For my second month of my Happiness Project I am going to focus on money.  I will  take a close look at my finances and figure out where I can make some better decisions on spending.  I am also going to make a plan on how to get myself out of debt and start a savings plan.   

Unlike the picture above, I do not want money to control my life.  I'd rather get a plan in place that runs smoothly on its own so I can live my life but still spend wisely.

In order to start making financial plans, I need to know where I stand.  In order to get a good picture of my money situation, I am going to use Mint.com to track my spending.  Their tagline is "It's easy to understand what's going on with your money."  They pull all your financial accounts into one place and let you use that data to create budgets and track your goals.

They have a great mobile app that you can put on your phone so your financial information is always at your fingertips.

Now it's time for me to get tracking!

This is the end of my first month doing my own happiness project.  At the beginning of the month I explained how I wanted to spend time focusing on my identity by embracing who I am and loving myself unconditionally.  I'd like to end the month by working on letting go of expectations and embracing the fact that I can't continue to expect my life to be perfect, because it will never live up to that standard.

I found the quote above that says "What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be."  This quote reminds me that most of the time I have a picture in my head of how my life it supposed to look, and if reality doesn't match up to that picture I tend to feel disappointed and sad.  What I'd like to focus on is appreciating what I do have instead of what I don't have.  Hopefully this new way of thinking will help me to be happier with everyday life.

What are some things that you can change in your thinking that would make you happier?

"Enjoy the little things in life, because one day you will look back and realize they were the big things."

This quote reminds me that there are things happening in my everyday life that I will eventually look back on and realize how much they impacted my life.  They may not seem big now, but one day I'll realize how important they really were.  Far too often I breeze through my day without stopping to appreciate the small things.  I tend to take them for granted without a second thought.

For the third week of my happiness project, I have decided to focus on appreciating the small joys of every day life and also purposefully doing things that make me happy.  They don't have to be big, elaborate things...just little things that make my day a little brighter.

Here are some of the ideas I've come up with:

• Drink a glass of wine
• Treat myself to a coffee at Starbucks
• Give myself a manicure
• Light a candle
• Write an email to a friend
• Go read magazines at Barnes & Noble
• Bake a dessert
• Appreciate a beautiful sunset
• Drink a cup of tea to relax

My goal will be to incorporate some of these ideas into my everyday life to add a little joy to my day.

What are some of your favorite ways to brighten your day?

Do you ever read your friends' status updates on Facebook and think to yourself that their life must be so much better than your own?  I know I'm guilty of doing that all the time.  That's why I have to remind myself of the quote by Steve Furtick that says "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel."  And I honestly think that is a huge part of people being unhappy with their life.  They forget that most people only show the world the good things going on in their life and usually keep the bad stuff out of sight. And then they wonder what is wrong with their own life that they don't have just as many good things to share with the world.

This is what I'm going to focus on for my second week of my Happiness Project.  I'm still going to go on Facebook and be happy for my friends who have great things going on in their lives.  But at the same time, I'm going to stop comparing my life to theirs and realize that nobody's life is perfect.  We all have bad things happen to us, it's just a matter of spending more time and energy focusing on the good things instead of always worrying about the not-so-good things.

Can anyone else relate to this cycle of comparing your life to everyone else and then allowing yourself to feel bad about your own situation?  If so, please share your thoughts in the Comments section!

I love the quote by Helen Keller that begins with "Be happy with what you have while working for what you want."  It's actually one of the Words of Wisdom that I am going to follow throughout my year-long happiness project.  This quote reminds me that my life is what it is for a reason and a lot of it has to do with who I am.  To put my own spin on the quote, I want to be happy with who I am while working for a happier life.

For the first month of my happiness project I have decided to start by exploring my identity. I want to embrace who I am and love myself unconditionally.  Part of this will be to stop comparing my life to others and realize that I have to follow my own path.

This week I am going to start out by answering the question "Who am I? and then spending the rest of the month embracing those things about myself and enjoying being me.  I'm sure it will be hard to think of everything right at this moment, but here are a few key things about who I am:

• I am a perfectionist.
• I am very organized.
• I am hard working.
• I am a loyal friend.
• I am a worrier.

Fun fact, the shortest sentence in the English language is "I am."

Now that I have highlighted a few things about myself, I am going to spend the rest of the week thinking of more things and adding to this list.  I might even take some personality tests online to get an outside view of myself.

Now that I've bared my soul a little bit, tell me more about you.  Who are you and what makes you "you"?  Please share in the comments section!

"Life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful."

This is just one example of the words of wisdom that I plan to follow during my year-long Happiness Project.  Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project, started out her year with a list of twelve commandments.  Instead of giving myself commandments, I've decided to compile a list of my favorite quotes and use them as words of wisdom throughout the next year.

Here are my Words of Wisdom:

1.     Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today. 

2.     Be loving and love will find you.

3.     Don’t be afraid to fail.  Be afraid not to try.

4.     It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.

5.     If it’s meant to be, it will be.

6.     Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.

7.     If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

8.     Don’t be so hard on yourself.

9.     Life always offers you a second chance.  It’s called tomorrow.

10.   The things you take for granted…someone else is praying for.

11.   Be happy with what you have while working for what you want.

12.   Worrying will never change the outcome.

What are some words of wisdom you live by?

A couple of people have told me about The Happiness Project, so I decided to check it out.  Here's the overview from Barnes & Noble:

"Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. "The days are long, but the years are short," she realized. "Time is passing, and I'm not focusing enough on the things that really matter." In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.

In this lively and compelling account, Rubin chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Among other things, she found that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that money can help buy happiness, when spent wisely; that outer order contributes to inner calm; and that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference."

Now that my 30th birthday is right around the corner, I've decided to start my own Happiness Project beginning in October and going for an entire year.  I plan on writing about my ongoing project in this blog, so you will get to see which parts of my life I've decided to work on and also hear about how the project has (hopefully) changed my life for the better.  Stay tuned for more!

Have you done your own Happiness Project?  If so, I'd love to hear about it.  Please share your experience in the comments section!