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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Navigating the Parenting Map With Dr. Shefali [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 416 of Live Happy Now. Mother's Day is just around the corner, and whether you have one, are one, or hope to be one, you don't want to miss today's conversation. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week I'm talking with Dr. Shefali, a New York Times bestselling author who blends Western psychology with Eastern philosophy to create a groundbreaking approach that she calls conscious parenting. In this episode, she shares her insights on why most of what we think about parenting is wrong, and how we can all become more conscious, not just as parents, but in all our relationships. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:43] PF: Dr. Shefali, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now. [00:00:47] DS: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. [00:00:48] PF: Well, I could think of no one better to have for our Mother's Day episode. Because parenting is your jam, and what I think is so interesting, you're so respected for your blend of Western psychology and Eastern philosophy. How do you think that's given you a different kind of insight into parenting? [00:01:08] DS: I think Eastern philosophy is so rich in wisdom-based technique of how to manage Western based stresses. When I say Western, I just mean a westernized way of thinking, which has been so overly emphatic about competition, and striving, and achievement, and domination, which have gotten us great advancements, but they create high cortisol in us. Eastern spirituality is such an amazing antidote to create that presence, that slowing down, coming into the inevitable impermanence of life, reminding us that that constant striving, and achievement, and competition that we're putting our children through and ourselves through, is not the pathway to wellbeing. Eastern spirituality teaches us a direct pathway to wellbeing. So, when I talk to my clients, I understand the Western obsession with power. But then I teach them how to create an antidote to that, to bring about greater wellbeing. [00:02:24] PF: Wellbeing is so important. We know that it's such a huge indicator for success, but we're not taught that. How difficult is it for parents to make that adjustment? Because you still have to live in this western world, and you're adopting a different kind of mindset than most of the people around you. [00:02:44] DS: Yes. But the predominant mentality is this competition, domination, achievement mentality, which is why most of us are medicated, and obese, and diseased, and unhappy. Obviously, that is not the way to wellbeing. How to create that balance? Or I mean, there's no utopic balance, anyway. But how to create that wisdom, where you are part of this world. Listen, I'm super successful, but there is a way to live in that successful driven world, success driven world, without being eaten alive by it, and without making our children feel eaten alive by it. That's why I'm successful is, because I teach people, yes, you can live in this world. But you got to live in this world with sanity. I think we've become a little bit insane in striving for this power, and competition, and success. [00:03:43] PF: I agree with you. I think we're seeing so many of the effects that play out with the anxiety of children and young adults now who have grown up in this environment. You have such tremendous insights. What made you decide to apply that to family and parenting? Because as I read your works, and I read more about you, it’s like, you could help us in every area of our lives. Why parenting and family? [00:04:10] DS: I am trying to help people in every area of their lives, but they're so resistant. I finally said, “Okay, at least help your children. You don't want to help yourself, and you're so messed up in your own obsessions.” Maybe, I thought to myself, that if I could show people how badly they are damaged from their childhood, and help them deal with their children, maybe the big fat ego will burst, and that's how I actually came to it, was like, “Maybe, you’ll bloody listen to me if I show you in terms of your own childhood, and in terms of children”, and that's what struck a chord. That's one reason. But the other reason really, is that because everything really starts with the early parent child dynamic. Okay, we are messed up. We got screwed by our parents. Fine. But let's not do this to our children. I really make a plea to parents. Please, yes, you are messed up. Yes, your parents weren't conscious. But I'm giving you a way to unravel your childhood in a way that doesn't pass on to your children and helps your children become who you could never be. I think, parents hear that, because they hear my begging and my pleading. They remember their own pain from childhood. Then, they finally acquiesce and go, “Okay, we don't want to pass this on to our children.” But let me tell you, it is still hard for me to do, because it's such a deep conditioning. I mean, I'm banging my head on the wall, getting parents to see their own ego, because it's so difficult for us humans. We are good at complaining about other people's ego, but it's very hard to see our own. [00:05:58] PF: Yes. We live in a world that's becoming more and more egocentric, because of things like social media. It turns it inward, those spotlights on us, instead of looking outward, so much of the time. What really burst you on the scene was your book, The Conscious Parent. I know other things we're going to talk about build on that. I guess for a baseline, let's talk about what you mean by conscious parenting. [00:06:21] DS: To understand conscious parenting, you have to first understand that the predominant way we were all raised is the traditional parenting model. That model was based on hierarchy of the parent. The parent knows best. Control, shame, fear, guilt, punishment. That's how we were raised. The parent was glorified in their authority and superiority. If you're a parent out there, a mother right now, listening, you need to understand you were raised with this attitude that you know best, that you're supposed to know best, that you're supposed to control your children, and you're supposed to raise perfect, super happy, super successful children. First, you have to own that as a parent. “Yes, dammit, I was raised like that. Yes, I think my child belongs to me. Wow. Yes, she's right.” First, we have to agree on that. Otherwise, we cannot agree on the second part, which is what is conscious parenting. Conscious parenting is for the parent to realize that they're coming to the dynamic with their children full of their own parental expectations. They believe good parenting is to control the child. Conscious parenting is for the parent to become aware of that, to realize that that is complete unconsciousness. That they need to raise themselves. They need to heal themselves. They need to stop using their children to fill their own inner longing. They need to stop asking their children to be happy, because that makes them happy, or be successful, because that makes them feel good about themselves. And begin to raise their children as the children need to be raised. Yes, maybe your child will be a gardener. Maybe your child will be a baker. Maybe your child will be a mechanic and nobody's child will be an Olympian. Yes, maybe so. That is completely okay. See, we're not okay with that. [00:08:20] PF: What's so interesting is if you ask a parent, when they have a child, it's like, “What do you want for your child?” They’re like, “I just want them to be happy.” That's what an answer we hear a lot. But then the actions would tell us otherwise, because children are being, in many times, pushed into activities or academics that they're not even interested in. [00:08:39] DS: Yes. I'm not talking about this [inaudible 00:08:41] pleasure that we all have to indulge in. But I tell parents, you cannot ask for your children to be happy, because that's coming from your idea of what happiness is. Why should they be happy? They're allowed to be sad. They're allowed to be angry. See, we were not allowed our big emotions, so it's very frustrating for us when we see our children's big emotions, even though our children are being human. This whole idea of I want anything from anybody is really our own ego talking. Right? We can say, “I want this for myself.” We can't say I want somebody else to be happy. Why? They can be whatever they want to be. We are so into this controlling mindset, that we don't even realize how far reaching and deep this mindset of control is and we have to stop. Read my books and examine our need for control in a very deep way. Not a superficial way. [00:09:42] PF: That’s so interesting, because your books have done wonderous things for people. Incredible. That has all led to your new book, The Parenting Map, and this one, you really smashed toxic patterns. You look about how to create authentic connections. Tell us how this book came about. You're just building on everything you've already created. [00:10:01] DS: Yes. I always say after every parenting book that it will be my last. But really, Paula, you can catch me on it, it's my last parenting book. Because the other books were the what and the why, because I so needed to explain the what and the why, because people didn't understand. This one is the how. So, this one is the 20-step how to become a conscious parent. If anyone out there listening, is intrigued by my philosophy, and wants to dare, it's a daring task to be a conscious parent, and dares to be conscious. They can pick up my book, The Parenting Map. It's 20 easy steps with exercises. Listen, we have to take parenting more seriously than we are, because we are not realizing how toxic our current parenting practices are. Then, we want happy children. Then, we want secure children. Then, we want leaders, when we are the most toxic influences often in our children's lives. So, if you're a parent listening, and you want to be brave to change the parenting in your home, to become an enlightened parent, then my book will help you. I give practice exercises. We have to practice. My child is 20 years old, I am still practicing every day. It's something we have to cultivate. It's not something that we are born knowing how to do. [00:11:26] PF: We think that we should. We think, I was raised. I was a child. I know how to be a child, so I know how to raise a child. Where does that mindset come from that, like, we just are all equipped to do it? [00:11:37] DS: From extreme ignorance and stupidity. Really, because – and our ego, right? Our ego is so ignorant that it thinks it's fine. It's such blasphemy that we need to learn how to take care of – if you want to become a dog groomer, we need to pass a test, a license. If we need to drive a damn car, we have to take tests and licenses. Why do we think that we need to know and should know how to raise a child that we've never met? Never taken a psychology course. Because you know why? Parents are infused on steroids with this grand ego, that these people belong to me, and because they come from me, I will own the hell out of them. It's ownership. It’s blind, absolute control. It's like saying, “I married you. I know you, and now you belong to me.” Right? But it's even more crazy, because I didn't even court this child. The child didn't even have a choice. Now, I'm owning this child. It's arrogance. It's blind stupidity and arrogance that allows us to think that we should know it, because they come from us. See, we mistake biology for psychology. Just because they biologically come from us, doesn't mean we psychologically know who they are. We need to learn. We need to become humble. No one wants to be humble. I saw in my own parenting how arrogant I was. I was brought to my knees. That's why I did this whole work. Because I was like, “Wow, you are so not good at this. Clueless.” I was humble enough to say I'm clueless. See, we're so arrogant we don't want to say we are clueless. [00:13:14] PF: Right. I think it's hard for people to acknowledge like, I don't feel I'm very good at this, and I don't feel like I'm in my element. [00:13:22] DS: But why is it so hard? Because we have a damn big ego. We should be like, off the bat. I don't know what to do. I remember when the nurse left my room, like she just left the room, and I was like, “Please come back. Don't leave me with this” – [00:13:35] PF: With this little person. I don't know what to do. [00:13:38] DS: I was happy to see I didn't know because I was not so proud. See, it's this false pride. We do not know what we're doing. Nobody knows what they're doing, including our parents who told us we should know what we're doing. They are the culprit. Let's blame them. Let's admit we don't know what we're doing. [00:13:59] PF: How does it change things when people are brought to their knees, as you say, and they start recognizing I do have these toxic patterns and what I'm doing isn't working. When they're able to acquiesce to that and accept that, how does it start changing their parenting mindset? [00:14:15] DS: Oh, my God. It's a huge floodgate of first, humility. Then, you begin to shut up. You stop blaming your child. Do you know what a huge paradigm shift that is, just you becoming aware that it's you? You won't open your mouth with that much grandiosity anymore. You'll be like, “Oh, my goodness. Let me learn. Let me stop. Let me observe.” The other day, a parent came to me and said, “Dr. Shefali, where is the fine line between mentoring my kid because I want to coach them and pushing them?” I said both of them are wrong. How about ask me where is the line between observing my child and observing them some more, and learning from them, and learning from them some more?” You see, we just refuse to believe we should be the students as much as we should be the teachers. I'm not saying don't be the teacher, but be the student too. Can you learn from your child? So, this humility opens a floodgate of wisdom, and it just takes you off the pedestal. Your children feel it, your children approach you like a human being, and now they're willing to learn. No one wants to learn from a dictator. [00:15:33] PF: Right. That's so interesting. You also talk about how our childhood wounds were playing out in our parenting role. Is that just our unresolved trauma that we end up bringing into our parenting? Then, what is that doing to our children? [00:15:51] DS: Yes, yes, and yes. So, in my book, The Parenting Map, the second colored part of the book is all about breaking your parenting paradigms and patterns by recognizing your ego faces. Once you begin to become aware of how your ego is showing up from your childhood, then you begin to realize, “Wow, I learned this from my dad. I'm doing the same thing to my child and it's so toxic. And my child is feeling unheard, and unseen, and unworthy. I'm creating low self-esteem. Do I want to keep doing this? Or do I want to break my pattern?” I teach people, step by step, how to break their childhood patterns. [00:16:34] PF: This affects your relationship with your child, obviously. But how does it change relationships between partners, between spouses, as they break down some of these walls? [00:16:44] DS: Because you become aware of your own ego, as I show you in the book, now you have awareness of your partners and your parent’s ego, and you begin to see how they have developed their ego phases. You have compassion. It doesn't mean you need to stay, but you can at least have compassion, and realize it's not personal. This just creates so much compassion in the world, so much upliftment in the world, so much radiance in the world, rather than bickering, and fighting, and domination in the world. [00:17:17] PF: Have you seen a change the children of the people that you work with? [00:17:22] DS: Well, my goodness, parents come and tell me, “My child just said to me to thank Dr. Shefali.” Or they say, “Go to Dr. Shefali. Read more about her books.” They get it. They're like, “Do you see? Do you see? Finally, do you hear? I've been telling you all this time, mom, and you haven't heard me. And now you're listening to Dr. Shefali.” I actually used to keep my own teachings away from my daughter, because she would kill me. She’ll be like, “You need to listen to you more.” But I do tell my daughter, and she'd be like, “Mom, you're such a hypocrite. You don't listen to Dr. Shefali.” She killed me. She'd be like, “See, you, yourself don't listen to yourself.” But what I'm trying to say is that children feel so heard and they feel so excited and they feel so happy and they flourish. My goodness. That's why my work has become so popular is because parents see the effect. I get feedback all the time. It makes me so happy. I know what I'm saying works, because I've seen it work over and over again. [00:18:30] PF: When we talk about parenting and talk about it on this level, we tend to think about young children. So, what about if you're a parent of a teenager or even a young adult? Or if you're a grandparent? Is this still going to apply to you? Can you still change your ways? [00:18:45] DS: Of course. You can always be a better human. You can always break your patterns. You can always show up differently. I'm telling you, my daughter's 20 and I'm doing it so much better today than I did 10 years ago. There's no end to this growth. But you have to be willing to want to show a better. Who doesn't want a better, more enlightened grandmother? I would love that. [00:19:08] PF: That’s a great point. [00:19:09] DS: I would love my grandmother to come right now and tell me, “I can see your mother is writing you for your grades, or writing you for your beauty, or writing you for your food, and this is how I want you to look at it, and give me an enlightened perspective.” Who doesn't need a more enlightened perspective? [00:19:26] PF: I love that. You've given us such a great body of work to build our lives on and to really recreate the idea of parenting. What is it with The Parenting Map that you most hope happens for people? [00:19:37] DS: It's just my plea and my offering to let's do this work to end generational patterns of unconsciousness and toxicity, and make it different for our children. [00:19:49] PF: What kind of world is that going to create? What is that going to look like as opposed to now? [00:19:53] DS: Well, it'll take a long time, but it's person to person, human to human. It will start creating less suffering. Imagine, on every block, one house does conscious parenting. That can eventually become a town, right? Then, it can become a city. Then, it can become a nation. But it starts with this one parent at a time. I've been doing this way before Instagram came, and way before podcast, horse spreading this message, one barren at a time. Now, it's become a movement. Now, conscious parenting is out there. That's what I need. I need it to become like more, so that we have more enlightened parents and children feel safe to be children. What an amazing thing that would be. [00:20:35] PF: I love it. Dr. Shefali. We have so much to learn from you. Thank you for spending your time with me today and I look forward to hearing more from you. [00:20:43] DS: Thank you so much. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:20:49] PF: That was Dr. Shefali, talking about conscious parenting. If you'd like to follow Dr. Shefali on social media, learn more about her books, or discover how you can get free recordings of her Parenting Summit, and the Parent Reboot Workshop, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure and stop by the Live Happy Store to take advantage of our spring special where you can get 25% off storewide just by entering the code Spring 25. That is all we have time for today. Well meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Rediscover Your Sense of Wonder With Monica Parker [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 413 of Live Happy Now. We're all born with a sense of wonder, so where does it go? This week, our guest is going to tell us and help us rediscover it. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm sitting down with world-renowned speaker, writer, and authority on the future of work, Monica Parker. Monica has spent decades helping people discover how to lead and live wonderfully. Now, she's sharing what she has learned in her new book, The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn and Lead. Monica reminds us of the wonder we once felt, explains why it's so important, and then gives us great tips on how to reclaim it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:51] PF: Monica, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:55] MP: Thank you, Paula, for having me. I'm delighted to be here. [00:00:56] PF: You have written such a remarkable book, and I'm really excited to dig in and talk to our listeners about it. So, I make sure that we're on the same page. Can you explain what you mean, when you say we're talking about wonder? [00:01:09] MP: Absolutely. So, wonder has a couple of different meanings. It's sort of a shapeshifter as a term. We have wonder as a verb, to wonder, which is sort of curiosity. But then we also have wonder as a noun, which would be, a wonder, which might be something that would cause us to have awe. So, what I did is I wanted to link those two into an emotional experience. So, the way I describe wonder is it's an emotional experience that starts with openness, moves into curiosity, then into absorption, and then into awe. It's actually almost like a cycle. So, the more that we experience any of these different components, the more likely we are to experience them in the future. [00:01:51] PF: It's something that's very overlooked, and it's undervalued. One of the first things that struck me as I was getting into this book is wondering what made you decide that you wanted to study it. Can you take us back to why this topic? Because next we're going to talk about why it's so difficult to study. Why? Why did you want to do this? [00:02:12] MP: Sure. So, my whole life, I have been helping people manage big change, existential change. My work as a homicide investigator, obviously, helping people deal with the fact that the state wanted to deprive them of their life. Working with parents who have children with disabilities, and that is a big change in their expectation of raising a child. And then even working in corporate environments where people are losing their job. That is an existential change. It’s a huge ego blow. So, I actually set about to research and to write a book about change management, which in retrospect, is pretty freaking boring. So, I'm glad I didn't do that. And then when I started doing the research, and also reflecting on my own life, I don't think I had the language for it when I was observing it through time. But I realized that people who held their world in a sense of wonder, were more buoyant. They were more resilient and able to handle what life threw at them. So, that just sent me down wonder rabbit hole, and four years later, here we are. [00:03:08] PF: Well, it was four years that was well spent, because this is a wealth of knowledge, and you touch on it in ways I had never even thought of. We'll get into that later. But one of the things you do bring up is why it's so difficult to study wonder. I found this really interesting. Can you talk about that? Because that might explain why no one else is – I'm not saying no one else is doing it. But there's not a lot out there about it, and tell us why? [00:03:35] MP: Well, for starters, because it's a component emotion, right? It has a lot of different elements. Most people, if they wanted to study, say wonder, would just study awe. but I felt that that was too narrow. Because in fact, awe, it feels like something that is brief and fleeting. But more research shows now that we can have awe in everyday life. The other challenge is that just to study the catalyst of big wonder. So, awe, it's very difficult to find something in a lab that will give somebody a sense of actual awe or wander. In these lab environments, either they're putting somebody through an MRI machine, which is like the big doughnut where you have to stay totally still, or they put on this tentacle helmet for an EEG. So, it’s all very stilted. It's very difficult to study. What you end up studying is people's perception. So, they report to you how they feel. Of course, that's how a lot of psychology research is run, but it just becomes quite difficult to pin down the detail of why people are feeling these things, the intensity that they're feeling, the consistency. So, it's really difficult, in fact, a study any emotion and particularly difficult to study one that is meant to have such a grand reaction in our brains. [00:04:56] PF: Right. I love how you put it in the book, because you say, wonder is part science, and part soul, and I absolutely love that. Can you help us understand how you came to that conclusion through your research? And then what does that mean to us? [00:05:12] MP: Absolutely. So, there were a few questions through the research where the scientists would either demur and say, “That's not something that's really in my purview.” And some of them would just say that's not an answer that a scientist can answer. That is for the philosophers. I talk about the big questions, so we can answer something like, “Why do I feel pain when I put my hand on a stove?” But we can't answer using science at least, why does matter give rise to consciousness? Why, as humans, are we conscious? That's when we start to get into philosophy, religion, that's the soul part. And I was really conscious that I didn't want this book to be woo. I grew up in a household. It was great. But I wanted there to be enough science that people understood that there was something real here. But there is a point at which the science just doesn't explain everything that we experience, and that's when we get into the soul. [00:06:08] PF: Yes, and I think that's something that's so important about this book, because live happy as always science base, and there's so much science in it, but it is such an enjoyable read. It's very funny. I love your friend in the first chapter. He was amazing. So, it is. There's a lot of levity to it. But it's all backed up by science, and I really love that about the book, just as an aside. So, when we're talking about wonder, are we all born with a sense of wonder? Because I think about – I really thought back to childhood when everything was new, or when I'm now with, like a friend's children or grandchildren, and everything's exciting. Is wonder something we all have when we come into this world? [00:06:48] MP: Absolutely. Wonder is a universal emotion. The scientists have proven this. It is something we've all felt, and absolutely, when we're born, babies are little wonder machines. I mean, you can see, their eyes are wide open. It looks like they're tripping out all the time or just absorbing, and what's really happening as they're doing that, is they're building what's known as schema. So, schema are the building blocks of how our brains react to the world. It's basically the lens through which we see the world. As the schema build up, then our brains start to say, “Oh, I've seen that. I understand that.” And they try to put it into a box and explain it away. But when you’re children, everything is new, and so everything does create a sense of wonder. Everything does re-path your neural pathways and build the lens through which you see the world. But the problem is, is as we become older, we get a bit calcified. We feel that we don't have as much to see that has wonder in it. And that's one of the challenges is getting people to really be present enough to see through the eyes of a child, to see like a beginner. I love – [inaudible 00:07:52] says that, “Always be beginning.” [00:07:56] PF: So, are there people who maintain that? Because some people seem to have a greater sense of, “Oh, my gosh, look at that.” Even though they've seen that sunset hundreds of times, and they've seen things, but everything sparks them. So, is it kind of like a character strength? Or what is it? [00:08:11] MP: Within the wonder cycle, you've got openness, which is an openness to experience, which is a personality trait. Openness to experience, as a personality trait, one of the big five is going to be half set by your genetics, and half set by your experiences, by the time you turn 25. That latter set is really important. It's why the way we teach our children, literally forms their brain, et cetera. But by the time we're about 25, our personality is pretty set. Curiosity is both a state and a trait. So, what that means is that it can be dialed up based on what we're experiencing in our environment, or it is also – it has some elements that are just who we are, as in our personality. Absorption and awe appear to be just a state. So, it's what happens in our environment. There are certainly people who are more prone. But one of the messages that I want to deliver is that wonder is not about a moment. It's about a mindset. So, there are some people whose mindsets are going to be more naturally wonder prone. They're going to be much higher in openness to experience. They're going to be higher in trait. Curiosity will say, but certainly we can build a mindset that makes us more wonder prone. [00:09:25] PF: Let's talk about that. How do you create a wonder mindset? And how do you know if you have one? [00:09:31] MP: Well, there's actually an assessment that people can take on my website to see how wonder prone they are. It's based on the science, but it is just for fun. So, it will give you an indication. I haven't been able to test it and do all of that yet, but it is based on, and you'll be able to see the different scales that it's based on from different scientists. How can we build a wonder mindset? One of the first ways and the ways that is really primary is through what I call slow thought. This is any way that we can slow down our minds to be more present, to be more observant, in our environment. Those are things like meditation, narrative journaling, gratitude, nostalgia, any of the things that get your mind out of the rumination and into the present moment. That is one key element. We can practice novelty and trying to grow our openness to experience. Now, I say the openness to experience knowing that our personality is set, but the subset of openness to experience that actually is connected to wonder is openness to new ideas, to new thinking. So, if we can expose ourselves to new ideas, new thinking on a regular basis, that's very helpful. Novelty, just going to new environments, meeting with new people, taking a new route. I love to talk about museums or wander factories. Those are great environments. Reading, so exposing yourself to new thinking that way. So really, novelty is another great way, and then priming ourselves. So, priming is a very powerful mechanism, very easy. It's sort of when people talk about like, the secret or manifestation, a lot of that from a scientific point of view is just that you're telling your brain, I want to find this, and therefore it does. So, priming can be as simple as a one sentence. I'm going to find three things to make me feel wonder today. And now you've told your brain, there's a reward for this. I want you to go find it. It's just a little bit like, a bloodhound, go find it. Go, fetch. That’s what it does. It's now been told that it's something worth finding, and it will. [00:11:34] PF: And then as you do that, well, most people hit a point where their brain automatically starts looking for that, because I know that's how gratitude is so effective. When you start writing down, what you're grateful for, your brain starts looking for gratitude moments throughout the day. Does the same thing happen with wonder? [00:11:50] MP: Absolutely. There is an expression that says that when neurons fire together, they wire together. So, the reality is, is that any activity you do with enough practice will then become a neural pathway for good or for bad, right? This is how we have habits. So, it's really about just building that habit, building that muscle, in order to have your brain react in that way. We know that, we can see that from master meditators, how their brain has actually changed. It literally changes the structure of their brain. So, we know that with slow thought, with novelty, these things when practiced enough, and with priming, then we can actually change our brain and it becomes a mental rut that we follow, and a positive one. [00:12:36] PF: One of the challenges that, I think, people will have with slow thought is most of us feel like we don't have five minutes of silence and getting away. I know one of your tips for experiencing wonder is to let yourself be bored. So, I love that tip. I want you to explain why that's important, and then how do we hit that point? Because we're so inundated with information, with noise with everything, right now. [00:13:05] MP: It is a noisy world and our lives are noisy. It's really interesting. I spoke to one scientist who was doing research on happiness, initially, and then she started doing research on awe. She says she doesn't want to research happiness anymore, because she doesn't believe it's very attainable, because people don't know what makes them happy. They miswant what makes them happy and so that's a challenge. But she went to a kite festival. It’s a beautiful day. Everybody was flying these kites and she asked them, on a scale of 1 to 10, how busy do you feel right now? People were like seven and eight, at a kite festival, on a weekend. [00:13:38] PF: Really? [00:13:39] MP: She’s like, “This is a problem.” She says, “Because in our brains, we just think we're busy all the time.” Even though you know with technology and everything, we really don't need to be as busy. So, some of this is that we fill our life with a lot of activity. One of the challenges is as well, we have that expression to twiddle our thumbs, right? The idea of being bored. Well, it's almost anachronistic now. We don't twiddle our thumbs. We use them quite carefully on our phone, right? Pick up our phone the second we feel bored. I remember as a child sitting, and I'll probably date myself, sitting in the doctor's office and like flipping through the Highlights magazine to try to do the different puzzles. We don't have that anymore. So, I think just feeling a sense of boredom and letting that uncomfortable sort of itch, creep up our spine, and then questioning how we react to it. Instead of reacting to it with the way many of us do, which is to pick up our phone, instead react to it in a way that is going to fill our brain with something that gets us closer to wonder, with something that makes us epistemically curious, or with something that helps us with slow thought. But I want to be clear, I'm not good at this. So, I know, physician, heal thyself. I'm not good at it. I know what I need to be doing. But I'm still also on the journey with every other wonder seeker. [BREAK] [00:15:00] PF: I'll be right back with more my conversation with Monica Parker. But right now, it's time to bring back Kate [inaudible 00:15:05], to talk about the adventures of Kittles. Kate, welcome back.   [00:15:09] K: Thank you, Paula. [00:15:11] PF: So, how is Kittles loving his cat tree from Mau Pets? [00:15:15] K: He absolutely loves it. [00:15:17] PF: I wanted to talk to you about style because you have a really beautiful home, and sometimes it's hard to work a cat tree into your home decor. [00:15:26] K: I will just say, this cat tree, I cannot tell you enough how gorgeous it is. It just worked so well with our decor. We love neutrals and whites and it's not obnoxious looking. It looks like a work of art you would never even guess, “Wait a second. That's a cat tree.” It is so beautiful. But I also love that it gives back to animal welfare and environmental conservation. [00:15:53] PF: Oh, that's right. Yes. Mau Pets gives 5% back for every purchase, and it also uses sustainably sourced wood. [00:15:59] K: That's really important to me, Paula, and they also plant a tree which is incredible for every purchase. So, it's such a good way to give back. [00:16:07] PF: If you want to upgrade your kitty’s furniture, and save 5% off your order, visit maupets.com/livehappynow. That's maupets.com/livehappynow. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Monica Parker. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [00:16:24] PF: Yeah, it's such an incredible challenge. Because even if we go out and we say, “I'm going to seek wonder, and I'm going to look for three things that make me feel wonder.” For myself, I feel like still in my brain, it's like, “Okay, get that list checked off, because you have stuff to do missy. Get back to the computer.” How do we kind of balance that, because we want this, but shutting off that busy timer in our head? [00:16:51] MP: I think, carving out time for it. I mean, there's a lot of evidence around the power of wonder walks. So, what makes a wonder walk, a wonder walk, you decide it is. I mean, it's simple as that. There was research where they sent people, two groups of people on a walk. One group just said, “Go on a walk in nature that is beautiful.” The other group, they were primed with one sentence, find things that make you feel wonder during this walk. And the wonder walkers came back having not ruminated about their life. So, they had carved out that time just to feel wonder, whereas the other walkers were ruminating about I've got a pack for a trip. I have this project. And the wonder walkers experienced benefits that the regular walkers didn't. So, stress reduction that lasted for a week, lowers stress hormones, yeah, all of that. So, there are a lot of benefits. But how do we carve out the time? Well, there's sort of an interesting irony or paradox to wonder, and that wonder actually makes us feel like time is stretched. It actually gives us a sense of time slowing down. So, we can make the time for it, it will actually make us feel like we have more time. It really becomes an additive process. If we allow ourselves that time, then it will give us that time back in our own brains. [00:18:02] PF: That's terrific. It’s kind of like when you make time for exercise, you actually have more energy, so you get more hours in your day. So, that’s same of kind of – I guess, maybe we've convinced ourselves like, “Hey, if you want your time to last better, then go experience wonder and we’ll come back and do that.” That's great. One thing that you talked about that I'm really interested in, I don't know if this is something you develop, because I'd never heard of it before, and that is wonder bringers. [00:18:28] MP: That is my word. I definitely had to add to my dictionary when I was typing it. [00:18:34] PF: I love it. I love this whole idea and it makes it so simple. So, explain to us what wonder bringers is, and then how we find them in our lives? [00:18:45] MP: Absolutely. So, wonder bringers come in many shapes and sizes. What we know is the different elements that bring us a sense of our curiosity. They can come as nature. Nature is one of the chief areas where we feel a sense of wonder. They can also come socially. So, social wonder bringer would be like watching your child take their first steps. And then, we can have cognitive wonder bringers. And that's the idea of like, maybe studying the folded universe or something like that. Or the question I said, why does matter give rise to consciousness? That can be a cognitive wonder brainer. Then, under that, there's so many different strains of the way that we can find wonder and they may overlap. You and I might go to the Grand Canyon, and for you, it'd be a natural wonder bringer. And for me, maybe it'd be cognitive, because I'd be thinking about the geology and the first people who saw it. These are necessarily discrete categories. But one of the things that I encourage people to do is just to consider what gives them wonder, and one of the ways to know that is what gives you goosebumps? Or what gives you those little tears that spring to your eyes? William Brown called them tears of wonder joy and I love that. These little tears that start to – and you think, “Well I'm a little bit clunked.” So, that kind of idea and what are the things that do that to you, and then do more of them. I also want people to feel comfortable using the language of this brings me wonder, because I feel that so much of what brings us wonder, we may be put in the category of like a hobby, and I don't think that that's fair. It doesn't give it enough gravitas. So, if you and your partner. We’ll use an example, I think it can almost be like a love language. If you're a person who for you, your wonder bringer is going on long hikes in the woods, and your partner's idea of a wonder bringer is going to the opera. If the two of you say that, and you don't share that, then you're going to think, “Oh, that's just a hobby. They like the opera. Oh, they just like to be outside.” Whereas understanding that it's more than that is fundamental to who they are as a human. I think that that, understanding that, giving it the respect and the gravitas that it deserves to say, “No, this is a wonder bringer. This is actually what builds my mind and helps me see the world through the lens, through which I do.” [00:21:02] PF: Is this something people should sit down and consciously examine and say, “What are my wonder bringers?” And really identify them? [00:21:09] MP: Absolutely. Because I think the more that we identify it, then we can say, “Okay. I only have so many hours in a day. I have this much time. I have one night to go out. What am I going to do with it? Am I going to go out and have some margaritas? I love margaritas. Or if I know that music is my wonder bringer, am I going to try and go see a gig?” In that prioritizing, then you get the benefits of it. And it still can be obviously a pleasurable activity, most of the time. But recognizing that I think – and sharing it. Wonder shared is wonder multiplied. So, sharing it with your friends, even telling the story of something that brought you wonder with someone else will then amplify that experience. So, I think it's really about using the language of wonder bringers, sharing that with other people and then prioritizing it in your own life. [00:21:56] PF: Yeah, as you mentioned, if you share it with others, I think what a great weekend experience to have like a wonder weekend and you're going to go out and you're going to all do these things that bring you wonder, either individually or collectively. [00:22:09] MP: And then sharing it. I think that would be amazing. I'm talking with a friend about even trying to put together some small like wonder weekend trips that help people find that, and tap into it, whatever that might be, maybe a cultural one, a natural one. Because I think that we get so busy. And sometimes we don't honor those things that give us wonder. We think that they're just nice to have as opposed to being fundamental to our spirit. [00:22:36] PF: Yes. Or we think, well, you know what, I'm going to put that on the shelf for now and I'll do it when I'm older. I'll do it later. I'll do it whenever it loses its magic. [00:22:45] MP: Absolutely. [00:22:46] PF: So, we talk a lot about like, how we find it, and what to do with it. But you have some amazing research on all the ways that benefits us. I mean, this book, if you sit down with this book, you can't not want to explore wonder, because it changes everything. That's what amazed me, like all the different areas of your life that it affects. I wanted to start by talking about health. And can you talk about what wonder does for our health? [00:23:14] MP: It's really incredible, physiologically, and I think this is probably one of the things that struck me the most in writing the book was the physiological impact. I think I understood cognitively that it would have an impact psychologically. But physiologically, it decreases our stress hormones. It decreases our pro inflammatory cytokines, which is fascinating. So, I'll talk a little bit about that. So, when we're sick, our body releases pro inflammatory cytokines to try to make us well. It's a protein, and it releases this, and then our body counters with anti-inflammatory cytokines, and the two of them balance out, and that helps heal us. But the problem is, is that when we're not injured or sick, and our body releases pro inflammatory cytokines because of stress, or because of some condition in ourselves, then it actually creates problems for us. So, too high pro inflammatory cytokines have been linked to Alzheimer's, to heart disease, to diabetes. This is a mechanism for balancing these pro inflammatory cytokines in your body, and it's really – this is not junk science. This is really founded, fascinating work. There's also evidence around the connection between wonder and biophilia and what biophilia does for pain management, for helping in recovery after surgery. So, a lot of healing that can occur from the wonder of nature as well. [00:24:42] PF: That was so interesting to me, because first of all, I thought, “Oh, my gosh, if more people had had – if we had had this during the pandemic, people could have been exploring the world so much differently, because that was so difficult.” And also, as we're looking always, we're inundated with news about like, okay, Alzheimer's, and how to prevent this, and have to present that. It's so much simpler that without taking a pill, without having to do with these other things, like you have a very compelling argument for using wonder as a wonder drug, type of thing. [00:25:15] MP: Yes. I think, obviously, I'm not saying that wonder is going to cure Alzheimer's, but I think it opens a door into understanding. So, what we do is say, “Okay, there's some disease, we just don't really understand. We do everything. We can we know exercise is going to be good for us. It's always good for us. We know that meditation really helps our brains.” And I think that wonder is another way that we can just say, “All right, this is calming the reactive systems in my body. And we know that it's connected to the vagus nerve, which really manages that rest and digest, as opposed to the fight and flight.” So, if we are able to activate the vagus nerve, and we're able to calm our reactive systems, then that's good for us, and that will certainly help stave off certain diseases. There's no promises that this is going to cure anyone. And I say that. I say, “This is not going to fix everything. But what it does is, I believe, it opens a window for us to have a discussion about different methodologies and approaches to healing.” [00:26:15] PF: Yeah. Overall, it's a pretty easy arrow to put in your quiver, because it's not like, you know, meditation is challenging for a lot of people. Exercise, people don't necessarily want to be doing that as much as they should. Eating right, same thing. And wonder, is, you're getting an incredible benefit and an incredible experience out of it. [00:26:37] MP: Absolutely. I think it's so accessible, and I know that your podcast is about happiness. But I do keep going back to it's so accessible, even in dark times. This is one of the things that I found most heartening about it, is that happiness really is hard for a lot of people to find. There's this thing called affective forecasting. It's where we miswant what we think will make us happy. We're not very good at knowing what makes us happy. Frequently also, our goal, and our desire for happiness gets wrapped up in consumerism, and stuff and the idea of hedonic happiness. Whereas wonder, we can feel in the dark times and in the light. We can maybe look at the war in Ukraine and say, “That's terrible, I can't feel happy about that.” But you can be in a state of wonder. You can be in a state of wonder at the resiliency of people. You can be in a state of wonder at the people that are helping. You can even be at a state of wonder at the magnitude of what's happening there. And that, I believe, holding – I know, the research shows that holding mixed emotions, the positive and the negative, the yin and yang together, at the same time, is incredibly helpful for our resilience, and it really helps us manage traumatic experiences. So, holding wonder, I think, especially during difficult times, like COVID, and the war, and all of that is really helpful. It's really ameliorative for us. [00:28:02] PF: One of the points that you bring up is to stop chasing happiness. And I really love that, because the kind of happiness that we talk about at Live Happy is not the happy, happy, joy, Joy. It's the long term. It's our wellbeing. It's how content are you, overall. So, talk about how the pursuit of happiness is not making us happy. [00:28:23] MP: There's a term that I learned happychondriacs and I think that’s a really – [00:28:28] PF: I need a minute for that one. [00:28:29] MP: Yes. I think that that was – I read that and I was like, “Oh, my goodness, I know these people. I probably grew up with some of these people.” Or they're like, “No neggies and everything's positive.” It's like, no, everything isn't always positive. The world sucks sometimes. It's just the reality. When we engage in toxic positivity, we are losing out on the richness of our full emotional spectrum. So, we know that people who have greater emo diversity, which means they're able to call up a number of different emotions, so it's not just happy, sad, angry, you a really robust multivariate number of emotions that that's very good for resiliency, we also know that mixed emotions. So mixed emotions, like wonder, like curiosity is a mixed emotion We've sometimes are driven to be curious about things that aren't very positive. Nostalgia is another mixed emotion. Gratitude can be a mixed emotion. Sympathy. So, any of these mixed emotions where there is bitter sweetness. What's known as existential longing. Susan Cain wrote a book about that. Anything that combines the happy and the sad together, the positive and the negative, that dual experience we know is very, very good for us and it's much more attainable. So, I found it fascinating that this researcher, Melanie Rudd, who I talked about at the kite festival, she said I just don't study happiness anymore. I study awe, because I think that it just makes more sense to study that. It's more achievable. So, I thought that was really fascinating and the benefits are significant when you look at it. The quantum of benefits for people who experienced wonder are much higher. In fact, sometimes the scientists will compare happiness to wonder when they're testing it. They'll compare happiness to awe. And awe has a quantum of benefits that's greater than happiness. [00:30:13] PF: I think that's great for people to hear, because we put pressure on ourselves, the whole, I should be happy. I have this wonderful home. I have this life. [00:30:21] MP: Ad then, you feel guilty. When you put guilt on top of it, it's not helpful. [00:30:27] PF: Yes. Exactly. I would love to talk about, as well, how wonder affects our relationships, because that's the biggie for everybody. When we start practicing wonder, we experience wonder, how is it going to change our relationships, both romantic relationships, relationships within our families, and our relationships at work? [00:30:48] MP: So, that was one of the things I started to study as well. And I think of wonder, almost like a love language. I think that it's something that we should be talking about with our friends, with our partners, to say, this brings me wonder, so that that is something that then we value, and that we protect, and nurture within our relationships. I think that having wonder in the workplace can be really powerful. It makes our teams more bond in a different way. It makes them more inclusive. So, we know people that experience wonder are more welcoming to outsiders. Inclusion becomes easier. Leaders who are more wonder prone or who lead in a wonder way, are more communicative. They're more empathetic. They're more humble. They're more ethical. They're more authentic. So, all of these elements that we know we seek in the workplace, and frankly, in friendships as well, there is a fascinating piece of research that showed that people when they experienced wonder, not only did they feel more humble, but their friends thought they were more humble. So, it actually changes are an affect. I thought that was fascinating. Or people who are genuinely curious. So, if you show genuine curiosity about another person, which really is the basis of empathy, right? Empathy is being genuinely curious about the human condition about someone else. People who are genuinely curious and ask questions in that curiosity, the person that they're asking questions of will find that person more friendly, and also more attractive. So, anybody out there who's dating on the dating scene, ask genuine questions to someone with authenticity, and they will find you more attractive. [00:32:25] PF: I love it. So, we're going to give our listeners a free chapter of your book, and we're also going to, on the website, we're going to direct them directly to the Wonder Quiz. But where else can they start? If someone's listening to this and decide, “I need more wonder in my life.” What are a couple of things I can start doing right now, to make that change? [00:32:46] MP: Number one, you can take a wonder walk. Really, again, what's the wonder walk? You decide it. You try things that help you find wonder. A new route, anything that gives you a sense of vastness. So, anything that makes you feel like a smaller component part of a bigger system. And then also, slow thought that's just even taking five minutes to allow yourself to be bored, and just question what's happening in your brain. That's another great way. And then, I love nostalgia or gratitude or prayer. Any of those, just five minutes to reflect back on a happy time, to think about that, to journal about it, also helpful, narrative journaling. So, any of those. Just start with five minutes and see what it does and how it makes you feel. [00:33:32] PF: Hat's excellent. Monica, thank you so much, first, for writing this book. It's a book that we need. We needed it sooner. But that's all right. But it is remarkable. [00:33:41] MP: It’s here now. [00:33:41] PF: You are here now, and it is remarkable. I really hope people check it out. And thank you again. Thank you for coming on the show and talking about it. [00:33:50] MP: Thank you so much, Paula. I really appreciate the kind words and it's been delightful chatting with you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:33:59] PF: That was Monica Parker talking about wonder. We invite you to check out her new book, The Power of Wonder: The Extraordinary Emotion That Will Change the Way You Live, Learn and Lead. When you visit our website at livehappy.com, we'll tell you how to download a free preview of the book, as well as a free wonder walk poster. You can also take her Wonder Quiz or sign up for Wonder Bringer newsletter. We'll also tell you how to find her on social media. To add more wonder to your daily feet. Just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tap. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for all new episodes. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Bounce Back from Burnout With Dr. Mary Sanders [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 408 of Live Happy Now. Do you ever feel like you've hit a point of burnout that nobody else can fully understand? Well, today's guest knows exactly what you're going through and what to do about it. I'm your host Paula Felps. And today, I'm sitting down with Dr. Mary Sanders, who specializes in energetic healing with an emphasis on positive psychology. Dr. Mary is on a mission to empower women over the age of 40 to bounce back physically, emotionally and energetically from the stresses of balancing work and life. Today, she talks with me about how burnout affects women? What warning signs we need to be aware of that indicate we might be burning out? On what steps we can take to reclaim ourselves from burnout? Let's take a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:54] PF: Mary, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:58] Dr. MS: Thank you, Paula. It's my honor, sincerely, to be a guest of yours. I am so looking forward to today's conversation because I have a feeling that you and I are going to tap into some really interesting topics. [00:01:10] PF: We are. And I've been looking forward to having this conversation too. Because, oh, my gosh, there's so many things that you and I could talk about. And I guess that's why you have a podcast because you have so many things that you can teach us. But today, I really wanted to focus on the topic of burnout because that's something that you address, something that you handle. And I know that burnout can mean different things to different people. So just make sure we're on the same page, can you talk about the clinical definition when you are describing burnout? [00:01:42] Dr. MS: Sure. Sure. It's a great place to start. From a scientific perspective, I follow Maslach's Burnout Inventory. And this researcher has done a phenomenal job breaking down burnout in into essentially three different categories. And the first category is what we are most familiar with, and that's called emotional exhaustion. You hear people – you hear women specifically saying, "I'm so tired of being tired. I am just – I feel like I have no get up and go." That's the physical exhaustion. The second component to burnout, clinically speaking, is cynicism, where somebody is experiencing a distrusting feeling. Or they're, overall, just feeling really pessimistic about what is happening within the traditional work environment. That's another category for burnout. Then the last category is all of revolving around the professional efficacy. And what I mean by that, Paula, is are the women working for organizations in which they feel valued for their skills, and their strengths and how they contribute to the overall success of the corporation? When you look at this – and I know, Paula, there are many, many listeners that are saying, "Yeah, but I'm not in the corporate world. How can I still experience burnout?" You absolutely can. Ladies, we are the primary caretakers of our entire families, whether that'd be our aging parents, or whether that be our children, or our spouses. It is very easy to experience burnout on a personal level as well as professionally. But characteristically, people identify burnout as being something related to the work environment. Those three categories that I just talked about can be measured independently. Meaning that you can be experiencing the physical signs where somebody is completely exhausted. They have reoccurring illnesses. Their central nervous system is not firing up. Their immune system is compromised. Maybe they're experiencing blood sugar issues. All of those physical symptoms are associated with the first category, being the physical exhaustion. When you take the survey, if you're reading high within this one category, then we know how to address those issues. We know to bring it right back to the physical body. You may be a person who is rating really high on the cynicism and the pessimism. And so, then maybe we need to be working on the mindset. Maybe it's something that we need to be working on finding more pleasure, joy and happiness within your life to decrease the level of pessimism that you're carrying on a daily basis. Then that's another category. Third category is the professional efficacy. If we know that somebody's reading really high or really low within this category, then maybe we're addressing, "Hey, if you don't feel valued as a team member, maybe we just need to find a different department within our organization that you align with. Maybe we need to find you a different team in which you feel like you can show up in your strength N." That's why I always use the Maslach Inventory to kind of get a baseline, "Where are you? How can we be of assistance?" [00:05:07] PF: That's important. Because I think a lot of times when we feel burned out, we don't even have the skills to say in what area I feel burned out. It's exhausting. And if you're burned out at work, it's pretty impossible to be there for your family. It's just this big overall feeling. Can you talk about how big, how prevalent a problem burnout is right now? And have you seen it since the pandemic? How has it changed? [00:05:31] Dr. MS: Huge, Paula. Huge. Right now, with the pandemic and going through what we're calling globally the great resignation, people are now awake. They're saying, "Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Time out. Time out. You mean I don't have to do a nine-to-five job every day? You mean I don't have to do my commute every day? You mean I don't have to do face-to-face engagements anymore? Plus, I didn't really like that. Maybe I want to do something different with my life of all." Because there's a greater purpose that they want to align with. Absolutely. The trend right now is that over 50 – and again, depending upon the statistics that you look at, 50% to 60% of people at this given point in time are going to say, "Yep, I feel like I am burnt out on some level." And if they're not currently in that position, they can honestly say, "You know what? I resonate with that because I have been through burnout." And Paula, when I went through burnout – and, again, my greatest – the peak of my burnout was 15 years ago. And I'll be honest with you. I was so embarrassed that I was experiencing burnout that I didn't want to share it with anyone. [00:06:42] PF: You have an interesting story. Let's talk a little bit. I was remiss in not asking sooner. This is something you know firsthand. Tell us your journey into burnout and why you're so passionate about helping others with it. [00:06:55] Dr. MS: Yeah. And you know what, Paula? I'll share my story for the sake of it being received in a light that I have learned a lot of information from going through this life experience. I do believe that we have divine timing. And I do believe that I received these lessons at the time that I did in my professional career in order to really motivate me to shift and to pivot. I'm going to share the story. And goodness gracious. I was a practicing chiropractor. And to make a long story short, I had a large practice, a central practice. And then I also had a satellite office. I was managing not only my current patient load. I was also managing various different doctors and a big staff. I went into chiropractic because I knew that I wanted to have my hands-on people. I believed in the healing modality of the physical adjustment. I believe that the body had the innate ability to heal itself. And because I had such a strong philosophy, and a good set of hands and a lot of perseverance and resilience, I created a successful practice. It looked beautiful on the outside. Aesthetically, it was gorgeous. But what was happening underneath the surface that people didn't realize is that I was thinking miserable. I was so unhappy. I literally put myself in a complete adrenal exhaustion. The one thing that I I did for my stress management at that time was exercise. I could no longer exercise. What I could do was wake up. I could get down to my office. Treat the number of patients that I had for that day. Come home and fall asleep. That's all the energy that I had. And that's not a life. There was no work-life balance. There was no vitality. There was no spark in my world. It was really dull. And so, I used food. I used alcohol. I used sleep. I used all the coping mechanisms of avoidance. I withdrew from my family and my friends. I isolated myself even more. And I know this doesn't paint a pretty picture. But that was my world. And my husband sat me down, and I was notorious for starting a conversation over the dinner table and then forgetting that I was having a conversation and stop and just like space out for a moment because I couldn't really complete a sentence, complete a complete thought. And he looked at me and he was like, "Mary, how long are you going to do this?" And I'm like, "What do you mean how long am I going to do this?" And he's like, "Well, if you don't make a change, you're physically going to go down a downward spiral. You're going to get worse. You're going to create some kind of a life-threatening illness. If adrenal exhaustion is not enough for you, then the universe is going to create something more." And he's like, "Furthermore, I don't know if our relationship is going to survive." And so, I was like, "Okay, you have my attention. I'm listening. What do I need to do?" And he said, "I have a question for you." And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Do you think that you could leave all of this?" I'm like, "What? What do you mean leave it?" And he's like, "Do you think that we could leave everything that we have created and move to the other side of the world?" And I said, "Oh, no. No. No, that's not happening." Because, I mean, really, I have put all of my blood, sweat and equity into growing this practice. I was miserable but I didn't want to leave it, right? Time passed and my husband acquired a position in Ho Chi Minh City and he says, "Are you on board?" And I said, "Okay." We sold the practices. We sold the home. We sold everything that we had. And I ended up on the other – waking up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, on the other side of the world, wondering, "Paula, who am I? What am I here to do? What's my purpose in life?" And I went through these huge identity crises and tremendous amount of depression. I did what any logical person would do. I ran away from my husband in Ho Chi Minh City and I ran down to Bali, Indonesia and I finished up my yoga teacher certification. [00:11:04] PF: Oh, that's fantastic. [00:11:05] Dr. MS: I know. I know. But for the first time, Paula, I was able to think for the first time in my life. I had time on my hand. I learned to meditate. And let me tell you something, I was like, "Wow. Wow. Let me wrap my head around this." I know the human body incredibly well from the neck on down. Obviously, as a chiropractor, I was very familiar with the neurology. And then I'm like, "Okay, something really magical is happening with the space between my ears, the space within my head. What's happening mentally as the result of doing meditation?" The curiosity got the best of me, and that's when I went and studied with Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar because I wanted – [00:11:47] PF: We love him. [00:11:47] Dr. MS: Yeah, I know. And he has such a beautiful way of just breaking down the neuroscience behind meditation. Now I had the experience of what meditation was doing. And then I also had the intellectual knowledge. And so, then, as fate had it at that time, my husband and I decided to create a non-profit organization in order to support teachers and the tools of positive psychology so that they can embody them and role model them into the classroom. We left Ho Chi Minh City. Went to Bogota, Colombia. And that non-profit organization went gangbusters. We thought we were producing a product for the United States. And then, once again, I'm finding myself in kind of a stressful situation. How fast can I produce? As fast as I was producing, it was being translated into Spanish and then it would put into the classrooms in not only Colombia, but in Peru as well. I was like, "Okay. Okay. Okay. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Let me wrap my head around this." So then, I'm now running the same neurological pattern that I was running when I was in my business. I haven't learned a darn thing. Even though I'm meditating and taking good care of myself, something's happening here energetically. We left our Bogota, Colombia. Went to Bali, Indonesia and spent a year. And it was kind of a sabbatical. And so, again, here I am doing yoga and meditating every day, eating vegan. I was just really just wanted to clean up and I wanted to get online energetically. And then that's when I started my training at the Academy of Intuition Medicine. I was like, "Okay. Well, I got the body. I got the mind. And now I need to understand the energetics." And so, here we are combined now – Paula, I literally could not have planned the sequence of events that I just outlined for you. It had to happen because I had to go through burnout and I had to blow up my world in order to hit rock bottom in order to come out in a full holistic 360 perspective as to how the human body and the spirit operates as one. [00:13:57] PF: What happens to women who don't have the resources you do? Who don't have a husband that pulls him out and says, "Hey, you've got to save yourself?" What do you see when women – we'll just use women because I know they seem to be more prone to burnout. What do you see with the women who come to your practice who are just past what you had gone through? [00:14:20] Dr. MS: I believe that every woman that is listening to this audio right now, this beautiful podcast, who is somewhat aligned with the idea of burnout. Chances are there's a high probability. I'm talking about 90%, 95%, 98% of these women have received signals. [00:14:38] PF: Do we recognize those signs? [00:14:40] Dr. MS: Yeah. And I can talk about these signs. And that was the second part of your question. And I alluded to some of the physical signs. We know that you can literally have a hormonal shift within your body physically as the result of long-term stress. And that comes from the adrenal glands, which are small little glands that sit on top of the kidneys. And the adrenal glands are responsible for producing – when you really truly are in a fight or flight demand, they are responsible for producing epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, DHEA to name a few. And when we are under long-term chronic stress, those hormones create – they get produced on a continuous basis and they create what is called a negative feedback cycle that travels through the entire endocrine system. And the endocrine system is essentially the system that governs all of the hormones that you produce. I'm talking about serotonin and melatonin. How are you sleeping? You know? [00:15:50] PF: Yeah, because that's one of the first things people lose, right? I know so many women who say, "I cannot get to sleep. I'm exhausted. And I go to bed and I cannot sleep." [00:15:59] Dr. MS: Or they pass out before their head hits the pillow, right? And then three o'clock in the morning, like clockwork, they wake up possibly due to a sugar burn off from the wine that they drank the night before or some kind of sugar imbalance. I believe that the hormones and the physical body talk to us in beautiful and mysterious ways. Maybe their metabolism slows down because their thyroid is not working. Maybe they're starting to feel sluggish and that they're having weight gain. Maybe the pancreas is out of balance and they're starting to see blood sugar issues. Maybe the hormones that they're producing – and it's a precarious time for women as they are going through perimenopause, and menopause and post-menopause. But you add those changes hormonally and couple it with the chronic stress, then you're really feeling a little whack-a-doodle, Paula. Just your body talks to you in so many beautiful ways. And those are the signs and the symptoms that I'm inviting the women listening to really pay attention to. [00:17:06] PF: Isn't it often the case you might go to your doctor and they say, "Well, it is just hormones." Because that often happen. Women, they're not being listened to by their doctors. They're told, "Well, it's just hormonal. You can't really do anything about it." Or they give them a prescription for something that's going to help them sleep or help them not be depressed. And then they're sent on their way. [00:17:26] Dr. MS: We live in a society, Paula, that we have been taught from our mother's generation that when we go to a physician, that they are empowered to tell us what to do and they are empowered to tell us what's happening within our body. And I'm here to say that, I'm sorry, there's no other physician that lives outside of your body that can possibly feel as to what's going on in internally for you. Really, the power needed to be given back to the women to be able to understand that there needs to be an integrative approach. Very rarely is a low back pain just a low back pain. There's going to be a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, chemical foundation to that low back pain. And very few physicians have the knowledge skill set to treat from an integrative standpoint nor do they have the time. I really encourage women to take that power back and to really say, "Timeout. Timeout. I know that my weight gain could be hormonal. Yes, I think that there is a chemical portion to the hormones. But I'm telling you that I live in my body and these are other symptoms that I'm experiencing simultaneously. And, oh, by the way, do you have a referral for a good psychotherapist? Or do you have a referral for a good nutritionist or somebody that can talk about the elements of food?" I believe that we as women got to really empower ourselves. I keep coming back to that word empowerment. When we are, unfortunately – and I'm going to go into another branch of what possibly might be showing up as signs and symptoms for women. And maybe you might understand a little bit more clearly why the challenges for women to advocate for themselves, is that when somebody is going through a burnout, I don't care if it's professional or personal, it really messes with their sense of self-worth. [00:19:26] PF: Nobody brings that up. [00:19:28] Dr. MS: Oh, my goodness. Self-worth, there's a component of learned helplessness. Thank you, Dr. Seligman, for educating us on learned helplessness. There is a lack of motivation. People just energetically and emotionally just feel flatlined. Okay? And this creates a trigger, an emotional trigger, which is very similar to a trauma response within the body. All of this, neurologically speaking, there's an imbalance as to the get up and go kind of sympathetic dominance. And then there's a lack of function within the parasympathetics to auto-regulate the central nervous system from the emotional standpoint. We absolutely are not thinking clearly. And now here I am saying we need to be empowered to ask for what it is that we need. It's hard to do that if you're not thinking clearly. Behaviorally, you're like isolating yourself. You're withdrawing yourself. You're not reaching out to your girlfriends and your support team. You don't have your cheer squad on your side. I see how it happens. I understand and I have so much empathy for people that are going through burnout. [00:20:44] PF: And you take an integrative approach. And we're going to talk about that in a second. Before we do it, what is someone to do when they know intrinsically there is so much more going on? And they go to a doctor and the doctor says, "It's just you're stressed. Or it's emotional. Or it's hormones." Where do they then go? [00:21:01] Dr. MS: Yeah, that's a legitimate question. Quite honestly, Paula, that's why I have created my signature program. Because there are very few people that are truly taking an integrative approach. And I believe, and I know and I'm thankful that there are integrative physicians that can address the bulk of the problems. But most of the integrative physicians are not taking in the energetic and the spiritual component. I do think that there are people that can help serve, support and help facilitate the healing journey. But from my perspective it really does require an integrative approach. [00:21:37] PF: Yeah. Tell us what you mean by an integrative approach and then what that looks like? [00:21:44] Dr. MS: Yeah. In my world, an integrative approach is incorporating the mind, the body and the spirit. When I'm talking about the mind, I'm talking about mindset behavioral and conditions, limiting belief patterns, tapping into the subconscious through meditation. That is the mind. The body, we're all very familiar with the body. And so, sometimes that's the chemical component of the body. Is it something structural that is happening? Oftentimes, I have women go through a functional blood chemistry analysis. From a functional standpoint, we look at the biomarkers, we look at the indicators and we look and compare highs, and lows, and medians and average. And then we compare whether it'd be three months, or six months, or year down the road. And then we look at your pre and post blood markers to see where normal is for you. [00:22:46] PF: Yeah, it's so important to point out. It is. Each person is different. And you have to find out what's right for you. [00:22:52] Dr. MS: Long gone are the days where medicine is cookie cutter. I believe that the next evolution of medicine, literally from the integrative standpoint, is to transition into energy medicine. The energy medicine that I'm alluding to takes into consideration that, within all of us, there is an electromagnetic current. And surrounding our physical body is also an electromagnetic current. And we're going to call that the subtle energetic body. It's known to some people as the aura or is known to others as the bio field. And so, essentially, this energy that surrounds this is like the layers of the onion. It's intended to be protective. Protective of the energy that come at us within our environment. I mean, energetically, we have so much information coming at us at all times, it's hard to live in a dense boundary type of way to reflect all of these energies either way. I'm talking about 5G energies. I'm talking about energies from other people. I'm talking about frequencies, X-ray frequencies. You name it, those energies are coming into our bio field once it enters into our bio field. Depending upon the direction, it will enter into an energy center, also known as a chakra, within our energy body. And these chakras have themes. They have life themes. They have emotional themes. They have nerve plexuses that are associated with them. They also have an endocrine gland that is associated with them. You can see where, energetically, if we're not protecting the field coming into our physical body, it then can turn into an emotional disturbance, or a physical disturbance, or an endocrine disturbance. That integrative approach, the mind, body and spirit gets to address all three of those systems simultaneously. And to provide you, the consumer, with the tools, the resources so that you can empower yourself to do your own personal healing. You start to look inward for support instead of outward. [00:25:20] PF: That's so powerful because that's not a prescription you're going to get from your doctor. And you are just really big proponent of meditation. You talked about that earlier. How big a role does meditation play in all of those things, in the mind, the body, all of it? [00:25:36] Dr. MS: Paula, I can almost feel some of the ladies listening to the podcast cringe. I can feel their toes curl, "There's that meditation. That word meditation. I've tried it. It doesn't work for me. I simply just cannot relax my mind. I have too much going on in my world. How can I possibly take the time to meditate?" And I am an advocate. I do believe in a formal sitting practice. But I also believe that mindfulness can be bought into various different daily tasks, such as washing your dishes at night, loading your dishwasher, making your bed, or gardening, or taking the dog out for a walk. I'm not saying that those activities are not grounding. But what I'm looking to do in meditation is to shift the various different brain waves so that you can then start to access the subconscious. So that you can leave the space of the ego and transcend into the place where the ego does not exist. Because I believe, Paula, that as women, as human living or spirits living in a human body, I believe that all of us have the capacity to receive information above and beyond our traditional five senses. Information that is valuable to our own personal healing. And meditation opens up those channels for receiving information. [00:27:01] PF: And then once we start receiving that information, we're going to act on it, how does it start changing the way we look at life? Changing the decisions we make? Tell us that bridge between I'm burned out, and I started meditating and now things are clear. What is that link that takes us there? [00:27:21] Dr. MS: Sure. Well, first and foremost, I'm going to openly admit that just because you're burned out and you start meditating doesn't mean that there's going to be an overnight shift. It's not a quick pill. It's not a pill. It's not a quick fix. This is something that takes time, and repetition and commitment to really see the benefits. But in my own personal experience, I started meditating receiving information intuitively. I didn't trust it. I still didn't trust the information. I just kind of ignored it. You ignore it once. Yeah, yeah. You ignore it twice, oh, maybe there's something to this. You ignore it the third time and you're like, "What am I doing? I clearly am receiving signals about what path, or direction, or decisions I should be making. And I'm not even following the own internal advice and wisdom that's coming from within." I think that most women have to go through that distrust period before they completely can surrender. And what I have heard over and over, Paula, is women saying, Oh, my God, Mary, you wouldn't believe it. I have boundaries now. I feel full of myself. And not from a really standoff-ish place. I'm coming from it from a really heart-centered, heartfelt way." It's like these transitions that women are learning to say, "No. No. Thank you. Let me think about. It I'll get back to you. I'll circle back with you." Once women can understand that they have this power, this life force energy surging through their physical body and their energetic body, they blossom. Blossom into something magnificent. [00:29:03] PF: If women are listening to this and they're saying, "Okay, I know I'm burned out. This all makes sense. But I don't know where to start." Where do they start? I know you offer some great resources on your site. You've got a wonderful podcast that people can tune in and listen to. But what is the next step? After listening to our conversation today, what is their next step? [00:29:23] Dr. MS: Ask for help. [00:29:25] PF: And who do you ask? [00:29:26] Dr. MS: Well, I would love to be a resource. I would be honored to be a resource. If I find that I am not the right match or intuitively that the woman is like, "Okay, you're nice. But you're not giving me exactly what I need." Then I'm going to help find that person that provides you with exactly what you need. One of the things that I really do enjoy about being a podcast host in the field of energy medicine is that it is developing and widening of my referral base. I've got a lot of cool friends and a lot of cool places. [00:29:59] PF: That's terrific. As we wrap up today, what is the one thing that you hope everybody that hears you today will take away from our conversation? [00:30:08] Dr. MS: I really want people to embrace the fact that they're not alone. And that there are people that are experiencing burnout all – it can be a different facet of burnout. But they're not alone. That nothing is permanent. And it that if you are experiencing burnout, whether it'd be depression, anxiety, physical discomfort, know that all of those symptoms are transient. They too shall pass. [00:30:35] PF: That's excellent. I thank you so much for being with me today. We could talk for hours. But I appreciate this conversation and everything that you're doing to help get us through these phases and these difficult times in our lives. [00:30:47] Dr. MS: Thank you again, Paula. Sincerely, it is my honor to be here today. Thank you, listeners. [OUTRO] [00:30:57] PF: That was Dr. Mary Sanders, talking about how women can manage burnout. If you'd like to learn more about Mary, download her free Boost Your Energy Guide, listen to our podcast or learn more about what tools she offers, just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. And just a reminder that the International Day of Happiness is just around the corner and we would love you to celebrate it with us. You can do that by hosting a happiness wall in your home, office, church or school on March 20th. And if you'd like to learn more, just visit our website, that's livehappy.com, and click on the happy X tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Celebrate the Women in Your Life with Linda Allen [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 407 of Live Happy Now. We're celebrating International Women's Day this week, and it seems like a great time to talk about how we as women can support one another. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and today we're talking about how we can use this occasion to remind ourselves to celebrate the women in our lives. International Women's Day celebrates the diversity and achievement of women, gender parity, and inclusion, and that begins with how we as women support one another. Today, I'm being joined by Linda Allen, a Texas business woman who has realized that the best way for her to leave a lasting mark on the world is simply to touch one life at a time. She's here to talk about why it's important for us to truly focus on making sure that the other women in our lives feel seen and how she does that in the workplace and in the world. