So, here's the funny story and it really does hit home with me week after week.

Several years ago I was in Hawaii with my children.

We were on a tour of the botanical gardens on the island of Kauai.

There were about 30 of us in the group and the tour guide was showing us all the beautiful flowers and where parts of the movie, Jurassic Park had been filmed.

I was standing next to this mom. I could see her daughter was getting bored and restless. Like all six-year-olds, she started to wander and play through the gardens.

Her mom called her over, got down on one knee, and now facing her child, she whispered, ”Honey, remember what we talked about?”

This 6-year-old said...

The girl looked down at her hands and started fidgeting with her thumbnail. At that very moment, the tour guide had stopped talking.

In dead silence, we all heard the little girl burst out and say to her mother,

“But I don't WANT good behavior!”

Mom looked like she wanted to fall through the ground as we all snickered on hearing this. Empathy washed over us. We have all raised children and have all been there.

So, let's talk about this "never-a-truer statement"

There are days when we just don't want to behave. We may know better and that 10-minute walk would certainly do us a lot of good but, “I don't WANT good behavior!”

And there are times when we know we shouldn’t eat 2000 calories of chunky chocolate chip cookies that just came out of the bakery. But, “I don't WANT good behavior!”

The thing about saying this to ourselves really brings out the fact that we can own it.

So what if we don’t take that 10-minute walk or we eat 5 huge chocolate chip cookies?

Did we enjoy not walking?  Did we enjoy the cookies? YES! We absolutely did!

And that in and of itself gives us the power to do what we want without feeling guilty.

The Power to Feel Good

In fact, it gives us the power to do what we want and feel the good, not the guilt.

So the next time somebody is berating you for not doing what you said you were gonna do or worse… you're berating yourself and feeling guilty for not doing what you told yourself you would do, just own it and say, “But I don't WANT good behavior!”

It's perfectly OK to have those moments when we just want to do what we want to do.

I use these words a lot now in my daily routines. Not so much with other people but with myself so that I can brush aside the guilt I might otherwise feel.

I use it when I have a list of things to do and I don't feel like doing that list.

I say it to myself when I want to vegetate in front of the TV and not write another blog.

Think about the power you have to self-care when you say to yourself, “But I don't WANT good behavior!” And then laugh it off.