Happiness Project – Tools:

After I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, I bought several copies for my closest family and friends to read in the hopes they would get as much out of it as I had. Today, I caught up with one of my closest and most wonderful friends for our first “Happiness Project Date”. We chatted about what we ultimately wanted to achieve this year with our own version of Rubin’s Happiness Project and what our monthly themes could be and the resolutions we would attempt to stick to during each month. We both agreed that January would be a month of focus and organisation as well as new beginnings in order to set ourselves up for the year and for the following eleven months of resolutions and goals.

As I mentioned in a previous post I am completely and utterly obsessed with kikki.K. As such, their amazing workbooks, journals and stationary have been a major aspect  in the development of my Happiness Project. This probably sounds a bit too obsessive, right? Let me explain. They have a series of notebooks, divided into sections that aim to help you put together your thoughts about your personal development.

I have been using their Goals Book, Wellbeing Journal and Gratitude Book in the development of my Happiness Project and I think they will be invaluable tools in tracking my progress during my year of happiness.

The Goals Book is split onto Personal Development, Family & Relationships, Finance & Career, Health & Fitness and Dare to Dream with pages for you to write the steps needed to get you to each specific goal as well as a mind map for your ‘perfect life’ and questions to work through to realise your goals.

The Wellbeing Journal includes the tabbed sections Body, Mind, Surrounding and Journal with specific pages to help you set goals in relation to food, exercise, sleep, time for yourself, positive thinking, stress reduction, reclaiming time, social wellbeing, personal surroundings and our planet.

The Gratitude Book is more of a simpler format filled with lined pages for you to write down three things you are grateful for each day. I think it is very important not only to take time to think about what you are grateful for in your life, but also to show it through your actions. This book is great as well because it comes with 10 postcards that you can send to people telling them what you are grateful for.

 

So, these are the tools that I will be using to create and track my happiness project. In my next post I will detail my goals for the month of January and share my personal resolutions.

 

“It’s your world.

You’re a shareholder,

take an active interest in it”

–Anonymous-

 

Eleanor x

My Happiness Project

I cannot even count how many times I tried to write an intro to this post. The fact is, I am not the one to clearly explain what a Happiness Project is. The idea comes from author Gretchen Rubin who just so happens to have written a book called The Happiness Project. “It is the account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier.”

Cover via Amazon

In her very first blog post (one of the tasks she set herself during her Happiness Project) Rubin describes her venture like this:

“Now, what is the Happiness Project? One afternoon a few years ago, I realized with a jolt that I was allowing my life to flash by without facing a critical question: was I happy? From that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about happiness. Was it mostly a product of temperament? Could I take steps to be happier? What did it even mean to be “happy”? So The Happiness Project is my memoir of one year in which I test-drive every principle, tip, theory, and research-study result I can find, from Aristotle to St. Therese to Benjamin Franklin to Martin Seligman to Oprah. What advice actually works?”

It is a wonderful book that I picked up mid-last year after seeing a referral to it in a magazine. The entire time I was reading it, I had a massive grin on my face, I could relate to many of the things she spoke about.

According to Rubin:

“A “happiness project” is an approach to changing your life. First is the preparation stage, when you identify what brings you joy, satisfaction, and engagement, and also what brings you guilt, anger, boredom, and remorse. Second is the making of resolutions, when you identify the concrete actions that will boost your happiness. Then comes the interesting part: keeping your resolutions.”

Rubin designed her Happiness Project so that each of the twelve months of the year would have a set theme about something she wanted to tackle in relation to happiness and she created resolutions around that theme to adopt during the month, building on more each month. She tackled Vitality, Marriage, Work, Parenthood, Leisure, Friendship, Money, Eternity, Books, Attitude and Happiness.

Upon reading this wonderful book I decided I wanted to embark on my own Happiness Project. Of course, mine cannot mimic Gretchen Rubin’s as not everything applies to my life. I have been preparing for a while and identifying some themes I would like to focus on. I am now working on making my own resolutions.

I don’t want to write an essay of a post, so I’ll just leave it at that for today and I’ll keep you updated with my progress.

If you like the sound of starting your own Happiness Project, or are intrigued to learn more, I suggest you buy the book or head to The Happiness Project Blog.

Eleanor x