Ten Steps to Happiness
Whenever you face a problem in life, you have two choices – you can let the problem overwhelm you or you can see it as an opportunity to grow as a person, to become better.
The first choice leads to frustration; the other to happiness. What doesn’t change is the fact that you have a choice – you can choose to be happy about something or you can choose to be unhappy!
Get Happy Now shows how you can make the right choice. It demonstrates the power of attitude – the critical factor that determines how different people react differently to the same problem. The lessons from this book are applicable equally to corporate life as they are to one’s personal life.
The setting keeps on changing. The only constant is YOU!
Get Happy Now leads you through a wondrous journey of self-realization and helps prepare you to be a happier person. It will equip you to better handle the trials of life, whether it is in accepting yourself as you are or accepting others as they are, to the intricacies of handling relationships, managing pain….
Let the magic that is YOU unfold….
Choose to GET HAPPY NOW
(Extracted from Chapter 1 – Happiness in accepting yourself as you are)
“When I can accept my own lapses of ethics and moralities and not see them as a danger to my existence, I will be more tolerant of lapses in others. When I admit that I am as fallible as the next person is to make errors, I will stop striking a noble pose and be more understanding.”
At times, there is nothing easier than to adopt a “noble” attitude towards the people around us. We see a fault being committed somewhere and we turn up our nose at it. We see something that does not appeal to our sense of moralities and we feel disgusted with the person responsible. If instead of being judgmental, one were to look deeper within one’s own self, to find out what it is in the act committed by the other person that is so odious to our sensibilities, we may realize that it is due to the knowledge within us that we too are fallible to committing the same breach of morality.
For instance, when I was disgusted with something that my neighbor’s teen aged son just said to his father, I found on reflection that it was due to the knowledge that sometime in my life, I too had behaved similarly with my father.
It is the knowledge of our own weaknesses & limitations that disgusts us when we see the same being acted out by somebody else. And we subconsciously defend our own limitations (past or present) by standing in judgment on others.
When you can accept your own lapses of ethics and moralities and not see them as a danger to your existence, you will be more tolerant of lapses in others. When you can admit that you are as fallible as the next person is to make errors, you will stop being judgmental altogether, and will instead be more understanding – of yourself in the first instance, and then of others.
You may have seen that whenever you try to eschew a particular strain of thought, it actually takes deeper root in your mind. The more you try to suppress a particular feeling, to put down a particular urge, the more it grows within you. This is especially true when you are trying to suppress a “Negative” feeling. Though momentarily you may succeed in putting the urge down, ultimately it grows in strength till it is beyond your control.
Instead of ignoring this feeling, try bringing it out from the recesses of your sub-conscious to deal with it. Satisfy yourself that this “Negative” feeling is a part of you, even though “Negative”. You may find it easier to accept this feeling then, allowing your mind the freedom to pursue the Positives.
To kill your Negatives, you have first to accept them!
This section mainly includes Q&A on the book. Some questions however may be about the author too. In case you have any queries that are not covered here, you are welcome to connect with Jagmohan Bhanver on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Alternatively, you may write to him at jagmohan.bhanver@iifmonline.com
At a very basic level, Get Happy Now is about understanding the various things that may conspire to make us unhappy and how we can address these. But more importantly, the book actually shows us that happiness lies within us. It is we who cover the inherent joy within us under the burden of how we see our problems and the choices that we make in life.
Therefore, if we can learn to control how we see a problem, most of the problems no longer appear as problems. Secondly if we choose how we want to react to the problem, that choice may actually make the difference between being happy or unhappy.
The book covers ten of the most frequent challenges we face in life that may make us lose our natural joy. Each of the ten sections has anecdotes and stories that will help clarify the author’s point of view and make it easier for the reader to understand what they need to do.
Life can either be serious or funny. It depends on how you see it.
To answer your question, the book does cover a lot of situations that may be serious simply because those things may combine to make you unhappy. And that’s serious stuff isn’t it?
But the book covers these issues in a way that makes otherwise serious and heavy things fairly lighter and interesting to read about. The whole idea is to be a happier person isn’t it? How can that be serious stuff?
Be careful. A lot of those authors might sue you and me both for that statement.
On a serious note, I think a lot of authors have done a marvelous job of writing stuff that helps people like you and me. However, Get Happy Now is different because it doesn’t preach. So in this book, I am not sitting on Mount Everest telling you what is wrong with your life. On the contrary, I have shared several incidents in my life where I made mistakes and ended up being unhappy.
