By Ken Honda | Published on December 10, 2020

People who have both money and happiness tend to have specific life skills in four key areas:

• Relationships
• Business
• Money
• Goal Manifestation.

Because they experience life differently in these areas, they are able to enjoy a much higher level of freedom in their personal lives. Freedom equals a greater sense of happiness. Not managing these four key areas of life differently can make achieving happiness and even acquiring financial abundance significantly more challenging..

Relationships

No matter how adept you may be at business or finances, the best opportunities in life always come to you through a real live person. Every chance that knocks on your door, every helping hand when you need it, comes to you through someone you know. Creating and nurturing healthy relationships makes success easier, too. Whether it’s choosing what to buy, who to confide in or who to do business with, people are moved into action based upon their emotions. Given the choice, we’d all prefer to buy from someone we like or do business with great people.

Even in the workplace, if you lack passion in what you do and don’t feel that you have good relationships there, it doesn’t matter how successful you are – eventually something will go wrong. Personal relationships that aren’t solid or positive at home or among staff are a surefire way to lose support from the inside out. And it can cause feelings of less than happiness.

Tip: How many people do you know that would support you in your endeavors no matter what? No matter how many people support you now, consider this your starting point. If you can get that number up to 100 people who genuinely support you, what would you be capable of achieving that isn’t possible for you now? What if that number went up to 1000 people?

The first step to creating better, genuine relationships of care and support with a greater number of people is to see the best in everyone you meet, whether you think they’re the type of person you’d like or not. In fact, finding positive things you like about people you’d usually tend to avoid will have a much more powerful impact on your life than only looking for support from people you already assume are on your side.

Create friends with everyone you meet.

Business

To achieve any kind of financial success, it’s essential to learn the fundamentals of business. Whether it’s marketing or sales, you need a lot of information and experience to do well. In a capitalist society, this is especially important because money naturally flows more easily to those with appropriate knowledge and wisdom about how to make their business flourish.

If you don’t have that knowledge personally, keep in mind you can always find a partner who does! Business relationships that flow well and thrive are key to success, and a key to greater happiness as well.

Tip: Do research in the field of expertise you will need to know to succeed in your work. In my case, I knew I wanted to be an author so I bought many books on the topic of what I would need to know in order to succeed.

To be fair, in the beginning I had almost none of the “qualifications” that the world said was necessary in order to succeed as an author, but I still published many best-selling books in the end. Don’t let this stage of the research discourage you from continuing towards achieving your goals.

You can also reach out and ask someone who is already succeeding at what you would like to do and ask good questions about what kind of business knowledge is necessary for your future success. Creating good relationships with people who could be your business mentors goes back to how important the people in your life are at connecting you with seemingly perfect opportunities that you wouldn’t see if you were trying to accomplish everything on your own.

Money

Money is the third major life skill set you should learn to have success with, and it’s what I teach about the most.

There are many types of money. Money earned for doing some kind of labor works differently than money in the stock market or money earned in owning your own business.

There are also many types of “financial intelligence” such as law, taxes, investing, business, etc. It’s impossible to master all of these categories, but it’s most important to have a general understanding of how the entire system works so you know what information is essential for you, based on your unique goals, to know.

Tip: Someone who is both successful and happy will make sure they have the basic financial knowledge necessary for whatever kind of work they have chosen to do. You will want to know how the system works in order to make the best out of your own project or work. However, “Money IQ” type of knowledge alone isn’t enough to guarantee happiness if your “Money EQ”, or emotional intelligence about money, is ignored.

For starters, I recommend taking an inventory of your beliefs about money to see how money makes you feel. What does money mean to you? Do you associate it with happiness and freedom, or greed and evil? Do you “lose” money when you spend it, or do you trust that there is a flow of abundance always available whenever you need it?

Goal Manifestation

Manifesting goals is such an essential life skill to master. It’s all about how well you’re able to achieve your dreams and make your ideas come to life. When most people go about trying to achieve something, they inevitably fall into the pattern of thinking “Can I even do it? Do I have the time? The money…?” and before you know it, they haven’t achieved anything at all because they used all their energy coming up with reasons not to.

People who make things happen almost magically focus their energy only on whether or not they want to do it. Once they decide they do want to move forward, they don’t focus on the negatives or whether or not it’s possible for them. They only think about the possibilities and then start taking action one step after another until it’s done.

Money and time aren’t an issue because they trust that both will be there when they need it. Small setbacks don’t bother them, so they don’t quit over perceived failures along the way.

Tip: There are many different ways to achieve your goals, and you should try to find the method that works best for you personally. To-do lists don’t work well for every type of person, and I even know a few people who seem to get everything they wish for just by making a simple prayer and forgetting about it. This method is obviously not for everyone, either!

I personally like to use a combination of different methods and make sure I do everything in my power to make my dreams a reality. Whichever method you choose, make sure you’re actually taking action and not letting your ideas remain just ideas.

Take a look at these four areas in your own life and see if any of them could be improved. You should also take a look at the HAPPY (not the unhappy ones, please avoid using negative people as your role models), successful people in your life who appear to be thriving in these four areas of life. You’re sure to pick up some great clues learning from people who have some of these life skills already figured out.

Read the full article here: 4 Key Areas of Life to Shift for Increasing Your Happiness