Can a minimalist have a jacuzzi?

Like mindfulness, minimalism gets a bad wrap sometimes.  Both are often misunderstood, misquoted and often get people from western culture thinking that you have to sit cross-legged humming with incense burning to practice it.  Also like mindfulness, minimalism is catching fire in our western culture, and mindfulness concepts and practices are making a huge difference with people suffering from depression, anxiety and PTSD.  They are being integrated more and more into traditional Western medicine practices, this is a good thing.   

Get tactical with your awareness

While developing a workshop about coping with stress in our lives I wanted to use concepts found in many different areas of psychology including mindfulness, psychological flexibility, acceptance/commitment therapy and others.  I started to pull from different areas and developed a definition that I now use coming from my law enforcement background, and called it “Tactical Awareness”. 

Very often the process of change for a person starts with just awareness.  The old adage “stop and smell the roses” is truer today than we all realize. 

What do happy people do different?

Do “happy” people do things differently? Did they attend some secret meeting where they were told the secrets to happiness?  There are thousands of books, websites, and blogs dedicated to the topic of being happy.  However, the best way that I have found to learn something new is to model those that are already doing it well.  Working with clients, talking with colleagues and friends, and also reading a lot of those books, blogs and websites, I wanted to see if I could come up with an answer to the question, do happy people do things differently. Looking at people that report being consistently happy on psychological surveys, it turns out there are things we can identify they do on a consistent basis that points to then being “happy”.  Putting all the research and information together, here are the tops things we can identify that “happy” people do on a consistent basis: