Your GPS to Happiness: How to Navigate from Where You Are to Fulfillment, Prosperity, and the Life of Your Dreams: How to Navigate from where You Are to Fulfillment, Prosperity, and the Life of Your Dreams

By Marina Shakour Haber

An enlightening GPS guidance to happiness, fulfillment, and success offering practical tools and deep insights on how to cultivate a greater sense of self to overcome fear and insecurity and arrive at abundance, confidence, and empowering relationships with yourself and others. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: DreamWorks Publishing, Inc
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986501130

Book preview

PREFACE

Welcome and congratulations for taking the next step on your path to self-discovery and self-transformation. My goal is to empower you to live your dreams and create the life you deserve.

As there is a lot of information in this book, I invite you to take your time processing it. I know from personal experience that, when I am ready, the right book, the right information, or the right teacher appears at the right time to help me to grow. If this does not feel right to you, then set it aside and come back at a later time. I have had that happen with a number of books that are now my staples, and I couldn’t imagine being without them.

If not everything I’ve written here agrees with you, that is alright as well. Take in what feels right, and let the rest be. Maybe, in time, you will choose to come back and revisit these pages to find information that now is perfect and exactly what you were looking for. If that never happens, that’s okay. You may find someone whose voice and tone are better aligned with you. That’s what it’s all about—finding what works for you so that you become a happier and more fulfilled person. When we do that, we raise our individual consciousness and thus help our collective consciousness to evolve.

There are no musts, shoulds, or have tos. There is no time frame within which to complete this work because it is never done. You will always grow—you never stand still.

If my terminology of God, Source, Creator, or Universe conflicts with yours, I invite you to replace my words with yours. If my views offend you, I apologize in advance. I invite you to be open-minded and allow new information to be processed from your heart-space rather than your analytical, critical mind. This is more about feeling, believing, and being rather than thinking logically or how we have always been thinking.

This book is a guidance system—leading you from where you are to where you want to be. When you set your inner GPS, you have to know your current location before reaching your desired destination. With your GPS on, you can get there with relative ease, avoiding roadblocks and wrong turns that may leave you lost and in despair. Instead, you arrive as programmed.

Your GPS to Happiness guides you through your transformational journey from self-realization to self-acceptance to love of self and others. When your life’s purpose becomes clear, you can set your course and leave uncertainty and doubt behind. Wouldn’t you want to know how to get to your goal faster? Of course you would! Your GPS to Happiness gets you doing the things that will bring you the happiness, success, and the fulfillment you are seeking. The book closes with what living is all about: having the things that truly matter and making a difference in your life and the lives of those around you.

***

When I was 24 years old, I learned how valuable a coach or mentor’s guidance can be! I returned to Tehran in late October 1979 to purchase Persian rugs for resale in Vancouver, Canada, as a way of getting my late father’s assets out of Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Family friends referred me to a young man, Hossein Elmi, who had grown up in the bazaar working in his father’s carpet business. He spoke German, which was a great help as I no longer spoke or wrote Farsi well. More so, I knew nothing about business or rugs, and had become Westernized—meaning, I didn’t behave or dress according to the new, strict religious laws. He gave me material to study, led me through the bazaar, and taught me product and business knowledge.

On November 4 everything changed! Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy and took 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage. We were in the bazaar when mayhem broke out. I heard fighter jets roaring and saw people scrambling to get to safety while the loudspeakers where blasting commands. Hossein knew instantly that I was in real trouble and had to get out. Islamic guards, armed with rifles, were posted everywhere, effectively putting the bazaar on lockdown. He started running with me right behind him through a maze of back alleys, stores, and shortcuts into the safety of his car. Without him, I would have never made it out. He was my GPS when I needed help finding my way!

As a Jack Canfield Success Principles Trainer, I am here to assist you through the maze of complexities and confusion of life. I will help you to release what is holding you back and take the necessary steps to become who you truly are. All the answers are already within you—find out how to access them!

Here’s your opportunity to create happiness. All you have to do is be open to new potential and a new mindset.

PART I

Being Enough: Who You Are

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

—RUMI

Welcome to your new world!