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:59] PF: Linda, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:01:02] LA: Well, thanks for inviting me. [00:01:05] PF: One reason that I wanted to talk to you is a few months ago, we had a guest on, and she talked a lot about how women really don't have each other's backs and what a big problem it is like not just in careers but in social settings. Honestly, as I was having that conversation, I was thinking about you because you are the antithesis of that, and you're very good at making women feel seen. You make everybody feel seen, but you're very good about acknowledging women and promoting and supporting them. So that's where I really wanted to start is how do you see the world. Do you think that women really are bad about having each other's backs? Or is that your experience? [00:01:44] LA: Trust me. I've had my experiences with maybe the backstabbing or the snide comments. But I don't see it that way, that it's all women are out to get women. Who isn't a little bit jealous? Who isn't a little bit competitive? But that's not the way I see it. I don't see that way at all. I see it as women, we like each other for the most part. I think we're very curious about each other. But sometimes, we don't want to ask questions or we don't want to be supportive because we don't know what to say or how to say it. How will that woman accept it? So that's the way I see it. Maybe I'm a little Pollyanna, but that's okay. I like the way I live. [00:02:23] PF: Yeah. This is – We've got International Women's Day coming up this week, and that's all about inclusivity, equitability, equality. We want that gender parity, and it's important to talk about how we need to start by getting support from other women because it's not that the men – I mean, it's not just that the men need to recognize our value. We as women need to recognize our value and one another's value in our lives. [00:02:50] LA: No. That’s so great. I don't know about you, but I think of a woman's support, for me, is more important than a man’s support. I'm not talking about it in a personal way but in a professional way. Because women, we identify with each other. We know what makes us tick, sometimes what makes us not tick. So when I get a compliment from a female or a supporting comment, that's bigger to me than a man's comment or compliment. [00:03:23] PF: Yeah. That makes sense. [00:03:25] LA: Because I think we know we tick. For a female too, I think about – we struggle. And I don’t wanna put all women in one bucket here. But women are trying to wear a lot of hats. We're trying to be everything to everybody, including to ourselves, and that's a lot of hats. Most men don't try to wear all the hats that we do. We only have one head, but we try, what, like eight hats on at a time? Well, that's ridiculous. Who are we fooling? And it's going to be hard to keep them all on the head at one time. But it's a struggle, and I don't know why women feel like they've got to be superheroes at all times. But, hey, that's the way we're wound, and we are what we are. [00:04:07] PF: Well, is that why you're so diligent about making women around you feel seen? That is just your nature? Where did that come from, and why is that so important to you? [00:04:18] LA: Paula, as much as I hate to admit this, I don't think I've always been this way. But let me tell you how I think I got here. When I was much younger, I always had this idea in life that I wanted to be famous. I didn't know how I was going to be famous, but I wanted to leave this gigantic mark, that when I walk off the face of this earth, I wanted to leave the big mark. So my first career, I was in broadcasting. The reason I wanted to do that was because everybody would know me. Linda Allen's on the air. Linda Allen, Linda Allen. I wanted to be known. I wanted to be relevant. I wanted to be a part of history. I got into that business, and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I don't think I was going to leave my mark in that business. So I said, “Okay, what am I going to do to leave my mark?” So I got into corporate America, which was great but something that’s not going to make you famous, leaving that big mark. No matter what big job title I could grow into, I feel good about getting the new job. But then after that, I'd be like, “Did I really make a difference? Am I a part of somebody's story in life?” [inaudible 00:05:25] really. So then I jumped out, and I left corporate America, and I said, “Okay, maybe I can make my story. Maybe I could leave my mark by owning my own business.” So I jumped out. I opened my own business after being in corporate America for a long time, which was a little bit scary. What I've quickly discovered is, don't get me wrong, I do well in my business. So I really feel like where I can leave a mark and be a part of somebody's big life story was with my team members. When you own a small business, you get to know your staff, your team members very well. I really was feeling like I was making a difference in their lives. They would fall into a hole, sometimes. I was able to help them recover because you're never going to be able to climb out of a hole. You need somebody to help you get out of that hole. I was able to help my team members not just be the best at their job, but to help them to make good money, to feel good about themselves, which ultimately helped them be the best mamas if they were females, the best daddies if they’re dads, husbands, spouses, wives. I thought, “Wow, this is where I can really leave a mark in this world and be relevant in life.” So I've been in this business for almost 14 years. I really think, Paula, that's where I made this transition to find. I mean, I'm in the insurance business, and don't get me wrong. That's not a very sexy business. Okay, fine. But it's needed. [00:07:04] PF: But we all need it. [00:07:06] LA: Glad to do it. But that's not going to leave the big mark. But where I leave a mark is with the people that I touch. My staff is a big piece for me. Then if I got – Just I realized I could see the difference I can make in their lives. I started doing with other people. I mean, I would meet people, whether it be come to my house. I'm in a lot of organizations, and I would find ways to build them up. Not just try like, “Oh, your hair looks cute today.” Oh, that’s nice to hear. Don't get me wrong. But I would look for things that I felt I could say or do or contribute to them that I knew would make them feel better that day or perform better, to help them to see their value. Man, I'm going to tell you how I go to bed at night, and I sleep well because I feel like I am truly relevant in this world, and it is the coolest feeling. [00:08:01] PF: What differences do you see in women when you do make them feel seen, when you acknowledge their accomplishments and just the simple fact that they show up on a tough day when they've been up all night with their kids? What difference does it make for them and the way that they move through the world? [00:08:19] LA: I can speak, first of all, to the people that work with me and for me. They come to work some days, and you could just tell they don't want to be here. [00:08:28] PF: We've all had those days, haven’t we? [00:08:30] LA: I mean, sometimes, they look like they don't need to be here either. I love my team. Just by either acknowledging something that's going well, something that can help them with, as little as an extra spring in their step. As cliché as that may sound, it's noticeable. I'll hear them get – As the day goes by, their chatter builds up. The excitement in their voices is better. So I know when they leave here because I'm only eight hours of their day. They got a lot more hours, and they're going to do things and see people. It's going to help them to be possibly better with all their contacts that they make throughout the day. [00:09:13] PF: How does that change them, as they walk out into the world? Have you seen differences in people in terms of like how they start dealing with customers, with their family, things like that? [00:09:24] LA: Oh, 100%. My motto in the office is when you look good, you feel good. When you feel good, you do good. I learned that from a great mentor early, early on in my professional career, and I have made that my mantra and everybody that's ever worked for me. They hear it, they have to live it with me, and it shows. It absolutely shows. The energy is good. I always tell my folks here. I said, “Guys.” I said, “You know, you're going to spend a lot of time in this office and a lot of times with these people that we all work with, me and the customers. You got to make it your best, and you got to attack it as if you own it, just like I do.” It's really cool to watch the way my staff operates because they feel that sense of pride and ownership in the business, in the customers, and the success we have. It’s hard to leave that at the door, which is a cool thing. So they take it out with them. They achieve bigger things at home. They take on board positions with their booster club. They take on new positions in their churches. It's really cool how that just follows them out here when they leave here. [00:10:39] PF: I remember several years ago talking with a researcher named Shane Lopez, and he was talking about work and was saying that if you don't get things to line up for you at work, it's pretty tough to get things to line up outside of work because work is such a consuming big part of your day. So your ability to create an experience where they feel supported, they feel encouraged, they feel happy to be there is changing their life once they leave that office. It's also changing the lives of their kids and family once they get home. I mean, have you ever really sat down and thought about that kind of ripple effect that it has, simply by going to the office with the intention of making everyone feel welcomed and happy and encouraged? [00:11:25] LA: It is amazing when you think about how it multiplies? Absolutely, yes. Because I know if they leave here, and they've had a good day, and they feel valued, and they feel good about themselves, that their kids will have a better night, their spouses, their friends, their other family members. It’s crazy. So I don't touch just nine people. I'm touching nine times eight, probably, and that's powerful. That's just in one day. [00:11:50] PF: That's an incredible reach. I wish more people would stop and think about it that way, where this one interaction is going to change these multiple lives today, and you can get up and do the same thing again tomorrow. That's so much power that we have. [00:12:04] LA: It is. It's really kind of scary sometimes, and then what's sad is we don't actually use that power to build people up. [00:12:11] PF: Right. You had a Facebook post a few months back, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was so powerful, and it was about an encounter that you had with a homeless woman as you were leaving a store. I wondered. It really struck me in such a profound way. Would you talk about that? Would you tell us what that experience was and the outcome of that? Because I thought this was an incredible example of really your kindness and uplifting someone else. [00:12:37] LA: I have to give you a free story because I didn't put this on Facebook. I wasn't having the best day. I was already irritated with the store I was at. Things weren't going the way I thought they should go. So then I walk out to the store, and I say hi to most everybody because that's just what I do. [00:12:57] PF: Right, it is. [00:12:59] LA: When you're in other countries, they think you're a fool, but that's okay. I don't care. So I say hello to this lady, and she didn't have any shoes on. She's pushing a cart. So you could kind of probably determine what her lifestyle is. She looks at me and she says, “I'm better than you,” and she calls me a name, and it wasn't a very nice name. At that very minute, Paula, I was like, I wanted to call her a name back because I thought that was absolutely unnecessary. I'm being nice. I’ve been [inaudible 00:13:32]. But I said, “Nope, that's not the way I roll.” So I just asked her. I said, “So why did you call me a name?” She said to me, “Nobody is ever, ever nice to me.” I said, “So what is it that you need?” I will tell you my first thought. She's going to say, “I need some money. I need food.” You could tell she paused for a minute, and she goes, “You know, I'm homeless. If you couldn't already tell, I'm probably crazy. But I'm happy.” She said, “I just want to be at peace. I want people to leave me alone.” I asked her. I said, “So would you make me a deal? Just make me a simple deal, if I ever, ever see you again.” I think she hangs out in the area that I live in. I said, “Would you just say hello to me next time and not call me a name, and I will show you appreciation and value?” She looked at me, and she reached over, and I'm like, “Oh, here it comes. It wasn’t about to happen.” She gave me a hug. I was a little bit surprised. Then she just walked away. You know what? I thought a lot about her, and it was profound to me as well because I thought, “Oh, my gosh. Did I just put myself in terrible danger right there at the moment?” I cared about making a connection with this woman. But I really thought a lot about her, and I thought she's no different than me, in the sense that we all just want to feel appreciated in some way, and we want to be at peace. That is huge in life. I can't think of anybody, whether you're a female or a male or whatever. Who doesn't want to feel appreciated and be at peace? It was such a cool moment for me. I mean, even when I was talking on Facebook, I teared up because I can't believe that just happened. But it felt so good that I felt like she walked away feeling a little bit better about herself. I thought, wow, what a difference I could have made in her life. I'm just so glad I stopped and even said hello to her and took the time to do it. So I think that's a lot of it. We don't take the time, in most cases, to build people up, to say hello, to acknowledge what their needs are. We just are too busy with our own space. [00:15:47] PF: How do we really start adjusting our mindset to be more about supporting other people, even if it's strangers, even if it's women that we don't know? [00:15:57] LA: I think for me, and I'm a really big believer on a couple of golden rule type things, you get what you give. As I just said, how many people – We all want to feel valued. We all want peace. If we give that off to other people, if we give that feeling, those emotions to other people, we have a greater chance that we're going to get that in return. So that's part of the way I think we can be more, I guess, present, if we think about what it is that you want because karma will tell you, if you get it, you're going to get it back. [00:16:37] PF: So be careful what you give away. [00:16:38] LA: Exactly. So I live like that. I feel like if I give you something, I may get it back. Maybe it's a feeling. Maybe it's a thing. To me, that has made such a difference of getting this mindset really, I guess, kind of locked in for me. [00:16:58] PF: Let me ask you. I know when you start practicing gratitude, your mind then gets used to looking for things to be grateful for. There are so many cases where when you start focusing on something, your mind automatically does that. Do you find that is true with you now, where you are constantly looking for the good in someone? [00:17:15] LA: You know, I do. I absolutely do. Sometimes, you got to look. I mean, sometimes, you have to really be more mindful of what people are doing. But that's a big part is get out of your head and look out of what's going on around you. [00:17:30] PF: Are there any daily practices that you use to keep your positive mindset? I mean, I don't know that I've ever seen you without a smile on your face. You are always so positive and so filled with joy. So are there practices that you do on a daily basis to keep yourself in that mindset? [00:17:48] LA: I pause and just reflect on the day before. I am a very spiritual person, so I do believe that good things come to those who do good things. So that definitely drives me as well. [00:18:00] PF: I love it. Linda, you are a delight, as always, to talk to you. I appreciate you coming on the show and just chatting with me for a while. [00:18:08] LA: You are so welcome. And you as well are a delight, so it was my honor to be in your presence. