HAPPINESS HOW-TO

Decisions, decisions, decisions…

If you struggle with making any of ‘em—from what to wear to work to whether or not to give love another shot—then today’s little happy life idea is for you!

The art of life is not that you take the clear path in front of you, it's that you set off on one and just see where it leads. (Image: Amy Spencer, Montauk Path)

My husband Gus and I can be pretty bad at making small decisions. It takes us 20 minutes to choose what to eat for lunch and 15 minutes to actually eat it. It takes us 45 minutes to pick a movie to watch, and Gus is asleep 10 minutes in. And our next vacation? My word, we’ll be debating the options until March. But I know we’re not alone.

With all the decision-making our modern world allows, sometimes we get so caught up in making the right choice that we paralyze ourselves from making any choice at all! In his book Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz writes, “Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.” What’s really behind all this? Well, I think that with all the information at our fingertips to help us make a perfect decision, we’re now terrified of now making the wrong one.

But here’s the thing. No matter how many pros & cons lists we make about a choice, sometimes it won’t work out. Sometimes the lunch place has stale bread, the movie stinks, the second date is a disaster and the job makes us miserable. And that’s okay! Becuase that’s how life works. We’re moving forward all the time. Like John W. Gardner once said, “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” No, you don’t have an eraser, but you have a huge, bright, empty piece of paper in front of you to draw in whatever direction you want to go next.

Try this: Give your brain’s decision department a break. Be bold! Imagine taking a permanent marker to draw your sign on the one piece of posterboard you have left. Just trust your gut, listen to your heart, and go for it. If you find yourself feeling along the way that it’s just not working out…redirect! There are very few decisions or mistakes in life that can’t be fixed. A wedding can be called off, and a called-off wedding can also be called right back on. Money can be mostly refunded, jobs can be quit, movies can be walked out of. And that piece of posterboard, it has a backside, too. Sure, maybe you end up with a little headache trying to fix it…but weren’t you giving yourself as much of a headache in struggling over the decision in the first place? Free yourself my making any choice at all, then see where it takes you next.

Gus and I have another trick that helps: We have an app called “The Decider” on our iPhones. And when we find ourselves torn between two great options, we declare, “Let’s let The Decider decide.” We type in the choices, watch the arrow spin, and see our future chosen for us. Really, it’s a relief. And so far, it’s worked out just fine.

Let’s not spend 30% of our lives debating what to do with the other 70%. What a waste of our spirit! Be fearless. Put the pencil to paper and just draw. Let your hand and heart guide you (or a Decider decide for you) and see how free you feel just making a choice so you can get back to living the brilliant art of your life again.

Big love,

Amy

Did you know that if you change just one word in your life, you can make a huge impact on what comes to you in life? With just one word, you can affect what comes your way in love, in work, in friends and in fun!

People build cities on top of mountains and dreams because they believe they can. No buts about it. (Machu Picchu windows, by Amy Spencer, 2010)

See if you remember this quote from Star Wars:

Luke: “I can’t believe it.”
Yoda: “That is why you fail.”

Yoda’s right. (Well, duh, Yoda was always right, wasn’t he.) And the message is clear: If you can’t believe you can do or have something, you’ll never do or have it. Ever. You just won’t.

When I was single, I went into a shop for a friend of mine to pick up her fixed engagement ring. And when I saw all those other rings under the glass, I thought, “I can’t even imagine myself ever having one of those.” And that, I realized, was a big problem. So I started to picture it. To believe I would one day have a ring like that—I wasn’t focusing on the flashiness, but on the idea that I’d meet a partner who would give me one as a symbol of wanting to be with me forever. I have a ring like that now. And an amazing guy who has vowed to be with me to go along with it. But I didn’t meet him until I believed I could. And it wasn’t an easy road.

Oh, trust me, I tried to believe. I wanted desperately to believe. I begged the universe to help me believe. There was just one word that kept getting in the way: the word but.

Recognize it? It usually sounds something like this:

• “I want to meet someone but there’s no one good out there for me.”

