Color Your Life Happy

Are you thinking about making a change in your life? If so, you’ve already taken the first step.

Without taking another conscious action, you have already taken a turn from something that wasn’t pleasing you. 

Discontent is your savior.

The moment that you realize you’re not satisfied with a situation, person, job, yourself or location, your mind gets busy processing ways to get out or over or around it. If you don’t heed any of the solutions that bubble to the surface, your discontent will grow bigger and bigger.                                         

( Photo by Perfecto Insecto)

One day you will eventually become, as some people say, “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

At that moment you are ready to act.

You will no longer need advice or permission. You will no longer wonder if the thing you need to do is the right thing to do. You will know.

You will know at the deepest level what to do. And you will know that it is exactly the right thing to do and that you will be okay.

You may act quickly, as if jumping to safety out of the path of an oncoming speeding  truck.

Or you may act carefully, as if neatly packing your luggage in slow motion for a very long trip.

If your change actions are good, doing no harm to others and in harmony with the universe, your sucess is assured.

What change have you been contemplating?

I’m fond of lists that offer tips–some familiar and sometimes new–that have been gathered to focus on improving my life in some way. The Internet is loaded with lists, but here are ones I enjoyed most for creating a happier life. I hope you will enjoy them too.

[Photo on right by strizh]

1. 30 Ways to Make Your Life More Simple 

My favorite on this list are

• Write to a friend with (gasp!) pen and paper.
• Resign from a commitment you’re not passionate about.

 2. 50 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do 

The emphasis is on self-reliance. Not only do you get the tips, but each tip is followed by 3 links to articles from other blogs that elaborate on the tip.

You may not agree with everything on this list, but it certainly makes me happier that I know how to

• parallel park
• take useful notes
• be a respectful house guest
• type
• hold a baby
• drive a manual transmission
• smile for the camera

3. 77  Keys to Living Well Before You Die

Since death is inevitable it only makes sense to think about what things you want to do before that fateful day. Movies such as “The Bucket List” have focused on this. You’ll want to use these as suggestions, then create your own list.

Here are some of the keys from his list that I’m currently living

• Be aware of your surroundings.  Take notice of the simple joys life has to offer.
• Surround yourself with positive people who share goals similar to your own.
• Tend a small garden and eat your own produce.

4. 20 Ways to Train Your Brain for Peak Performance 

When your brain is at its peak you’re definitely happier. Here are my few favorites from this list.

• Break your routines
• Think positive thoughts
• Be a continual learner  

5.   10 Tips for Adding a Splash of Colour

If you live in an area prone to very little sun and lots of wind, rain and gloomy days, you’ll understand why this author created this list for adding color to your life. She gives you links to sites with more about how to carry these out.

My favorite two are

• Eat a rainbow (visit her blog to see what she means here)
• Watch the Wizard of Oz again

6. If I Had My Life to Live Over

When famous humor columnist, Erma Bombeck, learned she had cancer she wrote a list of things she would do if she had her life to do over.  As it turns out she died from a failed kidney transplant rather than cancer, but her list is meaningful nonetheless.

These are few of my favorites from her list

• I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.
• I would have talked less and listened more.
• I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather ramble about his youth.

7. The Eight Irrestible Principles of Fun

 I saved this entertaining but profound video for last. Enjoy.

Have you ever signed up for a new program, product or subscription and realized days, weeks, months (gasp! even years) later that you’d never used it?

If you’re like me, I never even opened some of these things that sounded absolutely fantastic and life-changing at the time I ordered them.

For example, I heard a very informative public radio program about coconut cures. The doctor who was guest convinced me that I needed his book mainly because it also had a recipe for a colon cleansing program using coconut. (When you reach my age you finally understand the benefits of keeping your colon cleansed.)

Then I saw an infomercial for these colorful water globes that you can stick in potted plants so they get watered gradually over a matter of days. I did open one of the boxes and use the first four. But I’ve moved the other unopend box of four to different locations on the patio twice.

Oh yes, I also signed up for a set of DVDs and a magazine that promise to teach me search engine optimization. I can’t explain what this is since those haven’t arrived yet.

I advise folks all the time about the importance of taking action, and yet in my own life stuff keeps popping up. Fun stuff, but stuff all the same.

Does that happen to you?

It’s called real life. There are some things I just can’t omit: eating, sleeping, maintaining my blogs and websites, to name a few.

Then there are things that only come up rarely or only once a year, like my son’s birthday last weekend. We had a wonderful party full of food and games.

