#472 Why happy & resilient people thrive despite life’s hardships and how you can too, with Andrew Matthews.

What’s the secret to happiness and resilience, even when life throws its toughest challenges your way?

In this inspiring episode, Andrew Matthews, a globally celebrated author and speaker whose books have sold over 8 million copies, shares his profound insights on how to cultivate happiness and resilience in our daily lives. Whether you're navigating personal struggles or seeking a more meaningful outlook, Andrew’s perspective will empower you to shift your mindset and embrace life with gratitude, hope, and joy.

1. Learn how happiness is a decision you can make every day—and the simple habits that make it easier.
2. Discover why resilient people find strength in challenges and how you can too.
3. Explore practical strategies for cultivating gratitude, overcoming negative thoughts, and building meaningful connections.

Press play now to uncover actionable steps to create a happier, more resilient life starting today!

˚

KEY POINTS AND TIMESTAMPS:

02:01 - Introduction to Andrew Matthews

03:23 - The Importance of Happiness

05:19 - Writing Books for Hope and Understanding

07:29 - Happiness and Resilience: The Correlation

11:46 - Happiness as a Daily Decision

15:49 - The Power of Gratitude and Perspective

20:29 - Happiness as a Practice

22:27 - Finding Meaning in Challenges

26:51 - Practical Strategies to Cultivate Happiness

31:42 - Final Thoughts and Resources from Andrew Matthews

˚

MEMORABLE QUOTE:

"By all means, do your best, but you don't have to be perfect. If people see that you're doing the best that you can, and if you are authentic and honest, then people will forgive you for not being perfect."

˚

VALUABLE RESOURCES:

Andrew's website: https://andrewmatthews.com/

˚

Want to be a guest on Personal Development Mastery?

Send Agi Keramidas a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/personaldevelopmentmastery

˚

Personal development inspiration, insights, and actions to implement for living with purpose.

˚

Transcript

Agi Keramidas: 0:00

In this episode, 472, you will discover the secret to happiness and resilience, even when life throws its toughest challenges your way. Welcome to personal development mastery, the podcast that helps intelligent, busy professionals develop self mastery and discover their calling so you can thrive in a fulfilling, purposeful life. I'm your host, Agi Keramidas. By listening to this episode, you are going to learn how happiness is a decision you can make every day and the simple habits that make that decision easier, you'll also discover why resilient people find strength in challenges and how you can too. Before we get started, two quick things. First, today, the podcast is five years old. Whoop, whoop, yes, I launched personal development mastery on third February, 2020, and I really believe that my guest today is the most appropriate person to celebrate the podcast fifth birthday with talking about happiness. Is there anything more pertinent to talk about right now? In the next episode, I will share with you my thoughts on the five years. The second quick thing this coming Saturday, eighth of February, we are holding a birthday celebration, and you are invited. You will find all the information in our free community, mastery, seekerstribe.com, now let's get started with today's episode. Today, I'm delighted to speak with Andrew Mathews, Andrew, you are a globally celebrated author and international speaker, and your books on happiness and resilience have sold over 8 million copies. Your mission is to inspire positivity, self awareness and personal empowerment in others. And you are passionate about helping people navigate life's ups and downs with resilience and joy. Andrew, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to speak with you. That's a joy looking at your smile. It's it's brilliant. Thank

Andrew Matthews: 2:36

you. Thank you, Agi. I'm so happy to be with you, and so

Agi Keramidas: 2:40

am I? It's brilliant. And you said happy. And actually, that's the main topic I want to explore with you today. Happiness, also resilience, which I'm sure there is a relationship between those two, but these are the two main focuses that of this conversation. Let me start by asking you, what inspired you to dedicate your career to writing about happiness and resilience.

