Andrew Matthews-Bouncing Back, The Happines Expert

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Information about the book will be listed in the podcast note. Music. Welcome, everyone, in the United States, Canada, and around the world to another episode of It's a Wrap with Wrap, the podcast of overcomers and the podcast of useful information to better our daily life and mental well-being. I am your host, Ron Rapoport. I would like to thank all of our great listeners.

Viewers on our YouTube channel, It's a Wrap with Wrap, the podcast uncut, and our sponsors and supporters for making the podcast such a success. The podcast is being heard on all major platforms and the podcast website, it's a wrap with wrap.com, where you can find all the episodes, previews of future episodes and great products and services offered from our sponsors.

And now featuring the podcast book note, showcasing many of the books our past guests have authored and which can be purchased on Amazon. My guest today is Australian author, illustrator and international speaker, Andrew Matthews. Andrew's books, including Being Happy, Follow Your Heart, and Bouncing Back, have sold over 8 million copies in 48 languages. Andrew has addressed over 1,000 corporations on five continents on attitude, enjoying work, and resilience.

His clients include McDonald's, Lenovo, Honda, HSBC, Motorola, Walmart, and Citibank. Andrew is popular with CEOs and surgeons, with teenagers and even prisoners. Andrew's latest book is Bouncing Back, How You Rebound from Disappointment and Disaster. Andrew is an accomplished artist, and all his books are lavishly illustrated with his own cartoons. He is with us today to talk about his devotion to the subject of happiness and about his latest book, Bouncing Back.

From Queensland, Australia, welcome Andrew to the podcast. Hi, Ron. Nice to be here. Thank you. It's great having you here, an honor. Tell us a little bit about yourself growing up and what your life was like for you in the early years. I was a tiny kid, Ron. I was the smallest kid in school. In high school, I was the smallest boy and smaller than all the girls. And I remember going home to my mother and saying, I hate this.

Everyone makes fun of me and they say that my school bag is bigger than me. And my mum said, well, wait a year, there's got to be some smaller kids that come to the school next year. So I waited another year and then another year and I was still the smallest kid when I was in third year high school. And I said to my mother, I hate this. And she said, well, there's some things in life that you can change, but you can't change your height and you can't change your parents.

So she said, you've just got to change what you can and accept and deal with what you can't. So, I mean, the big kids used to throw me over the fence and lock me in cupboards and the stuff that goes along with being tiny. You were bullied. You were bullied. Yeah, but I mean, it was not brutal. They did it because they could, not because they hated me.

I saw it in that light. But it was still an introduction for me to the idea, thanks to my mother, of the fact that some things you can change, some you can't, and deal with the things that you can't change. So I grew up loving drawing and painting, but I thought I should become a lawyer. So I began law school before I said, no, I want to do what I really love. And I studied drawing and painting in your country at the Art Students League of New York in the 70s.

But even when I was 25, I was still not doing as well. I was not as happy as I thought I should be. In fact, at 25, Ron, I made a shocking discovery. I discovered that the happiest people I knew had bigger problems than me and that made no sense. I thought that as my life got easier, I would be happier but I had these people around me who had either recovered from cancer or they had lost their jobs or maybe they'd lost loved ones way too soon.

A lot of those people had a better attitude than I did and I wanted to know how happy people think and how I could be more like them. I wanted to understand how some people are more resilient than others, and I wanted to be resilient like them. Yeah, absolutely. So that led me on a quest, reading hundreds of books and studying people that I observed were happier and dealt with life better than I did. And ultimately, that led me to my first book, which was called Being Happy.

Well, I was going to ask you that. So at age 25, you discovered something about happiness, that happy people had bigger problems than you. Yes. And so that was the first... Understanding, I guess, that it's not what happens to you, but it's how you think about what happens to you. And I'm sure all of our listeners have been inspired by people around them who seem to have said, well, I can deal with this and I will deal with my challenges one day at a time.

And so my thought is, Ron, that nothing is more important than being happy. I mean, if we've all seen people who are rich and famous and they take their lives. Yeah. And I'm not even suggesting that happiness is necessarily easy. In fact, the reason I've now written 12 books about happiness and attitude is because it's not easy. And sometimes we need some help and always we need some hope. That's for sure. That's for sure. How would you describe your state of happiness before your authorhood?

