As I continue my personal experiential study of being softer with myself, one of the things that’s helping a lot has been to jettison the word “should” from my vocabulary. I find that even without holding a big stick over my head, things are getting done, and life is flowing along, better than ever in fact. Ideas are coming to me, I’m following the energy of whatever feels like the right thing to focus on in the moment, in the day, in the week.

Martha Beck talks about making decisions based on whether the activity in question makes you feel “shackles on” or “shackles off”. In other words, is it something you’re feeling forced to do, shoving yourself into chains or a dark box, or something that feels like you are free and flying? Is it something that makes you groan and want to pull the covers back over your head?

Or something that makes you want to shout “whoo hoo” because energy is coursing through you?

When I originally conceived of this site, I was excited by the ideas I wanted to share and explore, and I thought the way I “should” do this was through a blog. But as I faced the prospect of feeling obligated to write a new post several times a week, I felt the shackles creeping toward me.

The clear answer was to write less often, or change the structure of the site. But it took me a while to get to that solution, because my “taskmaster” voice kicked in and tried to tell me that I “should” write every day because I told people to come to the site and they would be expecting a constant flow of new content. The word “constant” alone feels like a shackle, so I knew this wasn’t right for me.

Now I know there are people out there who will say “But what about your responsibilities and obligations?” Can you just feel the shackles? That’s because the word “obligation” comes from the Latin for “bind.” Whenever possible, I say, eliminate anything that is an “obligation” – something you are doing only because you agreed to do something you didn’t really want to do. Get rid of obligations, shoulds, got-to’s! Say no thank you!

I’m advocating a different kind of responsibility – the responsibility to enjoy your life, to want to do whatever you’re spending energy on. If you hate your job, find one that you like more. If you hate your life, change it until you don’t hate it any more. I’m freelancing right now, and oddly, I’ve had to remind myself not to take on projects that repel me!

Basically I’m advising you to do as close to exactly what you want to be doing as much of the time as possible! Who’s in?

The very cool green-friendly home design site Re-nest has gathered suggestions on how to use old cassette tapes in home decor.

Designs include mirrors, lamps and a coin purse!

Then they pointed me to Interbent to figure out what to do with these pesky CDs and CD-Roms…

I stole this idea from my friend Zadie: a structure-free day. Pick one day a week where you have no agenda, no plans, no to-do list. Just do whatever you feel like doing. Could be going for a long bike ride or calling friends or (my personal favourite) lying on the couch with a book. If you truly feel like painting the porch, you can do it, but not because you feel like you have to, or because you said that’s what you would do this weekend.

It’s a refreshing feeling!

What happens when ask yourself “What do I really feel like doing right now?” instead of “What should I be doing right now?”

I’m attending the Toronto International Film Festival this week, so thought the time was right to bring out a list of films that are (as far as I can tell), just straight-out fun, no deep thinking required. Because sometimes you just need to lie back into a soft sofa, put your feet up, and laugh your ass off.

• Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (69, dude!)
• Caddyshack (Get in the hole!)
• Airplane! (Roger, Over, Roger)
• The Producers (original with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel – Never put your own money in the show!)
• Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (I know you are but what am I?)

If you’re not sure you can do this if it’s not on a to-do list, you can check off your way through AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Laughs.”

As you can see, my list (and sense of humor I guess!) is biased to pre-1990. What would make your fave five list?

For this weekend’s Try This, I offer a can’t-fail fun-maker: the yoyo.

I hadn’t played with one for quite some time, but picked one up at a store a while ago and just the feel of it in my hand made me smile immediately. I’m convinced flinging an object around on a string can’t help but “take years off your age.” Just watch out for bonking yourself (or others) in the head. Not saying that happened to me or anything…

If you actually need a rational reason to pick up a yoyo, it turns out that playing with a yoyo is great mental exercise because it uses both the left and right sides of your brain! Who knew?

If you don’t have one in the back of your closet or kitchen drawer, just going to pick one up could provide a spirit of adventure. Linger in the toy store! Try out all kinds of stuff! They’ve got all kinds of fancy models that light up and return to you automatically, but the old tried and true classic yoyo will do more than fine!

Once yoyo is safely in hand and you’ve had some time to play on your own, you can learn to do some tricks if you want. I found a site for beginner yoyo tricks, and one for more advanced.

Here’s the winner of the 2005 YoYo championships, for inspiration:

Give it a spin! Have a fun weekend!

I’ve been working on the site for a few weeks now, but I had intended to officially launch on Tuesday. I guess that was an appropriately soft deadline!

I got derailed early in the week by travel gone amuck and although I was tempted to revert to my old harder/faster/stronger ways, I realized that rushing around, stressing out and pulling an all-nighter wasn’t exactly going to be walking the talk of Being Softer with myself! I also realized that this was a self-imposed deadline (as so many are, really), and thus, flexible if I could let go of the need to line up with a random calendar date!

