Sunday, 21 March 2010

• My Happiness Project

  

  On January 1st of this year, I committed myself to a year of self care  and learning how to be happy. I certainly didn’t know at the time that my husband would announce less than two months later that he was having an affair and wouldn’t consider the possibility of salvaging our marriage. Needless to say, learning how to be happy is an even higher priority now.
  

  Part of what helped me realize that I wanted to focus on taking care of myself was being in a Personal Renewal Group (PRG) based on The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. I meet with five other mamas once a month to discuss one of the book’s chapters. So far we’ve covered:
  

  • “Reconnecting with Who You Are,”
  • “The Transformative Power of Self Care,”
  • “Creating Your Personal Support System,”
  • “Setting Priorities, Saying No and Asking for Help” and
  • “Good is Good Enough.”

  Guess what? I had pretty much lost my identity both to marriage and motherhood, wasn’t doing a good job of taking care of myself or asking for help, my personal support system had many gaps, and I regularly beat myself up for not doing or being good enough.

  It might not seem that spending time focusing on the  trouble with these areas is a great way to feel better, but being in a community of women I respect who are struggling with similar things is incredibly helpful. Identifying the problems allows me to fix them or at least to begin to fix them.

  The PRG primed me for The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I don’t know how I even came upon her blog originally, but it’s a great read, has offered me many insights, and then the book was published at the end of 2009. I bought it for myself as a Christmas present. In both the book and the blog, Rubin includes her research on happiness theory and her experiences testing the research.

  Rubin’s happiness project and mine are different in many ways. For one, at the beginning of her project, she felt that she was already happy, but could be happier. Unfortunately, I’ve spent most of my life wondering if I even know how to be happy. Secondly, Rubin was very focused in her approach. She chose an area for each month of the year, set happiness goals in that area, kept a resolutions chart to see how she was performing. I am waking up every day with one of two questions: 1) How can I take care of myself today? or 2) What would make me happy today/right now?

  Gretchen Rubin’s happiness project earned her a #1 spot on the NYT Bestseller list, a packed room last week at SXSW interactive, and she has created a way for other people to start their own happiness projects. Apparently there are a lot of people who want to learn how to be happier. I’ve got the happiness project toolbox for starting my own group or at least my own project Gretchen-style, but I’m not ready for that yet.

  At the moment, I’m doing well to accomplish acts of self care and to recognize happiness when I feel it. My goal is to move from doing things that make me happy to just being a happy person. Thankfully I’m only in the third month of the year. I’ve got time.

  Would you call yourself an overall happy person? When do you feel happiest? What do you do to help you feel happy?

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  Post from MamaTRUE
  

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