A little Friday fun in the hilarious world of competition among parents. I suppose we all have a little “mompetitor” in us — a great reminder to not take ourselves so seriously.

We are repeatedly what we do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
— Aristotle

In this new video from Kids in the House, I discuss ways to encourage children to practice gratitude.

Gratitude is one of the 5 high-impact habits I encourage you to start now. Learn how to jumpstart a gratitude practice and the four other habits you should incorporate in your life with my newly relaunched online class: Happiness on Autopilot!

Register now, and take the class at your leisure — but be sure to RSVP for a free video coaching call with me on May 24 (space is limited).

Register for our Happiness on Autopilot online class to learn five high-impact habits that will make you — and your kids! — happier now.  This class will cover:

Research convincingly shows that it actually puts people on “trajectories of growth,” leaving them better able to ward off depression and “become ever more satisfied with life.” This is probably because it increases a wide range of those resources that make for a meaningful and successful life, like having an increased sense of purpose, stronger social support, and less illness. Research even shows that loving-kindness meditation “changes the way people approach life” for the better.

Moreover, doing a simple loving-kindness meditation can make us feel less isolated and more connected to those around us: one study showed that a SINGLE SEVEN MINUTE loving-kindness meditation made people feel more connected to and positive about both loved ones and total strangers, and more accepting of themselves. Imagine what a regular practice could do! For more information about loving-kindness meditation, check out this post on my Greater Good blog.

Thank You Mom from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

This Mother’s Day I’m filled with gratitude for everything my mother has given me. Don’t forget to make sure YOUR mom feels it on Sunday!

If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.”
– Chinese Proverb

My mom, benefitting from item #10

I hate to admit this, but I’ve come to feel entitled to breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day (complete with gifts and a clean kitchen afterwards), a family hike (no whining, everyone remembers their water bottles and packs their own snack, remembering one for me), and a little downtime with a good book before dinner.
But truth be told, I rarely get all, if any, of these Mother’s Day treats. I know this shouldn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t irritate me… but it kinda does, or it has in the past. It’s a horrible confession for someone like me to make, but I’m rarely as cranky as I can be on Mother’s Day.

I know I’m not the only one feeling blue on on the second Sunday in May. In fact, I’m bracing myself for a series of phone calls from disgruntled friends again this year. “All I wanted was to picnic on the beach with the kids,” one friend lamented last year. Her often-charming but rarely-helpful-with-the-kids husband couldn’t get it together—the waves were looking good, and he thought he’d sneak a quick surf into the schedule, right when he should have been securing picnic supplies. Her kids, two of whom were old enough to take the day into their own hands, didn’t rally either. She felt abandoned, and taken for granted.

I know how she felt. One year my kids didn’t do anything for me but make very, um, hasty, cards on scrap paper, an effort so effortless it brought tears to my eyes.

Not the happy kind of tears.

The problem isn’t the kids, though. It is my focus on myself and what I’m entitled to. Even though I really do believe that we moms deserve a day to be treated like goddesses—at least one day!—I don’t think it sets us up for the happiest of Mother’s Days when we expect this to happen.

Although we think that indulging ourselves is going to make us happy, it generally doesn’t: Studies show that we’re happier after spending money on others than after spending on ourselves — yet when people are asked, they expect the opposite will be true.

I see this play out on Mother’s Day (for myself, and some of my friends). After we spend so much time caring for those around us — our kids, our partners, our parents — we think that a quick ticket to a happy Mother’s Day will come from being pampered. But we’re inevitably disappointed when we find that focusing on ourselves is not always, or even usually, a sure route to happiness.

The solution to this sticky-wicket is deceptively simple: We can set ourselves up to be happy on Mother’s Day — to feel gratitude and awe and deep love instead of frustration and disappointment — by simply helping other people. People who help others tend to be less stressed, more joyful, and healthier; less stress, more joy, and greater health all sound good to me this Mother’s Day.

So this year, even though I often long for a break from caring for others, I will make Mother’s Day all about other people. (I know that this strategy isn’t for everyone; those of you suffering from caregiver or compassion fatigue won’t want to try this from home.)

We’ll celebrate the grandmothers in our family, of course, with a big brunch or a fun family dinner (or both, for both sides of the family). But for months, I’ve been wanting to try what this guy does for his birthday: spend a day or two doing dozens of little good deeds—and bring my kids along for the ride.