And tell us what you decided to do on October 19th, 1983. three. Yeah. I would say that I had no excuse. I was somewhat of a complainer. I didn't forgive myself for my shortcomings. I didn't forgive other people for their shortcomings. And I basically had a less than positive attitude. And I had no excuse because I grew up with loving parents. And I, you know, I was able to deal with school. I had all my arms and legs. I was not ill.

And yet I realized that I had no excuse for having a fairly average attitude. And it was on October 19th, 1983, that I looked at my life and I made a quick assessment. I thought, well, how am I doing in romance? No, not very well. Am I prosperous? No, not very. Am I as happy as I thought I would be by now? No. I thought, I'm 25. My life is probably about a third over. I need to change something now. And on that day, I decided that from today, I will see my life differently.

I will be kinder to myself. I will be kinder to others. I will embrace opportunities. And I will throw myself into life with joyful enthusiasm and abandon. And I adopted a kind of a motto for myself, which was, if in doubt, do it. And not that I should go and do dangerous things where I might kill myself, but I just thought I need to be more courageous, more enthusiastic. And my life changed from that day, Ron.

And I'm sure you read about that in my book, Bouncing Back. And it wasn't that it changed a hundred percent, but the direction that I was headed changed. The trajectory changed. And you decided to take all the opportunities that came your way, correct? If opportunities opened up, you were going to go down that path. And I decided that I would look for opportunities and create opportunities. So I can remember when I met my now wife, Julie, and Julie became my publisher.

And she is this delightful, elegant, unstoppable force of nature. I remember when I met her and I said, I'm going to ask her on a date, which I would never have done before because she was sophisticated and classy and beautiful and way out of my league. But I remember when I decided to write my book, Being Happy, and what did I know about writing books? And I was not a psychologist, but I was now in this new frame of mind that do whatever I can, embrace opportunities.

Opportunities and so I share that because I think it applies to all of us that as we look for opportunities for opportunities as we say you know I'm going to do whatever I can and I'm going to look on the bright side of life because it's the only way to live then life gets better. Why do you think you've devoted your life and 12 books to the subject of happiness?

I would never have done it If I didn't begin to get the most extraordinary feedback from readers, and I never anticipated this, but within weeks of being happy being published, I began to get letters from people who said, your book has really helped me, it's giving me hope.

And for the last 35 years, there's barely a day goes by that I don't get an email or a message on Facebook or a message in LinkedIn or just a text from somebody that says, your book with its simple messages have given me hope and changed my life or changed my husband's life or my children are doing better.

And so it's not that I wrote just 12 books about happiness but they address living a more fulfilling life from different points of view so being happy is broadly about an introduction to happiness being a daily decision that we make Follow Your Heart is very much about enjoying our career, finding purpose in our life and work Bouncing Back, my most recent book, is really about resilience and has many stories about people who overcame the most shocking setbacks and tragedies.

And not all of them. Some of them are just massive disappointments. So, but it was because early on I got a sense that people were benefiting and for our listeners who haven't seen my books, the language is simple and they are filled with my cartoons because I think that books should be entertaining, books should be easy to dive into. And in a sense, I write books for people who don't read much.

Hopefully, they don't insult people who are readers and intellectual, but I think messages can be very simple and also be very useful. Yeah, I really enjoyed the illustrations. Thank you. Yeah. So it was because I began to receive so much feedback from readers. And I mean, for example, I got a message from a lady and she said, my husband who never reads books. Picked up your book from our coffee table and has been quoting you ever since, and he's a changed man.

And I ran into a fellow, I was in Malaysia once, and I was in a shopping center, and a fellow called Teku approached me and he said, you don't know me, but I'm Teku and I'm from Indonesia. And when I was at my lowest point, growing up in Indonesia, I was in college in Indonesia. And I was so broke that I could only afford to eat once a day and sometimes once every two days and I didn't even own a shirt, I had to wear my girlfriend's shirt to school.

He said, somebody loan me your book and I realized two things. He said it was the Indonesian version of being happy. He said, I realized two things. He said, number one, I choose my thoughts. And he said, the other thing I realized that I needed some goals. And he said, I set myself some goals. I said, I want to get my degree. I want to work for an international corporation. I want to have a wife and children. And I want to travel the world.

