My Happiness

For the last few months, I have been thinking about my own happiness.  What do I want to do? Is this what I want to do?  Is there more to life?  What would my obituary say about me?  What would my children say in the future about me? These questions mostly came to me when I was laid off earlier this year.  Before hand I was move through life without any sense of what I was doing. It was like I was on auto-pilot but I knew I was not happy.  But I did not have a clue what to do to find my happiness.

Now about eight months later, I have changed a lot, or at least my way of thinking about things happening to me and my family.  I wanted to find out what can make me happy.  I did a lot of reading and research into find happiness or solving a problem that would help me be more happy if it was solved.  Also I did a lot of praying and thinking about what made me unhappy.  Of course, my responsibility to my family came first, I went back to college to get my Associates to get a better job.  A job opportunity open up to where I can help support my family financially. Even though it is less pay than what I was making when I was laid off with no benefits, but this is better than living off employment.  I told myself that is temporary, eventually, I will have a successful business in something I love to do.

In what? I do not know yet, I have many ideas. I am still in the process of trying to find one that will work with my ultimate dream. I will tell you later about that.

I have notice, even though I have not specifically work on my happiness, I did not know that was what I was looking for. I was try to fix many things that had many words to describe them.  But after reading The Happiness Project by Grechten Rubin, I found the one word I have been working on the last eight months and what I was looking for all my life. Happiness. Thank you Grechten for a wonderful book, it looks like I have more to do (in my opinion for my happiness) but you have given me the tools to pursuit and expand my own happiness journey.

Looking for Work

I have been looking for work for almost 4 weeks now. It is getting hard to find work to apply for with my experience and pay wage. The problem is that I have a lot of experience and at my last job I was getting good wage. Also there is not that many jobs posted with wages near what I was making. Of course when I apply for jobs that do not post a wage, I find out later that I am over qualified for the position and that it is not in my pay range. Well, I now I have to think outside the box to find a way to make some money.

Well, I have been getting emails about work for self employment positions, like Financial Adviser or Insurance Agent, you have to pay a lot up front for training and licenses. Also you have to network with friends and family or cold call or buy more leads to get your business going. I have talked about this with my husband and if I do this it will be a last resort kind of thing. Also I do not know if I can still claim unemployment benefits or training can be call for career change and it's okay to claim.

Then there is going back to school, guess what they will not pay unemployment benefits if I go back. They will not let me because my job is still here in the United States and did not get ship overseas. Also my skills can be used for any industry. If there is office work then I must apply but the problem is most Office work is entry level position and is paying to low for me.

I have a few other ideas about making some money but I need to get a plan in place for business ideas. I need to some research and brainstorming. I might need some investors as well. I am trying to think of things to do between interview and job searching, which is not very often. Cleaning house gets boring after a while.