When you hold on to resentment or anger or hatred, letting it eat you up from the inside out, your mind gets stuck in a continuous loop. You replay the offense over and over again, unable to free yourself from the person you most want to get away from. Well, it’s time that ends. Learning to forgive your offender will finally free yourself of that mental loop and open yourself to a life filled with more love and more happiness.

Honesty, they say, is the best policy. It’s time we put it to the test. Have you ever gotten tangled up in your own web of lies? Are you in the habit of bending the truth? Do you fib and tell little white lies to get out of trouble or avoid drama or skirt confrontation or annoyances? Come take the honesty challenge and see how it affects your relationships, self-respect and life.

Has life lost its spark? Does it feel hallow and empty? Has the meaning of your life been lost to the daily grind of living? Has the flame gone out? If you feel like something is missing, whether large and numbing or small and vaguely unsatisfying, it may be time to reevaluate the meaning of your life, or perhaps simply add more meaning to it.

Have you ever remodeled, repaired and re-carpeted the living room of your life only to watch the whole house sink into the mud of frustration, disappointment and boredom? Learning where happiness resides is often the first step to developing more of it in your life. A house is a handy metaphor to help us understand just how to build an amazing mansion of happiness in your own life.

Pledging to live up to a set of standards, to something higher and larger and more eternal than self-serving and immediately-gratifying impulses may be considered an insignificant step in the process of actually doing the work of building character. But it’s in the small steps that miles are covered and continents crossed … and a character is fashioned.

This is a guest post from Paige Burkes: We subconsciously think that, if we simply do all the right things in the right ways (whatever “right” is), the happiness fairy will magically appear to us, touch us on the nose with her sparkly wand and we’ll suddenly be happy forever.

It’s perfectly fine to want more income or less weight, a higher degree or lower blood pressure, to overcome a habit or start a new one. But when we start stacking one accomplishment on top another on a foundation of sand, life becomes off-centered, unstable, and eventually comes tumbling down. All it takes is one good storm and we’re belly-up on the beach. This is when a firmer foundation is important.

Gratitude, it turns out, is no small issue. It can be life-changing, radically altering the way we see and interpret life. Gratitude is the electricity that ignites happiness. It is the breeze that lifts it. It is the context that allows it. This post is my attempt at enlarging the list of things we are grateful for, at reducing what we habitually take for granted and thereby providing some lift and electricity to our happiness. So take a look below at some atypical, unconventional things on my gratitude list.

Are you a goal-setting flunky? A New Years Resolution drop-out? Have you set goals time and time again only to summarily fail to reach them? All of them? Well, the good news is that you didn’t waist your time trying. You even likely improved your life, becoming a subtly better person, perhaps without even realizing it. The very act of setting and pursuing goals can actually make you a better human being. Click on in to see how!

Happiness is the natural result of habitually living and thinking in certain ways. As a matter of fact, happiness is something that is quite predictable for almost all people as we develop certain habits of thought, belief, action and character. Some people are unhappy. Others are mildly or moderately happy. Some are even pretty happy. The following, however, are those principles that produce highly happy people.

We are not merely physical. We are emotional and intellectual as well. We are also spiritual. As such, to neglect the spiritual side of our lives is to neglect a foundational part of who we are at the most fundamental level. To build relationships ignoring that vital part of our natures is to create a relationship that hobbles on one leg. Spiritual intimacy adds depth to our most cherished relationships.

There are times when the right thing to do is not the happy thing to do, at least not in the short-run. At such moments, a moral people have to decide what’s most important. More short-term happiness or more long-term decency? To protect the one at the expense of the other is a sacrifice with far reaching consequences.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live an extraordinary life? Well, extraordinary is as extraordinary does. An ordinary focus and commitment lacks the pulling power to lift you to the level of extraordinary. Extraordinary is extra-ordinary, after all. You just can’t reach it by virtue of ordinary effort. The “extra” is required. So begin to supercharge your life for an extraordinary impact of legendary proportions.

The reasons for change are endless: A new career. An old habit. A new one. Acquiring a skill. Overcoming a fear. Ending procrastination. Becoming happier. But no matter the reason or the kind, all change has a starting point. This post is a tribute to the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey. Change is made possible by understanding the principles undergirding change. Covey taught those principles.

What do your kids most need from you? Here are 10 gifts you can give your children that will change their lives … and yours … forever. Come see why parenthood is such serious business. There’s no other business, in fact, more important you can spend your time and energy building. Average parenting requires average effort. Great parenting requires more of us. It requires us to work on the inside, on the person who is the parent. Offering these gifts will require that deep commitment to what’s best to raise happy, loving and decent men and women.

There is so much emotional dust and negativity and other bits of self-defeating debris floating around in the atmosphere of our daily lives. Too many people are ill-equipped to recognize the dust and debris for what it is. They are therefore unable to remove it, block it or filter it from intake. While we have filters for just about everything: fish tanks, washing machines, cars, TVs, and cameras, do we have filters that effectively block our lower impulses and external influences that undermine potential, dignity and happiness?

There are things that matter and things that don’t. Some of those beliefs and ideas that don’t matter can actually poison the soul and kick us where it counts. Here are 4 things that don’t matter. But they can also lead to destroyed lives of waisted potential and deep sadness. Avoid these pitfalls for a much more rewarding life of happiness and decency.

When we live lives disconnected from those things that truly matter, sidetracked by the unimportant, lost in the frivolous, distracted by the superficial, our lives start to ring hollow, empty and vacant. But when we fill our lives with weightier things, our lives feel bigger, more meaningful and happier.

The test of one’s moral convictions is not in the safety of a questionnaire or in the sterile environment of a trial study, but in the field, in real life, when and where it counts. That’s where true moral courage is necessary. And it’s in those moments that standing up for what’s right can make a world of difference. What kind of world are you willing to help create? One in which we collectively sit and wait? Or one wherein we stand to be counted?

Millions upon millions of corporations, nations, cities and states, government agencies, non-profit organizations, clubs and events have created and adopted mottos as expressions of what they want to be and how they want to be seen, what they strive for and as a reflection of their core beliefs and values and as a way to infuse into the organization those values they want absorbed into the organizational climate. Why not individual and family mottos as well?