If you wanted to become a marathon runner how would you go about it? You would hire a trainer or learn what you need to do, create a plan of how you were going to increase your fitness level and you would practice learning the skill of being a marathon runner, continuously improving your fitness and strengthening your muscles with repetitive exercise and training.
If you wanted to lose weight you would also have to create a plan of how you were going to do this. You might first seek help for this via a personal trainer, a gym membership and/or a nutritionist. You would have to take a step by step process to achieving this weight loss and these steps would require cleaning out your cupboard of unhealthy foods and replacing it with healthy foods and learning to exercise, strengthening your muscles through repetition of your exercise program and gradually losing weight.
If you wanted to open a new business, you would need to learn what it takes to run a business and create a business plan. If you wanted to save for a house, you would need a savings plan.
So why don't we ever have a plan for how to be happy? Let's face it, how many of us grow up with the natural ability to go with the flow of life and not let many things faze us, like some people seem to have?
The truth is that although we all aspire to be happy in our lives, few of us contemplate how we are actually going to do this. This may be because you don't really know why you are unhappy in the first place.
People often think that it is events that make us unhappy, so they place their energy into trying to get that situation to change and put life 'back on track'. After that difficult event, they may become happy for a while, but this is only until another difficult event comes up again and they feel like they are 'off track' again.
However, it is not these events that cause us to feel unhappy, it is how we think about these difficult events that enter our lives. If it was the event then every person who experienced the same event (marriage breakup, difficult children, an unplanned caesarian etc) would react with the same unhappines. But we know that this is not true. Not everyone gets upset over these events. Why? Because they interpre these events differently in their mind.
The reality of life is that there are alwyas going to be ups and downs. This you cannot change. Life will not always go to plan and you cannot control how life unfolds. What you can change, however is how you view the 'down' times with your mind.
Changing how you think about events that happen in your life and adopting a realistic and healthy mindset is the way to achieve happiness.
The road to happiness, if it is not a natural thing for you, will require a plan. It will require assistance from people who have knowledge about how to attain it, and it will require you to learn new ways to think. Just like losing weight it will require you to clean out your mind of unhealthy thoughts and learn which healthy thoughts to replace them with.
This plan would then require you to repeat this new healthy thinking over and over again, physically strenghtening the muscles in your mind to grow new connections, so that this new thinking becomes the strong super highway of thinking and the old, destructive, unhappy thinking becomes the goat track.
Just like anything that you desire in life you need a plan, an education on how to achieve it and dedication to practice what you have learnt until it becomes a natural skill.
In The Happy Mum Handbook, this is what I teach you to do in order to be a Happy Mum. Through my own experiences of being an unhappy, miserable mum at home with two young boys born only 16 months apart, I have learnt off some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. I have studied what these intelligent and wise people have to say and listened to endless tapes about how they apply this informaiton and how it works.
I have trained with the Anti-depression Association of Australia and learnt how they help people to be cured from stress, depression and anxiety.
And finally, if not most importantly, I have applied this knowledge into my life every single day right in the thick of my own depression, stress and anxiety. I am testimony that you can change into being a happy mum!
I say these things, not to boast, but to pass on my learnings and teach you that if you want to be that happy mum that you would like to be, it is going to take learning a new way to think.
Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting the same results. If the reality is that we are always going to experience highs and lows in life and you are feeling like a failure, are stressed or miserable whenever you experience those lows, then you can decide to either continue with the same thinking you have always had, or you can create a plan to learn and change this thinking and try something different.
I discovered when I was in my pit of misery, that there were no resources out there that would give me that plan and help me to change my thinking. There were loads of self-help books, but none of them were in the context of raising children. I remember thinking at the time, "It's all very well hearing all of this wonderful motivational stuff from all these spiritual gurus, but how many of them had a 6 month old and a 16 month old to tend to? How many of them were a stay at home mum who had limited opportunities to walk away to gather my thoughts?
So, I decided that I would apply their information to my life, see how many other ways that I could apply it, then I would write this resource for mums, so they did have a plan, written by a mum who had followed it herself and who understood the ups and downs that come with motherhood and so that other mums had the knowledge to stop doing stress, depression and anxiety.
Then end result can be found in The Happy Mum Handbook. If you have not yet purchased The Happy Mum Handbook, then please don't hesitate to do this now and start your new year off with a plan to combat motherhood stress and be that happy mum you would like to be.