Happiness Challenge – Accomodate
Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP, RYT
I’m grateful I can be in a position to accommodate middle of the day emergencies for my daughter while she works her career as an iPhone mobile app programmer.
I’ve noticed the more accommodating I am to whatever needs to happen in the moment creates peace and sanity in my life (and happiness). This does not mean I’m a door mat by being overly accommodating to others needs at the expense of my own – it’s quite the opposite. It means I choose to stay in a place of calm happiness while allowing whatever is to be, be whatever it’s going to be. I seem to most easily find my way to love, joy, and laughter with other souls who enjoy being more accommodating as well. Oddly enough, this seems to happen easiest with the other mom pals in my life (and even more so with my older single mom pals). I think it’s because now we have more free time with our children fledged. Since we are used to juggling so much, we can truly accommodate just about any thing that comes our way with grace, comfort and ease.
So today I’m enthusiastically celebrating my accommodating nature. Being accommodating is the way for me to stay mentally flexible – it’s like a mental yoga practice. Just like this daily yoga routine helps me stay on the tracks of the healthy aging train, stretching my response flexibility by being accommodating ensures I keep the train going on the healthy aging tracks as well. Yoga does help me be more accommodating and responsive to whatever is emerging. But sometimes I fall off my tracks and want things done my way, dammit. This approach seems to harm me more than anyone else though. Remembering this makes it easier to find my way back to being accommodating as the preferred way of responding when someone has a different idea of how things need to be unfolding than I do. These infrequent reminders create a reboot of the accommodation app resident in my neural network so I get a renewed boost of happiness by realizing what being accommodating creates for me.
