If a statue were to be erected in your honor, what would it be sculpted to look like? Would the statue be holding a pen, a ball, a child or lifting a fallen stranger from the ground? Or would it instead be clutching a TV remote and a bag of chips with the look of boredom dully etched onto its granite face? What are you doing with your life? Are you living it primarily on your butt or on your feet? What do you stand for? What are you committed to?

Countries have constitutions. Companies have corporate mission statements. Clubs and other organizations have vision statements, taglines or mottos. So why not us? I recently asked some blogging friends to share their mottos here at M2bH. The result is 15 mottos that inspire and motivate.

Our mottos become guide posts and verbal beacons along the road we travel. They are the street names on the map of life. They are the rhetorical equivalence of a compass to help us get our bearings and stay on course. They also reflect the heart of our hearts. They are terse statements of deep value, of what we aspire to be. They also help teach the fundamental ideas we want to pass on to others, especially our children.

If you’re a blogger, you know a dashboard is more than the place you instinctively glance to check your speed when you pass a police car. A blog’s dashboard is where much of the behind-the-scenes work of a site happens, allowing us to individualize the appearance and functionality of our blogs. But these same characteristics can also be found in our own lives as well. What’s on the dashboard of your life?

Today’s post is very different from my usual writing. This is a letter written directly to you, my reader. I want you to know how I feel about you, that I’m proud of you, believe in you, appreciate you and believe you can become just about anything you decide to become. You are important and beautiful. You were meant to be happy and amazing, after all. Thank you all for the honor and trust and interest you’ve given to the principles and ideas I share here at Meant to be Happy.

I’ve been a high school teacher for about a decade now. I’ve been touched by the number of students who have shared their personal histories, both successes and heart aches, some of them gut-wrenching. But I’ve learned some valuable lessons about life along the way. Here, I present four of them.

Every choice, and thought and action, our habits, ideas, interpretations, assumptions and attitudes all combine to create an unmistakable trajectory for our lives. They point us down a particular path. Our beliefs create the context within which we think and interpret and assume and act. To change our lives, we must change our beliefs: what we believe is possible, what we believe is important, what we believe about ourselves and about life.

What you believe about life, yourself, what matters most in life, determines how you live, what you do, how you think, what you value. Belief creates reality. The Truth is constant, but our interpretations of it are not. For deep personal change to stick, beliefs must be questioned and replaced. How you live is a direct result of what you believe.

There are saying that have become integrated into the human psyche. We accept them as truth. “A penny saved is a penny earned” or “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Such words and phrases eloquently capture time-honored wisdom. But other sayings can imprison potential and undermine possibility as we accept them at face value. Come see which phrases you’ve used recently!

Have you set new resolutions, made new goals, committed to a new life, promising yourself and God and the universe that finally, this time, you would successfully conquer your demons once and for all? And then failed … again? Well, fail no more.

“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself” Happy people build and lift, not destroy and pull down.

There is no role a man can play that is more important than fatherhood. It’s been said, as a matter of fact, that no success can compensate for failure in the home. Let’s, then, make Father’s Day a day of recommitment to being the best fathers we can be! Both children and fathers will be happier for it.

Lincoln struggled with bouts of depression, especially after losing his son to Typhoid. To make matters worse, he had a wife who would fly into fits of rage and verbal abuse. Honest Abe can teach us all about happiness, in part, because he struggled so much with his own.

The data is out, but the controversy rages on. A sociologist from the University of Read More.

Happy people do not stand still for long. They don’t just hang around idly for Read More.