cultivating gratitude

The following expectations can be happiness killers:

• Life should be fair – It is not. Not at all. Bad things happen to good people all the time for no reason. Expecting you will never have to deal with hardship or difficulties and that you won’t cope when they come is denying the human experience.
• Everyone should like me – They won’t and don’t. Just as you don’t like everyone you know. Instead focus on earning the trust and respect of people you like.
• People should agree with me – Yours may not be the only right answer and being right is not always right. We tend to take others words and behaviour personally when often, it is about them not us. We expect them to think and act just like us and if they don’t, we feel hurt or angry.
• People understand what I am saying – Assumptions, like expectations, can be Happiness Killers. People won’t understand us just because we are talking. Genuinely listening to someone else with empathy creates understanding whilst projecting our own mental filters and world views onto others generates misunderstanding and hurt feelings.
• I must always do well – ‘If I do not attain these goals, if I fail to live up to my expectations, I am a miserable failure and deserve the worst’. This kind of thinking is the basis of self-denigration, self-hatred and compromised self-esteem. You are already enough and are intrinsically worthy irrespective of achievement.
• Things will make me happy – We are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future. What makes you the happiest? This question from Buddha is difficult to answer. Winning lotto? Getting married? Buying a new car? This hedonic treadmill does not cause happiness as we adapt to our circumstances which become the new normal.
• I can change them – There is one person in this world you can truly change. Yourself and that takes a tremendous amount of effort. The only way that people change is through the desire and wherewithal to change themselves. We can’t and shouldn’t ‘fix’ others.

The antidote to expectations may be cultivating gratitude.

"Expectations – the real happiness killer". HumanPsychology. Accessed on Jan. 26, 2024

anger is to motivate us

Because… we bear the image of God, each of us has on some level a concern for righteousness, fairness, and justice. Whenever we encounter that which we believe to be unrighteous, unkind, or unjust, we experience anger. I believe that in God’s design this anger is to motivate us to take positive, loving action to seek to set the wrong right; and where there has been a relationship, to restore the relationship with the wrongdoer.

Anger: Handling a Powerful Emotion in a Healthy Way by Gary D. Chapman, 2007.

anger is not evil

Anger is not evil; anger is not sinful; anger is not a part of our fallen nature; anger is not Satan at work in our lives. Quite the contrary. Anger is evidence that we are made in God’s image; it demonstrates that we still have some concern for justice and righteousness in spite of our fallen estate. The capacity for anger is strong evidence that we are more than mere animals. It reveals our concern for rightness, justice, and fairness. The experience of anger is evidence of our nobility, not our depravity.

We should thank God for our capacity to experience anger. When one ceases to experience anger, one has lost her sense of moral concern. Without moral concern, the world would be a dreadful place indeed.


Anger: Handling a Powerful Emotion in a Healthy Way by Gary D. Chapman, 2007.

we all must deal with adversity

With all the differences in our lives, we have at least one challenge in common. We all must deal with adversity. There may be periods, sometimes long ones, when our lives seem to flow with little difficulty. But it is in the nature of our being human that comfort gives way to distress, periods of good health come to an end, and misfortunes arrive. Particularly when the comfortable times have gone on for a while, the arrival of suffering or the loss of material security can bring fear and sometimes even anger.

The anger comes at least in part from a feeling that what is happening is unfair. The good health and the serene sense of being secure can become to seem deserved and natural. When they vanish, a feeling of injustice can come. Even a brave man I knew wept and cried out in his physical suffering to those who ministered to him: “I have always tried to be good. How could this happen?”

That aching for an answer to “How could this happen?” becomes even more painful when those struggling include those we love. And it is especially hard for us to accept when those afflicted seem to us to be blameless. Then the distress can shake faith in the reality of a loving and all-powerful God. Some of us have seen such doubt come to infect a whole generation of people in times of war or famine. Such doubt can grow and spread until some may turn away from God, whom they charge with being indifferent or cruel. And if unchecked, those feelings can lead to loss of faith that there is a God at all.

My purpose today is to assure you that our Heavenly Father and the Savior live and that They love all humanity. The very opportunity for us to face adversity and affliction is part of the evidence of Their infinite love. God gave us the gift of living in mortality so that we could be prepared to receive the greatest of all the gifts of God, which is eternal life. Then our spirits will be changed. We will become able to want what God wants, to think as He thinks, and thus be prepared for the trust of an endless posterity to teach and to lead through tests to be raised up to qualify to live forever in eternal life.

It is clear that for us to have that gift and to be given that trust, we must be transformed through making righteous choices where that is hard to do. We are prepared for so great a trust by passing through trying and testing experiences in mortality. That education can come only as we are subject to trials while serving God and others for Him.

In this education we experience misery and happiness, sickness and health, the sadness from sin and the joy of forgiveness. That forgiveness can come only through the infinite Atonement of the Savior, which He worked out through pain we could not bear and which we can only faintly comprehend.

It will comfort us when we must wait in distress for the Savior’s promised relief that He knows, from experience, how to heal and help us. The Book of Mormon gives us the certain assurance of His power to comfort. And faith in that power will give us patience as we pray and work and wait for help. He could have known how to succor us simply by revelation, but He chose to learn by His own personal experience.



Henry B. Eyring, "Adversity," Ensign, May 2009

always inequality in life

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.


John F. Kennedy, Press conference, 21 March 1962.