Without realizing it, so many of us are putting expectations on someone else to make us happy. Most women I know struggle with this at some point or another in their lives. Whether it’s with their partner, best friend, child, the clerk at the grocery store, the guy who didn’t hold the door open for you, or the boss that didn’t give you the recognition you deserve, there is a tendency to put our ability to feel good in the hands of someone else.
Do you really want to allow someone else to determine whether or not you feel joy?
I don't think you do. I can show you how YOU can get control over your emotions and get back in the driver's seat of your life now. It's so empowering and refreshing.
There are two major problems with expecting others to make us happy, (1) it usually requires that “someone else” to behave as we would like or expect them to and (2) this is never in our control. So can you see how connecting your happiness to the behavior of others is a “lose-lose” situation?
Get happy. Get joy. You deserve it.
What if, instead, we hold ourselves responsible for creating our own happiness? That requires that we live in a place of emotional adulthood and therefore truly own our emotional life. In theory this sounds, well frustrating, but also like something most of us already think we do. But you’ll be surprised if for one day, even one hour, you observe how many times you believe someone else's actions are making you feel what you’re feeling.
Believing that someone else's behavior is responsible for your feelings feels terrible because if they don't change (and lots of times they don't, especially if you are trying to make them), you are stuck being unhappy.
I have a friend whose property manager makes her completely nuts. In her mind he does not respond to issues fast enough, he doesn’t take them seriously enough, he’s weak and shouldn’t be in his job. So every time she interacts with him (email, phone or in person) she gets annoyed and tense. But here’s the deal, this is her choice. It’s not the property manager’s job to behave the way my friend expects, and if the reality is he will never behave as she expects, then she’s destined to be triggered and annoyed every time she interacts with him.
Remember #2 above, how others behave or react is never in our control.
My friend told me that she came to realize he wasn’t making her feel miserable, she was making herself feel miserable. She’s done her thought work on this and these days she barely even thinks about how frustrated “he used to make her feel.” She asks for what she wants, if she doesn’t get it, she takes steps to take care of it. She now gets how, the way her property manager acts, has nothing to do with how she chooses to feel. She gets to respond to the situation from a grounded place now if that’s what she chooses.
Make yourself happy, you’ve got this!
Play around with this a bit. For the next week, what if you took responsibility for every feeling you feel? What thoughts come up when you think about doing this? Write them down. You now have a page of thoughts you can do a model on. If you don't know how to make yourself happy, but you want to change your life, I will help you.
