THE NINE CHOICES

There is a book called "How We Choose to Be Happy" by Rick Foster & Greg Hicks.
The subtitle for the book is: "The nine choices of extremely happy people -- their secrets,
their stories".

" When Rick Foster and Greg Hicks set out to discover the "secrets" of happiness, their journey took them from cafes in San Francisco to corporate board rooms in New York to living rooms in rural Alabama. Their in-depth interviews involved people from virtually every walk of life: a corporate manager in Seattle balancing the demands of her career and her young family, a retired doctor and Holocaust survivor living by the canals of Amsterdam, a cafeteria worker struggling to make ends meet, a middle-aged woman battling breast cancer. What this research revealed, and what is so succinctly and compellingly presented in this book, are the traits shared by those people who, by definition and self-assessment, are extremely happy.

What distinguishes these people are the nine choices they make throughout their lives — choices that determine their behavior in a wide range of circumstances. And what How We Choose to Be Happy shows is how anyone can incorporate these choices into their own lives to create personal happiness."

Here is a summary of the nine choices.

1.) Intention -- the active desire and commitment to be happy and the fully conscious
decision to choose happiness over unhappiness.

2.) Accountability -- the choice to create the life you want to live, to assume full
personal responsibility for your actions, thoughts and feelings, and the emphatic refusal
to blame others for your own unhappiness.

3.) Identification -- the ongoing process of looking deeply within yourself to assess what
makes you uniquely happy, apart from what you're told by others should make you happy.

4.) Centrality -- the nonnegotiable insistence on making that which creates happiness
central in your life.

5.) Recasting -- the choice to convert problems into opportunities and challenges and to
transform trauma into something meaningful, important and a source of emotional energy.

6.) Options -- the decision to approach life by creating multiple scenarios, to be open to
new possibilities and to adopt a flexible approach to life's journey.

7.) Appreciation -- the choice to appreciate deeply your life and the people in it and to
stay in the present by turning each experience into something precious.

8.) Giving -- the choice to share yourself with friends and community and to give to the
world at large without the expectation of a "return."

9.) Truthfulness -- the choice to be honest with yourself and others in an accountable
manner by not allowing societal, corporate or family demands to violate your internal
contract.