I watched the following TED talk the other week when Sustainable Suburbia shared it on their facebook page and thought it would be a great one to share here.

Despite the title, this is not a population rant (which is at least what I thought it would be – I find them kind of unhelpful). It is instead a rational look at our philosophy and practice of continuous economic growth and how this is unsustainable (and could possibly lead to a scary future), but it finishes with a positive and uplifting call to action.

I really love this quote from the talk:

You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right. The only thing they’re missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things…We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one’s a monster. Paul Gilding. [source].

This talk is only 17 minutes long, great to watch during a quick cuppa break.

Have you read these articles?:

1. Food for thought thursday–a future for our cities
2. The sustainable veggie lifecycle infographic
3. food for thought thursdays – peak oil video

My two main goals this year are to have more energy and more fun (vague, I know, but I’m still working on them).

While I had planned a post about the strategies I’m putting in place to achieve these goals (which include such things as homemade hummus – intrigued?), the weather was so nice today and we’ve been stuck inside for so, so many weeks now (did I mention we came down with the flu / virus on boxing day) that I packed dinner up in a container and we had a picnic at the river.

Dinner was honey and garlic roasted pumpkin risotto. We ate our picnic, played in the park, splashed in the water and the sand and ate ice cream. We live in one of the major tourist spots in Australia and yet we’ve hardly enjoyed the sun and water so far this summer, so it was so very nice to get out into the fresh evening air.

In other words, we were out having fun (goal achieved, right ). Now it’s time for bed, so no long and thought-out post today. However, what I do have to offer is a printable goal setting worksheet that you can download and print to use if you’re wanting to set goals or New Year’s Resolutions this year. It outlines the strategies I’ve written about in the last two days (here and here) and is the strategy I use for setting and achieving goals. I hope that you find it useful and that you achieve your New Year’s Resolutions.

Click here to download the Goals Setting Worksheet (PDF).

Yesterday, a reader shared a great strategy for how they achieved one of their goals. Do you have a strategy for achieving a specific goal? If you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Hope you have a great weekend.

Have you read these articles?:

1. goal setting for success part one
2. goal setting part two – making it happen
3. New Year’s Resolutions Part 2 – Setting Goals

Yesterday, I looked at some psychological factors that help or hinder New Year’s Resolutions.

Today is all about taking action – the doing part of achieving your resolutions. The thing about changing your habits (which is the ultimate aim for most resolutions) is that it takes a little effort, a little thought and a little planning. And when life is already busy, that effort can be all too much. This is why many of us give up on our resolutions before January has even ended.

So what we need to do is to make keeping resolutions easier. Creating an action plan as per the steps below is one way of making your goals easier to achieve.

1. Make it personal

Before I talk about creating an action plan, I want to say that no one can tell you exactly how you should reach your goal, what exact steps to take and the specific strategies you will use. Because we’re all different, there’s no one-fit solution. Sure, you can get ideas about how to reach your goal (in fact, research is an important part) as well as get some outside help, but at the end of the day you will need to sit down and nut out a strategy that works for your unique circumstances.

Let me give you an example: A lot of people suggest getting up early in the morning before the rest of the family in order to exercise / meditate / prepare / work etc., but what if you’re not a morning person? Is it really a strategy that’s going to work for you in the long run, day in and day out?

While my ideal day would start around 5am with a cup of tea and some quiet reflection and planning before the little fella woke up, the reality is that he’s awake at 4am and that’s when we drag ourselves out of bed, bleary-eyed. When changing habits, we often have to work around circumstances that we can’t change.

2. Work out what you need to do to reach your goal.

Step two and three really go hand in hand. To achieve your goals, you will need to work out exactly what action steps you need to take, which means doing a little research to find out what those action steps might be.

Just say you want to get fit. What exactly will you do in order to achieve this goal? How will you measure your success (how will you know when you’re ‘fit’)? What specific exercises will you do? How many and how often? When? Where? Will you join a gym? Hire a personal trainer? (there’s no rule that says you can’t get help! In fact, getting help is the smart way to achieve your goals).