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:18:19] PF: That was Linda Allen, talking about International Women's Day and how we can support and encourage the women in our lives. Now, International Women's Day isn't the only thing that we're celebrating in March. This is also our month for celebrating happiness with simple daily actions that we call Happy Acts. Visit our website or follow us on social media to discover new happy acts that you can do every day to make your world a happier place. Of course, we'd love to have you celebrate the International Day of Happiness with us on March 20th by hosting a happiness wall in your home, office, church, or school. To find out more, just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the Happy Acts tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Celebrate a Month of #HappyActs With Live Happy [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 406 of Live Happy Now. It's almost March and here at Live Happy, it's our favorite time of year, and not just because of St. Patrick's Day. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week we are talking about happiness month, and how you can help celebrate it. Today, I'm being joined a Live Happy CEO and Founder Deborah Heisz, E-Commerce Marketing Manager, Casey Johnson, and Marketing Manager, Laura Coppedge, to talk about why we're so excited about this time of year, and how you can be a part of it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:35] PF: I'm so happy to have all three of the ladies here at Live Happy. It's really exciting to talk about happiness month. We've been doing this for a while. And I'm so glad that we can sit down and tell everybody what all we have planned this year, because I feel like we're back for the first time in like three years. One thing people may not know about if they haven't been following Live Happy earlier, and we forgive them for that. They may not know what happy acts are and what this is all about. And Deb, I don't think anyone can explain it better than you can. [00:01:04] DH: Oh, thanks, Paula. Yeah, this is something we have been doing for quite a while. I think this is our ninth year of doing some sort of a Happy Acts campaign. I could be wrong. But I think it's year number nine. We better figure that out before it's year number 10. Really what we do is we take the month of March, and the reason why we selected March is because in 2012, the United Nations declared March 20th, the International Day of Happiness. So, March was kind of declared for us, but we take the month of March, and we use it as a month to share happiness and try and make the world a happier place through something we call our Happy Acts. That's Happy A-C-T-S campaign, and that's really composed of two different things. One is an online social media, people doing happy acts and sharing happy acts and pointing out the good things they see in the world, but also being intentional. And the other one is a walls project, which is walls that we put up. And we call them walls, but they're anything from a bulletin board to something stuck on your refrigerator, to a large wall in a public place like a park or a mall, more people make a commitment to do something to make the world a happier place. And we've been doing this for a while and every year it gets bigger. What we really want to use the month to do is to get people focused on the idea that they can take action, that people can actually take action to improve their communities around them and prove their own wellbeing and make a difference in the world. So, it's a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun around it. But also, it's a way of giving back. [00:02:40] PF: Can you tell us more about the 20th, which is the International Day of Happiness, and maybe some of the ways that people celebrate that? [00:02:46] DH: Well, the kingdom of Bhutan, actually, there was a study done a long time ago, they were kind of the happiest country on Earth. They petitioned the United Nations to declare that the International Day of Happiness. So, a lot of days, there's everything from International Donut Day to, National Take Your Dog to the Park Day, whatever it is, there's all sorts of days that are declared. But when we found out about that, it's about the same time that Live Happy was founding. So, we actually partnered with the United Nations for a couple years. I mean, we did presentations and got a group of speakers together to address the United Nations on happiness. And we did that for a few years. And then there are a lot of other organizations similar to ourselves that do some sort of social, or charitable reach out to celebrate internationally of happiness. But really, the concept of happiness is not – we've talked about this a lot, Paula. We're talking about happiness. We're not talking about taking that roller coaster ride that makes you have fun. We're not talking about whatever it is that makes you like jump for glee. We're actually talking about personal wellbeing. Being the person who you're supposed to be, being where you're supposed to be in your life, really being congruent in the choices that you make. And that's really what they mean by the International Day of Happiness. It's a day of how can we improve human wellbeing. And there's other organizations, like I said, that do similar things to what we do. But really, it has been a part of Live Happy from day one. We just think it's important for the wider world to know that you too, can make the world a happier place. You're not dependent on other people to do it for you. And so, it's International Day of Happiness. There's a lot of stuff going on around it. I know the World Happiness Report comes out on that day. I think this is the sixth one of those World Happiness Report, looking at which of the world's happiest countries and why, once again, happiest being a measure of wellbeing, population wellbeing. There are a couple of conferences that are held every year, but I really feel like we own the day because you don't have to do a lot to participate and anybody, anybody anywhere can participate in our Happy Acts campaign. It's super easy. It's super simple, but you have to take action and do something. You have to be intentional about it. And that's what I love about it. It's accessible to everybody. But it actually can make a difference and we have thousands of people involved every year and it's a wonderful experience. [00:05:12] PF: What I love about the happy acts is, if you're going to believe that it takes 21 days to build a habit, well, we have 31 days in March, and each of those days, you're giving us a happy act to perform. And I think it really gets your mind started of thinking of how am I going to do this? What am I going to do? I can see by the end of the month, where it's like, why do you need to quit? You're going to come up with your own ideas, your own thing that you could do to make somebody else happier, and we know that makes you feel happier. So, that's one thing that I really love about the whole Happy Acts approach. Casey, you always do an amazing job of putting together our happy acts for the month. You've done that again this year. Can you talk about the campaign, how it's carried out, and what some of the happy acts that you're encouraging people to do will be? [00:06:00] CJ: I would love to. So, as you mentioned, you know, we have 31 happy acts for the 31 days of March, every day in March. So, to make things easy, we offer a downloadable Happy Acts calendar that anyone can access for free at livehappy.com/happyacts. So, we encourage you to – you can follow along with our daily happy acts or you can make up your own. There's more than just 31 ways to spread happiness in the world. And we would love for you guys to share the way you're spreading kindness and happiness in the world by tagging us on social. We're basically on all social channels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, we have a TikTok channel now, LinkedIn. And some of my favorite happy acts this year, just to give you guys a little sneak peek. They're small things like we've talked about, just small ways to make someone's day a little brighter, or even your own. But anyway, so for example, if you see like a cashier at the grocery store, having a tough day, buy them their favorite candy in the checkout line, and you'll see their face brighten up or make a funny TikTok with your friends or your pet, volunteer at your favorite charity or donate. They're small little things that make a huge impact. [00:07:14] LC: I think the one – this is Laura. I think the one that I love that’s new, because some of these we have been using for nine years, Deborah, if you wanted to clarify that. We've been doing him for a year as. I love that Casey, one of the ones you came up with this year was to plan an errand date with a friend. I mean, how great is that? It's making – and that's part of this too is like looking at our perspective of how can we make even our own day a little bit better. It's our mindset on it. We have to run errands, and it's drudgery, but we take a friend along, it's a whole different experience and I love the simplicity of that. [00:07:51] PF: I think it's really important that we start learning, it is small steps that move us into wellbeing. There are the big steps that everybody talks about making these huge shifts, and that seems overwhelming. But moving into a space of happiness and wellbeing really is about the small little habits that you build on every day, that you look back after a while and realize that you have changed your perspective, you've changed your mood, you've changed your life, because of those small changes. [00:08:16] DH: I think it's really important to point out something you said just a minute ago, Paula, which is some of the habit forming. Doing positive things, taking action, doing happy acts, can become a habit, but it only takes 21 days, really, to build the habit. A lot of studies say that that's the optimum time. And once you've done something for 21 days, it's easier to do than not to do. So, these happy acts, take this month and build happy acts into your regular every day. Form that habit. Form that habit of being optimistic. And these are not huge things. I mean, it is, buy a coworker a cup of coffee. Write a thank you note. Make a call to someone you haven't talked to in a while. Check on a neighbor. There are all sorts of things and the calendar that we've got out there on social media, great suggestions. It's wonderful to take March to do that. But after that, continue the practice, because our goal is not to have a really happy March. Actually, move the needle, right? [00:09:18] PF: Right. It’s the setup. [00:09:20] DH: It is the setup. Yes. [00:09:23] PF: Casey, where do they get that calendar? Where should they look for that? Because I've seen it. It looks terrific. It makes it fun. It's something they could print out, put up on their wall, put in their cubicle, whatever they want to do. Where do they go find that? [00:09:34] CJ: Yeah, they can find that on livehappy.com/happyacts, and we're really excited. We have a new format this year. So, we hope you guys enjoy it. [00:09:42] PF: And then each day on social media, they can look and see what the happy act for the day is, correct? [00:09:48] CJ: Yes, yeah. If you're following us on social, we'll be posting every day, so you can repost ours and make your own, just anyway, spread the word and just celebrate happiness. [00:10:00] PF: Very cool. [00:10:00] DH: Please follow us on social. Both social and then our email newsletter which goes out every other week. It's just content to help you improve your life and wellbeing and a lot of stuff that we put out there should make you smile. So, it'll make you pause and think. I mean, it's all good stuff to see in your feed. Right? I'd rather see something from Live Happy in my feed, than whatever the hot thing is that's being purchased, that's being pushed on you to buy right now or politics or vote for this or whatever it is. I'd rather – I mean, wouldn't you rather have your feet filled with stuff from Live Happy? [00:10:32] PF: I would. [00:10:33] DH: I would. [00:10:35] CJ: I would too. Maybe we're biased. [00:10:40] DH: Maybe a little, Casey. Maybe just a little. [00:10:43] PF: Well, Laura, you're really leading the charge on these happiness walls. And these are so cool. You and I actually really bonded over the very first happiness wall that we did in Chicago. We'd never met before. Brand new to Live Happy. [00:10:56] LM: 2014. So, yeah, 2014 in March 28th in Chicago, became my best thing. [00:11:05] PF: Yeah, so happiness walls have a special place for me. But you're leading that. Now, talk to us about what to do with them, how you can do it. Because what I do love is how you've really expanded the definition of what a happiness wall can be, and made it accessible to literally everyone. [00:11:19] LM: Right. When we first started out, they were these big, kind of – and they still are a very – it's just a social interaction campaign. We're not asking anybody to give us anything. We're not giving anybody – it is very much social awareness of what are you doing and what can you do to share happiness. How will I share happiness? In what Casey was talking about on social media, we're talking about 31 suggestions of doing it. When we really talk about the wall interactions we have, it's really kind of a pledge of what will I do. What little thing will I do, can I do, did I do today to share happiness.? The great thing about that, and Deborah started talking about that, is they can be. We've had these big orange walls of the Bean in Chicago and various places around the world, honestly, when we were really doing international interaction there for a while before the pandemic kind of slowed that down. But it's also like, it's a bulletin board. It's a wall in the middle of your mall. But it's also, we have a poster that you can get that talks about how you're going to share happiness and asking different people how they'll do that. One of the ways that we have been doing it in my house, and I know at Deborah's house, with our kids is we have one that we put on the refrigerator, and do every year. My kids, every year, we have done the paint positivity on a rock and leave it around the neighborhood somewhere. They still love that. When we started this campaign, Deborah and I, both of our kids were young, elementary school kids, and now we have teenagers. That's one of those things that the art on and the messages on the rocks have greatly improved, for sure. [00:13:01] PF: They’d come a long way. [00:13:03] LM: The sentiment is still been the same and they look forward to that interaction. And I think, talking about it being a social awareness campaign, our kids growing up with this concept, and knowing this is, like they know Valentine's Day is coming. They know that Easter is coming. For our kids, they know that the International Day of Happiness is coming and March is coming. That I think, has made them much more intentional with how they're doing small things that are good for the world, and still saw confidence in them. That's been a wonderful thing to kind of watch and see and how they ask deeper questions over the years about why they're doing this and what it means to do it. So again, Casey said that all of our resources are on livehappy.com/happyacts and we have on there. But what we really ask people to do, because we're interested in where people are doing this, is to go on and register your wall. And if you plan on doing something at your school or at your community, that's wonderful. We have some lesson plan guides for schools to use, for elementary schools to kind of talk about what the International Day of Happiness is, and talk about how they can do things for the world and people around them. But also, if you're just going to do it in your cubicle work, or at your home, let us know the name of the city and these of where you're going to do that. Let us know where we are spreading that joy in the world. We have walls in Mexico and Canada and across the pond in England and France and it's a wonderful thing to see. Again, for us largely too, the work that we do day in and day out makes a difference and people are paying attention and wanting to better themselves and wanting to better the lives of their communities. So, on the website again, there's like we have all sorts of has pictures of walls, like if you're like, “Okay, this sounds like a great idea”, but I'm not a Pinterest-y creative person. We have inspirations. There are all sorts of like, creative ways that people have done that. So, there's a whole page that can give you some ideas and inspiration on that. And again, we have the calendar, you can download. But we also have just a simple wall that you can place on your fridge that you can download that the kids can fill in, that you can fill in, that your coworkers can fill in at work. [00:15:31] PF: But all you're doing is telling them how you're going to share happiness. It's not – [00:15:35] LM: Yeah. It's kind of the flip side of what I want to do going forward, what I want to bring out to the world. Even if it’s, I'm going to be more mindful of parking streets, so I don't take it to places in the grocery store. I mean, it can be such a small thing, or I'm going to volunteer more of my time in the coming months. I'm