 attitude, mindset, state of mind, all these ideas of how do we interpret what's going on? How do we look at our lives? It seems like we have so much ability to really decide how we want to make sense of what's going on so that even in you could have two different people with exactly the same situation but because of a different mindset their experience of life can be totally different and this seems to be one of the most powerful ways that we can change our lives is through simply changing our interpretation. Now of course it's no substitute for actually making real changes in the external world, you know improving our health, changing the actual things we do and those things there's no substitute for them but so much also goes into what's going on in our own minds that we can almost program ourselves to look at the world that we choose is best and you know I like to think of it as creating our own paradise really heaven and hell paradise and some kind of nightmare are created inside our own minds through a way of looking at what's around us so we think paradise the tropical beach with a carefree life on the beach but then the reality of a lot of those places is a lot of very difficult things going on that is not like paradise at all and meanwhile in our apparently drab looking simple everyday mundane home we can have a state of mind that takes us to the height of satisfaction and happiness so the basic idea is that really we do have this ability to program ourselves in that way through changing our mindset and that's what this series is about a bunch of different ways of looking at mindset and how we can find different ways of interpreting what's going on around us and inside our own minds the next idea is the whole looking at the whole notion of happiness okay so we want to be happy so what's that all about well happiness the whole idea of chasing happiness needing to be happy being unhappy that we're not happy all of that seems to be a great way to produce unhappiness too much focus on happiness leads to unhappiness instead we can accept that happiness and unhappiness are like weather we just see them coming and going not trying to hold on to that happiness when it comes but just letting it come and go while taking care of the fundamentals that we believe will most likely lead to future happiness by not chasing it directly instead doing things that tend to lead to happiness we can then usually get better happiness overall than this endlessly chasing happiness is like trying to dig water and so are changing the way we look at happiness can be a step towards finding that happy state of mind then there's the idea of perfection our ideals and living up to them and I think we all know least in principle that we can't be perfect but it does seem like it's sometimes hard to let go of that idea of perfection what are our ideals at all anyway are they really something that come from inside us that really fit for us or are we kind of internalizing the ideals that we get from outside that we think we should be living up to some ideal because that's what we do and we kind of feel that we kind of absorb that from what we think is expected of us when maybe it's not really what we need the whole idea of having our own frame running our life within our own frame rather than being part of somebody else's concept then when it comes to mindset one of the basic things that seems so powerful is gratitude it's such an old cliche about how having this grateful attitude is good but yet it seems to work every time there's such an ability to improve our state of mind by simply having gratitude for the things that are good the things that we have no matter what might be wrong the many things we have that are good and for example one is simply to have normal health to simply have a have life and a normal level of health if we have that is already amazing just something that we don't usually think about until it's not there so this idea of normal life being amazing that itself can kind of bring us closer to a paradise state of mind