8 ways happy people are different from everyone else; and how YOU can be different too!

As a therapist-turned-entrepreneur (kinda), I have helped lots of people fight myriad mental and emotional setbacks.

Over time, I have learned that the skill set that helps you avoid depression or anxiety is not the same skill set that helps you experience a joyful, meaningful, and connected life. If you want to be truly happy, you need a new playbook.

Here’s a page from that playbook. It contains eight ways that happy people are different than everyone else.

They are resilient. 

Happy people bounce back, often quickly, from setbacks. Rather than see life’s adversities as destructive and rigid roadblocks that they must quash in order to be happy, they see adverse situations as manageable and temporary fixtures in a pretty good life–the price they pay for renting space on the planet.

They are optimistic.  

You know this to be true–most people want to talk about their problems and what’s not going right. Happy people have the same problems that everyone else does, they are just solution-focused and get bored and irritated talking about problems all the time. They have an uncanny skill for finding solutions where there seem to be none. There’s a time and place for venting, but when you’re ready for a solution, ask an optimist.

They experience a wide-range of emotions. 

While happy people have more positive emotions than negative ones–three times as many, in fact–they do experience negative emotions just like everyone else. However, they experience them differently. They don’t squelch negative emotions. They face them head on in order to learn from them. They let negative emotions guide them into changing a behavior, self-examining, or getting out of a bad relationship. They see negative emotions as an internal wake-up call to change course or re-evaluate…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE