Conquering The Glass Half Empty

Conquering The Glass Half Empty

This week I watched a video that was circulating on Facebook, a Channel Four News interview of Mo Gawdat, in which he talks about happiness. If you have a chance, I definitely suggest watching it. He first brings up the age old analogy of the glass half full/empty and flips our perception of it. He suggested that rather than seeing the glass as either empty or filled we should observe both the filled portion and the empty portion. The water that our glass holds should be appreciated and cherished, and rather than perceiving the empty portion of the glass negatively we should consider what we can do to change it and whether or not we can accept the way it is. Happiness, Mo Gawdat suggests, is seeing life for what it is – seeing the truth of the glass.

Happiness isn’t what life gives you, happiness is how you perceive what life has given you – it is the difference between what life gives you and the expectations you had for what life would give you. Here at Conquering Life this rings true with everything we believe and promote: happiness isn’t a pill or getting that car, job or perfect partner, rather happiness is a choice to be content and peaceful in our own lives. Happiness changes the things we can adjust and to learn to accept the things we cannot; finding the peace within the occasional stormy ways, that is our world – happiness isn’t suspending unhappy thoughts.

You don’t need a reason to be happy. Happiness is a natural default set of being, but, one that our society has programmed us to believe is wrong. We’ve instead been taught that happiness is achieved through following the appropriate guidelines laid out for us by society. At Conquering Life our goal is to help you undo the societal programming that makes you believe that happiness is unattainable and guide you through finding not only the water in your glass but appreciating or changing the water that isn’t in your glass.

The first step in our program at Conquering Life is acceptance – we must first accept ourselves and our lives and remove the shame and guilt we’ve been taught to associate with this. This is the first step to happiness, seeing the reality of our glasses and accepting it as our own glass. Once we do this we achieve awareness, which is the precursor to change. Our glass can be exactly how we want it to be even if sometimes we find it to be missing something, and once we learn this we have unlocked the secret to unlimited refills, or even better, the secret to never needing to refill or top up our happiness glasses. Take a look at your glass today, know your glass, love your glass and do what you need to do to make it the right glass for you. Conquering Life with acceptance and love.