And he said and tears started to roll down his face he said today i'm the international business manager for a multinational corporation slumberger and and he said i live in a beautiful apartment in malaysia my children go to international schools and he said i drive a bmw he said I travel the world business class. And now he's been headhunted three times since we had that conversation in 2013. He is an absolute, just an extraordinary corporate captain of industry.

So when I meet someone like that, I get inspired. People say to me, Andrew, where do you get your inspiration? I get it from readers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I started out obviously from a different perspective. From a different path. I'm a two-time male breast cancer survivor, and stuff happened along the way. There's a lot of stigma to it, and it's getting better, of course.

But I suggested to my group, malebreastcancerhappens.org, that we go on podcasts and spread the word around the world that men get breast cancer, and it's not being covered anywhere. And I said, we need to not preach to the choir, but we need to talk to people, you know, that don't know about it. And so we did that. We, we were on, you know, Australia, New Zealand. Africa, all over the on a podcast. And somebody one day said to me, why don't you start your own podcast?

And I said, I don't know anything about it. I wouldn't even know what to do. And I said, well, you got a, you know, a decent voice and maybe, you know, maybe you could do your own. So anyway, I bought a microphone, I bought a headset and I, I started out, you know, not really knowing too much about it. And now it's for four years later and we're all over the world. And I do get messages from people that how our podcast has helped them and our Facebook group has helped them.

And so I know what you're talking about when you, because, you know, I could have given up after a couple of episodes and said, you know, enough's enough. But, but when that, when that feedback comes, it really makes a difference and it inspires you to just keep going and keep pushing and, you know, you can do it. Yeah. Well, well done, Ron, for what you're doing. And it's the cream on the cake, isn't it, to hear from people who say, you gave me hope.

Yeah. I mean, you don't know how much that means to me and to you and to everybody out there listening to this podcast. You can make a difference in many people's lives, and you probably are making a difference in people's lives. You just aren't getting the feedback all the time, but people can make a difference. And you have to think of living your life like that. How can I make a positive difference in the world? Anyway.

Yeah. And we realize that many people are helped, but they don't think to let us know. And so for every one person that does tell us something, we're helping others who never think to contact us. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Moving on, why does gratitude matter? The great thing about gratitude is that you can't be angry and grateful at the same time. You can't be resentful and angry at the same time. You can't be resentful and grateful at the same time, I should say.

So if we look at what is the common denominator for happy people and how happy people think, happy people focus on what they have, which is essentially gratitude, and unhappy people focus on what's missing.

I illustrate that with a cartoon in one of my books where there's a guy and he's got a big smile on his face and he's eating a single slice of cake and the caption is happy people focus on what they have and in the second panel, there's a very miserable looking guy and he's got an entire cake minus one slice and the caption is unhappy people focus on what's missing. And we've seen that for those of us that have traveled and we go to poorer countries

than ours and we see people with so little and yet they are so joyful. Yeah, I know that. That teaches us. I would like to encourage you to embark on a transformative journey through the number one Amazon bestseller, our podcast guest and supporter, Gina Economopoulos, has authored titled, Shake the Dust Off Your Feet and Walk, which is a stirring memoir tracing Gina's path from despair to redemption.

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Details will be listed in the podcast notes. Number one, that it's not, about what we have, but it's about what we focus on. And it also underlines the fact that we find what we look for. So as we begin to say, I'm a gratitude finder, I'm a good finder, I look for things for which I can be grateful. Then we find more and more of those things and they don't need to be big things.

So one of the things that I've noticed about the happiest people is they're not even necessarily grateful for big things. They're not grateful for even the big house or the swimming pool or the new car. Sometimes they're grateful for a conversation or a phone call or to see a flower when they're walking the dog. And as we develop the habit of looking for little things and being grateful for smaller things, so we are beginning to think like the happiest people think.

Yes, makes a lot of sense. Kind of leads into my next question, but you might have answered it. What did you find to be the biggest difference between happy and unhappy people? Yeah, it's pretty much that. It is the defining difference that happy people, it's the questions that we ask ourselves. And even in the middle of a disaster or when things happen that we didn't want or that don't go our way, happy people have the habit of saying, what's one good thing about this?

