I am so excited to be part of this! An awesome podcast promoting living a full healthy and happy life!

On April 11 — one day before my 45th birthday — my sister gave me a second chance at life by donating one of her kidneys.

This was a huge sacrifice — nearly two months later, she’s still not fully recovered — and I am determined not to waste this selfless gift.

This new blog will chronicle my attempts to live my new life to the fullest, to be happier, healthier and more productive. I’m calling this blog “My Instruction Manual” because it will become a guidebook for life and how to live it well.

It’s not like I was unhappy before. I am blessed in marriage, have unique and delightful kids, have run half-marathons and have had a variety of successful careers in journalism, public relations, social media and publishing.

But something was missing. I was stressed and grumpy too often. I was bad at maintaining friendships and worse at keeping them. The habits I learned to cope during childhood were getting in the way of the life I wanted to live as an adult.

Like most of us, I never really learned how to be human, not really. So now I’m learning this basic but fundamental skill and I will share my learnings and experiences here.

Here’s what you can expect from My Instruction Manual.

• While this blog fits into the self-help / self-improvement / personal development categories, I’m not interested in exploring a bunch of unproven new age theories. Everything I talk about here will be grounded in science.
• To start, I’ve defined my focus as becoming happier, healthier (eating and exercise) and more productive. But this may evolve over time as I explore the most important elements to include in an instruction manual for humans.
• For the first few weeks, I’m committing to posting almost every day. Here’s what I’m planning for the next few days. Tomorrow, I’m writing about bullet journals, Thursday I’m writing about resolutions and Friday I’m writing about friendship.

So with that, welcome to My Instruction Manual! I’m excited to set off on this journey and thrilled to share it with you.

Originally published at MYINSTRUCTIONMANNUAL