We’re finally going to do it — for Mother’s Day instead of my birthday — as a way to honor my own mother, Sylvia. She just turned 70 and is as beautiful and vibrant as ever. We’d like to help one person for each year that she has been a mother (41 years). Since her mother, my Oma, passed away this year (at the amazing age of 104!) we’d also like to honor her by helping at least one person for each year Oma was a mother (71 years). Silly math, but we’re aiming to do kind acts for 112 or more people.

We started our “kindness scavenger hunt” this weekend, but to be honest, we didn’t get as far with it as I’d hoped. Personally, I could have powered through the whole list, but my kids fatigued after checking just a few things off the list. We agreed we’d do some more on Mother’s Day, and each week thereafter, until we think we’ve helped more than a hundred people.

Here’s our “Kindness Scavenger Hunt” list:

1. Pick the lemons from our elderly neighbor’s tree, make lemonade, and deliver it to her.
2. Bring food to the food bank.
3. Do a loving-kindness meditation for all those that we love and are concerned about—and also for those that bother us.
4. Leave flowers for a widow who is grieving the man she was married to for 59 years.
5. Give vegetables from our garden to neighbors.
6. Pick up trash in our local park.
7. Stop for everyone looking to cross the street or merge.
8. Make a larger-than-comfortable donation to Tipping Point, a group that is striving to eradicate poverty in our area.
9. Fill a thred up bag full of like-new clothing to benefit Teach for America.
10. Give out extra hugs to the grandmothers in our lives, who really appreciate them.
11. Write a thank-you note to the kids’ preschool teacher: one of those “other mothers” that really made a difference in their lives.
12. Make and deliver “care-kits” to as many homeless people in Berkeley as we can, and give the extras to our friends and family to distribute in their travels.
13. Send someone a book I think they will enjoy, totally randomly.
14. Send all the pregnant women I know some of my favorite parenting books.
15. Write a letter our beat cop thanking him for all he does for our neighborhood.
16. Help a friend with some work on Sunday morning (instead of sleeping in).
17. Visit people at the old age home where my father-in-law used to live (and bring the dog, who despite also being quite old, tends to light up their day).
18. Babysit for the neighbors that have little kids, so that they can have a date-night.
19. Deliver Challahs to temple congregants who are grieving or ill.
20. Serve dinner to homeless and hungry people in San Francisco’s tenderloin neighborhood (Glide Memorial allows kids to volunteer).

What do you think we should add to our list? Please add your suggestions as a comment below!

Happy Mother’s Day, all. Cheers to all the work you and the mothers you love are doing to raise happiness.

Register for our Happiness on Autopilot online class to learn five high-impact habits that will make you — and your kids! — happier now.  This class will cover:

To be honest, silence is not a state I naturally seek. I’m extroverted. I’m loud. I love parties and big families and people. And as an avid reader and professional writer, I tend to fear — not cultivate — a loss of words.

But reading nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow got me (you guessed it) thinking a little more about this. That noisy verbal part of our brains is slow, processing only about 40 bits of information per second. The creative, intuitive, non-verbal brain processes about 11 million bits per second. Knowing this, I’ve been motivated to try and better harness the power of my non-verbal brain.

According to Martha Beck — Harvard sociologist turned life coach, and one of my personal heros — practicing what she calls “deep wordlessness” is just the ticket. Here’s what she writes about wordlessness in her most recent book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World:

To master Wordlessness…you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow attention field — something animals only using the the moment of ‘fight or flight.’ Dropping into Wordlessness moves the brain into its ‘rest and relax’ state.”

I’ve been practicing Beck’s techniques for cultivating worldlessness, and though it doesn’t come easily to me, I’m finding it well worth the effort.

Take Action: Beck’s book is loaded with literally dozens of techniques for activating our non-verbal brains. Even though the book is probably a little too woo-woo for most of my readers — it really challenges most of our Western assumptions about intelligence — it is also one of the most practical guides to happiness I’ve found.

The easiest of Beck’s practices for dropping into wordlessness (for me) is simply to follow your own bloodstream. You can try it by focusing your attention on your heart in the space between breaths: after you exhale deeply, pause your breathing and find the feeling of your heart beating. Take another breath while following the sensation of your heart beat. Once you’re following your heart beat, see if you can feel your circulatory system elsewhere, in your ears or toes or hands, your head and organs, or your entire body. Hang out for a while in this meditative state.

Join the discussion: What do you think?!