You're driving to work and you get stuck in traffic. And maybe 80% of people will be angry or disappointed But there's that 20% that can say Well, what's one good thing about being stuck in traffic? Well, A, I'm not walking B, I can listen to Ron's podcast So that's got to be good There you go, Yeah, and so negative thoughts are like rats, and you get one rat, and before you know it, you get surrounded by them. You get one negative thought, and before you know it, you're surrounded by them.

It's like we get on a frequency where we just keep on getting to the next negative thought. I hate being stuck in traffic. This always happens to me. This is the last thing that should be happening today. And I've got to cook dinner and people don't appreciate me. My mother always told me I was making a mistake marrying this guy. Now I've got a headache. Maybe it's a tumor. It's just like, that's how life goes. It's a snowball effect. Yeah.

But the minute we start to say, hey, what is one thing about this I can be grateful for? we stop the invasion of the rats or the negative thoughts and the day starts to get better. Yeah. I always go back to that old saying, the people who say, why is this happening to me need to start saying, why is this happening for me? And if you take that approach, it just turns everything around. It really does. How can someone, here's a good one for you. How can someone enjoy a job they don't even like?

Well, the first thing we can do is imagine that we got to work tomorrow and the boss said, go home. We don't need you anymore. You're finished. When we start to say, well, how would I feel if I didn't have this job? Suddenly we start to say, well, you know, I would miss all my colleagues. I'd miss the social life. I'd miss the feeling that I'm contributing and that I'm growing and learning some skills. All of that gone.

So the first thing we need to do is say, how happy would I be if I didn't have it? The next thing is to realize that the way that we enjoy any activity the most is by giving our best. And we don't do our best to please our boss. We don't do our best to, when we're in school, we don't do our best to please our teachers. We do our best because it's the only way to be happy. So, number one, we think, what if I didn't have this job? Number two is we say, I will give my best for as long as I am here.

This may not be the ideal job. It may not be the job that I dreamed about. But even if I'm going to quit at 4.30 today, I will do my best until 4.30. That helps. The next thing to realize is that as we continue to put our best effort into whatever job we have, We continue to develop our skills. We continue to be, we're out there being seen by people. And someone may come along and headhunt us, in which case that's progress.

Or we may get the confidence to begin to do the thing that we really want to do. And the other point that I would make, Ron, is that there was a professor in the University of Kansas Shane Lopez, no longer with us, but his particular interest was, what is it about people who love their jobs? Do you just find the perfect job or is it about following your bliss? There's lots of talk these days about follow your passion, follow your bliss.

So what he did was he found or interviewed 8,500 employees in a variety of companies and he asked them, do you love your job? And it turned out that about 1,100 of those or 13% said, I love my job. And then he interviewed each one of those and he said, how do you find a perfect job? And here's the thing. Almost without exception, they said, you don't find the perfect job.

You find a good job and you put your heart and soul into it and you nurture people and you're kind to people and you surprise people and you build a culture and a community. And he said, one day you discover that a good job became wonderful. Wow, that's great. It's a lot of mindset, isn't it? A lot of mindset. Yeah, and we've all had that experience. We get picked up by an Uber driver, and one is delightful and one is grumpy, and they're doing exactly the same job. Exactly.

And then you say, why? Yeah. You say, why? Why do you feel like this about your job? And they usually give you the same answer. One says, well, I'm grumpy because I'm dealing with people all day, And the other guy says, I'm happy because I'm dealing with people all day. Yeah, yeah. This question is for you personally. What does being happy mean for you? And those things you will mention, do you have them in your life?

You know, the first thing is waking up in the morning and saying to myself, I'm happy to be me. We perhaps grow up and now with social media, the tendency is we look at what other people do and what other people have and we might drift into that, well, other people seem to have a better life than I do. So for me, I aim to and I want to wake up and say I'm happy with who I am and where I am. It's important for me to feel that I'm making a contribution to make the world a better place.

And I seek to do that by the books I write and by the presentations that I give. But making a contribution for all of us is critical. And I also want to have people in my life who I love and who love me. And we all need at least one of those people. So being happy with who you are, feeling that you're making a contribution and being loved and loving at least one person is a pretty good start.

