Get Ready for Summer: Update Your Goals and Make Time for Joy

Get Ready for Summer: Update Your Goals and Make Time for Joy Starting the year with goals in mind is a great idea. What makes that approach even more effective is checking in periodically to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t relevant anymore, and when we need to reprioritize. With the summer approaching, now is a perfect time to sit down with our list of New Year’s Resolutions and see how we’re doing and how we feel about the goals we set at the beginning of the year. Here are 3 steps to update your goals and make time for joy. 1. Are your goals still relevant? Let’s spring clean! When reviewing the goals you chose in January, consider which ones you've already achieved. Have you finished that big project? Have you been going to the gym? Take a look at your list of goals and check off the ones you've done. Celebrate what you’ve accomplished so far. Also, think about which objectives are no longer relevant and remove them from your list. We all change our minds and that’s fine. I call this “spring cleaning my to-do lists”! Any new summer goals you want to add to the list? Family, health, nature…what inspires you these days? Remember to pick only what’s most important to you and to be realistic in order to set yourself up for success. Often, less is more…I even have a “Not To-Do List” and I love it!! 2. Acknowledge the Progress You’ve Made. Acknowledging your progress can help energize you to keep moving forward. What’s working for you? What’s going well? What’s almost done? Take a few moments to think about how you achieved progress. Perhaps you have an encouraging note taped to your bathroom mirror. Maybe you have reminders set to pop up on your phone or calendar. What tools and strategies work for you? Make sure you continue using the techniques that support your growth. Consider updating the notes or reminders with a fresh message and try some new ways to continue doing things that make you happy and successful. 3. Add Joy. As summer approaches, perhaps it’s time to shift your focus to creating time for family and friends or simply enjoying the outdoors. Think about what adds joy to your life and where that happiness boost fits into your daily or weekly life. It might be as simple as taking a ten-minute walk at the end of the day or enjoying a cup of tea outside in the morning. Make time to engage with the people and activities that help you recharge. This helps break up the fog of monotony that can come from getting lost in our daily work and life routines. Add a breath of fresh air, whether it’s from a literal walk outside, coffee with a friend, or a visit to a meaningful place, like a museum or art gallery. You can learn more ways to increase your happiness in my book, 21 Days to Happiness. Each day of the [...]

By |2024-05-21T09:07:55-04:00May 21st, 2024|Happiness Tips, Leadership Tips|
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How Gratitude in Relationships Boosts Joy

How Gratitude in Relationships Boosts Joy “Practicing gratitude invites joy into our lives.” – Dr. Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW The relationship between joy and gratitude is a powerful one. We’ve talked before about the incredibly positive impact a gratitude practice can have on our personal happiness. This year, as we head into the holiday season, let’s talk about the effect of gratitude on our relationship happiness. 1. Reminds Us of the Value of Our Relationships It may be an old habit to say thank you to your partner, friends, or family members when they do something for you but taking a moment to think about how their actions affect you and what it says about who they are will help you mine more joy. When someone notices you struggling to carry bags of groceries and steps in to hold a door or help carry the bags, it means they are paying attention to our needs. What a blessing it is to have someone who notices our needs and takes action to meet them, even in small ways. 2. Helps Us Turn Our Gratitude into Action When we take note of our feelings of gratitude for the people in our lives, we start to become more aware of their needs. We start to notice the ways we can show our appreciation to them. This doesn’t mean having to create a grand gesture. Kind words and small favors are powerful ways to show our gratitude to others. And they matter. And what happens when we do something that generates gratitude in someone else? Joy blooms for us, too. 3. Allows Us to Believe the Best It’s much easier to overlook small inconveniences or challenging exchanges when we have a full reserve of gratitude in ourselves. Those moments that generated gratitude—the kitchen your family helped clean up or the favorite coffee someone grabbed for you the morning after a long night—make it easier to overlook the next time someone forgets to meet a responsibility or has a grouchy morning. The gratitude memories make it easier to remember that our friend or family member is more than this momentary, disappointing situation. Their character is more easily defined by the positive ways they connect with us in our lives, which is another way gratitude in relationships boosts joy. 4. Motivates Us to Keep Our Relationships One of the amazing things we learn from research about gratitude in relationships is that gratitude is a powerful predictor of whether the relationship will last. Romantic relationships in which people feel little gratitude toward one another are less likely to last long-term. Relationships with the highest levels of gratitude between people are much more likely to last. That alone is a powerful statement, and it makes a lot of sense. When we’re in relationships in which people feel gratitude for us, we feel valued and great about ourselves. When we’re in relationships in which we express gratitude, we experience more happiness. Looking at it that way, it’s easy to [...]

By |2023-11-15T19:31:48-04:00November 15th, 2023|Happiness Tips|
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5 Simple Tips for a Joyful Holiday Season

5 Simple Tips for a Joyful Holiday Season It’s the most wonderful time of the year! And sometimes the busiest time of the year, too. With all the extra celebrations, added errands, and weather changes, the holidays can lead to extra stress, but they don’t have to. Here are 5 simple tips for a joyful holiday season. 1. Limit Your To Do List No one can do it all, and trying to is a recipe for stress and conflict in your life. As you sit down to make your to do list limit the number of items you can add. The holidays bring extra celebrations and events, extra shopping and cooking, and all those tasks take time above and beyond our normal daily commitments. Each morning, think about what your top priorities are for the day and allow yourself to add only one or two things to your Holiday To Do list each day. A new idea is to add to your “TO BE” list, instead of your “TO DO” list: be grateful, be relaxed, be joyful, be yourself, etc. 2. Put Joy on the Calendar What are the things you most look forward to during a holiday season? Is it a certain visit with an friend? A gift exchange over brunch? Watching festive movies and drinking hot cocoa with the ones you love? Whatever your traditions, be sure to put the moments you love on your calendar before it fills with other holiday hustle and bustle. This gives you something to look forward to, too. On the flip side, try to politely decline certain events or activities if it doesn’t feel right…less can be more! 3. Check in with Your Body Make a point throughout the holidays to check in with your body. Are you thirsty? In need of a healthy snack or meal to recharge your energy? Are you in need of rest? Take the time to meet your body’s needs as soon as you possibly can. When we don’t meet our body’s needs, it often finds a louder way to make those needs known. Missing a meal can make us snappy or leave us with a headache. The longer we ignore our needs, the longer it can take to recover. Make a point to check in with your body regularly so you stay feeling great. 4. Give There is no shortage of charitable opportunities at this time of year, and there’s nothing like the joy that giving to others brings to our lives. This holiday season, start a tradition of giving with your family, friends, or coworkers. You can let each person choose a charity that’s meaningful to them and take up a group collection. Or you might decide to commit to a service project, such as volunteering. Sometimes, it just can being nice on purpose….hold the door, buy someone a coffee, smile… 5. Celebrate the Relationships that Matter In our last post, 5 Gratitude Practices, one practice we mentioned is to write a note to someone [...]

By |2023-03-24T12:02:16-04:00December 12th, 2022|Happiness Tips|
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