Here are five ideas I always return to whenever I experience the human sense of doubt.

Internalising these helps me take on life’s challenges from a healthy, confident state…

1. Doubt is human.

For many of us, it can feel isolating when we have doubts about our capabilities.

One of the worst things you can do is to buy into the idea that you’re totally separate from everyone else — that you’re unique in your insecurities.

We’re all going through doubts, no matter how seemingly together we seem — please trust me on this. Doubt isn’t reserved for a select few weirdos.

A sense of doubt is a normal human response to existence and our growth within that reality.

Whether we allow doubt to slowly cripple us is another issue, but don’t believe you’re the only one.

When we know this is an innately human condition, we sense our connection with each other.

We can look straight into the eye of another man and know he too can doubt.

This will lift you.

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No one is born any less compassionate than the next person, even though it doesn’t seem that way as we mature.

But we always have a choice.

We can find things to like in other people. We can find reasons to love others (even if they choose to dye their hair blue). Compassion is part of what it means to be human. It isn’t to be deluded or a ‘hopeless optimist.’

It is to open up to humanity and expect the best in others. It is to see ourselves in others.

When we do the opposite, we become jaded and bitter, tighten around people, and fail to seize opportunities for healthy collaboration and mutual joy.

We lose the most in the end.

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Want to know the quickest way to be continually miserable? Resist ‘bad’ stuff. Resist your inner shadow side.

Refuse to accept the cruelty of human nature. Moan when it rains. You could never enjoy life if there weren’t darker moments.

And you could never truly embrace human nature, or yourself, if you didn’t accept and acknowledge our darker elements.

Happy people have accepted the horrors lurking in the dimly lit avenues of the world around us. They don’t reel off hundreds of affirmations with a forced smile hoping and praying the bad things get covered up like clown paint and disappear.

Happy people are not deluded. They accept. They use their aggressive nature.

They learn to love reality for what it is.

They do what they can to address evil, but they don’t try to change things out of their control.

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The ‘happiest’ people by no means have ideal lives.

No one does, dumb dumb.

Even the people you envy are dealing with shit you don’t want. What happy people have in common is maintaining a continual need to keep things light.

I’m not saying you should be the over-the-top insufferable pun joke-telling guy who smiles when things need to appropriately be more low-key. No.

I’m talking about being light-hearted where appropriate and keeping the people around them lifted.

Most people are focused on their own miseries.

Happy people transcend this and actively practice the art of light-heartedness.

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For those with significant mental health or other problems, some kind of therapy for some time can be necessary.

But after a point, I believe that attention given to one’s ‘mental health’ is to your detriment.

When we focus on fixing our perceived problems, we inadvertently emphasise our issues in the mind, thus enlargening them. Instead, we must focus on our work, developing our skills, creating value in the world, and helping others.

That gets us out of our heads, away from our narcissistic self-obsession.

When we do this, we realize the mental wellness that was there all along.

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Recently, as I was sitting taking notes by the river, someone waved at me from a passing boat.

Whether it was aimed at me or not didn’t matter.

I waved back in acknowledgement of my understanding and confirmation that we’re all connected.

To sense the connection we have with all things is happiness.

By creating the reality we want, we confirm it. If we see others as connected, we are connected. If we see ourselves as a victim or an island, we create that reality and we feel the depression of that reality.

Seeing continual confirmation of your connection to other people, regardless of who they are, is a high-consciousness life hack.

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I’ve lived a life with plenty of unnecessary struggle, heartbreak and frustration.

I’ve always been interested in what separates generally happy people from those who seem to attract all the struggle and bad luck.

There are several ‘secrets’ shared by the happiest people I know. Here they are:

1. Stopped searching.

A curious thing happens when we do as 99% of humans do, which is to search for happiness: we become unhappy.

If we’re knowingly pursuing the illusion of ‘happiness’, we are unwittingly communicating to ourselves that we’re — you guessed it — not happy.

The chase emphasises the lack.

When I reveal to my clients they already have everything they need to be happy, right here, right now — I always enjoy watching the relief wash over them.

‘You mean I don’t need to get the girl or the Lambo to be happy?’ You can absolutely prioritise those things if you like.

But you do it from a place of wholeness and innate happiness.

When you approach life FROM happiness, you perform 100x better.

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