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A Wobbly Well-Being - Using New Tools to Find a Happy Balance

2/27/2017

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On Saturday, I made a mess. I linked test tubes with wire and leather to make vases to see if my ideas for the craft project for my next moms' gathering in March actually work and aren't too complicated or frustrating. 

As I sat at the dining room table and puttered, got frustrated, developed new ideas, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, I remembered how much I missed being creative when my boys were little. I never had time for a full project from start to finish. There wasn't enough time to organize my supplies, much less organize my thoughts. And then, even if I did manage to get my creative juices flowing, I'd be constantly interrupted. I couldn't finish what I had started and, by the time I could get back to what I had been working on, my momentum and inspiration were gone.

Back then, with the help of a couples counselor, my husband, Bill, and I carved out one morning a week when I had the house to myself. At first, I thought I needed this time to not be needed. Time to rest without a little one needing a snack. Time to think without thinking about everything that needed to be done. Time to just be without having to do. Time when all the care that went into managing the family, house, and business could go into caring for me for a little while.

After resting during my "me mornings" for a few months, my creative inspiration returned. During my three precious hours each week, I refinished bar stools in the kitchen, sewed pillow covers for the couch and love seat, got out my jewelry supplies and started designing and making jewelry again. Once a week, I'd wave goodbye to my family as Bill backed the car out of the driveway and then I'd spend the next three hours completely absorbed.

What had been missing was a big part of what made me feel like me, not only my creativity but the time when I felt completely lost in what I was doing. I found my happiness in the feeling of flow.


I had learned about the flow state in college classes but hadn’t realized its importance to my happiness until I lost the time to be engaged in flow, and then found it again. The awareness of how I felt without flow compared to my happiness while in flow changed how I managed my time, and what activities I filled my time with.

A Model for Well-Being
Years later, in my life coach training, I learned about the PERMA model of well-being, developed by the founder of the Positive Psychology movement, Martin Seligman. Seligman’s model includes five buckets – Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement – that comprise how we create a well-balanced life.  

Seligman recommends that you become aware of how you create your happy life, how you distribute your time and energy into the five PERMA buckets, noticing when you feel unbalanced – like when there’s too much time in Achievement, meeting a goal at work, for example – and using the PERMA model to recognize how to redistribute your time, energy, and attention back to what feels better. 

Here’s a description of each of the PERMA categories:
• Positive Emotions - Making room in your life for what makes you feel good. Creating positive emotions, like contentment, peace, happiness, pleasure, joy, and excitement through what you do and by feeling optimistic.

• Engagement - Having opportunities to get into what psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow: becoming so absorbed in an activity that you lose sense of time.

• Relationships - Spending time and committing to relationships that sustain and fulfill you.

• Meaning - Creating opportunities that matter to you. Focusing your attention on matters that are greater than yourself.

• Accomplishment - Working on activities and projects that give you a sense of achievement. Setting and achieving goals.

Everyone is different with how they distribute their “units of happiness" into the five buckets. If you have a strong drive to succeed at work, you might have more happy points in the Achievement bucket. Or maybe you find joy in helping others in your community, so when you allocate more time toward activities that bring Meaning in your life, you feel happier.

Making the PERMA Model Work For You
Here’s an exercise so you can do to see how this works. 

• Download this handout of the PERMA buckets. 

• Now, count out 20 small items – like pennies, M&Ms, Cheerios, goldfish crackers … These items will be your “units of happiness.” 

• Think about a time in your life when your life felt balanced, when you felt happy.

• 
As you think about that time, imagine how many units of happiness were going into each of the PERMA buckets. Distribute your 20 small items into the five different categories.

• Make a note of your PERMA well-balanced score on the lines under the PERMA circles.

• 
Move your units of happiness out of the way and think about your life as it is right now. How do you allocate your 20 bits of happiness? Where are you putting your most time and your most energy regularly? 

• Write your current PERMA score underneath your well-balanced score.

What’s different?


Maybe there’s a disparity between your Meaning scores. If your best balanced time came when you were volunteering each week for a cause you felt passionate about, you might feel happier now by adding more meaning into your life. What tiny, beautiful thing can you do to create more purpose in your life right now?  

You might see a big difference between your Positive Emotions scores. Perhaps there aren’t many options right now to create positive emotions; you’re too busy or too overwhelmed. Rick Hanson, psychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness, says that recalling positive experiences from the past has the same positive benefit on the brain as creating new ones. Take 30 seconds once or twice a day to re-experience a positive memory, diving deep into your recollection of the event to make it vivid in your mind, allowing the positive emotions warm you up from the inside out.

For me, creating more well-being in my life right now means finding time for more Engagement. My craft project on Saturday helped raise my happiness quite a bit and I'm marking off time in my calendar for more creative endeavors. I'm delighted with my linked test tube vases. They turned out a lot like how I see my happiness and well-being: wonderfully imperfect and a bit wobbly, needing my attention to make sure they're balanced just right. 

Big hugs!
Kathleen

The Well-Crafted Mom's gathering for mothers this month is focused on finding, losing, and returning to balance again and again. The mini-retreats are made up of small groups of lovely moms who come together for conversation, compassion, and creativity. To save your spot in the Wednesday evening or Saturday mini-retreat, register here.



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Carrying Light on the Change Train

2/6/2017

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I think it's pretty safe to assume that your inner COO is exhausted.

