Everyday Power > Articles About Motivation

How to Be Happy and Live With a Purpose

Published October 7, 2023 | 12 min read

Discover how to be happy and live a well-balanced, purpose-filled life with the helpful tips below!

Learn how to live life on your own terms through better time management and productivity that will increase your ability to do whatever it is you enjoy.

I meet folks from all walks of life when I speak as The Inefficiency Assassin.

I also have wonderful coaching clients all over the world.

The number one question I get asked is, “What is the best _____ to use to have more time in the day?”

You can fill the blank with words such as calendar, file folder, file cabinet, task app, cord manager—you name it.

I’m always asked about a product.

Everyone wants to know the secret quick fix for having more time.

How to create the time to be happy and improve your life

Depending on how much time I have at the moment I am asked this question, I try to explain briefly that tools are just tools.

They won’t work unless something else, something bigger, like an extreme strategy—is learned.

Since you and I have the time, let’s discuss that mind-bending concept.

What is the key to organization and productivity?

What is the key to creating the time to be happy and stop continually searching for purpose?

Here’s a hint: you already possess the most critical tool a person needs to be successful with time management.

It’s your brain!

Don’t get me wrong, calendars and apps are tools you can use.

However, the most essential accessory is your brain.

Your brain decides what goes on those calendars and what tasks get added to those apps or lists.

Regardless of the one you choose to use to track what you need to do, you put effort into filling them up.

How to be happy

Want to figure out how to be happy?

You have a secret weapon…

Your brain is in total control of everything you do.

It decides how much time you waste and how much time you use.

It decides whether you’ll procrastinate or jump in and get things done.

Your brain determines your reaction and response to every person who communicates with you and every situation in which you’re placed.

You can have brain constipation if you have too much spinning around.

It’s important to understand that you can’t be on autopilot if you want to be happy.

You must be conscious, aware, intentional, present, and cognizant—whichever term you prefer—regarding your decisions about how you use your time.

To carve out the time to be happy and to live a life with purpose, we must create clarity and learn to care for and use our secret weapon—our brain.

To create clarity, we must implement the following three concepts:

Capture our priorities
Identify our targets
Reflect with power

Capturing your priorities makes it easier to be happier

Make all decisions in work and life based on your priorities.

There are different tactics for capturing your priorities, depending on whether they are personal or work-related.

Use these tactics to help capture your priorities:

1. Brainstorm: Write (on paper or digitally) every goal that’s important to your life.

2. Write your top three or four personal priorities from this list.

3. View your personal priorities list every day.

4. Make decisions in your personal life based on these priorities.

When trying to capture your work priorities, change the way you brainstorm, slightly!

This time, focus on every belief, objective, and concept important to your work.

Then simply go through the same remaining steps!

Why understanding your priorities is important

To stay focused on what you’re trying to accomplish in your career, you need to understand your priorities in life.

We often think we know what they are because we’ve casually thought about them from time to time.

However, until we set our priorities down on paper (or on the computer) in a place where we can view them daily, they do not become ingrained in our thoughts.

And when they’re not ingrained, we lose sight of the big picture and wind up lost—off our path, in the opposite direction of our mission.

Big changes happen when we move from having thoughts float around between the conscious and subconscious parts of our brains.

Having those thoughts live fully in the conscious part, we become more aware and focused.

That’s what happens when we write our goals and view them daily.

They’re no longer random thoughts that pop in and out of our minds.

The wiring in our brains that helped us to capture these ideas helps us to turn those random thoughts into focused goals.

Stay in the moment to be happy

The next time your brain tries to drag you away from staying present, decide whether to follow that tangent.

Or the next time someone asks you to do something, decide based on the priorities that you’ve just written whether you want to or not.

Will doing the “XYZ” task help you achieve a priority on your list?

If the answer is yes, get it done.

If the answer is no, don’t do it.

Now that you have your priorities established, here are a few questions to consider before moving on to the next step:

When will you view these lists each day (or evening)?
How will you remind yourself to do this every day?
Where can you store these lists so you can readily view them when you need to decide?

Identify your targets

Make all decisions in work and life based on your targets.

Targets are the building blocks or measurable steps to attaining your goals or staying true to all the priorities you just set.

Here are a few suggestions for identifying your personal and work-related targets:

1. Take out the personal priorities list you created in the previous section.

2. Use this list to write your top three personal and work targets. Make sure they are measurable.

3. View your target list every day.

4. Make decisions in your personal life and your work life based on these personal targets.

Why identifying your targets is important

According to multiple studies, we are more successful when our goals are challenging yet realistic and can be measured.

