It’s not happy people who are grateful it’s grateful people who are happy!

8 ways to enhance your happiness:

1. Thinking about positive life experiences!  Relish and take pleasure in some of the gifts of your life! Appreciate this age and stage.
2. Expressing gratitude boosts worth and self esteem! When you realize how much people have done for you, or how much you have accomplished, you will feel more confident! Naturally you focus on failures and disappointments but if you focus on gratitude it will encourage you to value your current life!
3. Expressing gratitude helps you cope with stress and trauma! Expressing gratitude during a personal tragedy or adversity, as hard as it might be, can help you adjust, and move on. It may be a challenge to celebrate blessings at moments when they seem less apparent to you but it might be the most important thing you can do to not stay stuck in that trauma place!
4. Expressing gratitude will help you help others! As you become more aware of caring and kind acts it will help you want to do kind acts more for others. It doesn't have to be a big grand gesture, find what is possible for you to look outside of yourself and help others. 
5. Having gratitude helps bond relationships! Keeping a gratitude journal can help produce feelings of greater connection with others. As you value friends and family you are likely to treat them better. A grateful person is a more positive person, which will make you more liked by friends.
6. Expressing gratitude inhibits comparisons with others! When you are genuinely grateful for what you have you are less likely to have envy.
7. Practicing gratitude will diminish negative feelings! Gratitude can't exist at the same time as feeling anger, bitterness, or greed!
8. Gratitude helps you adjust to the new! When something is new and positive we get this boost of happiness, but that is short lived. But gratitude helps prevent taking the good things for granted and you remember how good it felt when it first happened.

Make a commitment to be more grateful— Becoming grateful can totally change your life!
Just select one thing to work on:
Gratitude journal: Write down five things every day that you are grateful for
Count your blessings: Identify one thing that you take for granted
Express gratitude after a trigger: Put your hand on your heart and take a breath
Directly tell someone you are grateful for them: Write a thank you note and mail it.
Give daily awards: Take time each day to appreciate something
"Yes, and at least...": Use this when you have dealt with a hardship and it will immediately minimize it. (But CAUTION do NOT say it to other people-because it minimizes what they are going through and they don't want that right now, they just want to be validated)

I have a reminder on my phone:  ASK FOR A MIRACLE. ASK BELIVE RECEIVE.
It actually helps me realize how blessed I am!! What can I even ask for? What more do I even need?

The fact that you can even read this today means that you have a house, a phone, a computer, or internet connection!! You have a pretty blessed life!!

Comparing yourself and your life to others and their lives is a great way to steal your happiness!
One very common and destructive daily habit is to constantly compare your life to other people and their lives. You compare cars, houses, jobs, clothes, money, relationships, social popularity and everything! Then your self-esteem is so low and you create a lot of negative feelings about yourself and even negative feelings about others.
How to overcome this habit is to replace that destructive habit with two better habits:

• Compare yourself to yourself. Instead of comparing yourself to other people create the habit of comparing yourself to yourself. See how much you have grown, what you have achieved and what progress you have made towards your goals. This habit has the benefit of creating gratitude, appreciation and kindness towards yourself as you observe how far you have come, the obstacles you have overcome, and the good stuff you have done. You can feel good about yourself without having to think less of other people.
• Be kind. You can say such negative things to yourself that you would never tolerate being said to anyone, so stop yourself from that internal bully, and just be nice! Also realize, as you are more kind to other people and help them, it helps you to be more kind to yourself. So focus on and appreciate the positive things in yourself and in the people around you. You can start by listing of the things you don't like about yourself and then write the opposite or things you do like about yourself. Then throw away the negative list and read that new positive list every day! 

And remember: stop comparing! No matter what you do you can pretty much always find someone else in the world that has more than you or are better than you at something. But you are needed and valued just the way you are!

Today we struggle with the idea of happiness. We think we have to work towards it, like a goal that someday we will reach it and can finally be able to say we are happy.  I had a favorite phrase that said: "I'll be happy when...." (fill in the blank). I will be happy when my health improves, I'll be happy when I have a child, I'll be happy when I get a job, I'll be happy when I have a new car, etc. (And since then I have learned a new way of speaking and thinking!)

But what if you could be happy right now, in the situation you are in today? I know it's possible.
I can share tips on ways to elevate your present situation. You'll be amazed at what a little shift of thinking can do for you!
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Tip #1 Feel Your Feelings    (Tips are in no particular order, in fact I like to save the best for last!)

One of the greatest barriers to experiencing more love and happiness is the habit of avoiding emotional pain and negative feelings. 
The purpose of feeling your feelings is not to get rid of them, but to let them fulfill their purpose—which is bringing our awareness to the things in our lives that need our attention.


An Exercise To Feel Your Feelings

1. Close your eyes. Now think of a negative feeling that you resist, avoid. (Pause)
2. Notice where that feeling is located in your body. (Pause)
3. Now recall how you feel when lying in a hot bath.  Feel the warmth of your body. (Pause)
4. Use your memory to recreate that feeling of expansion, relaxation and openness. (Pause)
5. Bring that sense of warmth and bodily relaxation into the negative feeling you have been resisting. (Pause)
6. Notice how your body relaxes and expands and the stuck feeling starts to move or dissolve. (Pause) 

Now take a moment or two, deep breath, and open your eyes.

To be unconditionally loving you must also expand your capacity to love yourself the way you are—not the way you think you should be—by practicing feeling your feelings, and having acceptance for yourself no matter what. 
Unconditional self-love means treating yourself the way you would treat a beloved friend.
Just feel.