general lack of control
Where you find yourself bouncing around the pinball machine of life, and you’re not in control of the flippers.
External forces
Where you encounter people or situations that seem intent on taking your sunny smiley mood and crushing it into the ground.
Now, would you like to do something about it?
During the pages that follow I’ll take you through practical steps to (re)organise your life so that you increasingly find yourself doing things that make you happy, and spending less time churning through the stuff that sucks the joy out of life.
Putting the smile back on your face won’t necessarily involve identifying problem areas of your life and attempting to ‘fix’ or eliminate them. But, that said, we are going to improve your work/life balance. We’re also going to snatch back control of your life and put you back in the driving seat. And finally we will start redesigning your life so that those external influences either won’t seem so influential, or won’t be there at all.
This book’s designed to get you started right away. Seven days is really all you need. That’s the minimum time required to read the book, and to start putting some of the ideas into practice. We’ll start with the easy stuff and build on it. If you work with me as we go through the various chapters you’ll feel much happier by this time next week, and better still as the weeks go by.
The ‘Secret to Happiness’, so it turns out, is that there is no secret.
So let’s get started.
Boxing Day
Here in the UK the 26th of December – the day after Christmas Day – is called ‘Boxing Day’.
According to some sources Boxing Day was originally a day when the wealthy would give a boxed gift to their servants. Whether this still happens is something that I haven’t the time nor the inclination to find out. But I can tell you that for those of us who aren’t in servitude, it’s a public bank holiday.
For many years in my family, Boxing Day used to be a re-run of Christmas Day. Sometimes the venue would change but there was always another roast turkey dinner, more Christmas crackers, more party hats, another Christmas pud, more mince pies and once again no one would even touch the Christmas cake. When we were very, very young there even used to be a second round of present giving.
When my wife Kate came along, Boxing Day became ‘our’ day. We’d get up around midday, open a bottle of champagne, play with our presents from the day before, roast chestnuts in the oven, play silly board games, watch Christmas movies, and eat posh nibbles. It was, quite simply, a fantastic day. Our first Boxing Day together I even ended up asking Kate to marry me. That gives you some idea how good Boxing Day made me feel about life, and there hasn’t been a Boxing Day since that hasn’t given me a similar inner glow, a similar joy for life.
And I speak with some authority here because in the last five years I’ve celebrated Boxing Day at least sixty times.
That first Christmas after Kate passed away my mother, concerned for my welfare during the festive season, asked if I’d like to spend Boxing Day with them. It was a generous offer but, call me sentimental, I decided to spend it just as we always had.
I got up late, I opened a bottle of champagne, I sat in bed and browsed my collection of gifts from the previous day. Then I took the Brie from the fridge, a box of posh crackers (the edible kind) and worked my way through the whole lot whilst I sat in front of the telly and watched The Santa Clause. A little later I emailed friends I’d been meaning to catch up with, and followed that with a walk down to Old Leigh. I looked out at the boats resting in the mud, and then I went home, wrote down some thoughts, and did some planning.
By the time I went to bed I felt like I’d had a week’s holiday, and all I’d done was get out of bed and see how the day unfolded. It was such a good day that I caught myself wishing that Boxing Day happened a little more frequently than once a year, at which point I had the following crazy thought:
Why can’t it?
What was to stop me replicating the same structure – or lack of structure – on any other day of the year?
Answer: nothing.
From that day on I decided to have a ‘Boxing Day’ once a month. Once a month I’d get up with absolutely no plans whatsoever and see how the day unfolded. And that was almost five years ago.
There have been successful Boxing Days (in that I achieve that holiday feeling by the end of the day) and less successful Boxing Days (when I didn’t), but there have never been unsuccessful Boxing Days (days when I somehow felt more stressed at the end of the day than the beginning). But of all the ideas I’ve had over the years, Boxing Day has been without a doubt one of the easiest to implement – which is why it’s at the start of this book.
The Principles of Boxing Day
From here on, when I refer to Boxing Day, I’m referring to my Boxing Day, our Boxing Day, the one we are about to create in your life. Now whether or not you continue to spend the 26th of December as you have in previous years is entirely up to you, and whether you want your Boxing Day to be called ‘Boxing Day’ or ‘Spontaneous Day’ or ‘Whatever I Want Day’ or something else is equally up to you, but for the purposes of this book, Boxing Day will be the day when you give yourself permission to do whatever you feel like doing, within the realms of possibility, on the day itself.
Let’s cover some basics here: Boxing Day isn’t just a ‘day off’, it’s important to get that concept out of your head immediately. Boxing Day is a day when you get to live totally in the moment. And why is this important? Because living in the moment takes a lot less energy!
As adults we expend a huge amount of energy just juggling the day-to-day. Young children, on the other hand, don’t. They live utterly in the moment and the job of structuring their day is handled by (hopefully) a responsible adult. Within the confines of whatever structure is imposed on them their day is totally driven by what opportunities exist, right now. They don’t have to expend any energy on thinking, and as a result they seem to have bucketfuls of get-up-and-go. You could probably power the whole of Birmingham on half a dozen four-year-olds and a ball pool if you could just keep them in that ball pool long enough.
And four-year-olds never seem to suffer from that Monday morning feeling, they never seem to worry about how they’re going to make it through the week, and they never pace themselves. They throw themselves at life, and when they run out of steam, they’re done. Have you ever seen the way a four-year-old sleeps? They’re so out of it you can pick them up without waking them.
Boxing Day is a little like being a four-year-old for a day. It releases you from thinking about the future or the past. For twenty-four hours everything else is on hold. If you do Boxing Day properly you should feel like you’ve had a mini holiday – by the end of a Boxing Day you should feel rested, and energised, and happy.
So, let’s reiterate how Boxing Day works in one concise sentence:
BOXING DAY IS DRIVEN BY THE MOMENT,
THE HEART, AND THE OPPORTUNITY.
Re-read