Andrew Matthews: 3:12

My first thought Agi is that there is nothing that's more important than being happy, and every so often, we will hear of somebody who was rich and maybe even famous, seemed to have everything, and they took their own life. And we might ask ourselves, How does this happen? And isn't it so important that we focus on happiness and how we can feel good about we feel good about who we are and find meaning and purpose in our life. When I was 25 I made a shocking discovery. I discovered that the happiest people I knew had bigger problems than me, and that made no sense. You see, I thought that when I had less problems, I would be happier. And yet I saw around me that there were people who had recovered from cancer or they maybe lost everything in a house fire, or they'd lost loved ones way too soon, people who had even lost their jobs unexpectedly, people who had gone broke, and many of them were Dealing with their own challenges much better than I was, and that set me on a mission to find out, how is it that happy people think, and how can I think more like them? And so, as is often the case, I wrote the book that I wished I'd had. Had before I wrote being happy, which was my my first book. I read about 200 books on attitude and their subconscious and success and prosperity and leadership, and many of them had good information, but I found some of them quite boring, and my background is in in art, drawing, cartooning. So I thought if I can write a book in simple language that I can fill with cartoons to make it accessible and easily understandable, images that will help my readers to remember the message. Then maybe that will be a self help book for people who hate self help books. Maybe it will be a book for people who don't usually read a lot of books. And especially I was hoping that I could write a book that would give people hope, hope that happiness is not beyond me, hope that I can live a better life, hope that I can have a career that is perhaps beyond what my family or even I had imagined. So my mission was to give people hope for a better life. And so the last 12 books I've written have been looking at success and happiness from different points of view. Follow Your Heart was very much about career and finding purpose in our work. I did a book during the financial crisis called happiness in hard times. I did a book for teenagers called being a happy teen, and a little book for people who don't read much at all, called happiness. In a nutshell, that's got very few words and mostly cartoons. And my most recent book is bouncing back, which is how we rebound from disappointment and disaster.

Agi Keramidas: 7:12

Thank you, and this is great, and we will come back to what you just said in the end about bouncing back. Let's go to happiness. What I found fascinating, what you started saying about the the happier people having more problems than that, that realization, so tell, talk to me a bit more about this. Do you think that it was that they were happy despite having more problems. Were they happy because they had problems? Or did they have more problems because they were happy? So I'm trying to find the the correlation.

Andrew Matthews: 7:55

Yes, I would suggest that we find happiness in spite of our problems and and so our problems hopefully will make us more resilient. I've, I've got a cartoon in one of my books. It's at the beginning of bouncing back, actually, and there's a guy climbing a mountain, and he looks exhausted and sweating like he doesn't want to be there. And even his dog is exhausted and sweating and looks like he doesn't want to be there. And the caption to the cartoon is what you thought was breaking you is probably making you. And I would suggest that very often we look back at our problems and we say, I wouldn't have chosen that, but it helped to make me into the person that I am today. I might develop that idea by saying that we aren't born extraordinary. We become extraordinary by facing challenges that we didn't choose. And so whilst it is not an easy thing, and in talking about happiness and resilience, we're really talking about what's possible, not necessarily what is easy. And I've discovered that to a large degree, our happiness is dependent on the decision we make to be happy. In fact, for me, having discovered that there were a lot of people I knew who were managing their lives better and more optimistically and with a better attitude than than I was. There was a day and I remember the date. It was the 19th of October, 1983 and I said to myself, what I'm doing isn't working very well. I complained to. Much. I'm not grateful enough. I'm not taking advantage of the opportunities that I've had, and I also had a look at like, how am I doing with romance? Not very well. Do I have much money in the bank? Not really enough. Is my life as exciting and stimulating as I would like, and it wasn't. And I said to myself from today, I will see my life differently. I will be kinder to myself. I will be more forgiving of other people. I will I will embrace opportunities. And I developed a little sort of motto for myself, which was, if in doubt, do it. In other words, when opportunities came along to maybe go somewhere with friends or to meet people or to join a course or read a book or learn something new, or I decided I would throw myself into that and see how that worked. And my life changed from that day, the 19th of October, 1983 it wasn't idyllic, but it was on a different trajectory. And so I would suggest that more than many of us realize happiness is a decision that we make. For example, Agi, we often see perhaps a little two year old toddler, and he's perhaps climbing around on the furniture, and he falls on his head, and we ask ourselves, what is the first thing he does? And the first thing he does is he looks around to see who's watching, and depending on the audience, he decides whether he's going to laugh or cry. And we think that's really cute. He's making a decision, am I going to be happy or not? And we make exactly that same decision, maybe dozens of times a day we get an unexpected bill. Someone chops us off in on the freeway. Our secretary quits, and we make that decision, how will I respond to this challenge? Will I be happy or not? And the more often that we choose to say, this is not going to defeat me. I wouldn't have chosen this, but this is still a day in which I can be happy. The better we get at doing that.

