good, BE happy!" It was simply the best advice I thought I could give them in setting out for a new day, and so it is also the title of this book. They still get the same advice from me today, thirty years later. I never told them to work hard, or to be good at maths and science, or to excel at anything else for that matter.

The interesting thing is that humans seem to have a natural desire to achieve. If your children have high self esteem, are self confident and happy, they will probably also want to be good at the things they do in life. So you don't have to push them for that.

Here are two tips for living a happy life that you can use yourself and also pass on to your children.

First, be happy with who you are. No matter what the circumstances of your life; what you do for a job, how rich or poor you are, etc., make a conscious choice to be happy with the person you are on the inside.

Second, think happy thoughts. Negative thoughts will always enter your mind from time to time, but you have the power to control these thoughts. You can choose to think happy and positive thoughts.

I don't have the book any more, but from memory, the book 'Sportsmind' gives you three choices when it comes to eliminating negative thoughts:

1. Just observe them, let them pass, and then get back to thinking positive thoughts.

2. Reverse It. Whatever the negative thought is, turn it around and make it positive. "I am having a bad day" becomes "I am having a good day".

3. Replace it. Stop the negative thought, and replace it with something entirely different that is a happy and motivating positive thought.

Your life will be become a lot happier and maybe you will even find that things just seem to go better for you, when you control your thoughts. You can develop the habit to do this, and it will also help you to BE happy.

It is a good idea to remind yourself to do this until it becomes a habit. Put a sticker, or tape this message, on the mirror in your bathroom, so that every day when you are brushing your teeth or combing your hair, you see the message. Even if you get so used to the message being there, and you think you have forgotten to consciously look at it, don't worry, your subconscious mind will see it every time. And that is exactly where you want the message to go.

The message is "Think positive, BE happy".

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