A Guaranteed Recipe For Happiness

This week one of my readers asked me this question:

How do you know when you have found what you really want?

My response was that there are many possible answers, but the one thatnimmediately came to my mind was that if you feel happy and fulfilled, ifnyou're enjoying life in general, and how you spend most of your time -nincluding your working hours, you could well have found what you reallynwant. From a work point of view, if you're doing what you really enjoynyou'll never work another day in you're life.

I found myself thinking a lot more about this subject and here's some of the conclusions I arrived at. I think that if you achieve what you truly want and arrive at the point in your life you always wanted to be at, you will certainly know about it. If you feel good about yourself and what you've achieved in your life having worked hard to get where you are, if you wake up every morning looking forward to the day ahead, if you feel happy with your life as a whole, you've almost certainly found what you really want.

But what if you've achieved everything you wanted and you don't feel happy? This is probably more important than the original question.

The short answer to this question is that you probably didn't really know what you wanted.

Let's say you've set your goals, then made plans, taken action and achieved them. You're at the place you always thought you wanted to be at, but you find that you're just not as happy, or don't feel as good about yourself as you expected to be. It can even be much worse than just being unhappy.

This is actually not unusual and is a situation experienced by a lot of people. One of the most common reasons for this is that many people's lives head in a direction that they don't really want it to go in. Just say for example that your father is a successful lawyer running the family law firm (you can put any job you like in here), just like his father and grandfather before him. Even if you are a talented pianist and wanted to pursue music as a career, you could easily find yourself in a position where you would have very little chance of taking any career path other than following the family tradition.

Many other people find themselves in a career almost by default. This can happen without them actually deciding to take up whatever job they're doing; it can be more a case of just drifting in a particular direction. Other people may find themselves marrying and raising a family at an early age because it's what their friends or relatives are doing, or because they feel it's what's expected of them, or even because it just seems like the right thing to do.

Events and life in general just happens to many people. Their lives simply head this way or that with little active input on their part. In these situations it's possible to set goals, make plans and work hard to achieve success and financial security in whatever circumstance they find themselves. This is effectively making the best of whatever hand life deals you.

However, a lot of people don't find real happiness and they don't feel fulfilled with where or how they end up, even if they do become financially secure.

This is usually because they aren't doing what they want to do with their lives. The biggest single reason for this is that most people simply never really think about the things that are most important to them and exactly how they want to live their lives.

Taking the time to think about and understand our values, the fundamental things that are most important to us, can make a great difference to our lives.

This will also help us to define our goals - what will make us happy and what we want to achieve. It is unlikely that anyone who doesn't make the effort to do this will truly know what they want to do with their lives, or what will ultimately make them happy.

Clarifying our values helps us to understand what is most important to us. Thinking about and establishing what we most want to achieve with our lives should make it easy to set goals and make plans to achieve them. When they are our own goals, not something that is expected of us, or that we just drift into, and they are congruent with our values, it should also be easy to take the necessary actions to achieve them. This is one of the surest ways to enjoy a rewarding and happy life.