The Statue of Liberty greets weary voyagers who have dared to cross an ocean, driven by despair, poverty, and most importantly, the hope for a better life in the New World. They risked the journey believing that they would be able to pursue happiness (which really stood for the pursuit of wealth). They would pursue life lived in liberty, equality, and having unalienable rights as free people. The dream was one from rags to riches and freed from the external conditions that had held them back in the past in the land they had left behind.

I can only imagine the joy they must have felt seeing Lady Liberty greeting them, lifting her light to show them the way into the harbor and into their new lives. You too are a voyager albeit on an inner journey to your new world. You too are seeking a better life in freedom and harmony—living your dreams and learning how to make them come true.

This first phase of your transformational journey is all about you as being the center of your world. If you want to change your life and how you feel about yourself, you have to start with yourself. You need to know what is in need of changing, how you can accomplish that, and what you will replace it with.

Let’s shine a light into the darkness to help you find the answers you are seeking to create the life you are envisioning.

CHAPTER 1

Let Your Journey Within Begin

You feel good not because the world is right, but your world is right because you feel good.

—HOWARD VERNON

Iwas standing at the podium—all eyes on me, all ears waiting for my next word—and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. My mind was a blank. I couldn’t see anyone clearly. It was all a blur. I felt my heart racing and my head pounding as I was struggling to come up with the next sentence, a word, anything other than ahhhh that would get me back on track, but it wouldn’t come. The harder I tried to remember the more panic I created, and the more stuck I got.

I started to apologize, I’m so sorry, I had it all perfectly memorized; I knew it by heart and now I can’t remember a thing. What seemed an eternity to me—I’m sure it must have seemed even longer for my audience feeling uncomfortable and awkward seeing me squirm in my agony and self-flagellation—was probably only a mere minute. For a timed speech of only 5 to 7 minutes, that is forever! Worse yet, I couldn’t use the speech I had memorized, should it ever come back, that is, so I had to come up with an abridged, altered version on the spot. Nightmare scenario—the kind that wakes you up soaked in sweat and panting in fear!

Then I heard my mentor Ed Lamont’s calming voice—first a bit stern when he told me that everybody knew how sorry I was, and then soothingly telling me to breathe and to let go. Breathe deep. Speak from your heart. Go on. You can do this. You got this. And I did get through it albeit trembling from head to toe. I had my shaky voice syndrome on full display for all to hear. I had finally crumbled underneath my perfect facade. Thank goodness for that!

That was my breakthrough moment. It was in October 2018. To make matters worse, I had been the president of my Toastmasters’ Club. One expects a president to have a certain level of proficiency. Clearly a misconception that was shattered not only by me. Pictures of an old television commercial popped up in my mind in which the president of the bald men’s club was also a client. I tried to make light of it but inside of me I felt broken. I had finally cracked open the shell I had placed myself in—it was about time for me to become authentically and unapologetically me.

I had been holding on to being perfect. I believed that when I was standing before an audience that I had to be perfect, saying just the right words that I had written with great attention to detail—brilliant words and sentence structure—that I had memorized and practiced before. But here’s the thing—that was automation perfection!

The problem with automated perfection was that there was no spontaneity, no connection to the audience or to my heart—I didn’t feel what I was saying. I didn’t connect with myself because I was afraid that I was not enough just being me. I made excuses like language barriers (a lie by now and I knew it), my accent, and my rolling Rs. The truth was that I was not feeling good about myself, not confident, and was worried what others would think if they saw the real me. Thus, perfection became my security blanket.

I am not alone holding on to such destructive beliefs. Whether you are a commoner or of royalty, no matter what your childhood experiences were like, you created the belief that you are simply not mustering up to your concept of perfection.

Just think of Princess Diana. On July 29, 1981, a modern-day fairytale came true. All the young girls and women around the world, including me, could believe that their dreams of marrying a prince—the prince of their fantasies—could come true.

The whole world celebrated the perfect romance and union of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, who would become the Princess of Wales. I remember watching from Vancouver when they exchanged their vows, which was slightly flawed as Diana accidentally reversed the order of Charles’s middle names. But her mistake didn’t matter—it was such an elaborate wedding with pomp and ceremony befitting the occasion. She looked so radiant in her beautiful gown, so glorious and so very innocent and young—she was magnificent. He, on the other hand, seemed distant, aloof, and reserved. Still, I believed that they would live happily ever after although Charles did not kiss the bride at the altar (what groom forgets to kiss his bride?). They did kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, but it seemed rather constrained.