Agi Keramidas: 13:43

In a way it is so simple to understand you said, it is a matter of making the decision to be happy, which, it sounds very clear. It's obvious. However, on the practical side of it, I mean, what I want to ask you about is those particular moments of challenge. You mentioned the example with the toddler that falls down and takes makes a decision, of course, unfortunately, compared to the toddler, we have a ton of internal dialog inside our head, but that toddler doesn't so that really, let's say colors. I will put it like that, our decision making process at that moment. So I suppose a big part of staying with that decision is to have the awareness to understand that this is a moment that I'm going to decide whether I can be happy or not. I hope my question makes sense. Yeah,

Andrew Matthews: 14:54

it does, absolutely. So the first thing is to realize that I'm actually choosing that I'm not a robot, I'm I'm not a tree. I can, I can choose how I think about this. The second thing is to understand that resilient people happy. People tend to be happy because of the questions that they ask themselves about any given situation. For example, you're stuck in traffic at a point where many people would begin to get angry, and you're now running even more late, and you're not even sure how you're going to get all the things done that you need to get done today. A resilient person or a happy person is going to say, I wouldn't have chosen this. But wait a minute, what's good about this? Situation. Well, a, I'm not walking. B, it's raining and I'm not walking, so that's good. I can listen to podcasts here in my car. I can plan my weekend. There are things to be grateful for. So it's the questions that we ask ourselves and happy and resilient people throughout their day are asking themselves, maybe not even consciously, what what do I love about my wife? What do I love about living here? What is how am I fortunate to be living in this town? How am I fortunate that I had, the parents that I had, and even the challenges that I had growing up, and what has that taught me? So it's it's our internal dialog and the questions that we ask ourselves, because negative thoughts are very much like rats. You get one negative thought, and before you know it, you're surrounded by them, like, for example, that situation you're driving to work, and the first thing is, you say, you know, this is the last thing I needed, and now I'm going to be late for work, and and my family don't even appreciate me, and I've got to do cook the dinner when I get home. And now I've got a headache. Maybe it's a tumor. It just continues and continues once we get onto that wavelength. And the way that we stop that invasion of rats, if you like, those negative thoughts, is we begin to ask ourselves, hey, wait, what is one good thing about this? We're at an airport and we've been bumped off a plane. We say, Okay, so I've got to spend three hours here waiting for my next flight. But what's one good thing about this? Okay, I get a chance to relax a little. I'll get to talk to someone new, I can maybe find an extraordinary book in the bookstore. And we might say, Well, isn't that just being a little bit like Pollyanna, you know? Is it? Is it realistic? And it is realistic because lousy things happen to all of us all the time, and it's just a matter of, how do we tend to deal with that?

Agi Keramidas: 18:15

If you enjoy this episode, can you think of one person that would find it useful and share it with them? I'd really appreciate it, and you will also be adding value to people you care about. And now let's get back to the episode. I will repeat now what I highlighted from this, what you just said thank you for this answer that to realize that we are choosing at every moment to realize that, and once we do to ask ourselves, which one, just one, one good thing about the situation that Will this really shifts the perspective to a different direction and hopefully of gratitude, I will say that your analogy with rats, I hadn't heard of that before, but I think next time, when I do have that negative thought followed by others, I think I will easily Remember the pictures that are just made of all rats come. And so I think that will be a useful analogy.

Andrew Matthews: 19:35

And in my, in my book, bouncing back, I've actually drawn the cartoon of a whole line of rats arriving. So you can see that there. But it is true. And you know, we we grow up with language that pretends that we're not in control. For example, we say to people, you make me angry. And a lot of people spend their whole life believing that they're not really in control of whether they're getting angry or not, and as we become more aware of this, we we dispense with that sort of language that is is not true at all. We we choose to be angry, we we choose to get upset, and we can choose not to. It's easier said than done, but with practice, it gets easier.

Agi Keramidas: 20:28

You said the right word practice. Practice is the key word there. Do you believe that happiness is also a practice?

Andrew Matthews: 20:40

I believe that every day we we continue to. Make that decision. Am I going to make this a beautiful day? And whatever comes along, and there will be things we say, well before I get upset or angry or disappointed, let me find something good in this. And and we continue to do that, we continue to decide. And there are, you know, there are really tough things to get through. So I'm, I'm not, I'm not making small of that. My own situation is that my wife Julie, Julie is my publisher, and my wife Julie had a very bad fall in Malaysia two and a half years ago, and she's been, she's been really ill. In that time, I've become her carer. And so, you know, I learned to practice what I preach and and we never saw this coming. We never imagined that, that we would be in a situation relatively early in our lives, where where she was unable to shower herself unassisted and get into a car unassisted. And so I'm learning all about that. But I mean, you know, the good things are that, in some ways, we've become closer together, even though we've been together nearly 40 years, and each day we just we deal with it and and I guess we both ask ourselves, What are the good things that have come from what is a really tough situation

Agi Keramidas: 22:32

you said earlier about you used the phrase finding meaning, and I think this applies in particular to these kinds of situations, because the meaning we will give to that situation will determine our outlook on the situation, isn't it?

