About
I’m Debbie, a US-based professional Happy Maker who operates my business from home. I started out with a laptop and a mission to improve people’s lives by helping them to get happy, and things blossomed from there. I’ve now expanded my business, aided by a large desktop PC which I call ‘Oops’!
My goal is to share as much happiness with people as I can. I may not be academically gifted, but I have a lot of life experience which is backed up by reading and research. My happiness has predominantly evolved around my life experiences. I have learned that you can read about happiness in many books, but it’s only when you reach it that you can really express it to other people. I draw upon my own life experience in my work, and support them through the willingness and passion to keep evolving and learning.
My mission statement
My motto is ‘The past is lessons learned; the present and future are opportunities to practice those lessons.’ I believe that life is full of challenges which present opportunities for us to grow and develop as people, bringing the chance to get happy along the way. I have learned that there are five important elements to finding your own happiness:
1. A desire to be happy
2. The will to appreciate what you already have in your life
3. The ability to learn to enjoy the moment
4. A great sense of humor.
5. The ability to be a child, some of the time.
I know that life experiences cannot be taught in a class rooms like history, math, science, engineering and other subjects. Everyone has a different set of circumstances, and we react to them differently. Your happiness depends upon you and who you, are and how willing you are to learn about yourself. With so much negativity in the world, we have to learn to work around it, through it, or underneath it when necessary. Happiness cannot be handed to you on a silver spoon, but it is there if you definitely have a desire to choose it as a way of life.
A brief biography…
The first 20 years of my life were spent on a farm in western Nebraska. I grew up with three sisters and three brothers. I was the fifth child out of seven, and the youngest of the girls, which could be a pain! The older sisters never seemed to think I grew up and really knew anything. This is ok, because in the end I grew up stronger for it.
My family lived in a four room house without indoor plumbing until I was 12 years old. My father was a hired hand for a farmer, which in turn meant that we really didn’t have much money. Our mother would clean houses for people or clean the school house to make extra money. Sometimes, she would take care of older people to earn that extra money. In the summertime when the children were old enough, we did field work to help out.
I attended a three room school from kindergarten to the eighth grade. When I was in seventh grade our family did move to a house that had indoor plumbing. I remember this as being pretty nice. It was really great sitting in a real tub and taking a bath. Those outhouses just don’t cut the mustard, and the toilet paper can really suck!
Right now you are probably thinking, “Man, she was raised with the dinosaurs.” It wasn’t that far back, but I do remember those darn horse flies in the summer time. Boy, when they bite you it really hurts! Me and my siblings did have fun catching the lighting bugs in a jar. We didn’t have a lot of toys, so we made up our own fun. We would walk on tomato cans with strips of rubber tied on them, so they would stay on our feet. It was fun to take five gallon barrels and lay them on their side, playing tag by rolling them and catching one another, and taking the big tracker tires to crawl inside and roll down a hill. The corrals fence were part of our entertainment, walking on them in hopes that if you fell off the fence it was on the clean side and not the inside, where all the cows were!
Life was very simple then, and we did have a lot of fun. Even back then I learned to take the negative and make something positive out of it. We were rich with love, not things.
The high school I attended was a small school. It was one that had kindergarten through the twelfth grade. My graduation class consists of twelve students. I enjoyed those years, but at the same time knew that if I had children some day they would go to a better school, because there wasn’t the opportunity available that larger schools offered.
When I see some of the children and adults in today’s world I feel a little sorry for them; they have trouble when it comes to being happy, because of all the modern conveniences they have always had. It’s like they cannot be happy without all the gadgets. As for me, I’m just happy having an inside bathroom and spell check!
Those early years in one’s life do develop you in many ways, but we always need to remember that as adults we can change the things we brought with us from those early years. One phrase I always find helpful is, “You are an adult when you forgive your parents for what you think they did to you.” As parents, we do the best job that we can in raising our children, but parents are never perfect and we all make mistakes.
Once I got out on my own and became aware of who I really was and what I really wasn’t, it seemed as though I was trying to break every record there ever was when it came to making mistakes. First of all when my heart got broken, I just took the next thing that came around and married him. Thinking this would help me forget about my heart being broken. The term for that is REBOUND. We all know that does not work, and it lasted only two years.
