MOTIVATION – Don’t Put your Happiness on Hold

MOTIVATION –  Don’t Put your Happiness on Hold


By Nikki Viljoen of N Viljoen Consulting CC – February 2013

Dale Carnegie said “Many people thing that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy.  Well that is doubtful.  So get as much happiness out of what you are doing, as you can and don’t put off being happy until some future date.”

Man oh man! I sure did have a quiet chuckle around this one!

You see I don’t believe that this only applies to your ‘happiness’!  I think that this applies to ‘life’ in general!

How many times during the course of the day do we hear ‘when xyz happens, things will be better or ‘when xyz kicks in things will be better’ or ‘when xyz happens I will feel better’ (insert any other saying that you’ve heard here).

The fact of the matter is that we tend to dwell in the past (and some of us seem to live there on a permanent basis), or live for the future.

What ever happened to the present or the ‘now’?  What ever happened to living in the moment?  How on earth do you enjoy life if you never take the time to ‘live it’?  We are always over analyzing the past when we know on some level that we cannot change what has already taken place.  We are always over planning the future when logic must tell us that the future can only be determined by what we do in the present!  Yet never quite being present, well present in our own lives, we plan and worry and hope and wish and . . .  well nothing really changes does it?

The reason that nothing really changes is because you are not happy inside of yourself, you are not content with who you are as a person and until you change that or make peace with it, it doesn’t really matter how much money you have, how much power you have, how much you have in terms of worldly possessions, you will never be content or happy.  The only way to change what you are not happy with inside of yourself is to make the decision to change – yip, it’s actually that simple. 

You have to make the decision to see your circumstances differently or to react differently to any given situation or feel differently when you are confronted with a certain set of circumstances.  You have the power to make the change! 

So the next time you feel that you can’t cope because there is no money and things will be better when you do have money, rather think about all the things that you can do with what you have and be amazed and how different you will feel.  You make your own happiness, but you have to make the decision to do so!

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or http://www.viljoenconsulting.co.za