When I got an email today from the company that sold me the SEO DVDs today, four words jumped out at me: MAKE TIME FOR IMPLEMENTATION.

I already know this, but obviously I needed reminding. So, as I make time to implement the information I’ve gathered, I thought you could use a reminder as well.

All the great information we gather from reading blogs, books, attending seminars and ebooks are of no use if we don’t put it into practice.

So let’s resolve together to pick a program or product and make time to implement it. Okay?

Share your progress with us.

My husband was a great motivator. He encouraged everyone to do and be his best. He would post positive sayings on the bathroom mirror and other places around the house.  He strongly believed in positive affirmations and setting goals.

He passed in 1988, but I vividly remember and am grateful for his insistence that I make long-term plans.

He advocated not the typical daily to-do-lists, but the long-term plans.

“What’s your five year plan?” he would ask.

I was not opposed to the idea, but this was in the early days of our marriage. He’d pop this question just as  I was diapering a baby or packing school lunches. My plans at that moment were short-term: get everyone fed, dressed, off to school, off to work, back home, homework done, violin and piano practiced, bathed and off to bed by the end of the day.

Just to keep him at bay, I finally sat down and wrote out a five year plan.

I had no idea at the time how theses goals would be accomplished. I just wrote them down.

1. Remodel the kitchen
2. Get a doctorate
3. Start my own tutoring program

. . .The list went on to about ten items.

Now, next time he asked I’d have a list to present, I thought.

Wouldn’t you know, however, when I proudly presented my 5-year plan, he moved into higher gear.

“Now where is your 10-year plan?”

I knew he meant well, but he was really annoying me now.

But I proceeded to create a 10-year plan as well, writing it in the back of one of the sprial notebooks that doubled as a journal, memos, recipes and so on.

I never looked at the lists again. Two decades passed. When I was packing to move I ran across my many long-term goals. I was startled to see that I had indeed accomplished everything on those lists.

What’s important to note is that I never consulted these lists again after I wrote them. As a matter of fact, they had remained buried beneath many other books, papers and notebooks for decades.

So, how did I accomplish these things? Was it magic?

Not at all.

Writing your long-term goals has power. When you commit a plan to paper, you set a course. If you have convinced your subconscious that it’s a deep desire, the universe will conspire to have the long-range goals turn into short-term plans and be manifested.

This isn’t magic. You will make the short-term, daily-doable plans too, but only for the long-range goals to which your subconscious has committed.

There are some things to keep in mind when writing your long-term goals.

1. Let your imagination soar. Don’t hold back. Some experts will advise you to be sure your long-term goals are attainable. Forget that. Write down whatever you truly believe you want to be or do. It doesn’t matter how crazy it sounds to others, this is about you.

2. Concern yourself with what you want, not how you’ll get it done.

When President John F. Kennedy set the goal of America putting a man on the moon he didn’t know how it would be done.

3. Let your list reflect all the areas of your life: personal, career, romance, family, physical, spiritual, financial and so on. There are no limits on this list.

4. Write your goals in positive statements. Write what you want to be or see happen, not what you don’t.

Once you’ve created your 5 year, 10 year or longer term goals, you don’t need to look at them again. Your subconscious will remember and the ones with the strongest importance and commitment will emerge and attract to you the things you need to do to make them happen.

A few years after I had written the goal about getting a doctorate, I was approaching my 30th birthday. I thought about what I had accomplished and what I still wanted to accomplish with my life. Even though I was teaching full time and had two young children–ages 5 and 2, I had my husband support and encouragement. So decided to begin a doctoral program.

I couldn’t afford to pay tuition, nor did I want to try working full-time, raising the kids and attending a doctoral program part-time. At first these were the only things I felt for sure about this desire.

One evening after I had just finished teaching a graduate class at Pepperdine University, I turned down a dimly lit hall to exit the building. As I passed a bulletin board outside the Education Dept. an announcement about a doctoral grant jumped out at me. I squinted to read the details.

Oh no! The application deadline had passed, but I scribbled down the contact information all the same.

I contacted the National Fellowships Fund and they confirmed that it was too late to apply for that year, but I could apply the next year. And so I did.

A year later I eagerly awaited the results of my application . In the meantime I applied for a leave from my junior high teaching job, and was declined. My school district offered me two choices: stay or retire.

I finally received a letter from the National Fellowships Fund in March of that year.

I was declined.

It looked like this was not going to be the route to a doctoral grant, so I continued to teach at my junior high job.

