Written by: Hoda Elsobky, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We are already midway into 2020 and the Pandemic has been the toughest of the challenges we had to face in our age. Lockdown has been the norm, social distancing and remote working have been the new slang of everyday activities. Yet we had a counter dialect emerging fast in our lives too: We had Empathy rising up to the surface, Compassion and Kindness reemerging in our relationships with others. We had simplicity revisited. We had been offered the opportunity to go back to basics, to purity and to rawness, and to get rid of the clutters the sophistication and disruptions of the modern world.
Today as the world is reopening again after six months since the first hit of the Coronavirus in Wuhan. Here comes my invitation and my insistence to go back to our true authentic selves, back to nature, back to intuition and back to happiness, true happiness. Yes, we learned to be happy with what we have, we learned to be happy wherever we are and under whichever circumstances. Allow me to ask you to just PAUSE and RESET.
Pause exactly here, and start all over again, but start with grace. Have a clear mind and a clean heart. That is all you will need in your new journey; and here is the answer to your golden question: Where is Happiness? Let me tell you, I hope you found it!
Happiness is there, you can achieve it, you can own it and you can sustain it; and here is the answer to your long-awaited question: Happiness is all of the above, happiness is the outcome of the Coronavirus-and please don’t get me wrong, nobody can underestimate the losses we had and empathize with-. But, if you haven’t found it yet, then you haven’t benefited from the experience! To make it simple, here is the equation:
Compassion + Kindness = Happiness
To elaborate more, compassion is a direct route to happiness, and it is the foundation of Kindness. So, both together form the shortest cut to happiness. Study after study recently showed that helping others brings about the same sensational or neurological response in the brain that is normally attained by realizing one’s own wants and lusts. The good question now is: Is compassion a built-in attribute, or it can be acquired? Luckily, studies pointed out that children who are securely attached to their parents tend to be more empathetic with peers. Meanwhile, Parents who use reasoning and rationalization to communicate with their children tend also to have the most sympathetic children. In the end, have I not known the value of empathy, I wouldn’t have nurtured it, until it grew and flourished and gave meaning and purpose to life.
3 Tips to help raising Compassionate Children:
When someone is sick in your circle of family or friends, talk to your children about it and encourage them to go and visit him/her with you. Buy them flowers on the way. This will help Children build their own empathetic system.
You are the Role Model, be Compassionate and Empathetic and be of help to others. Your Children will follow if not copy exactly.
Educate your Children to evaluate things through their real worth and merit, not their price. By that way, you are raising strong, Emotionally Intelligent humans, and not just materialistic beings.
Now, that you have all the three pillars to go ahead with your life, are you ready to press the button? Are you ready to reset? Let me tell you one thing before I conclude, I forgot to mention that Happiness like anything else in life; it has its own terms, and amazingly its terms are: Kindness, Compassion, and Empathy.
To dig deeper into the true meaning of happiness, download the first chapter of my book for free here!
To learn more about Hoda and Happiness - follow her on Facebook, YouTube, Join her free Live every Thursday and Monday on Instagram, and visit her website.
Hoda Elsobky, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Hoda was born in Cairo, Egypt. Graduated from the American University in Cairo in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majored in Economics and minor in Business Administration. Later, She received her MBA in Marketing. Her greatest interest lies in the fields of philosophy and positive psychology, with a focus on self help and wellness. Above all, she is passionated about happiness as a way of living! She have worked in multinational IT companies in Egypt, like IBM and Oracle, in sales, marketing and business development capacity, from 1994 till 2005. At that point she flew with her husband to live in Vienna for three years and then to Dubai. There she discovered her passion for writing.