Each of us has a part of ourselves that's responsible for building new habits, sticking with the old ones, and figuring out how to fit everything into a day.

I call this inner manager the Chief Operating Officer. She's quite good at her job. She has to be. She's the one who developed the systems for you to build all your habits – the good ones and the bad.

Think about all of the things you do now that take very little conscious thought, like pretty much everything in your morning routine: going to the bathroom (when you're potty training kids, you realize how much of a feat this is), getting all the shampoo out of your hair in the shower, putting on eyeliner... The list of “mindless” habits is long and continues throughout your day.

But your daily habits are far from mindless – your COO has created programs for your habit, each in its own slot in your brain, ready to repeat again and again.

At the beginning of the year, you might have made a long list of new habits you wanted to build. Maybe your list included adding more exercise, changing your diet so you and your family are eating better, going on more date nights so you can see your spouse as more than just a co-parent, getting a new job (or figuring out how to actually like the one you’re in). Maybe you added some self-care desires to your list, like getting a massage once a month, spending more time with your girlfriends, or taking a fun art class once a quarter.

How’s it going with all that?

About right now, I’m thinking your COO is more than a little overwhelmed. She’s no slacker but there's only so much she can do. And she has only a little bit of help  – Willpower and Dopamine.

Willpower is determined to help but she’s a bit of a delicate flower. She gets very tired very quickly and then slinks off the job to the break room. And when you go looking for her, she's half awake scrolling through Facebook with one hand with the other deep in a bag of Cheetos (even though she's the one in charge of managing the new diet).

Dopamine is quite perky. Hair in a high ponytail, toothy smile, lots of clapping and bouncing. I know you know the type. When you're building a new habit, like going to the gym, Dopamine is by your side: You put on your workout clothes! Yay, you! Look at you in the new Crossfit class! This is so exciting!

It feels good to have Dopamine with you, like you’re drinking free shots of happy juice at the smoothie bar.

But Dopamine is easily bored. She’s not so upbeat on Day Two at the gym. Weren't we here earlier in the week? she whines as you tie your shoes. She half-heartedly claps as you complete your set of burpees, but she's clearly not as impressed as she was on Day One.

Dopamine is only interested what’s new, so she soon wanders off and you’re left to trudge through your workout alone.

Meanwhile, the COO is trying to manage all the new habits you’re trying to build. Her biggest challenge by far is handling the barrage of incoming messages like …

• You've worked hard today. You deserve to have an easy night. Let’s order Chinese food and have it delivered.

• Your daughter hates the daycare at the gym. Are you really going to be that mom that puts herself before her child?

• One cookie won't make a difference in your diet.


Your COO can usually handle these messages when they come one at a time, masterfully batting them away like they're irritating salespeople with inferior products to sell. But now she's can’t handle the deluge while developing the systems for all your new habits.

There’s a final straw – an argument with your spouse, a really bad day at work, or a call from the principal’s office at your daughter’s school – and your COO is done for the day, maybe for the month. Definitely, she’s done for now. She's got a bad case of the "screw-its," and the diet, new exercise routine, even the motivation for planning the next date night is gone.

So what do I do? I hear you cry. When there’s so much that I need to do to improve my life, be happier, be a better mom/wife/daughter/sister/employee/manager… Your list really does go on and on.

You might believe that going all-in is the way to get you where you want to be, but it’s often the sure fire way to set yourself up for failure.

Here's what to do instead: Pick one small thing. That’s it. One small thing from your long list of self-improvement, life-improvement, parent-improvement, work-improvement goals. Start there.

What’s your one small thing? Losing 20 pounds is too big. Eating healthfully is too vague. Choose a goal that’s you think is too small to make a dent and start there, like eating a healthy lunch three days a week.

When you start small, here’s what happens.

• You learn to trust yourself.
When you work on change bit by bit, you build self-confidence because you’re less likely to get the “screw-its.”

• You’re more likely to stay on track.
If/when you fall off the change train, it’s much easier to climb back on board because you’re only carrying one habit along with you, instead of a pile of self-improvement luggage.

• You learn a lot about yourself – which helps you get better at building new habits.
When you focus on building only one habit at a time, you can see where you’re getting in your own way, like when you listen to your thoughts that try to convince you to eat ice cream at 9:15 at night or pay attention to your inner critic’s voice that tells you that you’re not strong enough or smart enough to follow through with your plans.

• You’re better able to achieve your goal.
When you build a new habit step-by-step, you’re also making sure that you’re giving your inner COO the time to build strong systems that can support the new habits so they become an unconscious part of your routine. When you start small, you make sure Willpower has enough energy and Dopamine stays on board with each small step along the way.

As you climb aboard the Change Train, pack light – one small carry-on habit at a time.

Hugs,
Kathleen

Do you need some help figuring out what change you’d like to make and how to break it down into lightweight but powerful steps? Schedule a coaching session with me and we’ll create a do-able plan for your inner COO – and her assistants Willpower and Dopamine – to build. To schedule your planning session, go to The Well-Crafted Mom’s online calendar here. Use coupon code NEW50 for half-off your first coaching session with me!

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    The Well-Crafted Mom

    About

    ​I'm an author, certified life coach, Tarot card reader, and HR professional (that's a combination!) I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband (William White of Happy Baby Signs), and our two sons, plus a rescue poodle, and a tabby cat that rolls over and fetches.

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