Billy has been writing blogs for Happy since 2017, covering mindfulness, stress management, confidence building and emotional intelligence as well as offering handy tips for Office 365 users. He's also an established arts, culture and lifestyle writer.
There’s a lot of wonderfully eye-opening mindfulness literature and scholarship, but reading it can’t quite equip you to swiftly commence a thoroughly operational mindfulness practice. Taking in-the-flesh guidance from someone well versed in the actualisation of mindfulness is a far more effective way of kicking things off.
We can all admit that our actions aren’t always entirely pleasant. This could be caused by external stresses, unsatisfied expectations or self-involved flutters of the ego. Accordingly, we often face difficult situations or somewhat fractious interactions with the people we encounter in our day-to-day lives.
Billy has read Calm by Michael Acton Smith - here are his thoughts on this mindfulness-focused book.
Writing is a key part of life in the modern world. Whether you are sending emails to a client or writing a Facebook post, the written word is an important part of how we present ourselves. Making simple spelling and grammar mistakes can have a huge impact on your credibility, and change people's impression of you. In this blog, brush up your grammar skills and start writing better emails, reports and social media updates.
In If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?, psychological researcher and happiness coach Raj Raghunathan argues that happiness is our natural state. Several aspects of socialisation can lead us astray, but Raghunathan aims to remedy this by identifying the “seven deadly happiness sins” and resolving each of them with a corresponding habit of the highly happy. Here’s the second half of our easy-to-read distillation of the book’s key arguments – check out Part One first if you haven’t read it yet!
When you’re brought to tears it’s not the end of the world, nor does it escalate your problems to a level of globe-stopping importance. However, that doesn’t diminish their significance. Embrace crying as a natural element of your constitution. Celebrate its very existence – it’s part of what makes us unique.
Confidence is a multifaceted term that refers to a psychological attitude and a set of behavioural attributes. It’s commonly regarded as a compound of self-assurance and competence. Such confidence is a great asset in the workplace: the most confident, assertive people will often get their ideas over the line and bag lucrative opportunities.
Stress. It’s a powerfully evocative word, yet one that’s tricky to define. Despite being a condition from which few could claim immunity, its causes and effects are hugely diverse, making its exact meaning difficult to pin down.