Go back to a place (not) far, far away when you woke up feeling happy. No good reason: you hadn’t won tattslotto overnight, you weren’t getting married, it wasn’t your birthday. You just felt happy.
There are two ways of looking at this complex situation. You can step back and think, “How long will this last before some bastard stuffs it up?” or consider the refreshing emotional state to be an inexplicable gift.
Both natural reactions are self-deprecating because credit isn’t given where it’s due. What if you chose to be happy? Yeah, you picked “happy” out of a long list of feelings and decided to run with it.
How we feel at any moment is never an accident or an inevitable consequence of some incident or series of events. We feel how we choose to feel even in times of major stress or grief.
We may have been overlooked for promotion, triggering an instant emotional cocktail of frustration, anger, despair, even embarrassment. We can choose to give up ever achieving our dream position and possibly resign, or we can steel our will and bravely seek feedback and form a brand-new plan.
Put simply, we can choose to be sad and defeated or we can choose to be positive and optimistic. It’s up to us. A simple instantaneous selection of an emotional feeling can have a profound influence on our future employment opportunities with dramatic flow-on effects on our social and family life.
Here’s a mind-blowing challenge, “Choose to be happy.” What’s the worst that can happen?