30 Days of More Happiness - 10 Years On

Revisiting my happiness activity was a mixed experience. While it was good to revise what I've kept and how it helps me remain positive - this activity originally happened during my father-in-law's final weeks. So, it included thinking back to the last few days we spend with him and the sadness of that time. But, it also reminded how the journalling helped me maintain a generally positive focus during that time. The result of which was feeling like I was better able to support Derek.

This activity includes three talks that share some similar ideas about how to be more positive - or happier. You can read the initial post about it all here. Since I am not a natural 'happy' person, this was an interesting activity. To be clear, I wasn't really chasing happiness. Rather, this was about increasing positivity and reducing the harder, negative thought processes I manage in my brain. Overall, I think it helped then and continues to help.

How this evolved

The best way to think about this is that it gave me a toolkit to help improve my mindset when things are more challenging than usual. Be that because of my own depression, heavy workloads or general stuff that happens in the world. I have adapted some of these principles into other actions for my toolkit, as well as using them just as they were during this activity.

The interesting thing is that I include some of these things in some of the training I do - particularly the resilience and stress management training. I'm a huge proponent of gratitude journalling and have even convinced Derek to do it a couple of times. And I can genuinely say that I have a more positive mindset than I did before this activity. Now, I do not discount the fact that: I now freelance and work from home; we've been in our lovely home for nine years; I'm generally more settled and comfortable with myself than I was back then etc. But, the impact of My Year of TED on a lot of those things also needs to be acknowledged.

All in all, a powerful activity that gave me some great tools to help me be more positive - and yes, maybe happier.