The event was televised and watched by 750 million viewers in 74 countries. As the day was declared a national holiday in the United Kingdom, some 600,000 people lined the streets of the wedding procession through the heart of London from Clarence House, where Diana spent the night with the Queen Mother, to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a globally watched spectacle.

But there were soon signs that this happy union wasn’t quite as perfect as it seemed to be. Many years later, Diana would reveal in a television interview that she was rather miserable from even before the wedding. She had believed that her life would get better after marrying the prince, not worse. She had suffered throughout her childhood and youth from her parents’ unhappy marriage. Her life was filled with trauma and heartbreak and sadly that part only got worse.

She learned of Charles’s love for, and affair with, Camilla Parker Bowles, which made her feel worse yet. She developed bulimia shortly after they began making their wedding plans, which continued for years to come. When Diana was pregnant with her first son, William, she felt so bad about herself that she threw herself down the stairs.

Few will ever forget how people and the media took to Diana. She was the image of the fairytale—the person you wanted to be, the way you wanted to live, and the prince you wanted to be married to. But she also had this special quality of pulling people toward her—she radiated wholeness, beauty, and purity while she was so relatable. She was real. In an interview in 2004, she said that The public . . . they wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them, and everything will turn into gold and all their worries would be forgotten. Little did they realise that the individual was crucifying herself inside because she didn’t think she was good enough.

Although Diana became a princess upon her wedding—and the third highest in rank female after Queen Elizabeth and The Queen Mother—she was not a princess at heart. She had the title, but she did not feel that she was royal.

Feeling that you are not enough is a foundation of our physical experience. Regardless of who you are or to whom you were born.

Like a friend of mine, you can become a Harvard educated attorney yet still feel inadequate. She started comparing herself to her peers during an event and concluded that she fell short in her achievements. She felt like an imposter, a fraud, a failure, and was so overcome by this debilitating feeling that she had to flee. But it was all only in her mind!

No titles or riches can change your self-image. No achievement, fame, or fortune can fix what is broken inside. It’s the same as if you were painting the exterior walls of your house and expected that your bedroom would magically also get a fresh coat of paint. Imposter syndrome is a state of mind.

You can become wealthy, you can have wealth, but if you are not feeling wealthy and abundant within, thus being actually wealthy, you will forever seek wealth. There is a void in you that cannot be filled with having or doing. It is of being. Wealth is, at its root, a state of being, not having.

Equally, you can experience happiness but, if you are not truly happy within, it is but a temporary fleeting spark that will blow out quickly. Like a candle in the wind. Happiness is a state of being, not having.

Living is a state of being, not having.

We’ve got it backward. We believe in have, do, and be. We think that when we have the stuff that dreams are made of—like fairytale romances and weddings, money, great careers, and lots of possessions—that we should continue working to have more and more things and only while we are attaining those things will we be happy. In other words, happiness is an outcome not an underlying condition. At some point, though, we realize that we’re not happy, that we can never be happy following this path because there’s always more to be had—more to be working toward amassing. You can’t fill a void within from without. You can’t fill the feeling of not being enough at your heart space with material things. It’s a mismatch. Things of the spirit must be filled with spiritual, positive values. They are the root and foundation upon which you build the constructs of your reality.

You have to be it. You have to be happy to become happy. You have to be it for no particular reason and for all reasons. Being is the only state you can build on. Being is from your heart space whereas having is from your head space. Being is eternal, lasting, and divine whereas having is temporary, fleeting, and physical. Being is your soul; having is your ego.

As William Shakespeare put it, To be, or not to be, that is the question. Yet we believe in, To have, or not to have, and that is the problem.

To get to a state of being, you have to discover the person you truly are, the person you always were—not the person others wanted you to be, not the person you molded to fit in to other people’s agendas or perspectives.

The first step on the journey to who you are is to become aware of who you have become. Whose dreams are you pursuing? Whose life are you living? You have to become aware of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your perceptions.

Begin by understanding who you are and who you are not: You are not what other people perceive you to be—that is part of their reality and should not be how you define yourself.