After that, I decided to get out of the small town and move to the city. Now this really was a good move. The only trouble was that those busy freeways were nothing like the dirt roads that I was use to, and there was a real fear of getting lost. That fear is still with me, but not as bad as back then. Let me tell you – when you are use to one lane going one way and another lane going the other way, and then you get on a freeway with all the lanes and roads going off in all different directions, that can be very fearful at first.
I have a fear of being lost from when I was three years old and got left in the car by mistake after going to the drive-in as a family. My parents didn’t realize I had fallen asleep in the car. They went into the house without me. Upon waking up a few hours later, I knew that staying in the car wasn’t an option. Little old me at three years old managed to get to the house in the middle of the night. That memory still feels like yesterday. This is good though, because it helped me understand fear. If you look fear straight in the eyes, you can overcome it.
Things were good in the city. I found myself a job and made new friends. Finally, after a few years, I met my husband to be. When it came to this person all the warning signs were there for another big mistake, but I just wasn’t listening to them. He was the type of person that was pretty cold when it came to emotions. Being a loving person I decided that there was a lots of love, so this would change him. After three kids and 13 years I realized that he was who he wanted to be, and there was nothing that I could do about it. You never can change anyone; they are who they want to be unless they decide to change.
This is when things got real serious about finding out why I kept making mistakes and the wrong choices.
It was obvious that the marriage had been a complete mistake, but with three beautiful daughters, it couldn’t have been a mistake. At the same time, when it came to my choice of men the record was not looking good. What was really important was not making the same mistake again. This needed to be investigated.
Learning from experience
When things don’t seem to be going right in a person’s life, before you go blaming others or circumstances in the situation you have to take a look at yourself. This sure seemed to be one of those situations where the same thing kept happening, so I must be the problem. I was responsible for my situation.
Why was I making this same mistake over and over? After running to the book store and finding some books on relationships and self improvement, I read and read some more. Soon it all became clearer to me. When I was a child my father did a lot of drinking. He was a weekend alcoholic. Being a child my thoughts were; maybe if I loved him more or did something he would stop his drinking. Because of this, the men of my choice always needed help. Wrong thinking!
When something isn’t right I look for the reason and see if it is me and in my control to change it, or if it is not in my control, walk away from it. This could be changed now that I was aware of my own shortcomings and wrong choices.
Things were rough after my divorce. The three girls and I didn’t have much, but we had each other and a lot of LOVE. And we had the Good Lord with us. That was one wonderful thing that my mother gave me when growing up. My faith; this is why I do not have any trouble when it comes to being happy, regardless what shape my life happens to be in. That’s one thing nice when it comes to the Lord; when the same thing keeps happening to you; he has a way of letting you know you need to do something different if you want it to stop repeating the same problem.
We got through those rough years after my divorce with child support coming once in a while and the girls were wonderful through it all. The nice things about hard times, is that if you handle them right it can bring people together even more. Everybody finds out what they are made of and what really counts in this life we’re given.
I finally did find the right man. He is wonderful (most of the time) not perfect and that goes for all people. It would be rather boring if we were perfect, don’t you think?
I have gone through some other really tough times through these last years, but with the Good Lord, my family now and my happy attitude I get through them. It’s really neat how our attitude can really make a big different in our lives.
With change remember; when one door closes a better door opens.
After losing my job and having no success in finding a new job, what was really important to me was to help people find happiness in their life. To me, life is very short and we do not have time to waste being unhappy.
Life is to be enjoyed and grow as a person. When my husband asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I told him that I wanted to have a website that helps people be Happy… he thought I had lost my mind, but he didn’t tell me that!
Sharing my experience with others
With my personal Happy BLOG, I hope to inspire individuals to find their own Happiness, and get more of what they want out of life. I invite individuals everywhere to come here to get ideas and inspiration, and hope that you will read my blog and submit your comments.
No matter where you are in your life right now, remember happiness is a choice. Make it your choice – you deserve it.
With my best wishes and much happiness,
