This is an interview with Marie-Louise Pereira, the self-confidence coach, as part of the Self-Empowerment Summit.
Here are some highlights of my conversation with Marie-Louise.
What is self-empowerment?
Marie-Louise started by asking me what my approach is to self-empowerment. To me self-empowerment comes from feeling aligned with one’s value and congruent. For myself, I have found that finding more happiness in my life has led me to feel more Self-Empowered so I now focus on helping people find more happiness in their lives.
The next question was quite naturally what I mean by happiness. I go into that a lot in my book Happiness Now! A Guided Journey. In a nutshell, I can say that
- I do not equate happiness to joy and
- I think it is for each person to say what happiness is to them.
What is happiness to you?
What gets in the way of our happiness?
We talked about childhood issues or trauma, about difficult relationships, stress, sorrow and grief. Lots of things can get in the way of our happiness, I’m sure you know this from your own experience! But sometimes it is also how we view these things that get in the way of our happiness. So…
How can we get more happiness?
There are many different ways. In this interview, we focused on Forgiveness. This is the topic of my TedX talk Finding Happiness: How Forgiving my Mother Radically Changed my Life. There is a lot of evidence, both from academic studies and also from the personal development movement in general, on how forgiveness increases happiness. The thing to understand about holding a grudge towards someone who has hurt you is that that grudge hurts you, not them!Perhaps you will have a sense of self-righteousness, but I don’t think that will make you happy. And it certainly strips your self-empowerment away from you.
Yet, forgiving can be difficult. In my conversation with Marie-Louise, I led the audience into a forgiveness meditation based on the work of Fred Luskin from Stanford University. You can follow the meditation with the video above and if you would like the steps to the meditation in writing, you an ask me here.
Who might you forgive?
Thank you, Marie-Louise for a rich interaction..
For more tips to cultivate your happiness, you can read my blog, my book or watch my videos!
Sonia Weyers
Happiness Wizard
Founder of Eudokima