Finding Happiness: It All Depends on Your Focus

We all want to be happy and to find contentment and meaning in our lives. But sometimes the harder we search for happiness, the more elusive it seems to become. Perhaps someone tells us that the achievement of happiness may require us to make some fairly big changes in our lives, such as increasing our level of self-esteem, or letting go of our anger, or embracing new and difficult challenges. We need, in essence, to become a different kind of person. While this type of advice may sound interesting in theory, it is tiring and hard to follow. In the current book you will not be advised to change the way you are in any basic sense. Rather, you will simply be asked to play with your perspective and with how you tend to look at things. Subtle recalibrations in our focus and in what we bring to our attention can have a powerful impact on how we view ourselves and our life. You will learn that you have a choice in what you bring into your awareness. You are the author of your own life narrative, and you, in a sense, create the world of your own experience. Just learning that we all have this type of choice can be liberating. The book is divided into 14 short chapters. The first five chapters concern how to increase contentment and satisfaction when thinking of the past; the next four deal with finding increased joy in the present; and the last five are about learning to think about the future with increased optimism and hope. The tone of the book is accessible and inviting. Concepts are brought to life by giving many applied examples and illustrations of ideas. Carefully crafted and tested exercises are included that nudge you into new ways of thinking and experiencing. Finally, thoughtful questions are incorporated at the end of each chapter to encourage you to think deeply about the concepts presented and to relate them not just to your own life, but also to the timely issues of our day. This book will be of interest both to the average reader and to students taking classes on positive psychology, where it could serve either as a main text in a short course or a supplement to a semester-long course.

• | Author: Virginia Murphy-Berman
• | Publisher: Momentum Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 25, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 118 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1946646768
• | ISBN-13: 9781946646767