For the first time ever, I’m posting my #projecthappy update late.  Three days late in fact.  This is unheard of in the little world inside my head – it ‘should’ have gone out on Tuesday and it’s now Friday evening.

Why?

Well, life is busy when you are running a full time self employed therapy business, whilst simultaneously raising three young girls to become (I hope!) brave and strong and independent and fierce and gentle and wild and calm and loving and ambitious and unique, all while keeping up with the boring household duties like washing and cooking and shopping and cleaning AND enjoying my various roles as wife, friend, daughter, blogger, amateur photographer and, somewhere in the middle of it all, still finding time to be me.

That’s ok up to a point – it’s the life I’ve chosen and I’m very happy with it.  I am beginning to realise that all of this busy-ness isn’t really sustainable long-term though.  I need to slow down sometimes.  And that means that occasionally something has to give.

On this occasion, it was getting a blog post up on time.  On other days it’s not quite getting round to doing the ironing.  Another time it might be that a few emails go unanswered because I’ve chosen to unplug for the weekend and spend time with my family.  Or any one of a thousand-and-one other things that I ‘should’ be doing.

I’ve made the decision to stop ‘should-ing’ on myself.  ‘Should’, ‘ought’, ‘must’ and ‘have to’- these words are all now eliminated from the internal conversations I have with myself.  Instead I’m using the word ‘could’.  It means I always have a choice – I could choose to do the thing I’m telling myself I need to do, or I could choose not to.  More often than not I choose to do it because it doesn’t feel like a chore or something that’s difficult or unrewarding.  It’s a choice I’m making to take action on something, and it feels much better doing it that way.

Why not give it a try and notice how much better those to-do lists look and feel.  You might even find yourself surprised at the end of the day when you look back and realise how much more productive you might have been as a result of those choices you could have made.  I’d love to find out how you get on if you choose to take part in your own little experiment of swapping ‘should’ for ‘could’, so please do feel free to leave a comment below with what you find out about yourself.

In the meantime, here are ten more days of happy moments 🙂