How to Have a Happier January

I just had a happier January.  This has been the happiest January I ever had.  I cannot recall any other January where I had such success and happiness.

This wasn't by chance.

Like any other good thing in your life you need to set a goal, make plans and follow through on those plans and be a little flexible in how this plays out.

Having a good life takes deliberate planning.  You spend time determining what your outcome should be.  Which is really setting goals.

Further you spend enough more time truth-ing these goals out.  Don't just write down a few goals and blindly work on them.

Make sure something that is going to take considerable time and effort on your part is something that you truly want to do and will improve your life.

So Critically Examine Your Goals

Write them down.  Think on them.  And think on them some more.  The idea of the goals should be so crystal clear with such a sense of how much better your life will become after obtaining them that it becomes easy to just go ahead and do it.

Working on something worthy in your life should be so easy that it just happens.

You don't need to motivate yourself to do it.  You just do it.  You don't need to schedule time to do something and force yourself to do something for some length of time.  You just do the something because you prefer to do it beyond something else.

Of course it helps if the goals you set are within your current capacity, in line with your personal mission and something you love to do anyway.

But isn't that what good goal setting and a happier life is all about anyway?

My Idea of a Happier January Usually Seemed Like a Ridiculous Dream in My Past

January has always been a tough month for me.

It was after Christmas so I was usually broke from spending all my money for Christmas presents, holiday related stuff and end of the year bills or in serious credit card debt.  Some years I was both. Massive extra debts and cash poor with no money to even pay the normal bills and make minimum payments on those massive debts.

Many time early in January I would get very ill from gorging on sugary snacks, excessive amounts of food and meals, maybe too many drinks and no sunlight.

I suffer the chronic problem everyone does of going to work in the dark and going home in the dark.

Others agree with me on January being a bad month -

13 Reasons Why January is the Worst Month

Usually the weather where I live in the Midwest US, the weather was quite outrageously bad with massive amounts of snow, brutal cold in alternating assaults.

Some January's all these miseries piled up into a headache, body ache, wallet ache, weather ache assault on my happiness where all I wanted is the frickin month to be over.

But not this January 2020.  I enjoyed more happiness this past January than I can ever remember.  The happier times that escaped me all these years.

Happier January Goals

I took 2 full weeks off over the Christmas and New Years Holiday.  So in addition to Christmas celebrations with family and friends I had plenty of time to think and plan my goals.  I spent quite a few afternoons at the coffee shop working on my plans.

Here were the happier January goals I set:

  • Have some fun
  • Career success
  • Meeting to join social club
  • Pay off dental work bill
  • Let injuries heal
  • Apartment tasks
  • Carnivore eating
  • Normal make payments on time

You can see that these are not earth shattering goals.  But I don't find the need to set earth shattering goals when my life is already quite good.  I am happier, everything is moving along quite nicely.  I just wanted to see if I could improve upon the normal January filled with suffering and frustration.

All these items were critically important to my life.  So there was no hardship on the working on them.  I looked forward to making progress on them in whatever way made sense at the time.

They were all things I had the capacity to do, as I had done similar things in the past.  But they were a little bit of a stretch to do all of them.

Of course, circumstances beyond my control were favorable to me this January.  The weather has been very mild, no below zero days and not a lot of snow.

In fact some days have been almost like springtime weather.

But I choose to think that my wanting good, mild weather had something to do with this.

I accomplished everything on my list in some form or another.  All these accomplishments moved my life to an even higher level as good goals should.

Further Breaking Down the Have Fun Goal

Usually when you set a fairly large goal, it is best to determine smaller things to do within that goal that would make the larger goal materialize.

So my goal of...have some fun...needs to have fun experiences listed so I will actually follow through with the experiences and have the fun.

Here are the Potential Fun Experiences I Listed in early January

  • Watch Wisconsin Badgers Rose Bowl
  • Hang out with new friends at a bar to watch one new friend's band
  • Family Christmas gift exchange
  • Watch NFL wild card playoff games
  • Watch Green Bay Packers divisional playoff game
  • Watch other NFL divisional playoff games
  • Watch NFL Championship games
  • Movie in theater
  • See my daughter
  • See my son
  • Social club meeting
  • Coffee shop planning

Basically I did all these things and they were all very good.  I consider them all fun.  Some were better than others of course, but all were good.

Plus, a good friend visited me for an entire weekend and we both had a fantastic time laughing, joking around and partying it up for 2 whole days.

So my goal of a fun happier January far exceeded my initial plans.

Happier January Wrap-Up

Having the goal of a happier month is not any different than planning any other good thing in your life.  You set the goal, you break down the goal into doable plans, you schedule time, or make time to do those things and you carry the tasks, activities and experiences to completion.

And then allow this to happen for yourself while being open to even better experiences coming into your life.

› › Happier January

The only way I could become the happier man I am today was by leaving my wife.  You might be in the same situation I was in.  I suggest you take a look at my book - Leave Your Wife & Become a Happier Man with the 3 Step System.

Click to go to learn more about the book

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