Andrew Matthews: 22:53

Yeah, absolutely, yeah, nicely encapsulated, and we give situations meaning. I mean, one of the ways that resilient and happy people give meaning is they say things happen for a reason. Now, even if that is not true, it's a very useful strategy to apply to anything, and it's very helpful, because if you spend enough time trying to find the reason and and by implication, if you spend enough time trying to figure out what it is you're learning and how it's making you a better person, then you end up being even grateful, or at least mindful of how what seemed like a disaster was was helpful, and we never want to go through the things that we need to go through To become the people that we want to become.

Agi Keramidas: 24:09

This is again, very useful, the to look for the reason for road Haven, and really think of the reason. Because, personally, I do believe that everything happens for a reason. It's a deeper it's a deeper question, but it is very useful, the way that you said, to really look for the reason

Andrew Matthews: 24:32

we never really know, because we only see a small part of the picture, and we don't know where our lives are headed. So often things happen that we think are disasters. Yes, maybe we fall in love with somebody, and we think I've met my forever, lifetime partner, and then six months later they dump us, and we think this is a disaster, this is terrible. And then we go off and live our lives, and we meet someone else, and 10 years later we meet that person, and we think, wow, I dodged a bullet, but clearly that wasn't the person for me, even though I thought so at the time. So we never know that is so

Agi Keramidas: 25:27

true. And I think that's where an element of having trust or faith that things will happen in best the way, or how is there meant to be. I think it helps. What I wanted to to ask is, you know, throughout this conversation. Today, you have been giving and I have been writing down. I've been taking a lot of notes today, some things that one can really implement in order to and I will, I will say that once more, because it's really for me, it is the main if I could, you know, summarize all these conversations so far, in one sentence, I would say to realize that you are choosing every moment, whether you will be happy or not. That realization, I think that is the key moment for me. What would you say to them? The listener, as is there some apart from all this, at the moment, you know the decision is there some practice, something that they can do to, let's say, reinforce their ability to take that decision day in, day out.

Andrew Matthews: 26:39

I think one of the first things we can do is make a conscious decision not to complain. We know that whatever we think about, we tend to talk about, we think about food, then we talk about food. But the reverse is also true, the things that we talk about, even in our quiet moments, we tend to think about, and we keep thinking about things that we've been talking about. So if we are complaining about our neighbor and our mother in law and the government, then that is going to make us unhappy, because we continue to think about the things that we keep talking about. So if there's something that we can fix or that needs to be addressed, then, of course, we will talk about it, but for the sake of just complaining, then we stopped that. 40 years ago, I made a decision that was just a thing that appealed to me that never, ever in my life, will I complain about the weather? I'm just not going to do it anymore, and it's given me so much time, I never complain about the weather. I mean, we can do things like that, but there so not complaining is a practical thing we can do. Another thing we can do is make a point of giving people compliments, because in order to give people a compliment, we need to be looking for good things in people. And so we we find what we look for in life. So that's number one. Then we let people know what we appreciate in them, they feel happier, but the extraordinary thing is we feel even happier than they feel, and we are the one that gave them the compliment. So that is really powerful and and that also leads into the understanding that happy people. Are kind people. And if, if we notice the people around us that seem to get the most joy out of life, they are kind people. They they do things that they're not even asked to do. They help people when people aren't even asking for help, they just do it because it's something in which they find joy. So making the conscious connection between joy and happiness is useful. And there's another thing about happiness, Agi and that is being kind to ourselves. People say, do you need to love yourself? Well, you need to. You need to at least like yourself, because we create the life that we feel we deserve, and if I don't like myself, then I may live with a partner who treats me badly for 20 years. I might stay in a job where I'm treated badly. I will overlook opportunities, and I will probably not look after my health or my body because I don't like myself. It's so important that I forgive myself for not being perfect. And one thing that I would recommend is that we get a photograph of ourselves when we were maybe three years old, when we didn't have all the answers, and we were just living life the best way that we knew how, and put it somewhere, maybe on your desk, where you can see it every day, and decide to treat yourself the way that you would treat that three year old child. Because you still don't have all the answers, and you are still just living life the best way you know how

