The world may be complicated but your happiness shouldn’t be. To be happier and grow your success, there are 6 happiness habits for you best life that is peaceful, purposeful and productive.

If you are like me, chances are you’re balancing the demands of work and home. The responsibilities we carry are numerous and the list of tasks pile up. I know the feel of overwhelm and the desire to do my work to a high standard.

The tasks we face by aiming high

You have achieved a lot. You’re a qualified professional. You’ve reached this by setting goals, carrying out formal study (probably for many years), and achieved professional standing. With this comes responsibility. Maybe if you were lazy, you would have less to do, but this isn’t you.

Is this you?

At work, you’re a professional so you face demands of paperwork, time with clients, writing reports, and keeping up with professional development.

At home, you have a family, you’re a mother (or not), which means you keep up with meals, house work, your children’s needs. You know how it goes.

The question is, how can we stay dedicated to our responsibilities and find time to live a peaceful balanced life of rest, fun, and time with people we love?

The solution: Happiness Folders

I encourage you to focus on less so you can achieve more of the things that really matter, like family, career, health and rest.

Folders 1-3: Happiness habits for a successful life

Below is a summary of domains, with associated habits, that contribute to a happy life. I call these domains “Happiness Folders” as a mental representation of contained domains that are part of a whole. I have adapted these from positive psychology principles and research.

Imagine a ring binder with separate folders. The ring binder is life as a whole. The folders work together to fill the binder and each folder carries habits that help grow happiness. Some of you may choose to rip out certain folders if they are not relevant to you. You can also add your own.

1. Your character: This is who you are. Your personality. Your innate worth. These habits exist in your core beliefs and thinking about who you are and what you can accomplish. Kindness, and compassion towards yourself become habits and happiness follows.
2. Your connection: This is who you are with. Certain habits help build healthy relationships such as; listening, compassion, patience and kindness in words and actions. Your relationships are a foundation to happiness and this has been well documented in happiness research https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/social_connection
3. Your calling, or life purpose: This is what your life is about and involves discovering your strengths and building on these. You become strengths focused, not weakness focused. This also involves finding meaning in loving who you are so you can love others and contribute to the bigger picture of life.

Folders 4-6: Habits for a successful day

1. Peace: This includes habits in your thoughts, emotions, internal voice, what you say and speak, and what you expect from yourself, others and your world. Peace also comes from interacting in healthy ways with people at work and home.
2. Daily purpose mindset: This is thinking about your daily activities as being linked to your greater life purpose and finding meaning in routine tasks. For example, cooking a meal can be meaningful when we tie the task to the purpose of loving other people. Then our emotion can be joy and gratitude versus resentment. I understand that resentment can creep in if we don’t ask for help from our family. This is part of communicating how you feel and asking for help.
3. Positive productivity: This is not random busyness. Productivity just to feel busy drains energy and enthusiasm. being positively productive involves threes things; knowing your preferred future or dreams, setting clear goals and not too many of them, and being focused on tasks to get you there. This leaves room for planned rest.

Follow my future articles to deep dive into these topics

The folders are a framework for how you and I can think about building happiness habits that help us succeed in work and love our lives.

Every article you read here aims to provide ideas for living a peaceful, purposeful and productive life and how to stay happy in the process. Journalling prompts are included as questions or task suggestions.

On this site I have a “Manifesto of values”. This will explain my values and assumptions for living a happy life. The values you read may or may not line up with your own and that’s ok to stop reading, or extract aspects that help you.

Science, Simplicity, Success

My writing and services come from psychology (positive psychology principles) and counselling practice, based on my education and work experiences. I will also cite a weekly research article for your interest.

My aim is for short digestible articles with simple ideas for building your happiest life.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. I am on this journey and will always be learning.