Positive Psychology Column for 11-2-03 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. MAKING CHOICES TO ACHIEVE HAPPINESS How happy you’re going to be is determined by your thoughts, choices, and commitments. Today we’ll examine how you can make choices that will increase your level of success and satisfaction in the major arenas of your life: work, love, play, body, mind, and spirit. Life can be a struggle as you strive for success at work, in your loving relationships, and in getting the rest and relaxation you need.  We all know what it’s like when one area of life is suffering.  It can affect everything.  That’s why balancing work, love and play is essential.  To keep your energy flowing smoothly in these external realms of your life requires that you are strong in body, mind and spirit.  Maintaining your balance and good energy is notoriously difficult, but it is possible.  Enlisting your top character traits is what enables you to consistently produce positive results in all of the important aspects of your life. Embracing your best qualities brings you a bounty of benefits by: · enhancing your wisdom · increasing your courage · deepening your loving relationships · boosting your leadership abilities · enabling you to exercise self-control · transcending your problems to achieve positive outcomes. There are 24 character strengths that have been identified by the positive psychology research as revered in nearly every culture on earth.  Each one of us has a set of 3 to 5 traits that makes up our “signature strengths.” One of the best things you can do is to discover your “signature strengths” and to start using them on a regular basis.  To take the V-I-A Signature Strengths Test go to the website www.authentichappiness.org. At the end of the 30 minute test you’ll get your results - your top five character strengths.  You’ll also see how you compare to the hundreds of thousands of others who have taken the test. Print out the results because you’ll want to refer back to this list of your signature strengths over and over.  When you’re grappling with a difficult issue in your life, you can pull out your profile.  Just looking at the list will remind you that you do have qualities that will help you to produce the positive outcomes you desire.  Reviewing your top character traits is like looking at a menu of delicious choices.  You’ll be able to decide which of your strengths is best suited to use in tackling the problem you’re facing. These are the attributes that have helped you succeed in the past, but which you’ve momentarily forgotten because your mind has been hijacked by the fear that something bad is about to pervade your life.  That happens to all of us, but only recently have we learned how to teach people to respond effectively by using their signature strengths. In addition to using the most effective parts of your personality, creating a more positive life requires that you start with small, easily accomplished choices to change your behavior.  Real change is a gradual process in which you slowly, but surely build new routines into your life. For example, imagine that you are one of the many people who choose food as the primary source of pleasure in your present life causing you to be overweight.  You’ve tried dieting and exercising before, but it hasn’t worked and you hate the thought of trying (and failing) again. So you take the test and discover that your signature strengths are having loving relationships, good judgement, zest for living, and perseverance.  You immediately recognize how you’ve used these qualities in other areas of your life, like rearing a couple of good kids. As you approach the issue of losing weight, you realize that what will work best for you is to find some friends to join you in mutually supportive endeavor. And you start to use your better judgement in planning your meals by prepackaging them to give you control over the quantity and quality.  You also begin to make food primarily a source of energy instead of pleasure by rekindling your passion for seeing the world, which allows you to walk around in wonderful places.  You remember how well your ability to persevere served you in raising kids.  So you stick to precise rituals about when and what you eat for a month or two, and find that you hardly even have to think about controlling your impulses anymore.  The routines you’ve established make it easy for you to shed your unwanted weight.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.