How happy and successful can you be when you do not experience peace of mind? Think about when you’re sick, or when you feel tired all the time. Or imagine you are broke as bills pile up and your income sources dry up. Does that make you sit back and enjoy the moment? Hell no! It gives you sleepless nights, stress and makes you feel anything but comfortable. Now quickly ban all those negative experiences I just referred to out of your mind. I am going to share with you the seven aspects of your life that have to be in perfect shape to experience that state of mind in which you can achieve success and happiness up to your highest potential.

Peace of mind: The absence of mental stress or anxiety, and the presence of serenity, calm, quiet, comfort of mind; Inner peace (source: Wikipedia)

1. Self-understanding

Some people know from their early childhood what they want to do and do practically everything to achieve it. I hugely admire young sports professionals who train four, five or even six times a week in the early morning, before they go to school and while their classmates are still sleeping. Some people need a longer time to figure out what their purpose in life is. I am often shocked about the extent to which people lack understanding about how their own mind functions, which ‘laws’ govern their day-to-day lives and – let’s put it simple – what makes them tick. You don’t have to study psychology for that – study yourself instead! The most successful people we know and the greatest thinkers of all time never stopped studying themselves and others.

2. Worthy goals

You need to have some sort of purpose that challenges you to get the best out of yourself, that you consider worthy of you and, ideally, that others consider worthy. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was laughed at when he set as his goal to get a PC in every living room and on every desk. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison before he became president of South Africa and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many, in the search for their purpose in life, look for something that can last a lifetime. But that is not so important. It is important that it feels real right now. Right now, I feel like writing this blog and working on my book How To Live Wow!?, because I feel the drive to sharing my thoughts with the world and helping other young people to find answers to the questions that matter. Who knows what I’ll be doing in 10 years? What helps enormously to determine your worthy goals, is a better understanding of yourself (1).

3. Health and energy

We need to be in good health. Stress is one of the main causes of physical illness, so we need to avoid that as much as possible. But this also works the other way! Physicall illness causes stress. It takes away our security, especially when a disease is (potentially) life-threatening. When you are in a good physical state, you also feel better mentally, which then makes it easier to develop mentally, to get deeper understanding of yourself (1) and in case you didn’t find it yet, to find your worthy goals (2).

4. Resources

Physical resources, to be more precise. You need the security of a roof above your head, money in your bank account to assure that you can fulfill in your basic needs (food, drinks, clothing, etcetera). Without those resources, our physical health, our safety and emotional well-being are immediately at stake (2). Those resources are also a little bit of insurance that whenever something is wrong with our health, we can go to a doctor and get treatment. Without resources, our health is at stake (3), and without health it is much harder to focus on your state of mind (1) and finding your purpose, your worthy goals (2).

5. Freedom

We have to experience freedom. We all have the absolute freedom to think whatever we want to think. Only one person in the world can have absolute control over your mind: You. So that’s a freedom we already have by nature. The form of freedom that can be taken away from us, which will ultimately damage our ability to aquire resources (4), our health (3) and thus our ability to study ourself (1) and to achieve our worthy goals (2) is peace of mind, is our physical freedom – our ability to go to places as we deem that necessary or wanted. You might never actually take the advantage of travelling across the world, but just knowing that in theory you could if you want it contributes to your happiness.

6. Relationships

We need to have the capability – impossible without freedom (5) – to engage into long-term, quality relationships, in the many different forms they exist in. From a basic, natural instinct, we know that relationships with people help us to aquire resources (4) – hunting in the old days, and it’s a lot more complicated nowadays! Without resources, no health and energy (3), and so on. The need for relationships also directly relates to our physical (read: sexual) needs, and our instinctive desire to multiply ourselves. Relationships also give us the ability to reflect upon ourselves through the experiences of others. After all, the people around you often know you a lot better than you think, and in many ways better than you know yourself, even! As such, they contribute to our self-understanding (1).

7. Moving forward

Ever feel like you’re stuck? You have (or had) a plan, large or small, but it’s just not happening. You’re not getting anywhere in life. You don’t have a real sense of purpose in life, you wonder who you are, what you’re here for (2), you don’t feel comfortable in your own body, or you’re physically unwell (3), you’re broke (4), others limit you to solve these problems (5) and if that isn’t enough, you’ve just been dumped by your boyfriend/girlfriend (6). Some people experience these things all at once, others just one or two, but they all work paralyzing. It either feels like a step back, or like being stuck. That’s why we need to experience ourselves moving forward in life. As soon as we experience a big boost in any of the aspects above, no matter if you suddenly earned a nice sum of unexpected income, when you fall in love or when you have finally found your passion, you feel like the world is yours! You feel like you can do anything! When we feel stuck instead, peace of mind is everything but what we experience.

Let’s put this into perspective…

If you experience a problem in any of these seven aspects of your life, I bet you do not experience peace of mind – the ultimate state in which you can experience happiness and achieve success. It is tempting to think that because all seven are so related to eachother, having issues in one field heavily affects the others. To a certain degree they do affect eachother, as you probably noticed by following the (numbers). It is like a chain of events; it takes one weak link to break it! This also means – and here comes the good news! – that once you fix one of those aspects, it will immediately have a positive effect on at least one, and most likely several or even all other aspects of your life! So, in fact, there is no need to worry at all.