Before you begin you may need to ask an expert for advice, browse the internet for ideas, read a book or two, crunch some numbers or join a group to find out exactly what you need to do to achieve your goals.

3. Break down your resolution into manageable steps

Once you’ve done some research, the next step is to start writing down your action steps. Let’s look at losing weight as an example. A resolution like ‘reach goal weight of x amount of kilograms’ is still an unwieldy goal, despite being specific and measurable. Even when we break it down further to ‘eat healthy’, it still doesn’t tell us what we’re actually going to be doing.

Here are a few questions to ask and steps to look at instead:

• What are you going to eat for breakfast?
• What are you going to drink with breakfast? During the day? At meals?
• What are you going to eat for a mid morning snack?
• What are you going to eat for lunch? Afternoon snack? Dinner? Dessert? On the weekends? Out with friends?
• When will you buy breakfast? When will you prepare breakfast?
• How will you find the time to prepare foods?
• How will you take your lunch to work? How will you keep it cool? Where will you eat it?
• Will you prepack snacks? What snacks? How will you keep them fresh?
• Are you getting a balance of nutrients throughout the day?

4. Small changes over time

Are you looking at that list above and thinking ‘that’s too much to think about’? The truth is that it is too much to think about! Yesterday I wrote about how we only have so much willpower and concentration and you’ve already got work, family, housework, friends, and everything else to think about. Changing 50 habits all at once is literally impossible, which is why by February, many of us have given up on our New Year’s resolutions.

So don’t try and change your diet.

Instead, focus on one and only one aspect of changing your diet for the first month. For instance, you might choose to eat a healthy breakfast every day. Don’t worry about the rest of your diet, that will come later. For January, just focus on breakfast. That’s manageable. In February, once you’re in the habit of eating a healthy breakfast, you can look at morning tea, or lunch or drinking two litres of water or whatever the next step is for you. And in March something else. By December you will not only find you’ve achieved your goal (or you’re well on your way) you will have also cemented positive habits that will last a lifetime.

5. Get specific, very specific

This may seem over the top, but you want to use tools to help you change your habit, without relying on your busy and unreliable brain. So the next step is to be very, very specific about how you’re going to do your action step and write it down.

Taking our healthy breakfast example further, your next step is to decide:

What you will eat; when you will eat it; where you will eat breakfast; when you will buy the ingredients for breakfast; when you will prepare breakfast; whether you will need to get up earlier in the morning to make breakfast (and if so, whether you will need to go to bed earlier at night or iron your work shirt for instance, some time other than the morning) and so on.

What you want to end up with is something specific and actionable such as: ‘I’m going to eat a bowl of oatmeal and fresh fruit with a cup of tea every morning at around 7am after I shower. To do this I need to buy oatmeal, milk and fruit each week when I shop and get up about 15 minutes earlier every day (6:15am).’

You now have something that you can actually do. ‘Lose weight’ isn’t something you can put into action, the above strategy is.

The final step, of course, is to actually do it.

6. When life gets in the way

To make your action steps realistic, you need to work in with life as it is day to day. Many of your circumstances are ones that you can’t (or don’t want to) change, so it doesn’t make sense trying to build new habits that don’t fit in with your existing circumstances. As I mentioned above, there’s no point me trying to find quiet time early in the morning because the little fella is invariably awake before I am. I can’t force him to sleep in, instead I need to find a quiet time that works in with the the existing flow of life.

The other thing to note is that it’s important to schedule time for yourself and your goals and keep that appointment just as you would any other appointment. However, flu happens. Friends drop by needing help. Kids won’t nap. Life keeps going on. Flexibility is a strength too.

7. Set yourself up for success

Use whatever tools and assistance you need to reach your goals. If that means setting a timer every hour to remind yourself to drink a glass of water, then do it. It’s a little weird, but do what works. If it means hiring a personal trainer, then that’s great. If it means setting up a separate savings account and automating savings, do it. If it means nicotine patches or counselling or clearing the pantry of cookies or affirmations or joining a class or whatever, use the (positive) strategies that work for you.

These eight action steps for achieving your resolutions go hand in hand with the strategies in yesterday’s article. As you’re working on each action step, don’t forget to look at your underlying reasons for why you have been doing what you do. For example, if your action step is to eat breakfast and you don’t because of time constraints, then you need to address the issue of time first or eat a healthy breakfast that works in with your time constraints. If you find yourself not sticking with a new habit, it will usually be because you have underlying reasons not to. To achieve your goal, these need to be examined rather than ignored.

If you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions this year, I hope that you achieve them and that this week’s articles help you do that. Tomorrow I thought I would share one or two of my own resolutions and my action plan. Also, I have created a goal setting worksheet that you can download and print, that I hope will be helpful when it comes to achieving your goals.

Have you read these articles?:

1. achieving new year’s resolutions – a strategy for building positive change part one
2. New Years Resolutions Part 1 – Taking Stock
3. New Year’s Resolutions Part 3 – Achieving Your Goals

I am one of those people who like making New Year’s Resolutions. Psychologically speaking, the first of January is a threshold that heralds a new beginning, a clean slate and therefore a great time to examine life – what’s working, what’s not, what direction you want to go in, what changes you want to make.

Around 40% of the population make New Year’s Resolutions. Unfortunately, only around 10% of us will actually succeed in reaching our goals. The important question is: what is the 10% doing to be successful? The answer: they are following up on their resolve by taking consistent action.

Making resolutions and setting goals is the easy part. I resolve to ‘lose weight’, oh, you know, a couple of times a day. Getting out of bed and actually doing some exercise takes a whole lot more effort. But there are few tricks that we can employ to make the process a little easier and therefore more successful and that’s what this week is about: building a strategy that works for making positive changes.

Goal setting basics

I’ve written a lot in the past about setting goals (you can find links to these articles in the resources section at the end of this article), so I won’t go over old ground, except as a quick summary. The important things to remember when setting goals are:

• Write down your goals and keep them somewhere visible where you can remind yourself of them each day.
• Make your goals positive: not ‘I want to lose weight’ but ‘I want to reach my goal weight of…’
• Make your goals relevant: your goals have to really matter to you. To reach your goal, it needs to be something you really want, not something you think you should want. Know why you want to reach a certain goal. What are the benefits?
• Make your goals specific: not ‘I want to save money’ but ‘I want to have $2,000 in the bank by December 2012’.
• Make your goals measurable: if your goal is to have $2,000 in the bank by December, then you will need to save an average of $166 per month, so by the end of April if you have $665 in the bank, you can ‘measure’ you’re success at staying on track.

As I’ve mentioned, making resolutions and goal setting is the easy part. It’s putting your resolutions into action that takes a little effort.

It all comes down to our habits

At the end of the day what we’re really talking about is changing a set of lifestyle habits and routines from ones that aren’t working for you to habits that will make you happier and healthier. Saving money is about changing spending habits. Losing weight is about changing eating and exercise habits. Quitting smoking is about ditching nicotine habits. When it comes to achieving your resolutions, what you really need to do is examine and adjust your habits (more below).

Changing habits takes a little time. It can take at least a month, sometimes more to override an old habit and cement a new one. Give yourself that time. In fact, you’ve got 365 days to work on it.

What’s working for you now?

Your current habits are working for you. You’ve got very, very good reason to continue to not save money, to eat junk food, to smoke, to not exercise… While you may rationalise that exercising, for instance, is healthy, the reasons not to exercise are currently more compelling (otherwise you’d be doing it): you don’t have the time, you don’t have the energy, your foot is sore, you’ve got nothing to wear… and if you’re like me, probably a thousand other very good reasons why you can’t exercise.

