This little parable does a good job of describing how to find happiness:

“A little boy was fascinated with his grandfather’s whittling projects. One day the boy walked up to his grandfather with a hunk of wood and said “Grandfather, how do I whittle this into a duck? The grandfather replied “It’s easy son, you just cut away everything that doesn’t look like a duck.”

The process for achieving happiness is the same; you need to assess your life and whittle away everything that doesn’t provide happiness. That is, of course, a complex process.

A good way to start that process is to take a look at the differences between happy and unhappy people. After thirty years of informal research as a mental health professional, I have put together the following list of the differences between happy and unhappy people. I interviewed both clients and non-clients to get a balanced perspective. There are of course many kinds of happiness. Some happiness is momentary happiness, and some happiness is more enduring, very similar to contentment. In this class we will be focusing on how to find sustainable happiness. On the following page you will find a list comparing traits of happy people verses unhappy people.

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