Moving Target of Happiness

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Just out of reach there lies a moving target of happiness. You know where you want to end up, yet you don’t know how to get there. Happiness is the bulls-eye, and you throw darts at random without awareness of the rules ad regulations of how the target moves. You haphazardly aim and shoot wishing for the best. You aim with your thoughts and your feelings reveal your successes and failures.
People are in love with the effect of a life that feels good, but aren’t in love with the cause of getting there. Successful people realize that success in life is created from positive-thinking thought patterns repeated over and over again. These people realize that the key to life feeling good lies beyond the other side of fear. Taking risks is essential to examining self-perceptions.
You are subconsciously aware of a discrepancy between where you are and where you want to be. Instead of confronting the cause, you mask it, usually with extremely attainable goals for yourself: money, cars, a spouse, losing five pounds. Instead of confronting wisdom and truth, you hide back in the shadows. You can choose to close the gap by baby-stepping out of your comfort zone and evaluating your perceptions.
One of our perceptions is in regards to change. The one thing which is constant is change. Whether it’s drastic changes in the world economy, changes in family situations, or changes in figuring out to how to deal with mass hysteria, like a Swine Flu pandemic, change is constant.
Our strength lies in our potential to emerge from these situations as more resilient and with a stronger perspective. Leadership is a universal key to this outstanding emergence. Whether we're talking about influencing your children, bridging a stronger connection with a significant other, helping a friend or loved one, or growing your business-leadership is about empowering you to step into any given situation and make an immediate, positive and lasting impact.
"The best investment you can make is in yourself," as Warren Buffet reminds us. The gift of difficult times is that they present an opportunity to enhance our skills. It's often through our biggest challenges that we gain new perspective. So, embrace challenges and greet them with anticipation. Here are 6 steps to Strengthening Your Leadership Potential:

1. Master Your Psychology. It's all about your state of mind. Regardless of our background, beliefs, financial situations or environment, the quality of our lives is found universally in one element: our ability to choose the meaning in any life circumstance and how we react to those circumstances. You create your own reality by your own thinking. The only thing that we ultimately control is our given reaction to any given situation.
2. Be Completely Honest with Yourself. In regards to your mindsets, your relationships and your successes. When you’re completely honest about what’s really happening, then you allow yourself to pave the way for improvement. If you were completely and utterly satisfied with every aspect of yourself and your current situation, then you wouldn’t be human.
3. Get a Deeper Level of Understanding. Increase your skill of being able to understand what is really happening in a person, in any situation, and learn how to help others change their level of understanding. Learn to go beyond a level of understanding only what you see on the surface, and get to the underlying factors that are really in play. Most of us spend a majority of our time thinking about a minority of things- these aren’t what’s important. When you get a deeper level of understanding, you begin to allow yourself to stop resisting your life and become frustrated with the everyday menial tasks we must endure. But, instead, we allow ourselves to understand that what’s most important and to define our purpose in life.
4. Create a Vision. Create a vision that compels you. This vision must also be relevant and realistic given your current situation. Make your vision compelling enough so that not only does it move you but encourages and stimulates others to join your cause. You must have an emotional reaction to it each and every time it is brought into your mind.
5. Map Out a Roadmap. Create a plan, but allow yourself the space to innovate and flex it as you learn what works and what does not. Life is about the journey, not solely the destination.
6. Relate to a Higher Purpose. Ultimately, it's all about giving, growing, and contributing. Life supports life - if you are working to contribute beyond yourself, more of life will give back to you. This is everyone’s higher purpose-contribution- yet, many people fail to realize it.

In order to begin this process, start to become aware of your thoughts as well as your moods. The vehicle of endeavor is the mind. Keep an emotion journal where you can record your thoughts- your internal dialogue- for fifteen minutes in each of these scenarios:

1. When you’re positive (happy, excited, etc.)
2. When you’re neutral (numb to the world, not feeling either positive or negative)
3. When you’re negative ( sad, angry, frustrated)

You are the only person who will be reading this journal, so make it as accurate as possible.