There is no easy journey to happiness that doesn’t involve a huge dose of acceptance.

There are three principles of acceptance that, if fully absorbed into your every-day life, will provide an instant and continuous boost to your mood. Each of these have to be fully embedded as part of how you work through life to reap the real benefits – but see the note at the end of this post for some help with making that a reality.

Accept yourself

None of us are perfect. Indeed, many of us have a natural propensity to magnify our flaws or to hold ourselves to a standard which is hardly ever achieved and impossible to maintain. Whether we focus on our appearance, our health, our intelligence, our skill, our career, our latest performance or just our choice of dinner, our criticisms of ourselves really hurt. The inner voice that challenges us, or makes us feel we’re just not good enough, is doing damage to our happiness, day after day after day.

It is absolutely okay for us to strive for better in any area of our lives that we wish to – but we should do so from a position of consideration and commitment. We should not be doing so from a feeling of trying to fix something about ourselves.

Accept others

Just as we live our lives with a unique perspective on our decisions, our abilities, our demons, so do others. Do not be too quick to judge others or to comment or criticise. It is especially important that we do not try to control or manipulate others for our own gains.

Approach engagements with other people with honesty and integrity. If they’re not aligned to our approach or our standards it is okay to tell them. It is also okay to chose who you do and do not have in your life. It is far healthier to build a circle of like-minded individuals that can support you, than it is to pressure others to meet your expectations.

Accept what you have… and what you don’t have.

There is a truism that the easiest way to get everything that you want is to want everything that you have. In twenty-first century consumer-led society, where we are bombarded with media which has been carefully and scientifically crafted to make us want, it is very difficult to switch off our desires for what we do not have. In fact, it is almost impossible.

What we can do, however, is to be more thankful for what we have. We should also be more selective with our desires. Focus your wants on the specifics that you have really thought about – those that you can put a realistic plan in place to obtain, a plan that doesn’t pull you apart at the seams.

Let’s pretend

The three simple concepts of acceptance above are not easy to achieve – they require vigilance and effort. Although there is no shortcut there is a technique that can help. If you don’t feel that you do accept yourself, if someone else is really winding you up because they are constantly letting you down, or you just can’t get that gadget that you really want out of your head, then just pretend. Ask yourself “what would I do or say if I had achieved acceptance?”

Pretending build muscle memory. Pretending builds strength and pride. Pretend for long enough and one day you find that you are not pretending any more.

You’re accepting.