Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. For those of you who don't know, I'm a clinical

psychologist by trade. I've been working with clients for close to 30 years now and truly love what I do.

But I've learned something in that time.

As far as I can tell, everyone has challenges in life. Sometimes they're incredibly horrible and sometimes

are just tough. But we all have challenges that's part of being human. And though this may

seem simplistic, I actually see it as each time we face these new challenges, we really have two choices.

And this choice keeps occurring throughout our life. We may make the right choice, the choice that

leads us to happiness, each and every time. But we need to keep making that choice. So what

is that choice when we face hard times in life?

What do we choose in between?

We get to choose each and every time these events happen between hardening ourselves against the events or healing from the event and

remaining soft. So life is either a choice between becoming harder and harder or remaining soft and seeing life as a beautiful adventure.

Let me use an example to illustrate this.

When we're younger, we all have our first experience of love.

And most of us have that experience of the person that we love

falling out of love with us. It happens is just part of life. I know there are a few

listeners that may have married their high school sweetheart and are still with them, but that

isn't going to be most of our stories.

So then when that happens, when our heart is broken, we have before us a choice.

Or a choice is going to happen.

We are going to choose to become angry, to become bitter,

to say, ah, life is horrible, people are mean, people are cruel,

...