Happy. Healthy. Rich. The smart mom's guide to living your best life.

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Living Your Best Life.

When we learn to live our best life, it makes us happier. Remember then, that happiness is about choice. There is a series of small choices that we make every day that can make us happier. We can find ways to choose things that are good for ourselves physically, mentally, and socially. To be happier, we say yes to the things that we love, things that feed our souls, and ‘no’ to things that are not serving our good.

Think about the memory you just described, and all the things that make you happy. As you read through this book, I invite you to think about how you can incorporate some of those qualities of what happiness means to you into your daily life.

One of the problems we have in our society is that we think we must wait to be happy. We think that we will be happy when we get a new job, new house, new TV, or go on that trip. And while that may be true, it is unfortunate to make happiness contingent on something in the future. We can choose to incorporate happiness into our daily habits and routine, so that happiness isn’t something in the future, it is something that we experience every day. Old sayings like Stop to smell the flowers or It’s the journey and not the destination is a kind of wisdom that have endured through the times for a reason.

Earlier this year, I was feeling very directionless and spent a lot of time thinking about what living my best life would really look like. That is partially how this book came into being. The goal planning steps that I am giving you throughout, and my advice on how to live your best life come from my own experiences in finding happiness.

In this book, we will talk a lot about different habits that can reduce our stress and make us happier.

Remember, as you build new healthy habits, and replace old ones, go slowly. When you try to make big sweeping changes all at once, they are not sustainable. That’s why new year’s resolutions do not work. You are trying to change too much all at once.

My recommendation for you would be to choose one small habit in each category to start with. These categories are, one thing for your physical health, one thing for your mental health, and one thing for your social-emotional health.

It is a great idea to set long-term goals for where you want to be. Envision your perfect life, and then slowly forge the way to get there. You can do that by setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals to get there.

If your goal is to eat healthier for example, decide that today you will eat one piece of fruit instead of one piece of candy. Do that for a week. Then, next week, eat two pieces of fruit instead of two pieces of candy. Don’t try to go vegan, gluten free and stop sugar all at once. You are going to crash and burn. When you make small goals and succeed, you are setting a strong foundation for yourself to build on. In a world where everyone is in a hurry. Remember, good change takes time and will likely last longer.

You may also want to do some journaling, introspection, and talking to your partner about what your long-term goals are. As you move forward, you will be building a healthier, happier life for yourself and your family with a strong foundation. As you decrease the causes of stress in your life, you can increase the sources of happiness. But do both at the same time. Don’t just try to get rid of things that you don’t want. When it comes to habits, you need something else to fill the space. Otherwise, it is too easy to go back to our previous habits. I hope that you have the most beautiful life, full of happiness and peace.

Happier Mom = Happier Kids.

When we are unhappy, our kids can tell. And since they think the world revolves around them, they often will self-blame for parental unhappiness. Have you heard of couples divorcing and kids blaming themselves? Even if your problems aren't to that point, it is the same principle.

Being healthier makes us happier. Being happier makes our kids happier. And you know what else? Happier kids listen better and do what they are supposed to do more easily! So, working on your own happiness is a win-win-win!

Kids can teach us happiness too.

How is that? Because kids live perpetually in the moment. They are completely absorbed with whatever they are doing. It may be looking at a beautiful butterfly, or petting a cat, or drawing a picture. In any case, they become completely present and focused on what is at hand. They don't worry about what is coming next. They don't understand time or money. They live in a perpetual, exciting NOW.

Being present is a key component of Mindfulness, which we will talk about later! And it is something our kids intuitively already know how to do. This is one area to take a page out of your kids play book. Spend some time each day playing with the kids and be fully immersed in what you are doing. Let them lead the way and follow along with their fun!

Kids are all about having fun, and guess what? Fun makes us happier!

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Going through the process of setting and meeting goals can make you happier.

As we go through this book, there will be workbook pages to fill out that talk about goal setting. When you are reading through each topic, there will also be journal pages to fill out where you can take some time to think about how the topics impact you personally. While you are thinking about how the things in your life is working or not working, you can visualize what could make your life better. No matter how good our lives are, we can always work toward constant improvement.

Setting goals is something I have always done personally, possibly since I am a driven individual. But goals can be helpful for everyone. They help us focus our energy on the direction that we want to go. Often, when we are directionless, that is when we flounder, and find ourselves under the most stress. Once we decide where we are going, it is much easier to get there.