You may have bought into believing what others have said to and about you, but that’s not you. You may have come to believe their criticisms, judgments, and putdowns. Maybe you accepted what they believe to be best for you. You follow the blueprint they created for you. You live their dreams and aspirations for you but you’re not feeling it. You’re deceiving yourself to please them. You’re living in denial. You’re living a lie, yet you try and try to make it work but it doesn’t. It can’t ever. Failure, mental struggles, and feelings of unworthiness and insecurities follow.

The harder you try, the more you repel what you’re seeking and the worse you feel for it. You are trying to become someone else. Someone who is not aligned with the real you at your heart level. Consequently, you feel bad about yourself. You feel inadequate, you struggle, and the evidence of misery and failure gives more impetus on how incomplete and deficient you are.

Parents often project their wishes, dreams, and desires onto their children. Friends, teachers, and mentors naturally voice their perceptions of who you are in their eyes. You are influenced consciously through the words you hear about you and to you. From the time you move about as an infant, you hear don’t touch, don’t do that, that’s bad, why do you always have to do that? As you get older, you hear more on the lines of, you can’t do that, you’re not good enough, don’t be ridiculous to think that you can achieve that, and so on.

Half of what we believe in is formed in our earliest childhood when we are still utterly vulnerable to outside influences and suggestions. Beliefs such as not good enough and not being lovable are rooted in these early experiences.

When I was about 5 years old, I wanted more shoes. I owned already six pairs while my older brother had only one pair, which he had outgrown. My mother showed me why I wouldn’t be getting more shoes: she put me on the edge of her bed and put all my shoes in a semicircle around me. I saw the evidence. It was undeniable that I had enough shoes, and yet I felt not good enough. I was so deeply hurt by the injustice of it all. Of course, I was disappointed. It felt like I wasn’t loved—mom obviously loved my brother more. What happened was that I formed a belief, a false belief, that I wasn’t as good as my brother—I wasn’t good enough and there it was. Not good enough!

This ridiculously insignificant childhood memory shouldn’t have caused any beliefs of inadequacy or not being loved, and that’s why I chose it. It had more to do with my misinterpretation of the events and my limited sight that made me believe in limitations. I believed that I was not good enough when actually I did not appreciate enough what I already had. As my perception was limited, and my mind was rigidly focusing on my needs, I misinterpreted my mother’s justified actions. My conclusion limited me for a long time in pursuing the things I wanted. I chose this example because it shows that what happens to us in childhood does not necessarily have to be traumatic to create false beliefs. We can create them ourselves from seemingly inconsequential events.

It is our human nature to always want more. If we didn’t want more, we would stop seeking new experiences. We would stop looking for better ways or to improve the human condition. More also means new. There have to be more new experiences to learn and grow from. If that were to end, we would no longer exist. However, when your sight is limited, limitations follow suit. Thus, you must raise your awareness of who you are to be able to perceive the limitless possibilities awaiting you.

You may not always get what you want and believe you need, but you will often get what is best for your growth. However, and I will address this in a later chapter, you will always get what you focus on. What is your dominant belief? If you believe that you’re not good enough, you will not be good enough in anything you do. It is the undercurrent that pulls you down no matter how hard you try to fight it. Actually, the harder you try, the worse it gets. It’s like the swimmer who is caught in a rip tide. The more he fights the waves, the harder the struggle and the faster he gets pulled down. But the swimmer who swims with the current fares better—no struggle but still a lot of exertion. Best fares the swimmer who lets go and relaxes into the waves, only concerned with staying on top. She will be carried to the shore and to safety.

There is limitless abundance but it is our belief in scarcity that creates limitations and poverty of mind. Where does this not enough belief originate?

It goes back to the time of creation when we separated from God or Source (which happened in consciousness only because we are and always have been One). We became individualized aspects of the Divine. It was and still is our desire to explore potential and experience all possibilities thus creating higher consciousness for all. The idea was to experience and observe not from within the Whole but from outside, nuanced with our unique personalities and singular perspectives. Our varied observations would be reported back so that all would benefit therefrom. Over time, however, our energies shifted and became more physical, thus denser, and heavier, which distanced us farther from God energy. It’s like AM and FM channels—they operate on different frequencies. The illusion of being separate from God intensified and that is the lack and the void we feel. The separation from Source is our poverty, our pain, and our desire to fix. But we cannot fill a spiritual longing with material goods, possessions, or power. They are of two different frequencies!