…but how to fix it!?

Facing your problems and then analyze them can be pretty tough! In fact, it’s one of the hardest things to do mentally. A lot of people close their eyes and hope they will eventually disappear. Unfortunately, that’s not the way life works. But there is good news too, and it is the good news we need to focus on to make things work here!

First of all, let’s look at your problems as challenges that can be fixed. Like my best friend once said: “If it can’t be solved it’s not a problem!”

In case you have a challenge in your life right now, try to allocate it under one of these seven aspects. In case you have several challenges and lost oversight, write down one at a time and allocate it under one of these seven aspects, before you even think of the next challenge. You will notice that it is much easier to find a fix to your challenge once you make clear to yourself in which area of your life the challenge manifests, in which area the cause of the challenge lies and how your challenge affects the other aspects by creating problems there. This makes it easier to find real solution! In fact, by reading this blog post and by systematically analyze your challenges in life, you’ve already made a great contribution to your self-understanding (1)! In fact, it all leads back to self-understanding. Whatever makes you tick, defines whether you are happy and successful or not!

If you don’t know where to start, I have more good news for you: It doesn’t matter! Just take the first step to solve one aspect that prevents you from achieving peace of mind. If you figure out which aspects of your life are up for improvement but can’t figure out how to fix them, try the 5 Questions That Can Help You Out In Any Situation.

Conclusion

To summarize this lengthy blog post – I got all fired up while writing – we can conclude that to experience and fully enjoy success and happiness, peace of mind is crucial. Whenever one of  these seven aspects of your life is raising challenges, it affects the other aspects. If you want to experience success and happiness, but have problems in one of these fields, try to find out for yourself in which aspect you experience challenges, in which aspect the cause lies and which aspects it influences. The impact of your solution will be much greater, and will be a huge contribution to your peace of mind, and ultimately success and happiness!

Allow me to leave you with a question to answer for yourself: Is peace of mind the key to success and happiness, or have you actually accomplished manifesting success and happiness as soon as these seven aspects of your life are in great shape, leading to you experiencing peace of mind?

photo by gabriel77

With new elections coming up here in the Netherlands and daily coverage of the election campaign, I was wondering whether this intense celebration of democracy actually makes us happy. I decided to dive into the matter, and found out that a well-oiled democracy is not at all guarantee for happiness. I also figured out that in a very undemocratic country, it’s hard to be happy, although there are some interesting exceptions!

There are several attempts to measure happiness, which is rather subjective compared to the objectively measurable economic results of a nation. One of those attempts is the Happy Planet Index. I compared the Happy Planet Index with the Democracy Index rank of The Economist, which you can find behind the country name:

1. Costa Rica (27)
2. Dominican Republic (73)
3. Jamaica (49)
4. Guatemala (79)
5. Vietnam (149)

Let’s look at the five most democratic countries in the world according to the same Democracy Index, compared to their rank in the Happy Planet Index, which you can find behind the country name:

1. Sweden (53)
2. Norway (88)
3. Iceland (94)
4. The Netherlands (43)
5. Denmark (105)

Let’s try another source! According to the World Database of Happiness, the following countries make up the top-5 highest ranking countries based on the question: “How much do you enjoy your life on a scale 1 to 10?” The list is based on the averages from 2000 to 2009. Again, behind the country names, you can find their level of democracy according to The Economist’s Democracy Index:

1. Costa Rica (27)
2. Denmark (5)
3. Iceland (3)
4. Switzerland (8)
5. Canada (11)

This list already gives a better indication to believe that happiness and democracy are related. However, to get more complete picture, I decided to look after some random, undemocratic countries. Chad (166) is the second last country on the Democracy Index, after North Korea. It ranks 92nd in the World Database of Happiness. Tunisia ranks 141st on the Democracy Index, and 71st in the World Database of Happiness. Ghana is the 94th most democratic country in the world, and ranks 101st on the World Database of Happiness. Laos ranks 157th in the Democracy Index, but 59th in the World Database of Happiness.

It is interesting to conclude that a good democracy does per definition lead to a happy population. It is hard to define why that is the case, but it might well be that in those countries, democracy is often taken for granted and people divert to other reasons to be unhappy about. The fact that happiness doesn’t work out well in countries where democracy is all but present, can be explained by that these countries are often plagued by social and economic problems, strong military presence and a lack of basic needs.

The abovementioned conclusions are by no means scientific. But they do give a direction, and I will continue to explore this fascinating subject the upcoming weeks and months to go deeper into the matter in my upcoming book, How To Live Wow!?

photo by joatklipa

Take a moment today to sit down and briefly describe your best possible future. Imagine everything goes exactly the way you want, realistically. Also make sure it’s brief enough to put it in your pocket or wallet, so you can carry it around.

Researcher Laura King from the Southern Methodist University found out, in a study called The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals, that those who described their best possible future ended up significantly happier after three months than people who were asked to do the same with a traumatic experience, or even by just writing down their plans for the day.

Describing your best possible future will not only be likely to make you a happier person, it also challenges you to actually think about what you want your life to look like and makes you consciously thinking about how to achieve that state.

Photo by asifthebes