One month later, I received another letter from National Fellowships Fund. It seems that so many applicants had declined when offered the grant, that they were now able to offer one to me.

Yippee!

Not only was I awarded a grant to pursue my doctorate, but I could attend any university of my choice. There was no deadline set on when I needed to finish and I would receive full tuition, an ample book and supplies allowance, research expenses and a small monthly stipend.

I promptly submitted my retirement to the school district and began making plans to return to school. Four years and many adventures later I received my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from USC.

I share this story as one example of how my goals moved from that forgotten list to being manifested in my life. I don’t want to give the impression that goals materialize while you lounge effortlessly on the beach. Maybe they do for some. But not for me. Once propelled toward my goal, I worked hard along the way studying, managing my time and balancing school and family.

I don’t believe this is a unique or singular experience. It happens for other people, and can happen for you.

The requirements are simple. Think about all the things you deeply and sincerely want for your life and write them down.

Then proceed with your life as usual. You, too, will discover maybe years later that you were drawn to do those things that lead to your heart’s desire.

Try it. There’s nothing to lose.

Have you almost been sideswiped by a grocery shopper rushing to beat you to the checkout line?

Or was that you who whizzed by me?

So many of our lives seem to be rushed that it’s a wonder we ever see the scenery as we go through life. Oh, that’s right–we don’t.

“Fast isn’t turning us into Masters of the Universe,”  said. Carl Honoré. “It’s turning us into Cheech and Chong.”

Carl Honoré, a Canadian journalist living in London, wrote  “In Praise of Slow: Challenging the Cult of Speed” in which he pointed out that slow is a state of mind.

“Slow is just a new word to understand old problems,” Honoré said. “It’s a re-freshening of ideas that have been there since time immemorial. But there’s a new appeal about the word slow. It’s pithy, it’s countercultural.”

Americans are so unfamiliar with the concept that the book title in the USA the book was retitled “In Praise of Slowness.”

The Slow Movement began in Italy in the 1990’s as the Slow Food Movement. It has now become a term for encouraging us to do everything at the right speed, whether it be education, exercise, sex, or work.

Honoré doesn’t suggest that we slow our living to a snail’s pace, but he does find it troubling that we have one-minute children’s stories, speed dating and the need to amass 1,000’s of “friends” on Facebook, thereby devaluating each of these endeavors.

The slow movement isn’t against speed, but is in favor of connectedness. Rushing through everything prevents us from savoring food, experiences and enjoying people.

You know you’re in need of slowing down when you always feel tired and rushed, and can barely remember what you did, ate or saw in a day.

It’s no surprise that the Slow Food Movement began in Italy in 1980’s. When Carlo Petrini learned that McDonald’s had plans to build a franchise outlet near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986, he organized a demonstration. As weapons of protest he and his followers threw–what else?–penne.

Carlo soon after founded the International Slow Food Movement where they encourage us to take care with what and how we eat.

Slow Food Movement advocates want to save endangered foods, promote responsible agricultural systems and return us to the joy of food preparation and consumption.

If you’re ready to slow down, here are some ideas to get you started

• Avoid cookie cutter homes at TheSlowHome  
• Enjoy your travel. Ease over to SlowPlanet 
• Wrap yourself in sustainable clothes, jewelry and furniture at Alabama Chanin
• Disenchanted with instant messaging? How about a slow electronic mail movement at Slow Lab
• Learn more about the Slow Movement  

Investigate these ideas on slowness. The slow life may be just your speed.

Humans have been seeking happiness since the beginning of time. Here we are in the most enlightened and technologically advanced period of history. Why are we still looking for happiness?

There are four problems with happiness:

1. We don’t know what it is.

All major Greek theories saw happiness not a matter of luck, but something we can control and increase. Aristotle’s term eudaimonia is often used interchangeably with happiness. But they are not synonymous.

For Aristotle, eudaimonia was an activity of flourishing, living an ethical life. Happiness was how you lived your life.

The modern view of happiness is a state of mind, a feeling of how pleased we are with our lives.

Much of what we read about happiness assumes that we have our basic needs met and are ready to master our reactions and attitudes.

Can we live a happy life even if our idea of happiness is brutalizing people for fun? Can happiness be applied only to those of us who are leading good and ethical lives? If so, who gets to decide what’s good, and what’s ethical?

Some modern psychologists have solved this dilemma, at least for themselves, by insisting that we shouldn’t mix ethics with our self-reported feelings about quality of life.

