Bonjour Royal Friends!
Welcome to my ‘tongue-in-chic’ life, style, and happiness blog from a funny princess point of view!
Welcome to all, including my new friends from South Brunswick who attended my recent talk. I “cooked up” and “talk-tested” this latest recipe about happiness with them and they gave me a wonderful reception. Thank you for that! I’d like to expand on that recipe and share it with my entire kingdom, today.
Who among you has ever eaten lasagne? Who among you has ever baked a lasagne? Who among you thinks they have the best lasagne recipe in the kingdom? In your corner of it, you probably do.
You may be thinking holy smokes, did I accidentally click on a cooking blog? What the heck does lasagne have to do with happiness, optimism, and positivity? Here’s how: becoming happier, more optimistic, and more positive is like making lasagne.
How do you prepare a lasagne? Here’s the general idea. You put some sauce in the bottom of a baking pan. Then you layer your noodles, then you layer your meat or vegetables. Maybe you throw on some ricotta cheese at this point. Then maybe you layer more sauce. More noodles. More cheese. Or some combination therein. All the layers being done, you pop the bad boy in the oven and bake. Perhaps you take an extra step to broil it at the end to get that fab crust on the cheese-y top. Yummmm!
Each one of those ingredients is delicious in its own right. But each ingredient alone does not give you the lasagne experience. However, when you start layering the ingredients one on top of another you start seeing the dish take shape and resemble the familiar, mouth-watering dish most of us know so well….and love! Then, when you let it bake for an hour or so, boy oh boy, that’s when you happily have yourself some delicious meal! A meal where you can hear chef Lidia Bastianich say as she famously does at the end of her cooking shows, “Tutti a tavola, ah mangiare!” (Everyone to the table, to eat!)
Becoming happier, more optimistic, and more positive is a similar process of baking lasagne in that you need to layer the little shifts in thinking and the new mind habits it takes to enhance your life. One change, one new habit, one shift alone certainly will add a tasty addition to sweeten your life. However, it’s only when you layer them and incorporate more and more of them into your life, then boy oh boy….you will bake yourself a totally delicious life. More Yummmm!
Learning habits of forgiveness, learning how to handle worrisome thoughts and rumination, learning strategies to see the glass half full not empty (in my case, the goblet), those are all fabulous strategies that stand alone to help you craft a happy life. Layer them together, and things get really amazing. There’s tons more….imagine your life when you layer tons more! You’ll be so stuffed with happiness you’ll need a doggy bag!
It’s important to stress that these shifts are often very small changes in attitude and outlook. Sometimes it’s as small as the change in one word that you use, like in my favorite example, labeling a problem a challenge. So many opportunities open in the mind when problems are seen as challenges. That’s an example of the big impact that can happen with merely a simple change in perspective.
Remember, on the road to happiness, optimism, and positivity the key is to keep layering small shifts in thinking for big results. Because it’s not just about one change. It’s about making a life lasagne, my royal friends! It’s about changing your outlook in many ways, using lots of different happiness strategies to create a more positive approach to life. And that’s where this princess can help you! That’s my super power! Helping others learn strategy and mind habits for a royally happy life. So glad you’re part of my kingdom!
x♥x♥x♥,
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Dame Diane Uniman, Aka Princess Diane von Brainisfried, is an attorney turned motivational speaker, certified positive psychology life coach and award-winning writer. She wrote Bonjour, Breast Cancer-I’m Still Smiling…Wit, Wisdom, and Optimism for Beating the Breast Cancer Blues.