Feel like you do on vacation all the time!

When I was younger I can recall going on vacation and feeling that there wasn’t a worry in the world.  For that week I was relaxed but I was also had a feeling greater than simply being relaxed.  I felt more confident, flexible, content, creative and inspired.  I would come back full of life.  Yet somehow, no matter how much I vowed to remain this way, I would quickly get back to my routines and back to feeling stressed.  

Back then I did not have the systems knowledge that I have today.  I can recall feeling that I wanted to feel that way on a random Tuesday in winter, not just on the first few days of a beach vacation.  Since then I have adjusted my systems to reach this level.  There are still times of stress and unease, but the “norm” has become a feeling of confidence, flexibility, contentment, creativity, and inspiration.  By adjusting my systems I was able to make it so I didn’t have such a drastic change in mood when I went on vacation.

I hadn’t realized just how much I have grown in this area, until I was on vacation a few months ago.  I was amazed that, while on vacation, I didn’t feel significantly different than I do on a daily basis.  At first I thought that maybe vacations don’t have the same impact on me anymore or that the vacation that I took was not as relaxing.  Finally it hit me that my daily systems create a routine that keeps me in a “vacation” state of mind.  

If stress becomes the norm it can be difficult to be happy for long periods of time.  It will always seem like you return to being unhappy after short spurts of happiness.  I encourage you to gain a knowledge of how to use systems to reach goals, and then adjust your systems so that stress is the spurt, not the norm!