More Happiness Commandments

I have a few more to add to this list.

Say sorry: I have a tendency to always be right. (Even if I'm not completely right, chances are I'm not going to give in until you agree with me or at least see my side...) This is fine, until of course, I'm wrong. In which case I find it incredibly difficult to apologize. The words "I'm sorry" do not fall freely from my lips. However, I have found that I can not only boost my happiness, but REALLY boost Kent's happiness if I just buck up and say it.



One minute rule: This is less of a commandment and more of a helpful tip. The idea is that if it takes me less than one minute to do a task, I do it immediately. For example, I keep all the kids important school papers filed downstairs, separated in giant Ziplocs by school year. I dislike the task of deciding which papers are important enough to keep, let alone walk the ten steps downstairs to file them. So now, every day when the kids are done with school, I immediately sort their things- some artwork gets hung up, some papers get filed and some I get rid of (not very many fall into this category!). It is so much easier doing it right away then trying to fumble through giant stacks of their work whenever I got around to it. Until I started applying this one minute rule, I had no idea how many things I was putting off. If it's going to take you less than a minute- do it! I promise you'll be happy!



Stop glory seeking: Kent and I are both middle children and our personalities are quite similar. He LOVES for me to tell him what a good job he did. At anything. One day he called me and his story started like this, "Well, the old kindness bug has bitten again..." and proceeded to rattle off a list of nice things he had done that day. I scolded him, "It's not genuine kindness if you're doing it just so you can call me and have me tell you how good you are!" Here's the embarassing part- I'm even more guilty of this than he his. I'm trying harder to do things because I WANT to do them, not because I'm secretly hoping someone will tell me "Good job!"