Goal Setting for Happiness

 Goals are the key to achieving anything in life and so it is with achieving happiness. Happiness comes from a steady progress towards meaningful goals which are highly desirable to the individual. Overall goals need to be broken up into specific goals for each aspect of your life e.g. health, career, relationships etc. Goals must be realistic and achievable, but at the same time they should be attractive enough to excite you and make you enthusiastic about achieving them.

 The key to understanding your real goals is to ask yourself these three questions. 

• What would I want to do if I had only six months to live?  

• What would I want to have or do if an angel had granted me one wish which would be fulfilled instantly?  

• Would I be truly happy if I actually got whatever I thought I most deeply wanted and what would I do with it?

02-26-2007

Happiness is a state of the mind. The dictionary definition is "feelings of joy and pleasure mingled together”. A feeling of happiness is more than just an experience of joy or pleasure. It is a state of mind where the individual feels that “life is good”.

This state of mind can be induced by many means – some result in short term happiness while others result in long lasting happiness. One way of inducing long lasting happiness and bliss is meditation. For a busy person, a more practical way to becoming happier is to make steady progress towards meaningful goals.Even though this seems simple, it really is a very powerful technique to attain a state of long lasting happiness. The goals may vary from individual to individual, but for everyone happiness comes from merely making steady progress towards goals that are meaningful to them. The key is that goals have to be meaningful to you. Progress towards goals set by some one else will not bring happiness (unless you too desire the same goals).

There should be a balance in your goals to ensure that the prerequisites of happiness are fulfilled. These prerequisites include good health, sufficient income to meet basic needs, affection, some productive work or activity, defined and achievable goals and good attitude. All the money in the world will not make you happy if you ignore your health or have bad relationships. Also you must try to remove the causes of unhappiness from your life. These causes are - lack of any of the prerequisites for happiness, failure to achieve goals, envy, relationship problems, loneliness and fear of the opinion of others.

Studies have shown that a number of factors contribute to sustained happiness. Some of these are

Thus a very effective process of becoming happier is to set goals for improvement in each one of these areas, develop a plan of action, start executing on the plan, and then periodically review the progress towards these goals.

Please visit the Happiness Information section of this website for more details.