Agi Keramidas: 30:56

that's wonderful. Treat myself like I would treat that little child. This is very, practical. Andrew, so wonderful. Thank you. Where would you like to direct our listener, the mastery seeker that has I'm sure that he found this conversation fascinating. Okay,

Andrew Matthews: 31:22

so my books, for example, being happy, follow your heart, bouncing back how life works. All on Amazon, and they are in ebook, and they are also in hard copy. Two of my books are recorded on Audible with my Australian accent that is, follow your heart and bouncing back. And so if I share a little bit about my books and why they're different, my background, before I was writing, I was I studied fine art that is classical drawing and cartooning. And so my books are filled with cartoons, and the cartoons are designed to connect to the messages, so that anyone who's reading, firstly, can open anywhere in the book and get a feeling of what one section is about. You don't have to start the book at the front, and then, because there's a cartoon there, I'll give you an example. When I'm talking about how we find what we look for, and talking about gratitude, I've drawn a cartoon of a very happy looking guy. He's got a slice of cake that he is enjoying very much. And the caption is happy people focus on what they have. And then in the second panel of the cartoon, there's a very miserable looking guy, and he has an entire cake, minus one slice, and the caption to that is unhappy. People focus on what's missing. So when I make a point, I I draw a cartoon that illustrates the point, so that my readers can go away with that cartoon. They don't need to remember the words anymore, because our minds work on pictures.

Agi Keramidas: 33:34

Andrew, this has been a really enlightening conversation, so I appreciate that very much. I do have two final quick questions, and the first one is, what does personal development mean for you?

Andrew Matthews: 33:54

When we embark on our own personal development program, suddenly we become more hopeful for a better future. So I believe it's about it's about hope and and I, I guess I put my books into that category that provided we have hope, that I have some tools here that can get me through whatever life throws at me. Then I can wake up tomorrow and I can say one day at a time, I can do my best, and I can live an essentially happy life. So personal development is not about theory, and you have focused on that so beautifully in this podcast, which is, what are things that you can do today and tomorrow that will make your life better? And that is my, pretty much my only interest. I seek to entertain my readers so that they will stay with a message, and maybe they will be uplifted and amused. Hopefully parts of my book are funny, but the whole point is what you've underlined here in this podcast, what are the concrete things that I can do that will make my life better and and they should be simple

Agi Keramidas: 35:31

and one quick hypothetical question, if you could go back in time and meet your 18 year old self, what's one piece of advice you would give him?

Andrew Matthews: 35:44

I would tell myself. Of not to take life so seriously. I was fairly driven from a young age, and I probably took myself a little bit too seriously, and that carried over into when I began giving corporate presentations, and now I think I've given over 1000 to two companies in a lot of different countries. I think I was too focused on trying to be perfect. And the message I would share with anyone from my experiences, by all means, do your best, but you don't have to be perfect if, if people see that you're doing the best that you can, and if you are authentic and honest, then people will forgive you For not being perfect.

Agi Keramidas: 36:46

Such a wonderful piece of advice there. Andrew, I want to thank you again this for this conversation and what you shared with us, and you talked earlier about your intention, before we started recording for this conversation to give people hope. And I think you also included that in your previous answer. I'm wishing you all the very best with your next steps from from here on, I will. I would leave it to you really for your final passing words.

Andrew Matthews: 37:29

Well, firstly, Agi, it's such a joy to chat with you. So thank you. And for our listeners, I would suggest that we all remember that that happiness is not an accident and it is not something that is always easy, but it is really a daily decision. Every day we get up and we say, what's good about opening my eyes for another day? So that's gratitude. The good thing about gratitude is that you can't be grateful and angry at the same time. You can't be grateful and miserable at the same time. So what's you know? What's good about having one more day? Why am I happy to be living another day? And let me make this decision to be happy just today. I don't need to focus on anything else. Let me make today my happy day.

Agi Keramidas: 38:27

I hope you found this episode enlightening. And is it alright if I ask for a quick favor? If you like this podcast, can you think of someone else you know who might find it useful and share it with them. Not only this helps the podcast grow, but you also will be adding value to people you care about. Thank you, and until next time, stand out, don't fit in .