Day 1

The Happiness Project

For those of you who didn't know, I picked this book up during my last visit to Calgary about a month ago. It's called "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin and chronicles her journey of making small changes in her life that will help increase her happiness. As a part of the book, it has an instructional Happiness Project section that outlines how you can go through the progress and hopefully make the strides that she made. A part of the project that she made a habit of doing was to blog about the experiences she was going through and if she was experiencing any positive changes. In light of that, I've decided to do the same thing with starting my own Happiness Project (being the 1st of July) and have a daily blog. To keep things simple, I'll go through the basics of the project for my first blog post.


Why start a Happiness Project?

One thing that Gretchen makes very clear at the beginning of the book is the fact that she's not depressed and that this isn't some kind of method of coping with depression. She has other reasons for starting the project and it's only fair that I let you read it in her words.

As for me, I also want to make it very clear that I'm not depressed (as far as I know of), but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm the happiest that I can be. Since moving back to Edmonton a year ago, I've found that the number of spontaneous and joy filled moments that I treasured from my year in Calgary had really gone down. I wasn't unhappy in Edmonton, it had seemed like I just fell into a comfortable routine that wasn't making the most of my potential. So what more fitting then to buy The Happiness Project book during my visit to Calgary and have some time to reflect on what I wanted in life.


When does this start?

My initial plan was to have this project start on July 1st. One of the things that Gretchen does in the book is she dedicates a full month to focusing on one area of her life that she'd like to improve. I chose July because I was excited to get started on a new project (as I always am), and it's a month that will really make me reflect on my life (my torn ACL surgery being in mid July).

How does it work?

How this project works (as far as I know since I'm only done 75% of the book thus far, haha whoops), is that I'll be outlining 12 different areas of my life that I'm going to be working on for the next 12 months. What's important here is being specific with my departments of life, what I'd like to change about them, having a plan to execute it, and then measuring my success. It sounds like a very business school type of mentality but Gretchen comes from a law background, and it's always been the approach that has worked for me in the past.

What's key here is tracking, which I've never been good at. I need to track my results for a few of reasons:
1) Self-reflection is where I'm at my best: For those who know me well enough, I've always been a creature of habit when it comes to self-reflection. The more I know about myself the better. I also like to think that I do a pretty good job of being realistic with my self-assessment and knowing what needs to happen next.
2) Justification: Sometimes you need to see it to believe it. What I mean by that is sometimes you need to see how far you've come in order to say to yourself, 'Yeah this is something that's worth my time and is something that I want to pursue'.
3) Encouragement: Kinda related to number two; it's much easier to stay on the bandwagon when you see how far you've come.


That's about it for now. I'm really excited to lay down the framework for this project as soon as possible and get started on my first resolution. First thing is first, I need to read the rest of this book. Thankfully it's so fricken hot today that it makes it easy to hide in the basement a read a good book.