What comes to mind when you think of happiness? What level do you experience right now? Does it pervade your life? How deep does it go? Is it easily disturbed? What makes you unhappy? Or where d you limit its presence in your life? No matter how self-aware you are, ironically increasing levels of happiness can feel like a threat to the security of familiarity, perceived control, how much you are willing to receive,, and old ways of growing, struggling and making decisions.

If we’re honest, happiness scares us. Not the basic happiness that rolls off the tongue without thinking, but the happiness we intentionally engage that keeps growing, going deeper and higher beyond our imagination with intentional and evolutionary choices, and quantum internal transformation. We can see ourselves in the life we desire to create, yet something keeps us in the realm of fantasy until we create the internal bridges to letting it get “that good.”

When we consistently say “yes” to our own thriving, it changes the criteria we live and decide our life by. Just imagine how it would change your relationships with your employees, your kids, with money, the new friends you desire, your health, and your business, if you were dedicated to your own thriving—regardless of the level of happiness you experience now. Are you willing to open yourself to more? This is your evolution.

No matter how self-aware we become, we can find ourselves reluctant to experience more happiness. It feels further to “fall,” as my clients have put it. We wonder if it can really be this good, or if we deserve it as we explore our next potential. We watch for the catch, wonder what we must release of ourselves this time, look for the control button, and wonder if we can trust ourselves with that much goodness. Are you smiling with familiarity at this point?

It is easy to say, “you must choose to be happy.” And though it’s basically true, the choice is more than a positive outlook. It will change your life deeply and completely—if you really mean it. Deep and authentic happiness is a coherence we cultivate between our thought, feeling and actions—past, present and future–transforming energetic patterns that hold us in disconnection to patterns that connect us with ourselves and the force of Life.

Most of us have heard and internalized ideas like not getting too excited because we might be disappointed, or being careful not to stick our necks out, get our hopes up, expect “too much”; or fear of being undercut somehow as if happiness sets us up for a great fall, or to maintain a somberness to prevent ourselves from relearning painful lessons from our personal histories.

Authentic happiness, however, is grounding. It is trusting ourselves with the power of our own lives. It is having your feet rooted and planted firmly on the earth with heaven in every cell. It is claiming your full power as a conscious human being to intend, create and be in command of your life while living in the detachment that all is well.

Happiness is an essential quality for unfolding your destiny. To cultivate it is to walk yourself out of old identities and ways of being and into new identities, higher potentials and ways of being yourself that are likely to be out of your current imagination. If you are stuck, on a plateau, or in a swirl of turmoil that has you mystified, you are pressing up against an old identity. Our visions set potentials, possibilities and new probabilities in motion and they are always—always—more than we could imagine them to be.

Lastly, happiness is unpredictable, part of living in your soul potential. From “this” side of happiness or a sticking point in life, the outcome of your transformation looks like it will go one way—often a black or white idea. But that is looking through the filter of your current identity, your current perspective, and the choices you are currently making that will give you more of what you have.

Your lenses will continue to clear and change as you dare to energetically dissolve the filters back into the quantum field opening to your next potential and version of yourself. This kind of happiness fills your choices with a new kind of wisdom, plugging your security into the unseen and taking you beyond the predictable path of your current choices. It is now safe to be happy-er.