Acres of Diamonds

How to Cultivate More Happiness on Purpose During the Holidays

I want to offer to you one of my most powerful tools that get me back to a sense of trusting myself, feeling grounded, and just enjoying where I’m at and enjoying other people for who they are. This is about generating more belief in yourself that you already have inside of you what you need in order to create what you want, going into the holiday season.

 

You don’t have to be afraid that you’ll blow it with your health goals or with the foods you love, or with relationships with extended family that may have felt a little strained in the past.

 

A potential pit fall that could make this holiday season a little more difficult, is living in a “good old days” kind of mentality, especially right now, 2020 feels like a setback in circumstances for many of us, and we’re wishing for “the good old days” when we could do all the things we were doing, when the world was different.

 

And one of my students in the Dare Greatly Society said, “wait – are you saying that it’s not going to get any better than this?  I want to know when it’s going to get better?”

 

And I said maybe we aren’t looking at this in a useful way, You’re asking, “when is it going to get better? When are things going to get back to normal?” but that question isn’t serving you. Because the truth is, There isn’t EVER better than Here.

 

When you think that it will be better someday, you are shutting down your capacity for happiness right now.

 

What if your capacity for happiness right now is exactly proportional to your capacity for happiness at some future point down the road? What if they are related in some way?

 

And so many of us are standing in acres of diamonds in our own back yard, but we’re leaving home, looking outside of our selves instead of inside of ourselves, or wishing our present circumstances were different, and searching outside of us, in hopes of discovering diamonds.

 

You may recognize that I’m speaking to and referencing a famous Victorian lecture that was given over a hundred years ago, by Russell H. Conwell, he was a newspaper man and a minister, he delivered this famous lecture more than six thousand times, called ‘Acres of Diamonds.’ When it became published, it became an immediate best-seller and a classic in inspirational literature.

 

I think of the story every so often, and I want to share it with you. The story has enormous appeal in that the metaphor works for all of us who are familiar with the emotion of wanting and the emotion of ‘unsatisfied…’

 

It recounts the life of a Persian farmer named Ali Hafed who sold his farm and left his family to travel the world in search of wealth. He looked everywhere but could not find the diamonds he searched his whole life for. Finally, alone and in despair as a homeless pauper, he died. His search had consumed him and spent his energy. In the meantime, the man who bought the land from Hafed was grateful for every blade of grass that was now his and lavished love and hard work on his farm. At night, surrounded by his family and eating the fruits of his labor, he was a contented man. One day, he was working in the field behind his house and made a remarkable discovery. In the backyard that Ali Hafed had abandoned was a diamond mine – literally an acre of diamonds.

 

The simple farmer became wealthy beyond his dreams.

 

And so Conwell used this parable to illustrate the message – within each of us lies a wellspring of seeds of opportunity for our treasures, but it takes gratitude to unearth those treasures.

Each of us Have our Own Brand of Feeling Unsatisfied sometimes. . .

Maybe it’s our body, or maybe it’s our husband, or our children, or our job, our house, our extended family. It’s interesting how sneaky the emotion of ‘unsatisfied’ can seep into our souls and kind of poison the water hole, maybe our heart space, our center for where we generate love and appreciate and satisfaction for our lives, where we’re at and where other people are at.

 

But I think the opposite emotions, the feeling of ‘satisfied’ comes alive and takes flight when we cherish what we have in the here and now, we cherish our life and its gifts, and treat them with love, respect, gratitude and appreciation for what we already have. When we invest love, creative energy, perseverance, and passion in what we’ve already been given, we discover within ourselves our acres of diamonds and our authentic brand of success.

 

And so – I’m speaking to the power of gratitude. My most favorite tool there ever was. And the reason I love it the best is because how immediate it starts to work.

 

We can all begin mining for diamonds right now. We don’t have to wait. We don’t have to regret and wish we would have started mining sooner. None of that matters. What matters is now, what are we doing to uncover the diamonds that are already within us?

 

And so that’s what I mean by it doesn’t get better than this.

 

Today, this week, for the rest of this year even, good ole’ 2020 with all its tricks and twists, we have the ability to be fully present and happy, to see that we have the ability to control our Thoughts and choose joy in the midst of difficult circumstances.

 

At first, when I work with clients who are new to the tools I’m teaching them, which, the tools are really about taking charge of their own happiness and not waiting for circumstances to change in order to feel happy, at first my clients will kind of want to argue with me. They’ll want to give me all the reasons of why it’s difficult to be happy right now.

 

And I understand that tendency. If they have this idea that I’m going to validate things that are causing them pain, that’s not what my work is about. That’s not what I do.

 

Let me explain, I had this experience with a therapist years ago, where I’d go – and I’d tell her my sad story from my past, week after week, month after month, and it was the same each week, and each month, where she’d nod her head, write on her yellow legal pad, and she’d say,  “wow that must have been really hard. Or you know, you’re a really strong person because of that experience,” and I would think . . . okay, but I’m still in pain, and I don’t know what to do about it? How do I get rid of the pain?

 

And she never told me how to do that. Which I’ve since learned, isn’t their job. Sometimes just the telling of the painful story to someone who listens can release the pain. But sometimes, telling and re-telling the painful story just makes it worse.

 

Many of us, For years and years, live in the past in our minds, we bring up the past and relive the same pain again in the present.

 

I’ve noticed that it can feel like hitting a brick wall, that no forward movement is happening. And so the next question becomes, Now what?

 

For me, it meant it’s time to shift my perspective and look ahead. I’m done telling that story in that way.

 

What I learned from all of that, from my own personal experience with therapy, is that it is NOT helpful to blame my Circumstances, like my past, for my feelings. It is not helpful to blame other people for my feelings. Because I can’t change those things. I can’t change the past. I can’t change other people.

