Live, Love & Laugh

Live, Love & Laugh
By
Bill Cottringer

“When done correctly by individuals, living, loving and laughing greatly improve the quality of life for humanity.” ~The author.

The more you do these three things, the more successful and happier you and others will be. But first you have to translate the ideas and meanings of these things into actions that get results. Here are some suggestions on how to do that.

LIVE

Living means letting go and trusting life to take you where the whole flow is going in the long run. The more “safe space” you put in between you and life, the less success and happiness you have in hand. That doesn’t mean you should be reckless and impulsive, but rather just more spontaneous and a little less controlled and certain. The natural inclination is to test the waters by sticking the tips of your toes in first, but that often involves a hesitancy in trusting life to reconcile the difference between where you think you want to be and where life knows you need to be, in order to see how to be genuinely successful and authentically happy in a perpetual, rather than ephemeral sense.

The most successful and happy people let go and take chances, maybe with one eye still open. They get enough information and make the best choices and decisions to act on that information, without second guessing themselves or having definite expectations that over-flavor or limit the outcomes they get . A tentative approach to living opens the door to much more enjoyment than being over-certain about what is going to happen. In reality, you never really know until it happens. And if you avoid the artificial categorizing of things into good/okay or bad/not okay, anything and everything that happens is okay, in effect doubling your happiness and success. Those are excellent odds, no matter what you are betting on.

LOVE

Loving requires adopting a loving, accepting and understanding attitude towards all of life and then applying it everyday in dealing with difficult people, problems and adverse situations, especially when you may not feel like it. It is easy to love lovable people and things, but learning to love the unlovable people and things is where the most growth and enjoyment comes from. The more effort you put into getting rid of natural resistances to do this, the bigger the payoff.

There are two most important things to remember about love: (a) it is an active verb not a passive noun, and (b) it is the positive opposite of its negative counterpart—fear. Life is actually very simple in this regard: Fear brings failure and unhappiness, and love brings success and happiness.

Loving actually involves a lot of different things like being patient, compassionate, creative, empathetic, understanding, kind, polite, sensitive, generous, and tolerant. Of course what you expect is usually what you get and so again the betting person would prefer to expect love in return for the love he or she practices with others. And when that doesn’t happen for one reason or another, it isn’t a sure sign that it is bound to happen again. After all, we are bound to make mistakes but we don’t have to be bound to those mistakes we make.

LAUGH

Fortunately life is much more unserious than it is serious. Hardly a day goes by in which there isn’t something you can find to laugh at and if you aren’t finding those things, you may be missing a third of the enjoyable part of life. Sometimes you have to look past the burdens, problems and tragedies that do happen, which do deserve tears rather than smiles, in trying to see some good happening from all the bad things that you want to run from or avoid altogether. And sometimes you just have to make some laugh time with jokes, funny videos, humorous stories or an entertaining trip to the zoo, in order to get back to the less serious, main part of life, work and relationships.

And for those readers who are still vain, we now know for sure that smiles use less muscles and cause less wrinkles than frowns. Besides that, people who have made it to their 50th wedding anniversary, report that the few common denominators of success include a sense of humor. In conclusion, someone once said to me, ”Don’t take life too seriously, because after all, you are not going to get out of it alive!”

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA and also a business and personal success coach, sport psychologist, photographer and writer living in the mountains of North Bend. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, “Passwords to The Prosperity Zone,” “You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too,” “The Bow-Wow Secrets,” “Do What Matters Most,” “P Point Management,” “Reality Repair Rx” and “Reality Repair” coming shortly from Global Vision Press. He can be contacted with comments or questions at 425 454-5011 or ckuretdoc@comcast.net