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Happiness is both a state of being and a condition you can create. Did you know that 40% of your happiness is determined by your thoughts, behaviors and actions? Only 10% is determined by circumstances you deal with in life. How you react to circumstances is what creates happiness. Your emotional default mode can be positive or negative, but that determines your outlook and how you’ll react to your life circumstances.

Happiness has a neurochemical process that can be used to create that state as part of how you approach life. Endorphin and serotonin levels are the two receptors responsible for regulating mood and happiness. The best ways to enhance these levels are by making it a practice to consciously focusing on positive outcomes.

Focus on the optimal rather than the suboptimal.

By examining our own logic and making it daily practice to use positive thinking, it rewrites our chemistry and our ability to create happiness as your emotional default mode. After nearly two decades of research, I decided to create a system to address the most complex area of our lives: love. Finding love is the hardest decision we ever make in life. It’s one of the only decisions that takes decades to get right. What makes it take that long is our own faulty logic in who we choose and what we think we want versus need. You take that blueprint and create your life schematics. So, I designed the Your Happiness Hypothesis (H20) method based on science and techniques to improve people’s relationship success. These are the keys to happiness.

What I found in my practice over the last 18 years, is that sometimes we carry definitions of happiness based on the things that don’t make us happy. Have you ever thought or heard a friend say “If I just had this, I could be happy”? The truth is relationships are complex, irrational and built on avoiding pain. The reasons that you created those definitions were to help you cope with your pain, hurt, and trying to understand someone else’s poor behavior. All of our decisions are based on benefiting some aspect of what we are and think we need/want.

Today begin a different practice.

Forgive yourself for your past relationship decisions. Once you have identified the aspects that caused you to make the decisions you made, then you are able to move forward and understand the painful experiences you have had. We all have things that have caused us pain that keep leading us to another form of pain. That’s the irony. Sometimes it is conscious, other times its subconscious. Forgive yourself. The only thing you did was try to show someone love and cultivate a life for you both.

Allow yourself to feel the pain and unburden yourself of what was your former life.

Learn from the past, but don’t relive it in the future. Try to avoid thinking that your past relationships owe you more than what is realistic. That may further imprison you or arrest your growth. The best thing you can do is go through life recognizing why you made the decisions that you did. All you did was demonstrate that you have the capacity to love and build a life for yourself. You can do it again.  

People are what they are not what you want them to be. Once you accept someone for what they really are, you can determine if they fit into your life. Too often, we keep making the same decision about new people in our lives.

We expect people to be rid of all their decades of pain, avoidance and their blueprint.

People lie. People want to be better, they just didn’t have better definitions in their lives. People want to be happy, but can make you miserable along the way. That’s on them, but the irony is that the #1 person we lie to is ourselves.