So here we are. I’ll be here five days a week, offering suggestions and stories about how to be kinder to yourself, to others, and to the planet. Please take a look around and tell me what you think! I welcome your comments, suggestions, encouragement and ideas! (To learn more about why I built this site see What’s the Idea Behind Be Softer?

To celebrate the official launch, I am giving away a Soft Selection of goodies to one lucky new reader! On September 10, a name will be drawn randomly from people who have commented on this (or any) post or subscribed to the newsletter. (or who drop me a line to say they’ve subscribed to the site via RSS or email.) You can get an extra entry by tweeting and/or linking to the site on your blog!

The Soft Selection Prize Pack includes:

	Softy Blanket and Pillow Better than the Snuggie!
	Organic Cotton Toe Sox! Grey or Pink!
	Yummy All-Natural Black Berry Vanilla Body Butter Slather on yourself or a friend!

Good luck, enjoy the site, and have a soft day!

Volunteering is an amazing way to give back or pay it forward, giving of your time rather than money. But only about one in four North Americans volunteer. The rest don’t know what they’re missing out on, because volunteering improves your mental, physical and emotional health!

There are many people finding innovative ways to harness the power of Twitter, Facebook, etc to promote volunteering. For example, Britt over at Have Fun Do Good, has put together a list of 21 Twitter feeds about Volunteering.

But Brandon Mendelson is taking it much further. He’s a man with a mission: to raise awareness of and gratitude for volunteerism, while benefitting several non-profit organizations with technical equipment and knowledge, AND raising money for the Invisible People homeless voices video project. And he’s using social networking to help do it.

His project, A Million High Fives will use “crowdfunding” over the next several months to raise the money required for the adventure. Anyone interested in participating pays $1 for each business card to be displayed in a world-record event . The goal is 300,000 cards and there is extra exposure for buying 100, 200 or more.

You can also send in used laptops, cell phones, game systems, digital cameras, etc to be donated to Invisible People and various charities.

The project kicked off on September 1 and runs through September 2010. Get in on the ground floor! You can follow tweets about the project using the #AMHF hashtag. Good luck Brandon!

1. Summer’s almost over! Before you know it, it’ll be time for sweaters.
2. You checked your work email over the weekend.
3. It’s been cloudy, so your Vitamin D intake is clearly insufficient. This needs rectifying!
4. You never charged for that night you worked late last March.
5. You’ve only worn that new red bathing suit once. It deserves another trip out of the drawer!

If there’s no lake or ocean near you, or driving there is going to be more stressful than fun, feel free to substitute a day at the park!

Why else do you deserve a day at the beach/park?

Every Friday, I’ll be offering up something fun and/or courageous for us all to try over the weekend. Be sure to comment to let us know how it went!

This weekend’s challenge: smile at strangers.

Depending what size city/town you live in, this may seem like a radical idea. I remember my sister telling me once on the New York subway not to smile because people would either think I was crazy, or a gullible, easy-target tourist!

Smiling has been shown to improve our health and attractiveness, and to improve our own mood.

Here’s how you do it:

I live in a decent-sized prairie town where people are pretty friendly, so I’ll up the challenge by going to the downtown district where we have our share of suits rushing by on Important Business.

Things to investigate:

- Is it contagious? Do people smile back? Does age or clothes style affect the return rate?
- Does it feel good just to do it, even if people don’t respond?
- If people don’t smile back, do you feel judged somehow?

Maybe another weekend we’ll try something radical like saying “good morning” to our fellow world-dwellers…

(Continued from Part I)

Whoa. “Work Softer.” What would that look like? And what if I don’t want to be working at everything all the time? How about just Being? Be Softer. Enjoy a Softer Life. Yes please. Yum.

Almost immediately though, I felt guilty. (Ah Guilt, the charming companion to The Badger*). Who was I to live a softer life? Life is hard. “Everyone knows that.” And if I decided to have a softer life, what about all the people in the world who truly do have hard lives? And what about the planet? Wouldn’t having a soft life mean being totally reckless and greedy and disregarding environmental impact? That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I was after. Could I create a concept of Being Softer that went beyond myself?

I hope so. That’s my experiment here. To find a way to be Softer with myself (gentler), Softer to others (kinder), and Softer on the planet (greener). In short, doing my part to create a softer world, where everyone can experience a softer life.

Interested? Let’s try it together. See what happens. See if, as the coked-up inner Badger warns us, the world crumbles, nothing gets done, we’re taken advantage of, and we end up on the street. Or, as I believe, we end up way less stressed out — calmer, happier, healthier, more peaceful, more content, having more fun, more in touch with the world and universe — and able to pass along all those poz vibes to others.

I’ll be offering techniques, thoughts (my own and others’), resources, suggestions, experiments to try, and opportunities to share your own experiences and findings. I look forward to playing and seeking softness with you!

* Martha Beck calls this our prehistoric “Lizard Brain” sending out constant messages of fear. Julia Cameron calls it our Inner Critic. Some religions call it Illusion.