Resisting happiness summary – You can’t put a price on happiness. Like the best things in life, it’s free. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work to find it.
Luckily, best-selling author Matthew Kelly is on hand with a helpful roadmap to a contented and meaningful life. By turns practical and philosophical, these blinks argue that the best place to start is by overcoming resistance.
Once you defeat the niggling doubts and fears that stand in the way of attending to the things that matter most, you can start finding out who you really are and what your life mission is.
What is resistance? Take an everyday example. The alarm rings in the morning and you sleepily fumble in the dark and hit the snooze button. That’s resistance at work. And you’ve just lost the first battle of the day.
In other words, it’s that familiar and discouraging feeling that makes you put off things that you know need doing.
Resistance is a major problem, especially when it comes to long-term projects.
Most people who start writing a book, for example, never end up finishing it. Laziness, lack of confidence or just plain self-sabotage get in the way.
That’s something Matthew Kelly knows a lot about. As a published author, he’s regularly asked for advice on how to get a book into print. But most of the people who ask him for tips haven’t even finished writing their own books!
Kelly tells them to get back to him once they’re done with the writing process – and he never hears another word from around 95 percent of his correspondents. These people clearly lost their individual battles against resistance. Procrastination or sloth won out.
So how could these budding authors have achieved full bloom?
Well, one way to start fighting resistance is to name the obstacle. Once you’ve identified the nature of the hurdle you face, it’s much easier to work out how you can get over it.
Another option is prayer.
Take Kelly. He’s a busy guy and spends a lot of time on the road. Constantly encountering new sights and sounds could easily become a source of distraction. That’s why he took up the habit of devoting ten minutes each day to praying.
When he prays, he considers four questions. Who am I? What’s my life’s purpose? What’s most important? What’s least important?
Answering those questions provides clarity. It leaves him with a sense of purpose and reaffirms what he’s passionate about. And that’s a great basis for making better life decisions.
The added bonus? It’s helped him become more spiritually fulfilled.
Happiness can be hard to pin down. Lots of people think that they’d be truly content if only they could afford a nice car, buy a luxury home or marry their true love. But reality isn’t like that. Conventional ideas and material goods don’t lead to lasting happiness.
So how do you find out what will really make you happy?
It’s much easier to get a handle on your true values when you confront the inevitability of death head-on. That in turn puts you on the road to leading a joyful life.
Kelly realized this when he was consulting for a well-known hospital. One day, he got to talking with some hospice nurses. What, he asked them, do people talk about as they’re dying?
The nurses’ answer was a revelation.
Most people, they said, dwell on their regrets. If only they’d been brave enough to be themselves, communicated their feelings better or had the courage to take more risks….
Kelly saw that this provided a clue about how to live in the here and now. By pondering the inevitability of death and imagining what you’d say on your deathbed, you can begin prioritizing what’s really important to you.
That means making sure you’re doing the things that matter to you – in other words, the things that will make you happy.
That’s easier said than done, right? What helps is understanding that everyone faces their own unique struggle. Once you realize that, you’ll become more compassionate.
Take another example from Kelly’s life. The day he was diagnosed with cancer changed his perception of the world forever.
It was a dazzlingly sunny day. He’d just heard the worst news imaginable. But……..
To Read Resisting happiness summary completely sign up to Blinkist for free (Click here)
Ever read 4 books in one day?
The post Resisting happiness summary | Matthew Kelly | 10-Minute Summary appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/resisting-happiness-summary-matthew-kelly-10-minute-summary/
No comments:
Post a Comment