My Happiness Project - Commitment

I started reading a book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and decided maybe it is a good time to start my own happiness project.  And just in case your imagination starts running wild, no this is not about the pursuit of happiness, instead, it is about increasing the level of happiness in life.  Now I will be the first to admit, while I am happy, I do not necessarily feel happy all the time and the intention of this project is to make this feeling of happiness more prevalent.

While this sounds like a trivial task to many, including me, I soon discovered that this is far from the truth and that in order to create an environment in which happiness becomes more prevalent I am going to have to do some serious soul searching and make some serious commitments to myself.  And herein lies the problem.

I have often made commitments to myself and, more often then not, have let myself down.  This, I have discovered, is not a very good place to be.  If I am unable to maintain the commitments I have established for myself does this mean I will not be able to meet the commitments that I have made to others?  While this seemed like a valid assumption at first, I realised, that  I am better at keeping commitments that I make to others because, at some level, I am concerned about what others think of me and I would like others to perceive me as committed.  What I failed to realise that since I was very lax about my own commitments to myself, that my self perception and not to mention my self esteem was taking a bit of a beating.

Having a look at the commitments I made to myself I found that there were a rather large number of commitments and that most were unrealistic so much so that if I had kept all my commitments to myself, realistically speaking, I would have absolutely no time for anything besides trying to manage and maintain my commitments.  Its no wonder I had failed so dismally.

Being an IT person it soon dawned on me that what I needed to do was to establish a framework for my life and what I came up with was the following guiding principles that would serve my purpose:
  • Do not commit to anything to which I am unable to commit to and be fully committed to the ones I do commit too
  • Act within my value system
  • Pray everyday
  • Reflect on your actions
Based on the above I have committed to the following:

  • I am committed to My Happiness Project and I commit to feedback regularly on my blog 
  • I am committed to maintaining a journal for the purposes of reflection and I commit to writing at least one page a day in my journal
I am sure that there will be more commitments that I will have to make, but for now these are the ones that make sense and will keep me focused.

So join me on this voyage of discovery and who knows what treasures will be uncovered? :-)  

Points to ponder and or share:

What are your guiding principles?
What are your thoughts on happiness?




 

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 11, 2013 at 11:17 PM

    "According to the current "hedonic treadmill theory" which compares the pursuit of happiness to a person on a treadmill, who has to keep working just to stay in the same place".

    Interesting, Happy is what happy does. Perhaps not just about attaining the goal(s), but finding contentment, peace, joy in the activities leading up to achieving those goals.

    ReplyDelete

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