Actually, I’m sure it started even before I started reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. This year started out with me deep in my mid-life crisis. What did I want to do with my life? What matters to me? What is my life about? Is this really the life I’ve chosen?
As the year has gone by, I’ve made a few minor changes via “Incremental steps”; thanks to my wonderful neighbor for the idea, motivation and support. I can feel I now have more energy to move forward instead of continuing to simply spin my wheels. Whether it was getting glasses, eating blueberries, cutting out carbs, or maybe something out of my control such as lengthening days or Chloe maturing and being less of a drain on my patience and energy, I have more energy than I did a few moths ago.
But with my happiness project, I want to focus my incremental steps on certain concentrated topics. I’ve made up a tentative list of sixteen areas for improvement and/or change. I suspect that as I go along, some of these topics will change, and I’m not going to publish the list ahead of time. The topics include: Diet, Exercise, Health, Kids, Possessions, Friends, and more.
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my commandments so far:
1. Be authentic.
2. No excuses.
3. Be in the moment.
Hi, Lalah! I’m so pleased to connect w/ you. I’m a PCI trained coach in CA and just discovered your wonderful blog. Bravo! I just read about your new strategy of including “a hard thing” for discussion w/your son. Such a great idea on so many levels….but wanted to comment on your idea that this would hep your son realize you weren’t painting the picture that he needed to be “happy” all the time (again a very good point.) But it just triggered some thoughts I’ve been having about “happiness” after reading Seligman’s new book “Flourish” where he breaks down “happiness” into 5 different components–this is something I wish I had when I was raising my children, especially my oldest daughter who’s idea of what made her “happy” and my idea about what would make her “happy” were very different (sigh!). In any case, according to Seligman’s latest insights, dealing w/ something “hard” may, in fact, bring happiness into our life if it’s seen as “engagement” or “meaning”. His book may be of interest to you?? Looking forward to your future blogs!