I would say so, for sure. How do you respond to people who are not blessed with opportunities, the loved ones about happiness? Sorry, how do I react to people who are not blessed with... How do you respond to people who are not blessed with opportunities, that feel that you don't have any opportunities? Yeah. We need to... Start wherever we can. There's always, if we're talking about in terms of friendship and relationships.

Whoever is in your immediate sphere, orbit, be kind, be nice to them, and relationships will flower. Do whatever you can with what is under your nose. Too often we say, well, and if we're talking about the job we're in, we say, well, if I had Ron's job, I'd really put in an effort, but I've got my stupid job, so I'd just goof off. Yeah. And the fact is, you embrace whatever is under your nose and you do your best.

And sometime, probably when you least expect it, you'll see another opportunity or someone will say, I like what you do and I want you to work with me or for me. One thing will lead to another. And it's like that wherever. You might be a folk singer and you're singing in a club to three people and you say, if I had a thousand people listening to me, then I'd really put on a performance, but I've just got these three drunks, so why bother?

No, you do a show for those three people and next week you'll have five and next month you might have 15 or 20 and you'll get to the thousand, but you start with what you have. Good advice, good advice. What, in your opinion, do we learn from failure? Well, first thing about failure is it's not failure that crushes us. It's what hurts most is never having tried.

So if we are out there giving our best effort and failing, we're probably going to be happier than the guys that aren't even giving it a shot. And we need to appreciate just how much successful people fail, how much a winning golfer, how often a winning golfer, doesn't win the golf tournament, how often somebody who's out there trying to sell insurance gets rejected. I mean, it's all about just stepping back out there and doing it one more time.

My own story was the first book I wrote was a children's book and I'd heard that it can be tough to get published so I thought here's a strategy I will I will get 60 copies of my manuscript and I will get a list of the top 60 publishers in the world who publish in English and I will send them all at once copies of my manuscript of my first book. I thought, that's got to work. I mean, at least five are going to like it or maybe three and then I'll choose who I want to work with.

So within a couple of weeks, I started to get these rejection slips in the mail, and soon I had 10 and 25 and 37 and 49 and 56 and 57 and 59 rejections and 60 and 61. I only set out 60 manuscripts. One publisher wrote to me twice and said, forget it.

And so that led to my second book which was being happy but that was rejected by 17 publishers before publisher number 18 well they sold 3 million copies so it took me let's see 61 and 17 78 rejections I think before I had a book published but it's not unusual and for our listeners who may be thinking. Ryan Haidt is a modern-day Renaissance man, seamlessly integrating Eastern and Western philosophies to empower individuals to overcome mental barriers and achieve peak performance.

He has diverse expertise as a Hollywood stuntman featured in television shows and films such as Superman, Haunted Mansion, The Iron Claw, Stranger Things, and The Cleaning Lady, to name just a few. And he is also a performance psychologist, author, and certified mental performance consultant, making him a sought-after authority in unlocking human potential.

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Well, how many times might I get rejected by a publisher? Well, you might only need to get rejected by 30 or 50 publishers. For me, I look back and think, what if I'd never persevered and how would my life look if I'd given up? Yeah. And you can't give up. You got to keep getting back up and trying. And so here's the key, Ron. You've got to enjoy the process. If you are just out there doggedly saying, I hate this, but I'm going to keep doing it.

Nothing is ever going to happen because the whole energy that surrounds you people don't even want to be around you they don't even want to talk to you yeah so it's not about just keeping on keeping on but being miserable you've got to find ways to enjoy the process and find ways to improve but celebrate the process. And usually, when you least expect it, when you least expect it.

Someone will come along and publish your book or join you in your project or employ you, whatever it is that you're trying to make happen. So make it a pleasurable challenge. absolutely and continue to be refining your craft you you most things don't work out as well as we'd hoped we build a website hoping people will come or we create a youtube video hoping that it will go viral or we write an ad or we send a manuscript to a publisher or we go on a first date.

And most things aren't going to be as wonderful and amazing as we hoped. But if we can just enjoy the process, regardless of the results, and we get up tomorrow, and again we do our best, then one day, and it's usually when we least expect it, something happens that is even better than we imagined. Yeah, yeah.

