I had a hard time watching the animated movie Inside Out. I went to see the movie with my kids and, like most of my mommy friends, I cried in the dark theater. The movie reminded me of how many of my children’s memories are fading and dissolving in clouds of smoke – like how my son can’t remember the imaginary friend he had when he was really little or the sweet ceremony our family shared when our first cat died.

But what made me squirm in my seat was how Inside Out reminded me of times in my own life when my outside circumstances changed and wreaked havoc with my internal emotions, like when I let go of my massage therapy practice last year, when I lost a dear friend while in my 20s, when I shifted from being a mother of one to a mom of two.

Sometimes Joy disappears from my emotional headquarters, leaving in charge a confused muddle of Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. When Joy is absent, my husband reminds me of all of the goodness we share: healthy kids, work we love, a beautiful home. His words are a gentle shake of my shoulders as he tries to settle Joy back where she belongs.

But Joy has to find her own way home.

I try to help. I keep a gratitude journal to illuminate parts of the dark path for Joy to find her way back to my emotional control center. I build signposts for Joy by exercising regularly in my dance classes and heading outside for early morning walks. A healthy diet of good mood food, reminders to rest and play, and time with friends keep the path clear for Joy, too.

But waiting for Joy to return is mostly about being patient, trusting that she’ll find her place with the other emotions at the control panel and expertly turn up the happiness dial. I know Joy is back when happiness comes unexpectedly and unbidden, when I feel like I've stepped out of a dark movie theater after a summer matinée, blinking in quiet surprise at the forgotten brightness of the sun.

My husband, boys and I were sitting on a bench overlooking Monterey Bay, behind the Seymour Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz. It was a gorgeous day, the fog bank had receded, birds happily chirped in the trees, dragonflies flitted in and out of the grey whale skeleton behind us, the boys weren’t bickering too much. It was a fairy tale moment.

I should have been happy. I should have been enjoying our time together as a family. But I wasn’t.

I had slept miserably the previous night at the Pigeon Point Hostel, my period had started unexpectedly that morning on our three-day trip, and I was frustrated with the WiFi at the hostel, which was exceptionally slow. I had started working at 5:30 that morning on the Touch Blue Sky newsletter, which was supposed to drop the next day, but the super slow WiFi meant I spent three hours on what should have taken me less than one – and I still wasn’t done.

But here we were. On a family trip. Together in the sunshine.

In the past, I would have tried to guilt myself into a forced, false happiness.

Instead, I recognized my mood for what it was: temporary, understandable, and not an indication I was a bad wife and mom, just a grumpy one.

I remembered a calming technique neuropsychologist Rick Hansen recommended in his book Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom and began to shift my breathing into evenly spaced inhalations and exhalations.

As we walked along the bluff above the Pacific Ocean, I counted my breaths, eight counts in, eight counts out, in and out, again and again.

All of my pissy-ness, I allowed.

All of my tiredness, I allowed.

All of my irritation at the boys as they kicked and threw bark from the pathway at each other, I allowed.

All of my frustration at the hostel’s WiFi and at myself for poor planning, I allowed.

There was nothing I needed to change. All of it, I allowed.

Eight counts in, eight counts out.

After a few minutes, I felt kindness and compassion for my tired, achy, stressed self, and more acceptance of my frustration, irritation, and exhaustion.

And, in this soft moment, my heavy mood lifted like coastal fog.

I thought writing a book would be easy, similar to creating a series of blog posts, each 1,500 word piece lining up like a queue of eager and effervescent teenaged girls before an Ed Sheeran concert.

In the days before my writing program began, I mapped out when I would write: Mondays and Tuesdays mid-day, Wednesday mornings, several hours on Thursdays before picking the boys up from school, Friday afternoons while my husband, Bill, was on with the boys.

I worried that adding writing into an already full schedule would cut into my time with my family and friends. I reassured myself that I could handle the extra responsibilities and the additional demands on my time and attention.

I was good at managing my time.

My “writing lite” schedule fell apart early in my first week of writing. I discovered writing a book was less like a teenaged crowd and more like a mob scene. Instead of writing for a few hours here and there throughout the week, I would sit down to write in the dark hours of the morning and would still be wrestling with words at 11:00 at night. I felt like security at the gate: too many unruly thoughts that wouldn’t settle down, never-ending red-alerts for my attention, and stubborn lines of writer’s block that I just couldn’t cross.

My time with my family dwindled to family dinners, working alongside my kids while they finished their homework, a few stolen hours on a Sunday to ride bikes or go get ice cream.

My husband took over much of the household, getting the boys ready for school in the mornings, doing the laundry, reining in the boys’ electronic use which had surged out of control as I spent more and more time upstairs in the big brown chair with my laptop on my lap.

I submitted the final pages in June and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

I believed after this writing mob scene, my schedule would return to normal. But the book and the subsequent new business that grew from it tore up the landscape of my life. Normal no longer existed. The aftermath of the writing riot felt like building a town from scratch: establishing the framework for a new business, structuring new programs, and assembling a new website. There was always a project needing my attention.

My über patient husband sat me down for a one-on-one, wanting to know when he could expect me back.

I took a long, hard look at my schedule. I made a list of tasks, projects, and ongoing responsibilities and got to work on drafting an ideal schedule. I quickly realized that even if I cut sleeping back to far less than the minimum recommended daily allowance, everything on my list wouldn’t fit into each week’s 168 hours.

Something needed to change and that something was me.

I no longer had the time to satisfy my inner Mean Manager by spending hours shaping my projects into an ideal framework, searching for the right turn of phrase, and looking for the ideal image to accompany a post. In the past, I was done when a project felt just right, when I received a nod of approval from my highly critical internal critic.

I was what Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz calls a maximizer, a person who struggles with decision-making to the point of unhappiness. I ranked quite high on a test that measured maximizer tendencies. I would spend an exhaustive number of hours developing a program or writing a blog and still not feel it was done. I agonized over every word in my Facebook posts. I reread everything I wrote, from the smallest post to my full book manuscript, over and over and over, hoping to arrive at a place where I was satisfied.

Each moment spent researching, reworking, rewriting, redoing – aka nitpicking –  took away time I had for everything else, especially my family.

I set a goal to build satisficer habits, to allow my good enough efforts to be just that – good enough.

“One of the things that life teaches you is that ‘good enough’ is almost always good enough,” says Schwartz in a Wall Street Journal article. “You learn that you can get satisfaction out of perfectly wonderful but not perfect outcomes.”

My brand new satisficer standards are creating big shifts for me. I’m writing more and checking off items on my to do list in record time. I’m sharing more of what interests me on Facebook – and spending much less time agonizing over each post. I packed for a full-day spent at the park on the 4th of July in record time, realizing that we could buy or do without whatever I forgot (only big plates for dinner so we ate off the little ones I had brought for dessert.) I’m stepping away from my laptop and spending a lot more time with my family.

I’m discovering that I don’t have to pass through perfection's gate in order to enjoy the journey. My good enough is actually great.


Kathleen Ann Harper is a life coach for moms and author of the soon-to-be-released book The Well-Crafted Mom. She offers programs and workshops for moms, including Find Your Time, a one-on-one program to help you find time for yourself and what inspires and sustains you, within the midst of motherhood. Kathleen's mothers' group this month will introduce moms to tools to take control of their time.