This is a lighthearted and easy to read “guidebook” that can as easily be read from the middle out as from page 1 to page 200. A worthwhile investment in time to anyone with a modicum of common sense who can appreciate that all other goals pale into insignificance without this one ingredient in your life. Well done Chris – keep them coming. – Amazon Customer
Why I wrote this book
Happiness is a trendy subject at the moment – at last people are realizing that success isn’t everything – certainly money isn’t everything – and maybe the only point of earning money and being successful is to be happier.
But money won’t make you happier, and often the price of succeeding in business is working long hours and taking on lots of stress, so the overall result is reduced happiness rather than increased.
So – how can a person become happier?
I’ve had a trawl through the books and I have found that most of them are either very intellectual – “can we even define happiness??” – or they just go on about mental attitude: “Think happy and you’ll BE happy” etc.
I think there’s a gap in all these books for a really practical guide, almost coming at it from time management: what should you spend your time on each day, what can you actually DO, in order to harvest all the happiness you can from the things that happen each day? That’s what this book is.
Of course, people vary a lot, and they get happiness from different things, so not every one of my strategies will work for you. But if just some of them do then that’s a result! In fact if you only find ONE thing in all of this big book, and it affects your life every day from now on, then that’s great!
So dip into it, jump around in it, try some of my ideas, and find what works for you.
Onwards and upwards!
Here are my 20 happiness principles for your life:
10 Career Decisions – 20 Happiness principles for my life and yours
So – Chris Croft does it again! For an engineer – he really has a handle on the emotional side of things, and yet is able to add an engineer’s structure and clarity. His take on happiness is, to me, practical and usable. A great book to dip into – or read end to end (your choice – depending on your own personality style!!). Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard some of it before – but are we actually doing it? What a great reminder! Really excellent… sometimes I wish I was Chris Croft 🙂 – Amazon Customer
About the Book
Why write a book on happiness? Why read one?
The answer is “Why write or read a book on anything else?” Surely happiness is the most important subject of all? Surely all the books, and all the time spent thinking about and doing everything else, from Time Management to Making Money, from Philosophy to Gardening, are all aimed at us trying to be happier in our lives. We think that if we had more time, or more money, or knew more about things, or had a nicer garden, that we would be more happy.
But would we?
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of what makes people happy.
Some people think they know, and spend years going after it, only to find when they get it that it doesn’t really make much difference to their overall happiness in life. Others don’t even know what would make them happy, though they wish they did. Many are in denial about the whole subject, going to work, watching TV or having a drink on a Friday night, going on holiday once a year, and trying not to think about whether this is good enough – and is “good enough” good enough? Is it possible to achieve “really good”?
So – what makes people happy?
Maybe everyone is different and the question is too hard to find a single answer to. Certainly there isn’t one easy answer or we’d all know it and do it.
But what if there were basics that work for everyone, or nearly everyone? Or what if we all want a combination of the same basic things? What if there were some quite simple things that we could do that would make a difference to us? That’s what I’m going to explore in this book.
There are limited things you can do each day in order to increase the amount of happiness that you experience. These limited things break down into three main areas
- How you think
- How you spend your time
- How you spend your money
You have almost no control over everything else around you.
You can control your reaction to things (how you think) but to actually make things different it’s pretty much only time and money that you’ve got. So: what to do with them??
This book is designed to be browsed at random. Maybe try a page a day. Maybe work on the ideas with a friend or a group of friends. Whatever works for you!
Full Book Contents
- Section 1: Understanding Happiness
- 6 lifestyles
- Another way of thinking about yourself – your personality type
- Barriers to happiness for each personality type
- Going back to the 6 lifestyles
- Suggested happiness actions for each personality type
- Fallacies
- Your current happiness audit
- Money
- Mixing present and future
- Work
- Purge
- Section 2a: Inside your head – things to get rid of…
- “Can I change myself?”
- Negative Emotions
- Laziness
- Guilt
- Worries
- Drivers
- Being Selfish
- Utility
- Breaking free of comparisons
- Section 2b: Inside your head – things to bring in…
- Review your life – sum up the good
- Observing and Daily Gratitude
- Choosing your mood
- Taking responsibility for everything
- Positive Self talk
- Scripts: you can choose your life
- Mantras
- The Present
- Meditation
- Physical
- Sleep
- Getting up
- Exercise
- Nature
- Security
- Security at work
- Child
- Making the Chores Fun
- Combining happiness factors
- Section 3: Social
- Family time
- Friends – reduce
- Keeping in touch
- Group of friends
- Get Help
- Those old photos
- Being nice
- Help others
- Strangers
- A good boss
- Section 4: Your environment
- The Power of Music
- Environment
- Compacting
- Stress
- Sport
- TV
- Section 5: Time
- Working Hours
- Home Time vs Work Time
- Blurred edges of home and work
- Get organised
- Need to do
- Would like to do
- Simplifying and closing
- Time Buffer
- Time Planning for Happiness
- Saying No
- Negotiate
- Procrastination
- Section 6: Growth and challenge
- Creativity
- Novelty
- Comfort Zones – The balance between excitement and security
- When does challenge become stress?
- Learning
- Control over the evolution of your job
- Section 7: Sense of Achievement
- Progress towards Goals
- Mastermind group
- Enjoying the Price
- Competing isn’t the answer
- Dabbling vs Excelling
- Section 8: Summing Up
- Maslow
- Overall balance
- Top 5 tips for Happiness at Work
- Summing up – My list of 87 actions
Chris Croft has an innate ability to logically and simplify the things we believe to be complicated in our lives. Straight to the point and easy to understand, this book has content that will help anyone to clear their mind and make positive changes to their life.
If you care about someone who you believe could do with being happier – buy them this book ! – Amazon Customer
About Chris Croft
Chris Croft is one of the UK’s leading trainers and provides a wide variety of courses designed to involve, inspire and motivate people of all levels. To date Chris has trained some 87 000 people and enjoys a 94% rate of repeat business. Chris is also a successful author, with his first book ‘Time Management’ was published in 1996 to wide acclaim and has since been followed by fourteen others. His tip of the month email goes out regularly to over 10,000 people. Recently he has also been making videos – there are more than 80 on his youtube channel which has 2000 subscribers and half a million views, and he is featured on www.lynda.com, the world’s largest and probably best management training video site. He has also created his own on-line project management course. [Read more about Chris…]