Before you can make resolutions that you’re going to stick to, you need to really understand why you do what you do and address those underlying reasons first.

Regular readers will know that our major financial faux pas is buying and eating takeaway food too regularly. It’s not only a strain on our budget, it isn’t healthy either. Why do we buy takeaway food? Because at the end of the day (literally) I’m too tired to cook. To resolve to save money by avoiding takeaway is all well and good, but we’re bound to fail. Instead, we would be more successful instigating backup strategies for nights when I’m too exhausted to cook; strategies such as having easy things to prepare (and wash up) in the pantry, having regular nights where DH cooks, eating a healthy mid-afternoon snack for energy and having a routine to prepare food early in the day (when I’m not so tired). By avoiding the underlying causes for the takeaway habit, we avoid the takeaway.

Tackling underlying reasons for your habits means that you automatically achieve your main goal. Another example: if your main goal is to save money and you find your underlying habits include shopping every Saturday and spending on impulse, you could resolve to avoid the shops. But let’s go deeper (and make the resolution positive). Maybe you go to the store because you’re bored? Why not resolve then to engage in a hobby at that time instead? Maybe you’re lonely? Why not resolve to spend Saturday afternoons catching up with friends?

By shifting the focus, you’re examining the real reason for your current habits, changing them to positive habits and better yet, achieving your main goal of saving money automatically. The automatic part is important as we’ll explore next.

The myth of willpower

Had a hard day at work? Came home and ate 2 litres of chocolate ice cream? Don’t be too hard on yourself, we all have a limited capacity for self-control.

The part of the brain that is largely responsible for willpower is the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain also handles short-term memory, keeps us focused and solves abstract problems. And unfortunately, it seems that our brain’s capacity is not limitless. A tired brain is going to struggle and most likely fail to resist temptation. Conversely, focusing on resisting temptation and sticking to resolutions can affect short-term memory, concentration and productivity in other areas of life.

The point is that by relying on willpower alone (‘I will save money’, ‘I won’t eat pizza’) you are setting yourself up for failure (and fatigue). Instead, to change your habits, you need to use strategies other than sheer willpower.

There’s good news though on the willpower front. First, if you do give into temptation then you can give yourself a break, you’re not a failure, you are just getting signals from your brain that it’s been a tough day and possibly your strategies for changing your habits need tweaking. Tomorrow’s a brand new day.

Secondly, research has found that self-control can be strengthened through exercise. Just as you can build muscle by lifting weights, you can increase willpower by practicing mental discipline regularly, with necessary time-off for indulgence. And remember, once your new habit becomes a habit, you will no longer have to consciously work at maintaining it – it will be automatic.

Thirdly, research has found that those who have better willpower use strategies to distract themselves. There is a famous study conducted by Prof. Philip Mischer, where a marshmallow is placed in front of a four year old child. The examiner then contrives to leave the room for five minutes, but not before telling the child that they can either eat the marshmallow now or wait until the examiner returns, at which point they can have two marshmallows. Like many resolutions there is competition between immediate reward (eating the marshmallow, staying in bed rather than exercising, buying that pair of shoes rather than saving) versus the long term reward where there may short term unfulfillment. Those children who sung to themselves, played with their shoelaces, sat on their hands and chatted and otherwise distracted themselves were more successful at waiting until the examiner returned before being rewarded with both marshmallows.

So next time temptation strikes, don’t rely on willpower, use distraction. Do something else enjoyable and relaxing until the temptation passes.

Finally, the strategy that best counteracts our limited capacity for self-control is to eliminate the need to exercise willpower in the first place. In practical terms, that means automating savings each pay day so that you don’t miss money you don’t even see. It means not buying junk food so that it’s not even in the house during those moments of weakness. It means avoiding the shopping centre and therefore avoiding impulse buys.

