Welcome to the Happiness Podcast, I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When we're unhappy with our lives, I think there's a tendency to believe that if our lives were different, our lives would be better, and we would be happier. There's a real tendency when we're

unhappy to look for external causes for our unhappiness and say if these things

weren't there then we would be happy.

And the sad truth is, you're right.

If we believe that our external circumstances make us happy or unhappy, we're right.

And because life is always throwing something at us, even when things are at their best, because then things can go wrong.

We're always going to be unhappy.

But we're not right in the way you may be thinking.

It's not that this is a truth. It's just that if we believe it, then it is a truth.

Our thoughts, how we see the world, shape our level of happiness or unhappiness.

Because the truth is, the external circumstances of our life

are irrelevant when it comes to our level of happiness.

And if we're truthful and if we think about this, we know this is true. Why? Because

we know people that have far less than we do and are doing well. We know people who have

gone through so much more than we have and are doing well. They may be the minority, but we all know people like this.

So in today's podcast, I want to talk about a technique that we can use to find happiness when it looks like externally things aren't going well.

So to begin, remember, our thoughts matter. Whatever we think our thoughts Our thoughts have a lot of power to them.

So what do people do who are happy when they go through tough times? How do they interpret these difficulties and still

keep a smile on their hearts? Well one of the things they do is this. They perceive that chaos in one level can be harmony on another. Let me use a couple

examples to explain this. I live in California and we have a park called Sequoia National Park.

It is beautiful and it's home to the Sequoia trees, which are these mammoth trees that live for centuries.

And yet in California, if you listen to the news, we have fires periodically, and sometimes we have a lot of them and we have big ones.

...