You know I’m all about adding more happiness and peace into life. And I love sharing coaching tools to help you make some easy changes that can have a huge and positive impact on your day-to-day lives. After all, if you’re happier and more content, then so are the people in your life, and the people in their lives, and so on and so on, until it reaches back to me.
So here’s a simple tool that you can start right now:
Use the word WOW more. It’s short and simple and can help you shift your mind out of overwhelm and worrry to curiousity and excitement. I’m not talking about wow in a sarcastic sense, but wow in the “isn’t that cool” sense.
Here’s a little game. Take your 5 top woes and switch them to wows. Write them down and try to have some fun with it. Pretend it’s a quiz in Oprah magazine or on Facebook. (We’re all guilty of taking one too many questionnaires trying to find what our name or birthdate or favorite animal says about us and our future happiness). But if you take just a little bit of time with this exercise and practice doing it, you really can directly impact your present and future happiness.
Here’s a real life example from my morning:
“Woe is me, it’s supposed to be spring and it’s snowing outside, blah. I have to take my dogs for a walk because they are driving me crazy, I have to bring my son a coat to school because even though I told him to bring one, he still didn’t. I have to go grocery shopping and get my snow tires off, and to top it all off I have another cold”.
Changes to:
“Wow! How amazing is the weather in the mountains. One day it’s 75 and sunny and the next day it’s 30 and snowing. Wow, I’m so lucky to have a flexible schedule so I can take my dogs for a walk in the middle of the morning. And wow, I get to come back to a nice, cozy house, turn on my stove to heat up some tea, nurse my cold and take it easy for a little bit. Wow, I have a good relationship with my son and he called me for help. And, wow, I get to drive my car to the grocery store where I can afford to buy healthy and yummy food for my family”.
This shift in perspective and changing your woes to wows really does help. Notice how it feels in your body when you do it. I can literally feel a shift from heaviness and crabbiness to lightness and gratitude. WOW!
The thing is, you still have to deal with your woes. They are still in your life and I know, some of the things are a lot harder and more intense than the weather and traffic and annoying animals and grocery stores. But changing your woes to wows and looking at the them from a different perspective certainly makes you FEEL BETTER. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to accomplish?