As noted above however, you won’t get very far if you just eliminate these habits. It’s all very well not to have junk food in the house, but what are you going to eat if you’re hungry? What are you going to do with your Saturday afternoons? As well as eliminating the need to exercise willpower, instigate new and positive habits that will support your goals (by stocking the cupboard with healthy snacks, for instance) and you will be in that 10% of people who do achieve their new year’s resolution.

As this article has already become quite long, I will cover the final and most important part of achieving goals in tomorrow’s article: creating action plans that really work.

Resources

Below is a some links to articles written previously on making and keeping resolutions and goal setting.

• New Year’s Resolutions Part One – Taking Stock, Part Two – Setting Goals and Part Three – Achieving your Goals
• Making resolutions happen
• Goal Setting for Success Part One, Part Two and Part Three – Achieving Financial Goals

Have you read these articles?:

1. achieving new year’s resolutions – a strategy for building positive change part two
2. New Years Resolutions Part 1 – Taking Stock
3. New Year’s Resolutions Part 3 – Achieving Your Goals

Last week, DH and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. How time flies. It certainly doesn’t feel like five years have passed since the day we got married.

Our anniversary got me thinking about all the things that have changed in our lives over the last five years:

• We got married
• We travelled overseas for the first time (New Zealand counts!)
• We moved interstate, leaving Sydney behind for sunny Queensland
• We purchased our first home
• I got a job as an accountant
• I finished my accounting course
• I quit my job as an accountant
• I started working as a volunteer teacher
• I built this website
• We had a baby (who is now 19 months old)
• My father passed away
• I wrote a book

It makes me wonder about what will happen over the next five years!

Sometimes it can feel like each day is groundhog day. Another day of the same work. Another day of the same chores. Another day of the same old, same old. The progress we make can be so small that we miss it. It can feel like we are stuck in a mire and there’s no way out.

But the truth is that each day brings something new and carries us just that little bit closer to our goals. If you’re feeling like you’re stagnating, try this exercise: write down everything that has change since 2006, then imagine what the next five years hold. The decisions you make today will determine, in some part, the place you find yourself at tomorrow.

Have you read these articles?:

1. tip tuesday – free ribbons
2. tip tuesday–desk drawer organisers
3. tip tuesday – bicarb for stains

You know you’re an adult when: you wake up, the sun is shining and your first thought is ‘good day to get the washing dry.’

We’ve had wooden blocks for quite a while now, but it has only been in the last month or so that the little fella has had an interest in them. We spend a lot of time building houses for his more favoured toy: the matchbox car.

There’s nothing like play as a way to learn. I teach computer skills as part of an adult literacy programme and I encourage the students to ‘have a play’ because I truly believe that playing, experimenting, exploring, making mistakes and finding ways to fix them is the best way to learn.

And playing with the wooden blocks, I have been learning (or rather, relearning) some important life lessons that I knew as a kid, but had forgotten as an adult.

Defying the law of gravity

I get the law of gravity. The little fella, he’s still learning. Geometry, tessellation, balance, weight… I know things. So I find myself saying:

‘That’s too big, that block won’t fit, it won’t go there, the tower will fall over.’

‘That won’t work.’

But more often than not, the block isn’t too big, it will fit and the tower doesn’t topple.

Not knowing, the little fella attempts the seemingly impossible. To him, it’s no big deal, he didn’t think it was impossible in the first place. For me, I discover that the things I think are impossible aren’t always so.

As adults, we don’t try new things because we fear failure. We’ve convinced ourselves, rationally or otherwise, that it won’t work. That we can’t do it. That it’s impossible (you can’t defy the laws of gravity, after all).

Or can you?

Here’s a few things I learned: if the block is not too far off the centre of gravity, the tower won’t topple. If you place a block on the opposite edge to the first (pictured above), it acts as a counterweight and again, the tower won’t topple.

If you use superglue, then you can bet your bottom dollar that tower isn’t going to fall over.

Experimentation and failure is an essential part of creativity, learning and growth. Having a go, risking failure and learning from our attempts is an important part of life, no matter what age we are.

