Our whole lives we follow a pattern and live in autopilot. Many of us miss out on ever finding our true purpose, but it’s never too late to change this paradigm. When you acknowledge your most common mistakes, you will understand if you are truly living in a state of bliss.

A lot of us are not. In my life I feel that I am in a state of bliss maybe 50% of the time, but the other 50% I am not. This is not a bad start, but I still have a long way to go. The moment in which you can unlock your bliss is the moment you will finally begin to feel alive.

I have personally spent years studying successful people because I am still trying to find my true bliss and live it more each day. Through my studies of successful people I have begun to see patterns (I would be stupid if I didn’t).

These patterns clearly show me in almost every case that successful people do what they do not because of money, but because they are chasing their bliss and get lost in the positive feelings they get from it. The positive feelings of bliss became like an addictive drug that they just have to have.

Below are my seven musts to unlocking your bliss that will allow you to live the life you have always dreamed of.

1. Know what bliss is

Bliss is ultimately about reaching a state of perfect happiness. This state of bliss is derived from two simple questions. What are you here to do and what is your greatest passion in life? When you attempt to follow your bliss you simply need to listen to your heart and follow what is true to you.

To be even more precise, bliss is the thing you can’t not do every week. Bliss forms part of a journey which reflects your true self in every sense. Bliss is that thing that makes you feel alive, and that gives you goosebump moments.

Bliss is not the following:

– Something you wish for
– Getting addicted to pleasure
– Indulging in escapism
– Listening to sensory pleasures only
– Being selfish
– Something that other people determine for you

Bliss is about following the thing that is creating your greatest and most serene state. Generally, when you are experiencing bliss, you become open to the possibilities of the present.

2. Proactively discover your bliss

The million-dollar question when it comes to finding your bliss is what are you passionate about? Think through the activities you engage in regularly and then think about which ones make you feel like hours are passing so quickly that they become minutes.

For me, when I start writing blog posts I can easily go for six to eight hours without even realising it. Blogging is something that I feel I never have enough time for because when I engage in it, days can feel like months.

I never really reflected on this until recently and I realised that one of the states that creates bliss for me is blogging. If someone told me this, I would never have believed them until I began to reflect on past experiences.

When you look at past experiences, you can begin to see which ones make you become totally absorbed. To do this exercise properly it’s best to write down these experiences or represent them to yourself through a series of photos.

“Past experiences where you become lost in the moment represent the clues to unlocking your bliss” – Tim Denning

Think about what made you different as a child. Reflect on moments when you didn’t fit in at school or work. These moments for me were when I was in creative states. When I would create music or indulge in writing for my English teacher people thought I was weird.

Your bliss is often found very close to your moments of creative thinking. One of the best parts about bliss is that you may not know what it is right now. Don’t do what average people do and stick your head in the sand.

The goal to finding your bliss is to stop standing still and start moving towards something. Rise up, embrace the fact you have no idea what your bliss is, go back to that childlike state, and discover it.

Strangely enough, those who have discovered their bliss report that one of the best parts to finding bliss is the exploration and the journey you get to experience. If you just start looking for your bliss, you will be on the road to getting your bliss even if you don’t realise it.

3. Write a journal or blog

One disadvantage that a lot of us suffer is that we think we know ourselves when the truth is, we really don’t. The easiest way to get to know yourself is through journaling or blogging. By writing to yourself on a regular basis, you will begin to unlock the keys to bliss.

See, when you write your thoughts down in words, you start the process of truly understanding your dreams, hopes, gifts, weaknesses, lessons you have learnt and hidden talents you may have.
Your bliss is really made up of all these things, and each one holds another piece of the puzzle.

Until you bring each of these to the surface, you won’t understand yourself to the extent that you need to, to be able to find your bliss and unlock it.

4. Make bliss a must

Bliss needs to become a must if you are to unlock its true power. You have to stop settling for second best and spending massive amounts of your time on things that you don’t love to do. It could be said that unlocking bliss is really just the art of doing more of what you love and less of what you hate.

See, people don’t often know their purpose in life either, and what I have learnt is that your purpose is very closely aligned with your bliss. In fact, they are close to the same thing but not exactly. The straightforward way to unlock your bliss is to make it a must by scheduling it in your calendar every day.

I do this in a way we are all used to; I schedule time in my calendar at least once a week, to do something that I absolutely love. Right now, this is writing, making videos, and public speaking. Each of these tasks put me in a state of bliss and aligns to my purpose of inspiring the world and using entrepreneurship to solve the world’s problems.

5. Forget what others think of you

When you walk down the street and see people drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, consuming alcohol, and eating junk food, it’s because they are so overwhelmed by fear that they are trying desperately to suppress it.

A large part of people’s fear is due to them worrying about what other people will think of them. Read this sentence very carefully; YOU WILL NEVER UNLOCK YOUR BLISS UNLESS YOU PUT ASIDE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF YOU!!!

Successful people know that learning to ignore other people’s opinion of you is how you achieve the impossible. You need to come to terms with the fact that you will never truly know what each person you meet thinks of you, so there is no point in caring about their opinion of you.

Your friends and family often will subconsciously collude with you to create a story that blocks you from unlocking your bliss. You need to face this problem head on and not let it continue. Outside of other people’s opinions of you, your own greatest inhibitor is you. You are limiting yourself and the difference you can create in the world.

6. Get used to being uncomfortable

Unlocking your bliss involves a large component of getting used to being uncomfortable. Your parents will often tell you to do the opposite, but that’s only because they want you to be safe and secure. If you settle for always being safe and secure in life, you will never find your bliss or get to experience what it’s like.

There is a part of you that you never knew existed, and the only way to see that side of you is to stretch yourself to the point of it being uncomfortable. The whole journey of bliss is one of the triggers to you discovering your personal quest to bliss in the first place.

If you are not sure what unlocking your bliss is like then the best way I can explain it is, it’s like being hit in the head by a soccer ball over and over until you learn to move slightly to one side. By moving to one side a new perspective is created, and a fresh route appears in your mind.

This process may seem a bit like insanity but when you trust bliss, things that you can’t see start to come together, rearrange themselves, and support the fact that you had faith even when there was no reason to do so.

In fact, you could say that you should keep following your bliss until you get lucky. This perceived luck though is really just hard work that you have put in to get the successful result you want – bliss.

Being uncomfortable for me is getting up each week and attempting to deliver a speech, fumbling my words, getting a rush of adrenaline, and then doing it all over again the next week even though I feel like I failed.

It’s all too easy to be okay with being comfortable each day but what I have found is that if you are not uncomfortable at least every once in a while, you will get bored, each junk food, watch endless amounts of TV shows, and end up dying from an unfulfilled life.

7. Put yourself out there

Being uncomfortable will certainly help you unlock your bliss, but you also need to go to the next level and put yourself out there. By out there, I mean in front of the eyes of everyone else. Assuming money and time were something that you never had to think about, how would you express yourself and how could that serve others?

Part of unlocking your bliss is being able to share what created your bliss with the world. This is because bliss on its own is one thing, but bliss that is created and then shared with other people is an entirely different thing.

As you put yourself out there, don’t try and anticipate what you might find otherwise you will block the path to unlocking your bliss. If there is someone you never speak to, then go and speak to them. If there is a story that you have never told, then go and post it on social media.

Do all of these tasks with unlimited amounts of vulnerability, a fearless sense of consciousness, and all the passion you can unleash. If you put yourself out there, coupled with the previous points, I promise you, you will eventually unlock your bliss and live your dream life.

Have you unlocked your own bliss? If not, why haven’t you? Let me know your answer below or on my Twitter and Facebook pages.