• “I want the job, but they’ll never hire someone without the right experience.”

• “I want to own a house with a pool someday, but there’s no way I’ll ever make enough money for that.”

Those “buts” are the biggest thing standing in the way of you believing you can do, have and be what you want. So…

Try this: Say out loud the thing that you want most in life right now and come up with the “but” that is keeping you from achieving it (or the “buts” if there are a few). Then, replace “but” with “and…because” and change the outcome of your sentence and your life. Battle the but! So now, you’ll sound more like this:

• “I want to meet someone and there has to be a good person out there for me, because I personally know a lot of people who have found love for themselves!”

• “I want the job, and even though I don’t have the exact experience they require, I know I’m capable because I have skills that could do even more for their company.”

• I want to own a house with a pool someday, and though I can’t afford one today, I know I’ll have one in the future because my appetite for success, my perseverence and my desire to swim my summers away won’t let me settle for anything less!”

If you can’t believe it, you will fail. This Yoda know. So get started on the road to believing by not letting your buts get in the way! Change that one word and you can change your life. And I know this because it’s worked for me.

You can have everything you want. Please, believe that and be on your way.

Big love,

Amy

Have you ever had a friend say, “Oh my God, you have to see such-and-such a movie, it’s amaaaaaaazing. You’ll die. It’s so, so, so good!” But when you see it…eh. Then, you see a movie simply because it’s close to your house and has good popcorn (oh, or is that just me?) and you think it’s absolutely amaaaaaaazing.

This little birdie expects that finding food in the sand will be tough. And that makes a big difference.

Why is that? Well, because we build our sand castles on our expectations. In movies. In meals. In dates. In dreams. In life. We forget that at some point, the wind might pick up, the sand grains might blow, or a child might come stomping right over the foundation. Just because we sat down ready to build a perfect sand castle doesn’t mean the process will go perfectly. But as much as we know this, we’ve all done it anyway.

You know, we think…

…as soon as we get our dream job, we’ll be happy to wake up and jump out of bed every morning!

…as soon as we start to date, we’ll find a connection and fall in love!

…as soon as we write that book or screenplay or business plan, we’ll be millionaires!

…as soon as we marry the right partner, we’ll live life like a cotton commercial, snuggling and laughing our way through the day!

…as soon as we start trying to get pregnant, we’ll be those people who say it happened on the first try!

But that’s not how life works, right? Because no matter how much we love our jobs, there are days we’ll hate it. And no matter how much we love the people we meet, there are days we’ll butt heads and argue and wonder why we ever thought each other was so darn great in the first place! The issue is those expectations. Because if we expect things to be perfect and we smack into the wall of reality, it hurts like heck and we’re devastated. But if we expect to meet with a little failure along the way, reality will just be a speed bump in the road that we roll right over in an average day.

In other words, all it takes to be happier is to expect failure. And all we need to do that is a Monster Trap!

Make your own mental "Failure and Success" chart for life!

Watch this video of Audri Clemens, in which he explains how he made a monster trap—complete with a “Failures and Success” chart and his hypothesis of how many tries it would take him to succeed. ”I think it will have ten to twenty failures and two successes,” Audri says, “that’s my hypothesis.” We then get to see him try out his trap, starting with “Failure #1.” And we can all learn from his plan.

When you plan for failure, it won’t hurt as much when you hit it. When you know there will be dark days in your job, your love life and the path to your dreams, you won’t be tempted to throw down the plans and stomp on them. If you’re out there dating, make your own “Failures and Success” chart and mark down the awful dates in the expected category.

Like those movies our friends—and movie companies—like to shout about, don’t get so hyped up by your own expectations that every date or every day at work will be amaaaaaaazing. When you know things might not go well, the failures can be spectacular and interesting and hilarious!

Expect failure. Plan for reality. And then hope for some fun surprises along the way. When you can appreciate the crooked journey along the way—failures included—you give yourself the chance to be so much happier every single day.

Big love,