2. We don’t know what makes us happy.

Have you ever been the unlucky person standing in the fast food line behind the indecisive person who is studying the menu as if there’s going to be a test? Eventually the cashier has them step aside so she can serve you.

Happiness is like that. You have to know what you want, what makes you happy before you can have it.

Wayne Dyer, popular author and speaker, says in his book Power of Intention, that we focus on what we don’t want, and then wonder why we get it.

Emanuel Kant believed that duty and moral law are important than happiness. He said that if happiness were the ultimate aim of life, we should have just had instincts, not reason. We constantly seek something good that we think will make us happy but that feeling only lasts for a time. Eventually we are looking for something else.

Scientists believe this stems from a primitive part of our brain that dooms us to the “hedonic treadmill”–longing for what we think will make us happy but getting used to it or tiring of it and going after something new, only to be back at the same place habituating to the new, with happiness always just out of reach.

3. We are not sure we even want it.

Unhappiness is more comfortable and socially acceptable.

In spite of all the books, shows and promoters telling us how to become happy, we still hold happiness in low regard.

Google revealed, for example, that when the phrase, “fat, dumb, and ___” is used on the Web, 97% of the time it’s as “fat, dmb, and happy.”

Ernest Hemingway expressed the way many feel when he said, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

We don’t want to be seen as Pollyanas who shut our eyes to the “real” world or clueless dullards not sharp enough see harsh reality.

4. Happiness requires effort.

People all over the world loved watching the Olympic medalists as they won top honors in their sports, but few of us would be willing to put in the years of training and make the sacrifices that they made.

We enjoy paying lip service to happiness, but when it comes to putting in the effort to make the changes or take the steps that are suggested by self-help books, therapists, researchers and religious leaders, many of us settle for staying where we are.

As Clint Eastwood’s character, Dirty Harry, said in the movie Sudden Impact, “Everybody wants results, but nobody wants to do what it takes to get them.”

When Dr. Martin Seligman, psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania, decided to turn from the emphasis on unhappy states of mental illness to study the happy states of people who are content with their lives,there was very little research devoted to happiness. So Seligman raised one million dollars and gathered a thousand therapists to create a way to go about conducting scientific research. Out of their meetings a new field, Positive Psychology, was born with the intent of building objective evidence of the components of happiness.

Based on a growing body of research of identical and fraternal twins, happiness is derived from

40%–our genes
10%–our circumstances such as education, upbringing, economic level
40%–within our power

Happy people seem to share three common core traits: a positive attitude, gratitude and close relations. They also seem to be actively engaged in work they enjoy and spend some of their time and energy working for something bigger than themselves.

When asked what accounted for the tremendous performance of Michael Phelps, American swimmer who holds the record for earning 8 gold medals in the Beijing Olympics, his coach didn’t say superior physical condition as reporters expected. He said, “It’s Michael’s ability to handle anything that comes up and turn it into something good.”

So must we, using the power that we have to create our joy, overcome the problems we have with happiness and turn what we encounter into something good.

Growing up in the Midwest, we were bombarded with rules that were never explained. We never quite understood why, for example, that you ”Don’t wear white after Labor Day.”

My curiosity lead me to try to get to the origin of this rule.

First of all, it seems the rule has been misreported. According to Jacksonville etiquette consultant, Diann Catlin, the rule originally applied to white shoes only, not clothes. But it’s too late. The application to clothes has stuck.

This is clearly a Southern thing where light clothes are cooler than dark clothes in summer, thus the rule that it’s okay to wear white between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The catch comes when this rule is applied across the country even in places where there are no sharp lines between winter, spring and summer.

Worse, the Southerners tie this to poor manners. As Catlin points out

“The only reason these rules are important is for your image,” Catlin said. “If I showed up on Feb. 1 in a white linen suit, you’d think this person does not know what she’s doing. What happens is that people notice that you just don’t know any better.”

Second, Acting Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology Valerie Steele, has another take on this. She points to the fact that more people were entering the middle classes in the late 19th century and the 1950s. Because these newly-rich folks were often unaware of the standards of high society, they were given specific rules to follow in order to fit in.  Not wearing white after Labor Day was one of them.

Whatever its origin, this rule has long been lost along with other dress codes on most Californians.  When asked the dress code for almost any affair, the response is California Casual. From the varied outfits I’ve seen in this category, the color of the outfit is the least worry.

 What relics from your childhood don’t apply any more?