Ten ways to find happiness in your day

We chat to a past Hello Sunday Morning member about her hunt for happiness and what it means to become a happy person.

“Everything flows from us. We are the creators of our own reality.”

Fiona, mother of two, joined Hello Sunday Morning in 2013 after her life had become unmanageable in all areas and her drinking was escalating.

“I felt completely trapped and knew that I needed to give myself some space to work out what was going on. The only way that I was going to be able to do that was to stop drinking.”

When Fiona was signing up for the Hello Sunday Morning platform, she decided to give herself the avatar name of ‘Happiness’.

“I knew at the time that it needed to be really cemented and the name happiness just popped into my head so I typed it in. I thought, ‘I just want to be happy, so I’m calling myself happiness,’ and I put a photo of my kids on there as well to remind me every time I logged in why I was doing it. It wasn’t about ‘you’re a disaster and terrible,’ it was all very positively focused and everything that I started doing from that moment forward had a positive spin to it.

“If you focus on positive, you’re going to get positive. If you focus on negative then you will get negative. It’s about the law of attraction, so I started to do a bit of study around this and started to focus on what I do want, not on what I don’t want.”

A year after joining Hello Sunday Morning and changing her relationship with alcohol, Fiona started a coaching business called The Happiness Hunter, inspired by her profile name that became her reality. The Happiness Hunter is an online space created to teach, educate and share about what living a happy, meaningful, successful and purposeful life is. It is a place of connection, community and support that offers coaching, healing, retreats, workshops, free community walks and motivational speaking.

Happiness is all about making our health and well being our number one priority

“To be happy and successful in our lives, we need to be balanced in ourselves mentally, physically, spiritually and socially. When we are balanced and working on that relationship we have within ourselves, we are only then going to better everything else.”

Fiona started to apply everything she had learnt from her journey to her life from that point onwards. She was a business coach at that stage and started talking to her coaching clients about what she was doing personally. Inevitably, that’s what she started teaching people.

“The more you start caring about yourself and the quality of your life – not from a selfish perspective but from the perspective that, ‘the better I am the better I am for the world and the better I am able to love and care for the people around me’.”

• Happiness is an active choice in each and every moment.
• Happiness is an inside job, nothing externally can bring about happiness.
• Happiness is to be found in overcoming the obstacles and challenges in our lives and not in the absence of them. It’s the gift of the struggle.

“Many people in our society are unhappy because they are looking externally for validation. We don’t have a sense of self within us and there is no time for stillness and quiet and contemplation and reflection and quality in our relationships. We are so disconnected from our selves, that disconnection with ourselves is manifesting into different areas of our lives. It is your responsibility at the end of the day.”

What can I do in my day to make me happier?

1. Be kind and make that a priority in your life.
2. Do things that bring you joy.
3. Exercise.
4. Meditate.
5. Eat well.
6. Have a positive attitude.
7. Be grateful.
8. Be forgiving.
9. Spend more time doing things that fulfil your soul, that you are passionate about and care about.
10. Spend more time knowing who you are and understanding yourself.