Happiness leads to success

What is holistic success and happiness?

Happiness can be defined as success in four areas of life.

• Material abundance
• Love and relationships
• Health and well being
• Spirituality (intuition, creativity, connection to a higher power)

Holistic success is important because it improves your:

• physical health (immunity towards diseases)
• better relationships (family, friends)
• self confidence

You can not define your success by income.  If you sacrifice holistic success in those four areas, you may make a lot of money but you will be extremely vulnerable to hypertension, stress, feeling miserable, addictive behaviors, etc.  Being successful does not mean you are happy.  A Harvard study shows that success does not lead to happiness but vice-versa.  Happiness leads to success.  

So how do I reach happiness and holistic success?

• Pay people attention.  Show them your affection.  Try to find a way to add to someone's life today.  That could be a friend, a family member, a potential customer, etc.  Christian pastor Joel Osteen encourages Christians to treat people with honor regardless of how he or she may be treating you.  As a child of God, we are held to higher standards in how we think and behave.  
• Define daily worthy goals and achieve them.  It takes small steps to reach ambitious milestones.
• Exercise, meditate, pray, relax, take a walk, get physically active.

Happiness= set point in the brain (determined in the first four years of your life that determines your emotional intelligence) + conditions of living (if you are extremely poor you are unhappy or if you are extremely rich people obsessed with money you are unhappy) + voluntary choices or actions daily (doing things for pleasure like going to the movies, sex, shopping, expressing creativity, are you doing meaningful work, are you making someone else happy) thus S + C + V = H

• your emotional intelligence can be improved through therapy, cognitive analysis or meditation

These ideas are credited to Deepak Chopra, a physician and writer.

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