Everyone says they want to be happy; however it is the rarest person who really wants to take the plunge into........................ Guess where the plunge must be taken in order to be truly happy? Answer: Into oneself! It is not complicated, and the steps to true and authentic happiness are not what one would normally think to take. Here are the three most important steps you can take to be on your journey of Happiness. 1. Connect with the Truth within yourself. There is no place where there is more truth than anywhere else. Most people, however, do not take that journey, to look where they have not looked before-- Within. There are hundreds of stories about this but most people still do not take that journey because we live in a society that tells us to seek outside of ourselves for everything. Your truth is about YOUR history, your insights, your values, your passions, your gifts, your skills, your feelings, thoughts, beliefs and perceptions. In this life you only have one choice. If you make the correct choice, you then have opened yourself up to unlimited choices, unlimited options, and unlimited possibilities. The first and most important choice is to be connected to your own truth, your authentic self. If you would like I can send you a couple of paper and pencil exercises to do to identify some key aspects of your True self. These are the Hero’s Exercise and the Value’s Exercise. 2. Deal with the really big losses in your life.Most people erroneously believe that if something painful happened in the past, the best thing to do is to leave it in the past. People mis-use age old wisdom teachings such as "BE IN THE MOMENT NOW", as a way of deluding themselves that they do not need to re-visit painful losses in the past. That wisdom adage, BE IN THE MOMENT NOW, means that we are able to fully present to our entire being right now in this moment. When we do this, we are willing to be aware of deep and painful losses with deep and painful feelings that are keeping us literally tied to the past. Another wisdom teaching tells us the only way to deal with some painful issue is by going through it, not over it, not around it or not pretending it did not happen. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss Psychiatrist, talked about the Hero's Journey in the following way: the losses we have not dealt with are in our Shadow, a place of disowned parts of ourselves that surround our most authentic self. Part and parcel of these disowned parts are the feelings which most people call negative, (mad, sad, and scared). When we embark upon our own Hero's Journey, we become willing to deal with these feelings and losses. By being willing to be with our feelings, we discover which painful losses are keeping us stuck.Then, there are ways to heal these losses. In the process of healing them, we become even stronger and able to reach out into life and embrace our life in ways that we would never have thought possible before we went through the process of identifying and healing our losses. If you would like a one page exercise on identifying losses you may not have dealt with, please contact me and I will send this to you. 3. Find your authentic purpose. We hear about this nearly every day. Some may call it finding your passion, following your bliss or connecting to a Divine Purpose. Many books have been written about it.Our purpose need not be hard to discover, and our purpose will change periodically throughout our life. One's true purpose does have an aspect of helping others and it also has to do with a need in our lives that we have learned to meet and thereby can help others meet this need as well. For a one page exercise on discovering your purpose, e-mail me and request the exercise:Clues to discovering your Authentic Purpose Finally, one of the most important things you can do in this life time to find true happiness is to learn to love yourself by meeting your needs. If your parents were able to teach you to love yourself, they did it by teaching you that your needs are important, and they taught you how to meet your needs.If you would like a needs inventory, which is the best way to know what your needs are, please e-mail me and request the Needs Inventory 101. If you begin to follow these three steps and also become 100 % willing to meet your needs in at least one of five areas, your life will change. You will have embarked on your authentic journey, the only real way to Happiness; the way to YOUR Happiness.