Moreover, the book has been structured around real life questions asked by real people who needed help. Therefore, the writing style is more like me talking to these people. That makes it easier for people to identify with the issues and the suggestions in the book.
That’s an interesting question. If you read it at one go, you may finish it in 3-4 hours. However, most of my readers tell me that after they have finished reading it the first time around, they have reread the book several times, one chapter at each sitting.
This is not a book that you finish and leave alone. The readers who have got the most out of it are people who have gone back to it from time to time, depending on the nature of the problem they are facing in their life at a particular moment.
Life is not restricted to a particular country. Neither is happiness! These are universal experiences. I have drawn from my experiences in India and elsewhere in the world. However the recommended solutions are as universal as the problems themselves. Any person with the desire to be happy will benefit from this book.
Actually this book was never meant for publication. I wrote this at a very early age and it was a compilation of my experiences and those of others around me. By the time I was in my twenties, I started counseling people informally. And every time I thought a person would benefit from something I had written that was relevant to his life at that moment, I would hand them an extract from the book.
And then something strange happened. I had people coming back telling me how the extracts from the book had helped them face their problems. And these people shared the stuff with other people they thought could benefit from it. Over a couple of years, there was a large community of people trying to persuade me to get the book published. Finally when I was in my thirtieth year, and planning to take a sabbatical from my banking career, I approached one of the leading publishers in India. The Chief Editor at the publishing house was kind enough to read it personally and within a week of submitting the manuscript, I had a letter from them confirming that they wanted to publish the book. And that is how Get Happy Now was born in 2004.
The book was published in 2004 when hardly any Indian readers were keen on reading nonfiction. And whatever nonfiction they read was from international authors.
Therefore, it came as a welcome surprise when Get Happy Now hit the Top Ten bestseller list within a week of being launched. And it stayed there for a significant time. The book was also one of the fast moving titles on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Apart from this, the book has been a favorite pick at all my Dynamic Living seminars in India and overseas markets.
Titles such as Life Coach and Motivational Guru are more of semantic. Every time I have been referred to as a Life Coach or a Motivational Guru, it has been a source of amusement and concern for me. Amusement, because my mother still treats me like a ten year old. And concern, because I realize I have made more mistakes in my life than most other people. And I know for certain that I will make several more before I finish the journey of life. Giving a person fine sounding titles is like saying that person has done whatever it takes and is completely infallible. I can’t claim that honor yet.
But yes, I am a little more aware than a few other people about my own weaknesses and strengths. And that definitely helps when I am coaching someone or counseling them.
I spent seven years writing the book. After that it took me eight years to decide I wanted to get it published. Once that decision was taken, it took a week to get a confirmation from the publishers. And within two months of that the book was launched in the market.
Yes, I try not to repeat the same mistakes I made in my past. Yet, I find that I continue making new ones at a startling pace. I guess that’s what my father calls “Learning”
First and foremost, it would be my parents. I was diagnosed with Brain tumor at a very early age. I remember thinking even at the age of eight, that my parents grew closer as they faced this trauma together rather than letting it tear them apart. And they never let me feel that I lacked anything because of this health problem. Consequently, I never believed I was any less than anyone either. They made me what I am today.
The other person who has inspired me significantly is a historic figure and some people mistake him as a myth. Krishna! The man who became more than mortal; and whose deeds compelled us to turn him into a God. The biggest learning from this incredible person is that I try and stay focused on what I need to do rather than worrying about whether it will happen or what the consequences might be.
Yes, I had been toying with the idea of showing Krishna’s human side to the world for several years. But my work and other responsibilities did not allow me to start this venture.
Finally, a few years back, I knew I had to write the book. Once decided, I began my research on the subject and the more I learned about Krishna, the more I became certain that this was a historical figure rather than the mythological person we have been led to believe all these years.
Towards the end of 2013, I completed the first volume of the Krishna trilogy. Its called The Curse of Brahma and it was launched in early 2015. The other two volumes of the trilogy are ready and should be published soon.
Well, I love interacting with people. This was one of the main reasons I left a lucrative banking career a decade back. The idea was to have more time and freedom to interact with people, without having any specific agenda in mind.
I would therefore be very happy to interact with people on any of the social media platforms where I am present. The preferable ones would be Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.