Lesson 1: Don’t let fear of failure prevent you from trying.

What’s now, not what’s next

The little fella and I have two very different reactions to placing one block on top of another. My instant reaction is ‘what’s next? Grab another block, we’ll build it higher.’

His reaction, on the other hand, is to sit and marvel at what he’s already built. It is only after he is completely pleased with himself (and everyone else has appreciated his work) that he moves onto building the tower higher.

How often do you find yourself thinking about the next thing rather than appreciating what you have now, in this moment? I find myself doing it all the time.

We accomplish a goal and we’re straight onto the next one.

We sit still in the present, but our minds are in the future, thinking about dinner and getting the washing in and checking facebook.

We strive to fit more into our day, rather than taking the time to do less things more thoroughly.

We spend our lives thinking about what we don’t have or what we haven’t done, rather than appreciating the things we have.

Lesson 2: Stop and appreciate what you already have now before moving onto the next thing.

As adults, we can benefit from bringing back some of the wonder, the fun, the play, the creativity and the leisure time we had as children. We can learn again to take pleasure in the process as well as the outcome.

Have you read these articles?:

1. achieving new year’s resolutions – a strategy for building positive change part one
2. living an authentic life here and now
3. uncommitted. declutter your schedule and get a life

The thought for this Thursday is a passage from the free eBook written Cara Stein of 17000 Days.

“As you align yourself with your values and do challenging work that calls on your strengths, you will find yourself absorbed in what you’re doing. Sometimes time will pass without your notice, and you won’t be aware of yourself or your surroundings, just absorbed in your work. That’s called the flow state. You become one with your work. This is the source of deep gratification and great accomplishment. Here’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who named the flow state, has to say about it:

‘It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand… Only after the task is completed do we have the leisure to look back on what has happened, and then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellence of that experience—then, in retrospect, we are happy… The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness.’

You’ll never get the flow state by watching tv, but activities like rock climbing, writing, skiing, painting, dancing, or programming are good candidates. For an activity to invoke the flow state, it must:

• require concentration
• be challenging but a good match for your skills
• provide immediate feedback
• represent a harmony between what you feel, want, and think.

It’s one of life’s ironies that we often choose to spend time passively as a gift to ourselves, when true satisfaction and deep happiness come from doing the things that require more of us.”

I love this idea. Often we (and I mean me here) use the need to relax as an excuse to justify wasting hours in front of the box (be it TV or computer). But what we really need to relax and make ourselves happy isn’t losing playing endless games of Spider Solitaire, but is something more challenging and more satisfying.

You can get the full free eBook called How to be happy at Cara’s Site 17000 Days.

Have you read these articles?:

1. food for thought thursday – status anxiety
2. Food for thought thursday–one reason why we might be allergic to food
3. food for thought thursday–a little each day

They say that Gen-Y are the instant gratification generation, we want everything and we want everything now. I can relate to that, I’ve often had the desire for immediacy myself.

Maybe it’s a sign of maturity (here’s hoping), but I’ve really come to appreciate lately that I don’t need to have everything now, that I can wait, and that it’s ok to wait. In fact, it’s often better to wait for what we want, and to just appreciate what we have in the moment.

Maybe it’s the perspective of aging: the older you get, the more time you have to look back on and reflect, ‘look at all the things that happened in the past ten years, imagine what is going to happen in the next ten years!’ Not that I’m saying I’m old, just that, like everyone, I’m growing older.

I now appreciate more the idea of ‘a little each day’. Life doesn’t have to be all or nothing. For example, while I would like to wile away the hours crafting, one row of knitting is sufficient (two is a bonus). I no longer need a whole block of time to do something I enjoy (although as I said on Tuesday, DH and I have agreed to give each other a whole block of time each week). And, by the end of the week, I may have done seven rows of knitting (which is seven more rows than what I would have done if I had waited for a block of time to do seven rows, if you know what I mean).

