The question you need to ask yourself to find happiness

I just want to be happy! We all say it, don’t we? When it comes down to it, everyone just wants to be happy — whatever that means. You do things that you think will make you feel happy because you think that this “doing” is what will achieve the feeling of happiness.

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Many people mistakenly search for happiness like this

1. You take some sort of action.
2. You sit back and take your emotional temperature.
3. If you feel happy, you repeat the action as often as you can.
4. If you don’t feel happy, you try and avoid doing that action again.

There’s a problem with that approach. Even if that thing you just did made you feel happier and you decide to keep doing it, you’re now relying on something outside of you to generate a feeling inside of you. That’s a slippery slope because you’ve just given away all your power! You’ve attached your happiness to something that is outside of your control.

What if the weather turns, the business you built goes bust, the restaurant you love eating at shuts down or your awesome new friend is stricken with a mystery illness? What will become of your newfound happiness?

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I’m not telling you to reject the material world — not at all. However, if you generate happiness from within, you can enjoy the external, material world from that standpoint of a stable and firm emotional foundation.

Happiness, joy, satisfaction, bliss — these are all feelings you want your life to be flooded with, so generating them through actions might not work. Choose to feel your way there instead.

How do you want to feel? Do you know? I suggest you figure it out and then simply follow the feeling path of it, step-by-step.

If you think that sounds like exactly the same thing as you were doing before — deciding what feels better and then doing it — I assure you it’s not!

I’m talking about feeling into things before there is any doing at all. I’m talking about using your gut and your intuition to generate that feeling inside of you, then allowing yourself to be guided to things that match it. I’m talking about inspired action rather than taking wild shots in the dark.

Ask “which feels better?” to make inspired moment-to-moment decisions

• Which feels better: Eating out, cooking at home or possibly take-out?
• Which feels better: Answering your partner’s question with love and a helpful attitude or snapping at them impatiently because you already told them three times earlier?
• Which feels better: Forcing yourself to go to that networking event despite feeling tired or excusing yourself for a quiet night at home?

Most of us don’t make our decisions by considering what feels good in the moment. We rarely trust ourselves — our gut and our intuition — enough to let them guide us. Instead, we use our intellect to come up with a rational argument about the right and best thing to do. Can you see the madness in this?

Let glimpses of the emotions you want guide your life

If what you desire, treasure, covet and dream of is a life filled with happiness, joy, alignment, bliss and satisfaction, why not let yourself be guided by the constant glimpses of these things?

If you take advantage of every little one of those moments, treasure and collect them. Soon you’ll find they join together in a rich tapestry — the tapestry of your life. A life that is suddenly filled to the brim with all those wonderful feelings you so desired. Piece by piece, your life will take shape.

Happiness comes from within, and that means you are what lights up the path to your happiness.

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