Now, your latest book, of course, is Bouncing Back. What was the spark that made you write it? Can you please tell us a little bit about it, and what do you hope the reader takes away from it? Yeah. I tell the story of my stepson, Michael, who had a horrific car accident when he was 18. And the doctors wanted to switch off the life support.

And my wife, Julie, fought the doctors and made them actually operate and remove a piece of his skull to allow his brain to expand because his brain was swelling and it was going to kill him. And then she begged with him to keep him on life support for three days. And when we unplugged the machine after the three days and the doctors had been basically harassing Julie to sign forms so that they could take his organs, because they said he'll help a lot of people.

When they unplugged the life support, Michael breathed by himself And Michael survived He was severely brain injured He couldn't speak, he couldn't walk, he couldn't really eat And so began a 25-year journey of rehabilitation for Michael, And he has inspired us And Michael's mother has inspired me.

Michael now lives in his own apartment Two minutes away from where Julie and I live, And we've learned so much about Bouncing back with Michael I've learned so much about Julie's attitude People will say to Julie How do you deal with having a severely disabled son? And Julie will say I still have him And he's a beautiful soul And he's kind And he's generous and he's caring. In other words, she focuses on what she has. And I talked a little bit about acceptance earlier.

Acceptance is so critical to dealing with major challenges like that. And also gratitude, being happy with what you have. So I saw that there was the possibility to write a book that embraced some of the things that Julie and I had learned in this journey with having a severely disabled son. I also believe, Ron, that we're all bouncing back from something. We're bouncing back from eating too much or spending too much or bouncing back from a relationship that started out well.

Or we're bouncing back from having lost someone that we cherished. So my thought was, if I could write a simple book about resilience, that draws inspiration from people like Michael and many other people who I know. And there are really probably three things that I might highlight here that resilient people do. Number one is, Whatever happens that they don't like and didn't want, first thing, they accept it. They say, I wouldn't have chosen this, but this is where I am.

So let's say that you think you're going to get a promotion and you don't, or somebody drives into your brand new car and smashes it, or your girlfriend dumps you. There's a misconception, a myth perhaps, that says, well, if you don't accept what you don't like, you're not stuck with it. But the reverse is true. The minute you accept it, you say, I didn't ask for this, but this is what I've got. That's when you can begin to move on.

And that's, so acceptance is power. And that is what resilient people understand. The other thing that we learn to do in dealing with Michael and his injuries and wondering if he'd ever be able to do anything again is we just dealt with life one day at a time, one day after another. Let's not get drawn into how is it going to look six months from now or we've got today, we've got to live life the best way we can. And the third thing that I would highlight that resilient people do is they

imagine a better life. They say, well, this is where I am now, but where am I heading? Well, our life only gets better when we have a picture for our life getting better. More money in the bank begins as an idea, as a picture in our imagination. Being able to speak in front of a group begins as an idea. A happy relationship, a loving relationship begins as an idea in our mind. And so if we're going through tough times,

we really need to have a picture of where we're headed. So those three things, being acceptance, living one day at a time, and imagining where we're headed, help us get through tough times. Right. Makes resilient people. You know, we hear a lot about forgiveness.

Everybody has different ideas about it. What's your thoughts about forgiveness? Firstly, let's admit it's not easy very often, but we don't forgive people for their benefit. Let's say you're my boss and you give me the sack. And I say, well, that's it, Ron. I'm never going to forgive you as long as I live. So who's suffering? Not you. You're probably at the movies and I'm outpacing the floor. Yeah, right. Yeah, saying that bastard.

So, the idea, where do we get the idea that if we don't forgive people, they suffer? So, I forgive you for my benefit. So, what I would say about forgiveness is once we have that kind of clarity, it makes it easier. The next thing is that we say, well, even if it's tough to forgive a big thing like that, maybe I can start letting go of little things.

So we perhaps forgive people who begin with forgiving people who cut you off on the freeway start small maybe he's in a hurry and i don't need to get angry with people who cut me off on the freeway or someone who seems a bit rude at mcdonald's right maybe you know maybe they're going through some kind of personal tragedy so yeah those two thoughts okay for those out there listening, is there a formula for happiness? And what would you say are three tips to be happier?

