I do not know about you but the World seems a pretty crazy place at the moment. So much is happening and so much is changing. Things were pretty constant for thousands of years with only slight changes along the way, and of course natural evolution. Now things are happening so quickly that we have no time to adjust. We have entered a World that is like a treadmill, we are all taught that everything will be alright as long as we get the demon dollar. The problem is that we assume that all the bits we ignored in the pursuit of money will sort themselves out.

WRONG!

Life is very unfair in that department, it is like an hour glass. The grains of sand on the bottom are the past, and however much you prod them they are gone. The grains of sand in the top are the future and you have no control how they will pass through the neck. The grains actually falling through the neck are the present but we only have control over them for a very short while and if we do not use them they are gone forever. The grains that have gone through are gone forever, that relates to the time that you have ignored your family, ignored your friends, and worst of all ignored yourself.

Happiness and contentment are all a state of mind, and if you are at peace with yourself the money that you get will assist in doing things that you enjoy, it will not guarantee Happiness. How many stories do you hear about people living in huge houses who are not happy, and how many feelgood stories do we hear about people with very modest means, who are really happy. At this point you will say that there is a connection then between money and happiness, to a certain extent you are right. We hear through life sayings such as, Filthy rich, Stinking rich, The rich are bad, Money does not buy happiness etc., all these have one purpose, and that is, that if you fail in life, or consider yourself unsuccessful you can in a quirky kind of way justify your failure, by saying you did not want to be rich anyway..

Admittedly a vast number of people who obtain wealth at the expense of enjoying life on the way through, do end up miserable. The secret then must be to have a plan so that you can have a goal to attain wealth and security, but also smell the roses on the way through. The great thing about obtaining happiness and contentment is, it allows you to set your own targets. As long as you are at peace with yourself then you know how much money you need and also you have your own definition of success. Most problems are caused because we are trying to impress others, when we are at peace with ourselves, we do not need to worry about what other people think.

Happiness is not a one size fits all state of mind, obviously we all have secret dreams, and they will vary, based on the information and events we have experienced in the past. The secret is to really think deep and say, Am I doing the things I am doing to make me happy? or Am I doing them to impress others? Am I doing them to provide for my family? or any other reason that is different to making you happy. We have to be very honest here, because every thing depends on your answer.

Assuming that you have said that you are not doing what you are doing to make you happy, we had better look at ways to alter your thinking. So many people work at the expense of their life and also their family. Why on earth would you want to work ignoring all the good things on the way through? As we said earlier there is no way you can recapture lost time. The best you can hope for when you finally think you have enough, is to live in a house with a group of people you do not know. Thats a great reward isnt it!.

For the records I think that an ample flow of money is essential to a happy life, and I have no qualms about people getting huge amounts of money, provided that they ENJOY it. The silly thing is that many people who I have mentored in the past, have found that they make more money once they lock into being happy. They find that decisions are easier to make, they realise that it is better to be creative rather than competitive, they realise that there is an abundance of everything and it will come to them once they have a goal that is structured to make them happy.

The choices we have then appear to be[a] Carry on as we are, stressed out, no family life, no real down time to enjoy ourselves and a competitive frame of mind equating to dog eat dog etc.. or [b] A balanced life, with ample time for family and friends, a stress free outlook on life and a goal that includes you as a happy person with time to spare. That seems like a no brainer to me. So why do most of us get stressed out and keep on the treadmill day after day, convinced that when we get all this money we will be able to put everything right.

How many people do you know who are stressed? I suspect we all know plenty, and that will only be the ones that talk about it. So many people bottle up their emotions because they have been brought up to think that it is weak to admit that you cannot cope. Once again trying to do things to impress others has caused the problem. The strange thing is that once you pluck up the courage to talk about your problems, things seem instantly better. Most of our stress is caused by something I have named circular thought. This is the situation of us trying to solve things that do not exist. We have all done it, we have a situation and we try and work out, what would happen IF, and then we say,IF this happens what will I do and we keep second guessing what might happen. As the problem does not actually exist , how on earth can we solve it? The funny thing then is that we cross refer these imagined scenarios and all of a sudden we are in a real pickle, trying to solve a mish mash of circumstances that only exist in our head. No wonder we cannot think straight. For some people this state of stress is commonplace and they accept it as the norm.

During some of my mentoring classes I send people to Worry Free Island for two days, so that they can de stress themselves. This is a place where your imagination can do some remarkable things.

When people take the time to stop and take stock of their lives, they nearly always agree that they would like to do things differently, but they are conditioned into the mode that is causing the grief. At this point you must realise that with very little effort you can reprogramme your thinking to a totally new life.