Deciding about what we want from life can be our guide. Do you want to start a business? Travel? Buy a new house? Any of those are great goals, and there are so many more. When we decide what we want to do, we can make a plan to make our dreams come true.

How do you know what your best life is? Visualize in your mind your perfect life. What does it look like? What kind of person do you want to be? Think about it in your mind and use the next page to write about your perfect life.

My Perfect Life:

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Priorities and Values: Why they matter with kids.

The first step toward setting goals is to choose your priorities and decide what is important to you. If you try to do everything, you are bound to fail. So, it is important to choose a few areas to focus on so that you are able to excel.

Goals with your kids.

Have you ever heard the saying that You have to pick your battles? Well, this is especially true with kids. I have a toddler that asks me to do something about every 5 minutes, and it can be anything from kissing an owie, to playing a game, or getting some candy. Some of these I say yes, some I say no, and for a while I would get irritated about how often she would ask me something.

It's easy to let any little issue turn into a big argument. Over time, I have had to learn to pick my battles with my kids. Am I happy when my daughter wipes play dough on the carpet? Or when she dumps a whole jar of fish food into the tank? Not really. But I am re-learning to let some things slide.

Figuring out your priorities.

When my now-teen daughter was little, I decided that the three things I wanted more than anything else for her to do were:

Eating Healthy

Doing Well in School

Getting Along with Others

Now that she has graduated from High School with high marks, I think for the most part, she has internalized the things that I think are important.

Most of all, what I want for my kids is for them to be healthy and happy.

I grew up in an authoritarian household, where I constantly was afraid of what my parents thought of me. Happy kids is something that I have always strived for. That means, I try to encourage my children in the direction they are going and help them get there the best they can. I don't try to direct their course.

When my children take up an interest, like cosplay, building, or art, I try to get interested in it with them and help them to get better at their hobbies or interests.

Personal Values.

Values are ideas and beliefs that are important to us. In many ways, our values shape our reality, because they determine the way we live our lives. Many times, we are unaware of our value system, and we can have conflicting values taking us in separate directions. When we are trying to go two different directions, we end up going nowhere fast.

Many people adopt a value system from religion or culture from an early age. If this is the case for you, then your values may be deeply ingrained in your subconscious, and not something you spend time thinking about daily.

Self-awareness or self-realization is the first step before you can make plans. Too often our subconscious is guided by our childhood and parents. While we rebel often in our teenage years to defy the things we do not want to do and actively change ourselves, later in life we often fall right back into duplicates of our parents – for better or worse.

Let me give you an example and while it may not apply to your life it should certainly make you understand what I am trying to convey.

A friend of mine in her late 40’s suddenly became aware that everything he did for the better part of her life was to follow the path her mother laid out for her. As mothers so often do, hers applied a heavy pressure to succeed. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. But it takes a life of its own when the child adopts a drive for success it without the knowledge to distinguish between the mother’s goal and their own. Success can be a good income or personal gratification in what we do, perfect success is both. It took her the better part of her life to realize that everything she did was her mother’s wishes and, in the end, failed in both. She was never truly happy.

What we can take away from this is that we sometimes, or often, do things in our lives that we are certain who we are. Motions we go through that define us are not necessarily who we really are.

When we take our values from religion, often they are the values handed down to us from our parents and grandparents. If we attend religious services from a young age, we grow up with religious stories that teach moral behaviors and ideas about right and wrong.

Examples of religious value systems would be the 10 Commandments in Christianity, or the 4 Noble Truths in Buddhism.

Cultural values are beliefs that are held by most people in a country or culture. In the US, many of the beliefs and values that we practice daily are laid out in the Constitution.

Some examples of US cultural values would include the ideas of freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.

To some extent, we all have values shaped by religious and cultural norms that we have grown up with. However, at times there are cultural shifts in society, such as gay marriage or the Black Lives Matter movement, which may cause us to reconsider our values and belief system.

Also, our values may change somewhat as we move through different phases of life. For example, when you are a high school or college student you may value individuality and autonomy the most, but when you become a parent then you start to value family more.

Earlier this year, I took a class with my work where we were asked to pick out our top five values from a list. You can brainstorm your own, or you can look at this list.

We all most likely have more than five values in life, the idea is to choose which values are most important to you in your current phase of life. This is also an exercise that you can do with children or teens, although with very young children I have rephrased the question to what makes you happy instead of what are your values since happiness is a more accessible concept for small children.

To give you an example of what