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Women are not playing enough! If you run errands and clean the house on Saturday morning rather than play tennis, get a massage, take a beach walk or a hike, you are a more likely to look at life with a little more pessimism and not enjoy your job as much as you could. Your work and your time off run into one another as one big chore.

If you send your kids off to their activities and your husband or significant other off to a golf or tennis date while you grocery shop and pick up the dry cleaning, you may find yourself really unhappy about your job, and generally not all that happy with the world in general. Now, more than life being a chore it is really irksome and not very fun.

On the other hand, if you get up on a weekend morning with fun plans of your own, enlisting your family or significant other into helping you with the chores before or after the time set aside for fun, you are most likely someone others look at and say, “she really enjoys life!” You are also someone who also enjoys their work

And if you forget all the chores and organizational necessities and just go play you will feel like a trailblazer and someone who is ready to grab everything good in the world and go for a ride. Life will be full of joy, your job great fun and people will marvel at how wonderful things go for you. Believe it or not you will still have plenty of time to get the chores done.

It is a fact that most women look at Saturday morning as the time to clean house, grocery shop, do the laundry and the rest of the chores that got dropped all week. When you see the bikes whizzing by on your way to the grocery store why are most of the riders' men? Why do most of the tee times on Saturday go to the men as well? Where and when did it get written that work comes first and then play?

Can you sit back for a minute and remember a summer morning when you were a little girl and you hit the door with no plans except to get outside and play? Do you remember making play out of a stick and a can or jumping rope for hours or playing imaginary games with friends? More importantly do you remember the feeling of these times? This is what is missing in creating the lives we loves as adult women and having the time of our life, regardless of the circumstances around us.

Look around you, all the successful, (meaning happy), women you know have play and fun in their lives. Women leading the life they love have a wonderful combination of work and play.

No one denies you have work to do, children to raise, parents to care for and a home to maintain. Why not do all these things and play too? No time? Make the time with some simple planning. Think about how great it would be to have that spirit of playfulness in your life again? Think about creating the life you love through giving yourself the gift of play.

Here's how to get started and lead the life you love through play;

1. Make a list of all the playful things you like, or did like, to do that are playful and fun. Go back to your childhood if you need to and reach for the feeling of some of the things you did. Figure out what would be a good adult equivalent of those childhood activities, giving you the same feeling if not the same experience. Remember as children we did what came naturally when we played and it was usually great fun.
2. Make a list of new things you would like to do that are playful and fun!
3. Combine your lists until you have at least twenty four different things that are fun for you to do. Be sure to put things like naps and talking with good friends if that is a playful part of your life.
4. Now take your calendar and pull out a PINK high liter and mark out five different times in the next week you will stop and either play or think about play. Sometimes just the thought gets us started. Sometimes shopping for what we plan to do or doing internet research on what we want to do is as good as doing it! Bakers love great stores of specialty items, and sewers love fabric shops. Is there a place in your life that will get you started?
5. Keep these appointments with yourself. Honor them as if they are as important as anything you will do this week. Remember if you don't take the time to play no one else will make it for you. In every one of those appointments you will be creating the life you love.