Live Bold and Bloom

51 Of The Best Ways To Always Be Happy With Yourself

You want to be happy with yourself and your life. Who doesn't?

Maybe you're here because you're unhappy right now, and you're seeking some ideas to improve your happiness.

There's good reason to look for ways to be happy.

A growing body of research tells us happiness isn't just a lovely feeling — it's also quite beneficial for you.

It's been linked to a load of life benefits including a higher income, a stronger immune system, and even a boost in creativity.

Psychologists Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia conducted a happiness study of more than 10,000 participants from 48 countries.

They discovered that people all over the world rate happiness as more important than other highly desirable personal outcomes like meaning in life, becoming rich, and getting into heaven.

People who are happy with themselves also make for a stronger, healthier, more productive society.

33 Of The Best Small Talk Topics And Questions

by Barrie Davenport

Do you ever find yourself in that dreaded situation where you're face-to-face with an acquaintance or stranger, and you're forced to make some kind of conversation?

Whether or not you were expecting to be with this person, you're now stuck in the moment trying to come up with small talk topics and struggling to know exactly what to say.

How was your weekend? What do you think about the weather?

Do you have any plans for the summer?

The prospect of having these short conversations can lead to anxiety, as you try to straddle saying enough while not saying the wrong thing.

Let's review some small talk topics you can bring up in these uncomfortable situations that will seem neither forced nor awkward.

33 Time-Tested Ways To Find The Key To Happiness

by Barrie Davenport

Woman blowing dandelion, key to happiness

What is the key to happiness?

Not just fleetingly happy but deeply content with your life?

Have you figured out how to maintain that contentment so that it's the undercurrent that runs through all of the ups and downs of daily life?

Finding the key to happiness isn't about finding external things, events, or relationships that boost you up.

It isn't about attaining more money or power.

Real happiness, the kind that brings you a sense of inner peace and well-being in spite of outer circumstances requires new mindsets and habits.

If you'd like to open the door to that kind of sustained happiness, you may be using the wrong keys.

Here are some ideas for developing a foundation of happiness and success in your life.

55 Positive Emotions That Make You Healthier and Happier

by Barrie Davenport

All emotions have their appropriate place and time, but positive emotions are the ones most of us prefer to have more frequently, with maybe a light scattering of negative ones to prove we’re still human.

And yet, we often find ways to make ourselves miserable, and then we wonder why we catch every bug that’s going around.

It’s no longer a leap to see the connection between our emotions and our physical (as well as mental) health.

In essence, the more time we spend with positive emotions that are in congruence with our core truth, the healthier we are.

And because what we feel is tied to what we believe and to the words we use to express those beliefs, we can make more room for positive feelings by eliminating the beliefs and the language that are hostile to them.

First, though, we need to know what emotions are and why they’re so powerful.

Extraverted Intuition: 8 Signs That You Are A NE Personality Type

by Barrie Davenport

Do you know who you are?

This seemingly simple question may not be as simple as it sounds.

Psychologists, philosophers and some of the world’s greatest minds have been pondering this question for centuries.

Carl Gustav Jung, a renowned Swiss psychiatrist believed that all human beings are guided by four main psychological functions: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking.

Some years later, a mother and daughter duo, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers developed what is now known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a predictive questionnaire designed to determine which primary psychological functions guide people to explore and understand the world around them.

“Intuition gives outlook and insight; it revels in the garden of magical possibilities as if they were real.” – Jung

One of the most underestimated and widely misunderstood personality types is the Extraverted Intuitive (NE) and today, shed light on some of the main signs that may indicate that you fall into this rare group.