As we are perched on the first day of the year with 364 blank pages ahead of us, let’s stop for a moment to think what we’d like to look back on next New Year’s Eve. What do we want to manifest in 2013? What do we value? How shall we spend our limited time (525,600 minutes)?

And how can we make sure we focus a wee bit on ourselves while we also take care of the needs of our family members?

First we identify what makes us happy. Some of the things I value most are my family, my health, my friends, and my passion for open adoption advocacy. These are what bring me happiness and satisfaction. What would be at the top of your list?

Time management experts and personal coaches teach that it’s more effective to pursue something in the positive rather than avoid something in the negative. The affirmative wording for  “get out of debt” (overturning a negative) might be “live well within my means” (pursuing a positive). So instead of “lose a few pounds,” I’m going to set an intention to choose foods that are healthy for me and move my body in some way every day.

It’s important to have a clear intention for any goal you set, for with that you’re more likely to get your aim right and make progress in the direction you choose.

There are, I believe, two other components to experiencing happiness:

• Deciding to be happy
• Noticing when you’re happy

As with so many things, these bits of advice are supremely simple, yet too often we just don’t do them!

Channeling my Dad, who channeled another great man:

Happiness is largely a choice. Some of it does come from outside your control, but much of happiness is an inside job, as William Arthur Ward counseled.

Besides choosing happiness, you also must be able to recognize when you’re experiencing happiness. In our hustle and bustle life,when we are often on auto-pilot, that awareness doesn’t always come.  This is one reason I encourage myself and others, through Perfect Moment Mondays, to make a moment perfect simply by noticing it. Sometimes a perfect moment is when something happy happens TO us; but sometimes a moment can be made perfect just by by noticing it. It makes me happy to notice and write about my own perfect moment, and then again to read perfect moments of others. I invite you to participate in December’s Perfect Moment Monday by reading those of others and by contributing your own, and I encourage you to take note of all the perfect moments you experience in January and the rest of 2013.

How many perfectly happy moments can you have — and notice — in 2013?

Image courtesy of chanpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Lori blogs from metro-Denver at LavenderLuz.com. Her book, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, written with her daughter’s birth mom, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in March.