How are you today?

How are you today?  Feeling good?  If you are, then I congratulate you and invite you to spread your good feelings around – pay it forward.  Smile at strangers, let someone go ahead of you in a queue, anything!   There will be a huge amount of people whose path you will cross today who are not feeling as great as you, so please do us all a favour and do a little something to cheer them up. 

Sometimes it can help to think of how we feel as being somewhere on a long line, a spectrum of feelings if you will, with perhaps furious and outraged at one end, joyful and proud at the other and everything else we can feel in between.  And we move among those feelings depending on so many things.

And if you’ve not got that ‘on top of the world’ feeling?  And let’s face it there are a million different reasons why you might not: exam results, work pressures, job interviews, family illness, too much on your plate or perhaps you simply got out of bed the wrong side after not sleeping well.  If you’re lucky you’ll come across one of those feeling good people and they’ll send a smile in your direction or make your life a little easier by smoothing your path in some way or other. 

We often leave how we feel up to others, or the weather, or how our diary is shaping up today.  So put another way, we’ve put our ability to feel happy out of our own control.  So today I’m going to invite you to take back control of how you feel.  No matter what else is going on for you.  Take a moment, take a breath and start by naming how you feel.  Now depending where you are on that line, it might be unrealistic to expect you to zoom your way to the joyful end all in one go, instead I’m going to ask you to name the next feeling between where you are now and that joyful end of the line.  That’s the one I’m going to invite you to go for.  How? 

Well, I’m going to suggest following the advice of writer Mark Twain: The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer someone else up.