I would say, number one is, and we spoke about this a little bit earlier, we make a decision. We say, from today, I'm going to be happier. You see, we might argue, we might say, well, is happiness really a decision? Have you ever seen a two-year-old playing around on the furniture in the lounge room and he falls on his head? And the first thing he does is he looks around. He looks around to see who's watching and depending on the audience, he makes up his mind, am I going to laugh or cry?

And we think that's really cute. But the fact is, we continue to live like that for the rest of our lives. Things happen, someone's rude to us, depending on who they are or what our circumstances answers are, we decide whether I'm going to be upset or not. If we just fell in love yesterday, I mean, we're much more tolerant. So happiness, just like with that toddler, is very much a decision we make.

Another thing we can do is we can be mindful of our language and what we talk We all know that what we think about, we talk about. If you think about food, you talk about food. But the reverse is also true. What you talk about, you think about. So the more that you complain, the more that you will be thinking about things that make you unhappy. So we want to be happier, we stop complaining. The other thing is that miserable people seem to be, for the most part, very rigid.

They demand that life should be a certain way and people should behave a certain way, and perhaps I should say angry more than miserable. Angry people say, well, my plane should arrive on time, or people should be more polite, or people should think like me. But the fact is, they don't. And if we observe people who seem to just go through life quite happily, they're much more flexible. So happy people have preferences. They don't demand that life or people should be a certain way.

They may well say, well, I prefer that my flight arrives on time, but if it's late and if it arrives safely, I'm happy with that, or I prefer that people are kind, or I prefer that people are thoughtful, but some people aren't, and I can deal with that. So in being happy, we say, I'm going to live my life having preferences rather than making absolute demands. That's a great thought process you're using there.

Now, we do not have enough time to delve into all the topics you write about to help us live a happy life, such as acceptance, bad luck, replacing negative thoughts, setting goals, and how to get better at anything.

So I encourage everyone to buy the book, read it. You will not be disappointed. Andrew, what new projects are you working on right now? I wrote a book for teenagers that was published in 2001. And a lot has happened in the world and in the lives of teenagers in the last 24 years. That's for sure. So, yeah, so I'm kind of old to be doing it, but I'm delving into the challenges and the lives of teenagers and updating that book.

So there's lots of information about dealing with social media and bullying and sexting and all of that sort of stuff, online issues. Yeah. Writing an updated version of being a happy teen because there's a big need for that. So that book will be published. I'm thinking maybe three or four months away. I've done the cover. I've done most of the rewrite. I'm just doing some of the cartoons. So as with my other books, it will be available on Amazon.

And when I can make the time, it'll be an Audible book as well. Oh, excellent. That's the big project at the moment, yes. Andrew, how can people contact you if they want to contact you? Well, firstly, I have a website, andrewmatthews.com. Okay. And if you would like to receive a newsletter every two weeks, and my newsletters are very brief. They consist of about four sentences plus a cartoon.

Yeah. So if you would like an uplifting little message in your mailbox every two weeks, that's at andrewmatthews.com. And the pop-up sign-up box, that'll be the first thing you see. I'm on YouTube, so you'll see videos on YouTube, on Facebook, on TikTok. I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram. And all of my books are on Amazon, in e-book, and also in hard copy. And if you like audible, say that again, audible books with an Australian accent, then follow your heart and bouncing back.

I've done those books in Audible Okay, we're going to put that all in the podcast notes I want to thank you Andrew for being on the podcast And sharing all this wonderful work you have done Over the years on this subject And the energy and spirit You have spent to make other people's lives better I really appreciate you coming on And I hope we can have you again When you have more books coming out Would love to Ron Thanks so much. Thank you.

Comments and suggestions for the podcast, you can email me at itsarapwithrap at gmail.com. Our website is itsarapwithrap.com. Our Facebook group, we have about 2,000 members in there. It is a private group. So if you want to join, you'll have to email me. I'll let you in. It'sarapwithrap. Instagram, it'sarapwithrap.com. We're on X, formerly known as Twitter, at rapper, W-R-A-P-P-E-R-1-3-0. Our YouTube channel has all the podcast episodes. It's a wrap with Wrap the Podcast Uncut.

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