Concentrate on making yourself happy instead of those around you

A lot of people have a habit of trying to make everyone around them happy. In general, you could call that a nice character trait: if you focus on the happiness of others, you would not say anything mean and would avoid hurting others at all cost! The problem is the last bit however: at all cost! Mostly it costs these people their own happiness – and that’s why I believe it is not really a good idea, character trait or habit at all!

It is quite logical if you think about it: who is in charge of your happiness? You are yourself. Who is in charge of your colleague’s happiness? Your colleague herself! So it doesn’t matter what you do, if your colleague does not want to happy, you cannot force her to be. She needs to find happiness herself.

Unfortunately people with this habit tend to not only make full efforts to make others happy but get disappointed if they don’t succeed! No, more than disappointed, they actually start believing it is their own fault that the other one is not happy. How could it be their fault, you ask? Oh, they are creative in finding ways they could be guilty: it could be something in their efforts that could have hurt the other person, maybe they were too direct with something they said or maybe they didn’t do enough, didn’t try hard enough?

In the twisted view that these people have on situations, it is as though everybody’s happiness is their responsibility and they fail their life’s purpose if they cannot make everybody happy! In this, they get unhappy themselves, make themselves crazy about what they could do and forget doing anything about making themselves happy.

This may sound crazy to you like this and I tell you, this person would say the same. Of course they are not responsible for everyone, what a nonsense! Logically, they also understand and agree – but their actions, thoughts and feelings go a completely different way!

If you are one of these persons, someone who cares about others and sometimes takes it too far, forgetting his own happiness, please remember that you really cannot force anybody to be happy. Sometimes you just need to take a step back, create distance to those who cannot or don’t want to be happy and let it go! It’s alright to care for yourself!

And if you know someone close to you who does this, appreciate their efforts while starting to take care of them. They forget doing it for themselves, so help them and slowly show them that they are important as well!

Finally, if you are one of those people who just doesn’t get happy, realize that it is your own responsibility to take care of that – so change whatever has to be changed, accept the rest and be happy!