Happy Marriages Start with Happy Partners

One thing I learned from screwing up my first marriage is that happy marriages start with happy partners. It’s not the other way around. As much as your mate might want to add to your happiness, he or she cannot make you happy when you are not.
In my second marriage, Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want has been a big part of our efforts to find our own happiness and support each other’s. This wonderful book came out 30 years ago, and it is still so popular that a special 30th anniversary edition comes out on March 24th.
I met Barbara Sher in 2004, at a PBS donors workshop in Bethlehem, PA. Immediately, I signed up to coach others using the techniques in Wishcraft, through something she calls Success Teams. My next team, eight weeks of workshops following Barbara’s great program that will start you on a lifetime of successfully going after your dreams (no self-improvement or positive thinking required), is a telephone team, so anyone can participate.
Whether you join a Success Team or work through Wishcraft on your own, it’s a fabulous program for getting past your procrastination and self-defeating stories about why you can’t do what you love. And Barbara Sher plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary edition in a big way. She’s offering prizes to those who join her, plus a giant, worldwide, 24-hour Idea Party to figure out ways to get you where you want to go, which begins the evening of March 23 for those of us in US time zones (all day March 24 UTC / Zulu / Greenwich Mean Time).
Recent research into happiness shows the pleasure of a box of chocolates, a bunch of flowers, or a massage is short-lived. More effective are a career or hobby that engages you daily and a life of meaning, in which you bring your talents to a cause greater than yourself. You owe it to yourself and the man or woman who loves you to find a way to do what you love.