We want to renovate our yard. I would love to hire a little digger to come and do it all in an hour or two, but our funds don’t stretch that far, so we are digging it out one load at a time, one week at a time. It’s slow work that will take many months, but the yard is already looking better. Imagine what it will look like if we do nothing at all because we felt that a little at a time wasn’t worth the effort.

Results are gradual. And I have the time to wait. There are other things to enjoy in the meantime.

Have you read these articles?:

1. food for thought thursday – another reason to build a stockpile of food
2. Food for thought thursday–one reason why we might be allergic to food
3. food for thought thursday – taking the stairs

When I think of the things that make me happy, and what I want more of in my life, I realise that none of those things can be bought with money. I don’t want clothes or the latest gadgets or more stuff (ok, sometimes I do), instead, I want intangible things that improve the quality of life. Sometimes I get stuck thinking ‘I wish we had…’ but when I think deeply about it, I know I wouldn’t be any happier once we procured whatever item it is on the wish list.

I sat down and actually wrote out a list of things that would really make me happy. This is a good exercise to do, because now I can focus on those things that are important and that will bring greatest happiness. Here is the list I came up with:

I would like…

More energy. I would love to bound out of bed in the morning, have enough energy to chase after the little fella all day and still be able to get stuff done at night when he’s fast asleep and spend quality time with DH.

More fitness. Probably related to the above. I don’t enjoy the things that I used to. I think I would have more fun if I was fitter.

Better health. Who doesn’t want to be healthier?

To be more organised. I’m getting there slowly.

More patience. Generally, I think I’m fairly patient, but there’s still room for improvement. Having children certainly tones your patience muscles.

More grace. More acceptance. More goodwill. More fortitude.

More gratitude. I want to spend more time seeing the world through glasses half full, rather that glasses half empty (to extend the word play – the glass would have to be filled with red wine or pink lemonade to give that rosy glow).

More wisdom. I love getting older for just this reason. When I was about ten I read a book called ‘The Crone’ about a wise woman with gnarled hands who lived in a cave and to whom people came to for healing potions and advice. I remember thinking ‘that’s what I want to be when I grow up!’

More fun, more laughs, more silliness. This is really what being happy is all about, having fun and a lot of laughs with family and friends.

What things do you want that would make you really happy?

Have you read these articles?:

1. Can You Afford to Buy a House?
2. Do You Buy Garbage?
3. why being lazy can save you money…

Our neighbour is under a lot of stress at the moment.

How do I know this?

Well, she drove into the side of our house.

No damage was done to our house (although her car is a little worse for wear), but I when I asked her if she was ok, she avalanched me with all the details of how stressed out she is at the moment.

Actually, driving into the side of our house was the grand finale to a week of stressed out events that included her daughter losing her brand new shoes at the park (upon returning, someone else had already claimed them), and locking herself out of the house, twice (ahem, there’s not much privacy when you live in a block of townhouses).

This has all cost her money which, she told me, she doesn’t have at the moment. Petrol to drive back to get the shoes, the cost of replacing the shoes, the cost of getting a locksmith to get into her house, twice, and the cost of repairing the car.

Now, I really feel for our neighbour. She’s having one of those weeks. I’ve had plenty of those weeks myself. Where everything is crazy. You’re on overdrive. Too stressed to sleep. A million things to do. Mistakes. Accidents. Bruises. Waste. Memory loss. Things piling up and up. Being pulled this way and that. Doing too many things at once. Multi-tasking. Multi-screwing-up. Multi-exploding.

Stop.

Breathe.

Take a pause. Take a deep breath. Take a shot of bourbon (or not, I’m a bit partial to the occasional dram myself).

You will get more done, more efficiently, after a good break.

In fact, break less, after a good break.

Now write a list. Cross off everything that isn’t important, prioritise what is and focus on getting just that done. One task at a time. When the kids are asleep.

And get your power steering fixed.

At least, that’s my advice to our neighbour.