How I prioritized happiness and you can too.

Hello beautiful. Lovely to have you here today. If you are new to my blog, my name is Victoria, and I must tell you all about my experience with prioritizing happiness. I’m going to tell you all about how it has changed my life and my views on life, as well as how you can do the same!

I’ve talked about my life in previous content on my blog before, but here is a brief catch up for those of you who don’t know anything about me.

A couple years ago I managed to completely change my entire life. I was miserable, mildly depressed, and had an unhealthy mindset.

One day, I realized that I only had a couple of days left in my 20’s and I wanted to make my 30’s amazing. So I did some soul searching, made lifestyle and mindset changes, and before I knew it, I was living my dream life.

I was so over the moon with happiness that I wanted to help other people who were struggling with life as well,

At the beginning of this year I created the Life of your Dreams course, which takes students through every single step I took to create the life I have now. I am not rich, I didn’t get a new house or stumble upon a lump sum of cash.

I changed my life the good ol’ fashion way, through hard work.

2020: The year I decided to prioritize happiness and nothing else.

2019 was the year of getting things done in my household.

My husband and I both dramatically increased our credit score, worked hard to reach our savings goals, bought new cars, and started looking for a house among other goals we had.

I was happy last year. But I think there was a lot of pressure to reach our goals. I’m a goal oriented woman and I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself. My husband is much more relaxed and doesn’t stress as much as I do. 

When 2020 started, I decided that I didn’t want to worry too much about goals that would stress me out. I wanted to find true peace and happiness.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Here’s how Prioritizing happiness changed me

• My stress and anxiety went away.
• I found adventures.
• I found true peace.
• Money found its way to me even though I wasn’t expecting it.
• My goals did get accomplished despite me not worrying about them.
• I connected more with my inner self and my mental health improved.

I am blown away at the level of happiness I have reached this year. But I learned a major lesson as well. I learned that sometimes it can be toxic to always want more.

I read a book called The Happiness Equation and I learned that I need to learn to be satisfied with what I have sometimes. Once I let go of the pressures of achieving multiple goals during the year, happiness, abundance, and success started finding it’s way to me.

Here are the prioritizing happiness steps that I took that changed my life.

1. I welcomed a new decade with positive intentions.

I turned 30 this year. It seems so long ago because Covid entered the world shortly thereafter and time began to shift, but I was extremely excited to start a new decade of my life.

I had a lot of intentions for my 30’s and instead of being intimidated by aging or depressed about the things that I didn’t accomplish in my 20’s I took this as an opportunity to create a positive and motivating mindset.

I spent my 30th birthday with all the people I love.

I had dinner at a fancy restaurant with my mom, and a separate party with my best friends. It was a wonderful experience and an overwhelmingly beautiful way to start a new decade of my life.

2. I escaped my reality.

In March, my state (Virginia, USA), was officially ordered to stay home due to the pandemic. I wasn’t necessarily upset about the decision, but I was frustrated when I found out that even our hiking sports were closed.

I didn’t know the state could shut down a mountain, but guess what? They can. And they did.

So what did we do? We spent a lot of time watching TV. I binge watched everything I could possible get a spark of entertainment from. I even watched Love is Blind. But after just a few weeks of watching TV. I became extremely tired and bored.

I wanted an escape.

That’s when I turned to reading fiction books. The first book I read was The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. The book absolutely blew me away.

I was sucked into the story from the very first page and I just couldn’t stop reading it. What I loved about the book was that I was able to escape my reality, but there was also a pandemic in that book and people were in quarantine, so I felt like I was in a slightly distorted version of my current reality.

Reading The Dreamers triggered my addiction to reading. After I finished reading that book, I decided that I had to find other books that were just like it, or better.

I have read so many incredible books during this pandemic and now I am absolutely obsessed with escaping my reality through reading.

In fact, I even created a book club on my blog where I review books that I’ve read. Feel free to check it out.

3. I traveled more than ever.

Even though many people weren’t traveling during the first phases of reopening the country, when our state opened up, my family and I started traveling.

We took 5 road trips in the late spring and summer and it was incredibly fulfilling. Traveling more was actually one of the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the year.

We traveled to Indiana to visit with family two different times, and we also went to the beach three times.

Traveling during a pandemic was interesting, but I something that I did notice at the beach was that the people that we encountered there were so kind and happy to be at the beach.

We all learned a lesson that we had been taking the beauty of our earth for granted all these years. The beaches were closed during phase 1 and two of the reopening, even people staying in AIRBNB’S were ordered to leave.

For a while, I wasn’t sure if we would be able to go to the beach this year, no one knew what was going on.

When we arrived at the beach I made an effort to stop and take in the beauty of the earth, To be more connected to the ocean.

To let the waves take me away and give my body to the sea. I respect and appreciate the little things a little more after all that we’ve gone through this year.

4. I laughed until I cried.

I am a firm believer that laughter is healthy. I feel so amazing when I laugh, and I do my best to watch something or read something that makes me laugh right before I fall asleep every night so I can go to bed on a happy note.

When we visited family, we spent hours reminiscing on old times, laughing at memories that probably weren’t funny back then, but they sure are funny now.

My husband always makes me laugh. And there were a lot of hilarious memes and videos that came about due to the pandemic.

5. I meditated.

Meditating is always something that I wanted to learn to do. But every time I would try, I had the hardest time quieting my mind.

I found myself easily distracted by noises outside or in my house, and I could never concentrate. I would always just give up after a few minutes because I didn’t think I could do it.

But then I discovered guided meditations. And I’m so glad I did.

A guided meditation is an audio with someone telling you where to focus your thoughts. This was an absolute life saver for me. Meditation has done wonders for me in terms of manifesting my dreams and helping me visualize my future life.

If you are interested in guided meditations, you can check them out on youtube. Currently, this mediation is my favorite

6. I invested in myself and my business.

I fell in love with blogging in 2020. I had always loved blogging before, but I finally invested in some courses and other things that I knew would help grow my blog and it was the best financial decision I ever made.

The money came back to me ten fold and now I have a steady income from my blog that is growing each month.

I also invested in myself. I got a massage, I bought myself new clothes, got my nails done, finally updated my capsule makeup collection, and so much more.

Over the years I have been terrible at investing in myself. I always focus on my kids which I think most mothers do, but making the financial decision to spend a little money on myself and my business brought me so much in return that I didn’t foresee.

10 Things you can do to become happier

• Practice gratitude
• Be selective with what you do, only do things that make you happy
• Remove toxic people from your life
• Start working out
• Make a happiness list: write down things that make you happy
• Start a new hobby
• Stop comparing yourself to others
• Travel more
• Listen to happy music
• Take yourself on dates

Prioritizing Happiness: The bottom line.

2020 was surprisingly pleasant in so many ways, and I truly believe that it is because I let go of the pressure that I put on myself last year, created different goals and intentions that focused only on the things that brought me true happiness.

My advice to you is to take some time identifying the things that will make you truly happy and chase those things.