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I started my quest to happiness ten years ago. I was 19, very unhappy in all departments of my life, had a negative outlook on myself, on people and on life in general, and my environment didn’t promote either growth or well-being. One day, I was in bed, scrolling my Twitter feed and stumbled upon a tweet from an American gossip blogger I was following. Her tweet mentioned the law of attraction and linked to an interview she had given to a magazine. I had never heard of the law of attraction before and believed it pertained to love; the hopeless romantic I was thought it’d be entertaining to read the interview and that’s how I discovered the true principle behind the law of attraction – it had nothing to do with love and everything to do with how to live a life of abundance (happiness, achieving goals, etc). I was intrigued, as you can imagine, so I started doing more research and stumbled upon an interview given by the authors of The Secret on the Oprah Show, which convinced me to purchase the book. I can’t say that this book single handedly changed my life, because there are many others I read afterwards that have also had a profound impact on me, but The Secret opened me up to a world of possibilities, a new way of thinking and apprehending life. If you are not familiar with the law of attraction, it can be summed up in three words: ask (be crystal clear about what you want to accomplish or obtain), believe (feel, with every fiber of your body what it would feel like to accomplish or obtain it and don’t obsess about it), receive (in due time, you will get what you want).
Since reading The Secret ten years ago, I never stopped feeding my soul with books, videos or podcasts that motivate, inspire and teach me how to live a more fulfilled life.
I actually wrote a post last year, about my all time favorite personal development books that have deeply changed my life and have helped shape me into the woman that I am today and I highly recommend that you take a look at it, I will post another one soon, with other books I have recently read that have taken me to the next level of awareness, as they opened up my eyes to so many unconscious habits we have that make us unhappy without even realizing it because they are so deeply anchored in us.
We are a product of our environment and sometimes – actually most of the time – our environment is not conducing to growth or happiness, because our parents pass along to us their own perceptions of life, their own behaviors, their own past experiences that helped forge their own belief systems, which then became our own and we start acting and reacting exactly like our parents, if you dd to that our own life experiences, fears, doubts, pains and you have the recipe for an unhappy life. What we all need to do is to go back deep inside ourselves, figure out what is working in our favor and what is causing pain, or unhappiness and find a way to change that. That’s what the right books will help you do. They will help you discover what is wrong in your life, what are all the patterns you keep perpetuating and that are holding you back from being happy, then the authors will teach you how to move toward a more fulfilled, and happier life.
But you have to keep reading book after book, in order to fully implement the lessons they teach, because all the books essentially convey the same message but the authors express it differently and you’ll get something new from every book.
If you read just one book and think: “that’s it, my life is about to change for the better!” guess what? you’ll apply the advice from the book a week, maybe two, then you’ll fall back to your old habits. You have to keep nourishing your mind with this new belief system day after day, until you become one with it, until it becomes a part of you, until your old belief system is completely replaced by this new one. One book read in a couple days cannot change decades of thinking and behaving a certain way. It is by reading over and over these new concepts, that you will end up really replacing your old patterns by positive ones.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a society that promotes true happiness and well-being; rather, we live in an era where we are encouraged and pressured to follow the mold without ever taking a break to think about whether this lifestyle actually suits us or not; we are blinded by the idea that life must go as follows: graduate from University, find a job, get married, buy a house, a car, have babies, grow old… then what? If you ask someone what they want out of life, they’ll assuredly reply “be happy”. But if you push a little further and ask: “what does happiness mean to you concretely? What could you add to or remove from your life to be happier?” I’m 100% sure the person will not know what to respond at first. Because happiness means being at peace with you are, being fulfilled and actively pursuing your dreams or passions; and most people have buried their passions and their dreams ages ago, when “life got in the way”, or when they were told it’d be impossible for them to achieve their goals.
I used to be that girl. I was once told, when I wanted to pursue studies in arts, that arts were just a hobby and I needed a real degree that would guarantee me to find a well-paid job in the end, it didn’t matter whether I liked it to not. “Nobody likes their job, Karina, but they do it anyway because they have to! You’ll continue making art as a hobby.” So I studied economics instead. None of my life decisions were made for me, for my own happiness: it was always to make my family proud or to appear great, according to society’s standards. Until I read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and decided I was done and over compromising my own happiness just so other people could be proud of me. Although I genuinely loved my family, I had come to terms with the fact if they loved me, they’d want to see me happy even though that meant doing things that made them uncomfortable or scared them because nobody had ever done that before in our family. I didn’t care what people thought anymore. I wanted to start living for me, for once. I was 22 at the time, applied to pursue a year abroad as part of an exchange program with my University, packed my bags and left for the UK to realize my dream of living in an English-speaking country (I’m French). I had never felt as free in my life as I felt during the year I spent in London. Free from everyone’s opinion on how I should be living my life. Free from everyone dictating what to do and what not, free to be whoever I wanted to be and do whatever I wanted to do. And reading the right books is what helped me gather the courage to change my life for the better. Reading is what showed me that true happiness was not just an utopia, a vague illusion that only a few were blessed with, that there were people in this world that actually were genuinely happy and fulfilled, and the only person that was stopping me from being happy was… myself. It’s easy to blame society, family or whatever for your own unhappiness but once you realize that these factors only affect you to the extent to which you allow them to, you realize that the one that’s in power is you, not them. The minute you realize that, you are faced with two options: be a coward all your life and continue to blame the world for your own unwillingness to take control over your life, or decide to take actions toward bettering your life and be happy.
When I started my blog and began discussing the topics of fitness, pursuing one’s dreams, etc, an old friend whom I had not spoken to in ages reached out to me telling me how proud she was that I had the courage to chase my dreams. She then added that she, in appearance, had everything to be happy: a loving husband, amazing children and a great job, but she felt like something was still missing in her life, she wasn’t fulfilled as a human being and she couldn’t tell exactly what was missing, but she knew for sure she expected more from life then just being a mom, a wife and going to work every morning; “I’m missing this creative aspect in my life that I don’t know how to fulfill”. I so loved that she confided in me because I was able to guide her towards books that have had the deepest influence on me and she thanked me later.
I can honestly say that reading has saved my life. Books have been my best friends and my greatest teachers at rough times where I didn’t want to confide in anyone because I knew people’s judgement would be clouded by their own fears and insecurities, so I knew their advice would have been worthless as they would have just contaminated me with their biased belief system. So I turned to books. And I’m happy I did.