 

But I can change the way I think about them. It doesn’t mean I change what happened. It means I change the way I tell the story.

 

And there’s such power in that.

 

When I look back at the year 2020, how am I going to tell that story?

 

If this year has taught me anything, it has taught me the skill of being grateful in the circumstances I am facing right now. If you can find the gratitude in your current circumstances, if you are purposefully looking for gratitude, you are developing resilience, and you will have tremendous strength of character. Your ability to be happy in the future will increase one hundred percent.

 

It’s true.

 

If your capacity to be happy is the same now as it will be in the future, because Thoughts create Feelings, not circumstances, then why do we look to or expect and wait for external circumstances to change in order to give ourselves permission to be happy?

 

Why are we squandering our ability to be happy right now in hopes of some unforeseeable future?

 

It doesn’t make any logical sense why we do this, and yet it makes sense if we understand some basics of how the brain works; I’m not going to get super technical, but the primitive brains motivation to seek pleasure and avoid pain, the brain is always looking for ways to feel better – it is a pleasure seeking happiness detector, kind of like a metal detector, only it’s scanning for happiness, and it’s constantly misfiring - false pleasure for real joy. It’s also offering up error messages whenever uncomfortable emotions are detected, and it’s driving us toward actions that will relieve the negative emotion.

 

Sometimes the pleasure detector is programmed in such a way where it is scanning for the wrong elements of true happiness.

 

I think our brains on default are doing this.

 

And it can really mess with our ability to appreciate our acres of diamonds.

 

An external thing will never bring lasting happiness. You can get the new car, the promotion, the pretty clothes, the yummy deserts, all the stuff – which can really be the easiest part, the getting. And the pleasure center of the brain, the dopamine receptors will enjoy the new car for a while, the promotion, the pretty clothes, and the yummy deserts for a time, until it wears off.

 

When it wears off, the brain gets to work looking for new stimuli. On default, the brain will look to what brought it pleasure in the past, and want to recreate it again.

 

But when we manage our minds, and we direct them to focus on what it is we really want, not the false pleasures, but the feelings of gratitude and satisfaction for what you have right now, you are teaching your brain how to be happy on purpose. You are training your brain how to think and feel on purpose, in a way that will serve you and help you create whatever you truly want.

 

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t strive or try to improve an area of your life, such as building a business, or losing weight, or finding a partner you adore, all of those things are worthy of pursuing, but when you’re in the gap of achieving those things versus where you are right now, you don’t have to be unhappy, or unsatisfied.

 

You don’t have to have those things in order to be happy. You could choose to be happy in the pursuit.

 

My husband flipped the phrase that we all know, “the pursuit of happiness,” and instead calls it the “happiness of pursuit.”

 

It’s such a cool way to think about it.

 

Being happy as you are pursuing what it is you are striving for, what it is you are mining for, what it is that you are trying to unearth, uncover, discover, that is calling to you.

 

And so we want to be really careful about telling ourselves that we’ll be happy when . . .

 

We don’t want to do that to ourselves.

 

Because that’s the lie.

 

The lie of someday. . .

 

So how do you access your acres of diamonds?

 

The answer is gratitude.

 

I want to offer a little challenge to you this week, there might be a tendency to want to focus on the next thing, the new year coming up, and to keep your eyes focused on moving on, getting 2020 over with. I think a lot of us are ready to move on already and hit the reset button.

 

But I want to offer to you to take a deep breath, slow down for a minute, and try not to look back or look ahead, just try to be more present – and notice what’s intended for you in the here and now, what are the gifts that the here and now have to offer?

 

The season ahead is an open invitation to resonate in gratitude for the people who love you and appreciate you, take the time to let them know you appreciate them.

 

I don’t want to miss the here and now and overlook the diamonds that are already in my backyard, in my home.

 

That pull to want current circumstances to change so you can feel better, that tendency isn’t serving you. It might be causing you to miss the gifts that are found where you are now, just as you are.

 

A year from now, life will be different. And so, there’s a certain richness in today that may never be around again.

 

Choose gratitude for the here and now.

 

Choose to enjoy all the little things.

 

Notice them.

 

For me, it’s my children, my teenage boys.

 

Everyone tells you how fast babies grow up, and when you’re in the thick of diapers and toddlers, and endless meals and laundry and car pool and homework, lessons, sports, the bustle, you think that stage is going to last forever.

 

Everyone told me how fast it goes.

 

It’s funny how I look back and I didn’t fully believe them. I knew they knew something about it, because of the way they’d look at my babies and hold them and cherish them like they were the most special thing, and I felt that way too, but I don’t think I fully appreciated what they knew about time – about how fast it goes – about how fast children grow up.

 

And so, I deliberately take time in my days, every day really, to think of what I love about my children. I love being a mom to teenagers.

 

A year from now, they will have changed so much. What it is today that I truly love about them that I want to savor?

 

Choose to love the loud times and even to love the too quiet times, too.

 

Right now, this week, this time of year, it’s the perfect time to intentionally spend a few extra moments appreciating exactly where we are, just the way we are.

 

We all have a place from where we can begin, today, to practice gratitude intentionally. To mine for our diamonds.

 

Let your imagination take flight in this process.

 

When we tap into the energy of gratitude, when we really resonate there, we discover that our own opportunity for finding happiness, authentic joy, it can be as close as the soil we are already standing on.

 

And that’s a beautiful realization.

 

What are your acres of diamonds?

Do you see them?

Do you appreciate them?

 

Look for them on purpose.

Invite a little prayer into your heartspace to help you see if it’s not readily obvious.

 

You’ll be amazed at what is available to you, maybe what you’ve missed.

Ask Spirit to give you eyes to see.

 

This is a beautiful practice my friends.

 

The practice of gratitude.

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