The Bible depicts this moment as man’s expulsion and fall from paradise. We instantly became aware of being naked and being without shelter or food security. What we experienced was abandonment, loss of safety, and above all of Love—Divine Love. We felt lost and alone, left to our own devices to survive in a fearful, new environment. The illusion of separation and isolation created the belief of not being or having enough. This disconnect and separation caused our feelings of incompleteness as well as eternal lack and longing for love.

When you think about it, acts of evil are born out of a feeling of lack and scarcity, out of not having enough, which is why we take from others—be it through theft, power plays or intrigues, murders, or wars. When people don’t feel loved or lovable, they do anything to regain those feelings through force or foul play. When they don’t feel secure or safe, they build borders, fences, and thick walls to keep intruders at bay. This leads to feeling defensive of possessions and resources and then people are willing to do anything, including harming others, to protect what is theirs and to maintain their status quo.

When we believe that we are not enough and that we don’t have enough, we start thinking that we must do something to feel better and fill the void we feel. Naturally, that leads to attempts to take from others whom we perceive to have more than we have. When we feel we don’t have enough money—even if we are wealthy beyond imagination—we continue to amass wealth even if it means taking from the less fortunate. It’s natural because it’s part of our survival instinct—we have to protect ourselves from scarcity at all costs.

The greatest and most fundamental lack is that of love. When we feel that we aren’t loved, we start believing that it’s because we are not lovable. In other words, that we are not good enough. What we really feel is that we don’t love ourselves and, on a deeper level, we feel the absence of divine love. This is not only painful but also destructive. We hurt ourselves with our low opinions of self. We undermine our happiness and success. We harm others because when we can’t love or respect ourselves, we can’t do so for others either. When we don’t have enough love for ourselves, we can’t love others either. We can’t give away what we don’t have. Instead, we take, and take some more, from others—without ever being satisfied. A terrible, never-ending cycle of lack creates more lack in return. It holds us captive and preoccupies us all day long.

Our experience of not being enough manifests on multiple levels, such as not being smart, educated, beautiful, talented, tall, or thin enough. We blame our situation on our perceived shortcomings rather than our actions. We put ourselves into victimhood and feel vengeful toward those who seemingly do have it all. Not feeling good taints our perspective as well as perception of others and poisons us and the energy we emit alike.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, some people’s fear of not having enough toilet paper and paper towels created a panic and was ensued by a run on and, consequently, a depletion of paper goods. People loaded up and started hoarding toilet paper and the like! They had physical altercations in supermarkets over rolls of paper—just unimaginable a few months earlier. Fear-based beliefs create shortage, cause more fear, and bring out our lowest instincts, which lead to seeing others as enemies.

Fear works on our lowest urges and deepest, darkest emotions. It reduces us to beings of lower consciousness who throw away morality, ethics, and, most importantly, respect and love for others. Fear imprisons us and brings out the worst in us. When we live in fear, we do anything to survive. Fear is the absence of love, the opposite of love. Where there is insufficient love, fear takes over. Where there is insufficient trust, faith, and hope, fear takes over. Where there is doubt, worry, and anxiety, fear rules. Where there is the belief of not enough, fear triumphs.

What we need to overcome fear is love. What we need to change our false belief of not enough is love. And the first step in creating a new, love-based mindset starts with loving and respecting ourselves.

What we seek is to connect with that love within. What we need is a deeper connection to our higher self, which is pure love.

It’s simple: if you don’t love yourself, you perceive yourself as unworthy, as not lovable, and just not good enough.

If you don’t love yourself, you cannot fully love another either.

You cannot give away what you don’t have.

Therefore, let us start working on learning to love yourself.

CHAPTER 2

Love Is and You Are—Know Thyself

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.

– BRENÉ BROWN

Ican’t even begin to count how many times I have asked myself this one question: Who am I?

It is one of the most difficult questions to answer. It requires self-inspection, self-analysis, and self-assessment. There was a time when looking at myself in the mirror was uncomfortable—I didn’t like what