How To Be Happy & Remove Negative Thoughts in ANY Situation

Are you happy all the time? If not, why not? If so, why? Spirit is where all comes from, right? It's the spirit of your soul, the spirit of your heart that makes you happy. It's not the external things as we all know. And yet, most of our society gears us up for all the externals. And when the externals don't work out so well, or when we're in a winter or challenging time, sometimes that happiness disappears. A fulfilling life is a meaningful life. It doesn't feel happy every moment. But it can be meaningful every moment. And happiness is a habit. And it's one that we don't value as much. But how great is life if you achieve everything you want and you're not happy? Not very. When I did Money Master the Game, I interviewed these billionaires, one after another after another, 50 of them. All self-made. So it wasn't people that were spoiled or somebody who just gave them what they had. But there were probably four of them, and it's just my judgment, I could be wrong, that are really happy people. And they have everything they could have ever dreamed with, times 10 or 20 or 100 or 1,000. And so the secret, really, you've heard us talk before about beautiful states. When you get in certain states, you think one thought. When you get in other states, you think another thought. It's like turning the channel. And so what I really show people in the book how to do is how to turn the channel so that you're not suffering and you're living in a beautiful state. Because there isn't anything more important. And because the times we're in, it's even more important. Good times make weak people. Weak people make tough times. Tough times make strong people. And strong people make good time. But you've got to be strong internally so you can enjoy yourself. Could you enjoy yourself in the middle of winter? We've been for years talking about prepare, winter's coming. Well, winter's here, but we're not through it. And the worst part, the more challenging parts of winter still are coming. And this season called winter, we all experience it. You've had winters in your emotions. You have winters in your relationships. But this type of external winter is much more intense externally, which means if you don't manage the inside, it's going to be a rough, rough road. But if you manage the inside, it could be the most beautiful time of your life. So I'm not here to say be happy, happy, happy, just positive thinking. I'm here to say this is not only a survival but a thriving tool. This is the tool this week you want to really envelop yourself. This is the time to recharge, to re-engineer yourself. Because if you think about it, if you're not going to run a race, you're going to go like a Baja race. They go 1,000 miles across the desert, and you take your beautiful Mercedes to do that. It ain't going to work. Mercedes is an expensive car. It's a beautiful car. It's a well-made car. It'll be destroyed in that race. You will not finish the race. You have to have it be adapted, re-engineered to go 1,000 miles in the desert. And I'm suggesting to you this idea of fulfillment, this idea of being able to find happiness or even joy, it'll start with acceptance. Accepting the things we can't change. Knowing the things we can and doing something about it is very different. But there are certain things you can't change. Otherwise, you're going to be miserable all the time. And once you get to acceptance, you can find appreciation. And once you find appreciation, you can start to find something to actually perhaps love or enjoy or be grateful for. And the more we do that, we develop these habits, then in the middle of winter, you're going to have a killer time. And more importantly, your state will envelop the people you love. Your state will be the leader. You will drive the state by your example because it'll be so rare. There's lots of different kinds of happiness. You can have rock star happiness. You all know what that is. That's just pure pleasure. You get what you want. That's rock star happiness. How long does it last? You get what you want. You're so excited. You get it. How long are you excited? How long are you happy? Ten years from that moment? A year? Six months? A few hours? That's nice. What's the second kind of happiness? Passion happiness. Passion happiness is flow. That's when you're doing something and you disappear. It's when you do something you love and you disappear. You're doing something for your family, your kids, or your work, or something, and you're so into it that you're in this flow state. That's a beautiful, beautiful form of happiness. And you can have that in any season. But then there's a higher level of happiness that has greater duration, and that's purpose happiness. When you feel like you've got a purpose beyond yourself, when you're trying to serve something beyond yourself, you won't be worried about winter so much. It's like someone dies in the family and a bunch of people go into grief, and one person, they don't seem to go into as much grief because they're busy taking care of everybody else. As a result, they find the strength because they're here to serve something more than themselves. And because relationship is the ultimate happiness, and it's friendships that are that happiness. It's your children, it's your family, it's your spouse, it's your lover. All of those is where the deepest, long-lasting happiness comes from. Make sure you have all types of happiness available so you can play with them all, but make sure that purpose happiness gets expanded. So a question that has to come up is, what gets in the way of happiness? Is happiness something that we have naturally? So a question that has to come up is, what gets in the way of happiness? Is happiness something that we have naturally? We can choose happiness because it is a choice. You do not experience life. You experience the life you focus on. All you got to do is turn on the news and you could get really nuts. But then the things that tend to make me nuts are the things I can't control. And so what I've wanted to do is to figure out what I can do about it and what I can't. There has to be something deeper that makes you believe there's something more. If you don't, when times get really rough, unless you have some kind of spiritual belief, there's something you believe in more than yourself, God, a universe that somehow has a higher purpose to guide you, then there are going to be times in this coming winter where you're really going to suffer unless you can have a trust in something larger than yourself as guiding it, that good will come from this. In my experience, because I'm a student of history, regardless of anything else, that gives me even more faith. It always does. We throw the pendulum so far, and when you push far enough, it finds its balance. That's history. And so we're not going to be stuck here forever, but we got to make sure we enjoy this trip along the way while we're here. And we all, as humans, have a negative bias, meaning our nervous system from 2 million years ago has wired us to look for and avoid anything that gives us significant pain. We're going to either fight it or we're going to run from it or we're going to freeze. And that 2-million-year-old part of your brain, that survival part of your brain, has not gone away and never will. It's not designed to make you happy. It's designed to make you survive. So just think about it. It's what I focus on, and it's number two, the meaning I give it. Because out of that, I'm going to have certain emotions, I'm going to take certain actions, and it all depends on what you focus on. You could be totally depressed in this moment or you could be totally excited. So it's a choice. But then the question you got to ask yourself is, what's my habit? Where do I spend more of that time? And it doesn't take a lot of time on the negative bias, since it's natural for the brain, for it to start to become overloaded, where you stack so many things. Most people are doing a negative flood almost every single day. And it doesn't matter how smart you are, because today the acceleration of the negative, by nature in winter, there is more attitude of negativity, regardless of the activity. It just becomes the standard. I must understand where the world is, not just where my world is. The biggest thing that creates stress is we're expecting people to behave a certain way, to treat us a certain way, to talk a certain way, to love a certain way. But even the ones closest to you have their own model of the world. And unhappiness can be defined as having expectations that others are going to live, respond, and react the way you want them to. If there's a secret to beautiful state, it's giving up that thought, that anyone has to do things a certain way for you to be happy. As long as your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your kids, your parents, your co-workers, your associates, your employees have to behave a certain way for you to be happy, you will not be happy. Because let me tell you what people are going to do. People are going to do what they do. I'm not disappointed anymore. I know people are going to do things. I know people are going to betray, and then I find softer language from it. They're going to not keep their word. I know people are going to say one thing and do another. People are going to lie. I know good people are going to make dumb mistakes, including me. So as long as I know that, I don't have an expectation, all of your happiness is destroyed by your expectations. Some of you know your expectations. Many of you are unaware of your expectations. You just think that's what life is supposed to be like. And when it doesn't match, you're mad. It's really the conflicts of how we think it's supposed to be. So our happiness, the only way to have our happiness long term is to have expectations that are authentic. And here's the authentic expectation. People are going to do what they're going to do, and it's not going to be what you expect a good deal of the time. It's not going to be what they promise. And you can be pissed off and moralistic, and you can judge them and feel better about yourself, but that's not going to make you one miserable person.