When your goal cannot be measured, it’s easy to bow out.

Therefore, you never get the success you want.

So, be specific.

Since most people never sit down to define specifically what it is they want, they feel as if they’re constantly chasing what they can’t reach.

However, if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, how do you know that you’re not there already?

How do we know if we’ve hit the bulls-eye if we don’t know what the target is?

So many times, we feel like we need to keep burning the midnight oil because we haven’t made it yet.

Many of us have accomplished far more than the average bear!

Yet we haven’t given ourselves credit because we didn’t know our specific target.

How to use these targets to improve your goals

A major snag in the goals lists I’ve seen people create is that they contain intangible or unmeasurable goals.

When I ask clients what their goals are, here are typical examples they give:

I want to…

be happy
be healthy
love myself
spend time with my family
be successful in my career
make enough money to support my family

You can choose a related target if your health is one of your priorities.

Some examples might include walking for 30 minutes each day or eating more vegetables.

If spending time with your spouse is a priority, you can choose a target related to that, like spending two solid hours with him/her this weekend or discussing planning weekly date nights.

Creating a specific target from your priorities list will help you focus on creating a life outside of work.

Having this target will help your brain to make better decisions about how you use your time.

Ask yourself the same questions from the previous section before moving on to reflecting on your priorities and targets:

When will you view these lists each day (or evening)?
How will you remind yourself to do this every day?
Where can you store these lists so they’re available to view when you need to make a decision?

Reflect with power and make a conscious choice to be happy

At the end of each day, celebrate all your wins, no matter how big or small!

Each day is a chance to be grateful for something.

This is important to remember before trying to improve upon what went wrong or didn’t work.

Never start with, “I didn’t get ‘XYZ’ done.”

Take a few moments each day (or at least each week) to reflect on what you’ve been doing to work toward your personal and work priorities and targets.

Ask yourself:

What tasks (small, medium, large, and extra-grande) did I finish and need to celebrate?
Have I stopped and made any decisions based on my priorities and targets? (Celebrate!)
Did I say no to something that would not benefit me? (Celebrate!)
What worked? (Celebrate! And keep doing this.)
Were there lessons I learned from all this good stuff I did?

Reflecting on at least one positive step forward will encourage you to stay focused on your personal and work priorities and targets.

This will help you make better decisions about how you use your time moving forward.

This is how to reflect with power.

Next, ask yourself:

What glitches occurred?
Why did they happen?
Did I learn from what transpired?
Can something be done to prevent them from happening again?
Do I need to make more time for a certain priority or target?
What do I need to take off my plate to make more time for that?

When most folks reflect, they skip the prior “round one” positive questions and celebrations.

They instead start and stop with only the first question in this “round two” section.

Then, they stay frustrated.

Raise your hands in the air and let out a big “Yahoo!” for taking the time to reflect with power on all these questions, as doing so will increase your positivity and brainpower, which will improve the decisions you make about how to use your time.

Reflection is a critical component of being happier

Reflection is an important part of any improvement process and is essential for you to practice if you want to be happy.

But if we focus on chasing unrealistic dreams and never acknowledge what we have in front of us, we end up frustrated from chasing our tails in circles.

Too often, we try to hunt down something that we might already have in our lives that won’t benefit us.

This causes us to spend time and resources on something we don’t need.

We will also stay frustrated and beaten down if we focus on everything we haven’t done.

When we don’t take the time to reflect on power, we often just focus on what’s left on our never-ending to-do list.

That’s not motivating.

We also focus on what went wrong.

This is also not motivating.

For example, if you say something like this at the end of each day, it’s going to get depressing:

“All I got done today was…”

Egad!

Start with what you got done.

How to reflect

You might learn that you’ve accomplished more than you ever thought.

You just haven’t given yourself credit for it yet.

When you start with what you accomplished, you’ll refrain from using negative language like “all I got done” because you’ll realize how inaccurate the “all I got done” phrase is.

Capturing wins is so much more encouraging than focusing on deficits!

We are pros at picking ourselves apart.

That’s why I’m repeating that we must empower ourselves by reflecting first on our large and small victories.

Here are a few final thoughts to help you reflect:

Is there a day (or days) of the week that work better for you to have your power reflection session?
Do you have a quiet place in mind to conduct your reflection?
What reminder will you set for yourself to make sure that it happens?