going to reduce my carbon footprint. That's one of our 31 apps this year. It's taking that today and moving it forward in our lives. [00:16:10] PF: Yeah. And what's really cool about doing it is if you don't have any ideas, you can steal someone else's from the wall. [00:16:16] LM: Absolutely. Yes. [00:16:19] DH: So, I think it's interesting to talk about that this is what we're doing. But if you haven't done this before, this is the way a wall works. Wherever you are, it's a wall. We like it to be orange, for branding, and then there's a card that says, “I will make the world a happier place by”, and someone writes something down, and he put it on the wall. Now, if you haven't done this before, it's kind of an interesting experience. Because if you see someone in a mall or something like that, and there's a bunch of people walking around, you're thinking, they're trying to sell me something. And so, people are like, “I'm not interested.” And it's like, “You're not interested in happiness?” And then they kind of go, “What?” You go, “No, we're not selling anything. We just want you to fill out a card, make a commitment to make the world a happier place.” And they're like, “Oh, what religion are you?” “No, no. We're not a religion, either. We're just out here, it’s International Day of Happiness.” And you'd be surprised to how people engage. In order to have them engage, we've had that experience the grumpiest person will stick around for two or three hours and join in asking people to fill out cards. It's the craziest experience. Those are our big public walls. And it's phenomenal, because it really is good to be able to stop and go, “Hey, there's something good. I can do something.” But we made it – I'm going to say it's a huge change. But it's only a huge change, because we haven't made any changes in the past. We made a change to our in-home wall this year. And I think it probably sprung out of it fact that Laura and I have teenagers. So, teenagers and accountability don't really go well together. This year's downloadable wall is seven days, it's got seven spaces, so that every day, your teenager, or your child, or you, or your spouse, or whoever it is, can fill out for a week, one week, what did they do to make the world a happier place that day. So, this is a change for us. And I think it really kind of comes out of the fact that our families are getting older, and we start seeing it engaged and not a desire to change it up, but a desire to make it more meaningful. Because if everybody writes down what they did today, you can have a conversation about it. It's that dinner conversation that we try and have around our table. What good happened today? Well, as opposed to what good happy today it's, what good did you do today? So, I think it's going to be an interesting take on it. I encourage those of you who would love to host a public wall to find out more about that. Go to livehappy.com/happyacts. Or go to live happy.com, there's a Happy Acts on the navigation that you can see. Go there, read about happiness walls. If you're a teacher, we do them in schools, classrooms. I think pre-pandemic we had more than 2,000 walls in 37 countries, the last year pre-pandemic. It's a huge boost in the classroom to get kids thinking about it. I know our principal puts it on the calendar and asks us what day we're going to come in and do it. So, it makes a difference if you're a teacher. If you are a manager in an office, put one up on a bulletin board. If you own a small business, put one up where people can come in and see it. I think the person hosting the wall, the person doing it and taking the effort actually gets a ton out of it. Because you get to spend your day talking about happiness, and making the world a better place. And it really does give you that feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of I did something, but also you get to engage with a lot of people that you might not ordinarily get to engage with. So, check it out. Once again, live happy.com/happyacts. There's a lot of information there. Register your wall. We'll be doing a bunch of giveaways during the month of March. People who register their wall or share happy acts, random giveaways, would just like to spread some share by randomly giving away some Live Happy gears. So, check it out, register your wall, join us in celebrating Happy Acts. It's something we do for the month of March every year. But really, it's something we should be doing all year round. [00:20:14] PF: I love it. So, as we wrap it up, what looks like success for this year's Happy Acts campaign? [00:20:21] DH: Success looks like more people sharing on social media their happy acts and getting a lot – I mean, my goal is, we haven't really talked to number yet. I guess we probably should. But my goal is to get at least a thousand home walls, at least a thousand people to do a home wall, and add that to the schools and the businesses that we already typically. Get Happy Acts walls going forward, and just to grow this. That would be my goal. But also, sharing on social media. Wouldn't it be great to see in your feed all the happy acts are doing? Well, to do that we need more people participating, and we need more people to just go ahead and create videos, make your Reel about the happy acts you did that day. What about the happy act someone else did that day? Or something that makes you happy. Make your Reel, your TikTok, whatever it is, your Insta. Let's just flood social media with as many happy acts as possible for the month of March. We’ll have a larger impact that way. [00:21:16] PF: I love it. Well, Deborah, Laura, Casey, I appreciate you, as always, sitting down with me. You're doing such wonderful things to make the world a happier place. I'm excited to get going on this year's Happy Acts. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:21:32] PF: That was Deborah Heisz. Casey Johnson, and Laura Coppedge, talking about our Happy Acts campaign and the International Day of Happiness. If you'd like to learn more about how to join us for a full month of celebrating happiness, share your happy acts with us on social media, or post a happiness wall in your home, office, church, or school, to celebrate the International Day of Happiness on March 20th, just visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the Happy acts Tab. We’re for excited to see you there. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Unleash Your Creativity With Steven Kowalski [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 402 of Live Happy Now. Creativity is a driving force of innovation. But have you thought about how it can change your life at work and at home? I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm being joined by Steven Kowalski, a leading voice in the global movement for conscious creativity. In his new book, Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work, he explains that all of us are creative, whether we think we are or not, and he tells us how to find our own creative style. Then use that to find greater satisfaction, both on the job and at home. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:44] PF: Steven, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:46] SK: Great to be here. [00:00:47] PF: This is such a great topic to talk about because we talk about creativity in our lives, but you are really taking it into the business space and looking at how it affects us at work, at home, and all these different ways. So I'm excited to talk to you. I guess before we dive in, can you tell us what you mean when you talk about conscious creativity because this was interesting to me. [00:01:09] SK: Yeah, super. I think conscious anything, conscious leadership, conscious capitalism, conscious creativity, we're hearing a lot of that these days. What that really means to me is that we're bringing attention and intention to what we're doing. So there's a component of self-awareness. There's a component of being clear about what I'm aiming for, reflecting on how results are mapping to my intentions. Intention and attention is probably the shorthand. [00:01:36] PF: Yeah. How does one start giving more thought to that? Because I do think in the past, we've been like either, “Oh, I'm creative, or I feel creative,” and not really thinking about our control over it. [00:01:49] SK: Yeah. So in the book, Creative Together, I talk about how most of us are walking around with what I call an ability-based definition of creativity. What that means is we think it's an ability that we have or don't have or have to some degree, and we just kind of settle into – In some ways, maybe that's even comfortable to think, “Well, maybe I'm not that creative. So I shouldn't expect it that much for myself.” But we all have the opportunity to move to this different way of thinking about creativity, but it's a potential. So I talk about this in Creative Together that shift is really critical. Because when I approached my life and my work as if creativity was an ability, I may or may not realize all the opportunities that I have to bring it forward and bring it into work, into the teamwork that I do, into the business. That's the first part about paying attention and bringing more intention, more conscious creativity is understanding that we're operating in this old story of what creativity is, and the first thing we need to do is to change the story. Then we can change the story of who we are as creators and then create more effectively with others. [00:03:01] PF: Right. Because that is one thing, and you bring it out so beautifully in the book that we've kind of been taught, when we think of creativity, we think of artists and writers and musicians. So someone who is in a business space, someone who's an accountant doesn't think, “Gosh, I'm a creative person.” We've been told that our entire lives. So how do we start thinking about creativity differently and seeing how it is being used in our daily work so that we can tap into it? [00:03:33] SK: Yeah. I like to think about creativity and propose this definition. Creativity is really this potential that we have to invent new solutions to problems we either face. So pandemic – [00:03:47] PF: Oh, is that a problem? [00:03:48] SK: Flooding, job losses, whatever, right? Problems we face or problems that we designed for ourselves. Like I have an aspiration to write a book. I'd like to start a business. When I call them problems, it's really opportunities, right? [00:04:03] PF: I love that. [00:04:04] SK: That's a big part of the switch. But creativity is just our potential to invent new solutions, new approaches, new in the face of these challenges and opportunities we might face or design for ourselves. I think that's critical as a starting point because then, anytime we face a challenge or an opportunity and an accountant or a scientist, or an IT professional, or an HR professional, or an engineer, or anyone from any industry at all, in any domain or line of work, is going to face challenges and opportunities, some of those we’ll design for ourselves, and some of them will be impinging on us. If we pay attention, we start to see evidence that our creativity is there every day, moment to moment, as we need it. That's, I think, the critical piece. In the potential definition, it shows up when we need it. In the ability definition, it's supposed to be there all the time, and some people just have less, and some people have more. [00:05:08] PF: So what do people need to do to kind of start changing their mindset and realizing, “I am creative, and this is creativity at work.”? What are some of those little baby steps to start looking at that? [00:05:20] SK: Yeah. In the book, I talked about the GIFTED methodology, G-I-F-T-E-D. So I'm going to use the first couple of letters as some of the answer to your question. So the G stands for greet the unknown with passion. I know I often greet the unknown with dread. [00:05:38] PF: Yeah. Or fear, terror. [00:05:41] SK: I try to control against it. So greet the unknown with passion, with faith in my creativity. So greeting the unknown is like one of the most important steps. There's uncertainty. There's volatility. There's complexity. We've heard this VUCA thing for many, many years now, right? There's ambiguity. What we need to do as a first step is not shy away from this because that's where our creativity will get activated. That's the G in GIFTED. I is ignite creative potential, and it's important to know what kinds of conditions give rise to creativity and to work those conditions. I call it the intersection of purpose, possibility, and constraint. All three of those things are essential ingredients for our creativity to show up. Maybe just at the very start is to think about like what are the unknowns in my life? Where are the arenas in which my creativity might show up? Maybe I'm getting a divorce. Maybe I'm looking for a new house. Maybe I'm starting a business. Maybe I'm recovering from a challenging illness, whatever. What are some of those unknowns, and how is my creativity showing up there or not? Or how can I bring more conscious awareness to how it is showing up and then work it a little bit more? [00:06:59] PF: You are really a fan of actually working on your creativity in terms of it's not just like becoming aware that I’m creative. They need to do some exercises, and they really need to do things to nurture and cultivate that. [00:07:13] SK: Yes, we all do. It's the most sustainable, inexhaustible resource we have, our creativity. I call it CDD, creativity disruption disorder. We're walking around, not realizing the amazing potential that we have and how to use it more consciously. [00:07:31] PF: Another thing that you say, and I love this, it's once we discover our creativity, we must have profound faith in it. That was just a really powerful statement. Can you explain what you mean by that? Then tell us why we need to have that much faith in it. [00:07:49] SK: I can and I'd also love to hear what went through your head maybe after when you read that, and it had that impact on you. When we rely on our creativity as an inexhaustible, sustainable resource, we can face these unknowns, this ambiguity, this uncertainty that where – It seems to me – I don't know. I don't think I'm unusual in this way, but it seems like there's more and more of it, and it's coming from every direction. I don't know how many inboxes I have now, with all the email inboxes that I have and the – Forget the mailbox. It's like old school, right? There's all these inboxes. There's all this input. There are so many demands. There's obligations. There's things I want to do, that time is running out. How am I going to manage this? There are so many unknowns that I'm facing, and I think that's critical. When I have faith in my creativity that it's going to show up, it's less overwhelming. These things are less taxing. I see them more as opportunity as opposed to trauma and adversity. [00:08:49] PF: That makes absolute sense. [00:08:51] SK: Was there anything that came into your awareness as you read that? [00:08:54] PF: Yes. Because I think it's almost like two sides of a coin because on one hand, I do take that creativity for granted, and that is doing what I do. I write. I write stories. I write books. I do a lot of things, in addition to podcasting. So I kind of take it for granted. But then on the other side, it’s almost like realizing I don't have enough faith in that creativity that it is always going to be the thing that I lead with. That's what I want to get into as well. I think sometimes, I need to lead with the idea and let the creativity catch up to it. You talk about that in the business sense of we're focusing on innovation, when we should be focusing on creativity, because that's the spark that drives it. The way that you put that all together, it's like, okay, I'm doing kind of the reverse. I've reversed engineered the way that it should be done. That is, as you said, so many businesses are doing that, placing the emphasis on the wrong thing. So can you talk about that, why it's important? We’re all talking about innovation and disruption, and this is how we lead, and you're saying like, “Hang on. That's not where it starts.” [00:10:04] SK: Well, I see innovation as a type of creative result. It's a creative result that yields value, new value. The interesting thing you could ask is like, okay, value for whom? What kind of value, like constructive, destructive? I don't know. But innovation at its core is about new value, new markets, new customers, new benefits, new whatever, new value. As a creative result, if I'm not working with my creativity and my relationship with my creativity is kind of in the closet or – In Creative Together, I say where is your creativity? Is it out in the lobby checked out? Imagine you're in a theater. [00:10:48] PF: It's waiting in the trunk. [00:10:49] SK: Out on the balcony, like unreachable or – Where is it? So I don't have that daily connection. If I'm not leveraging it, if I'm not drawing on it, if I'm not stepping into the unknown with faith, I'm kind of disadvantaging myself. [00:11:05] PF: So what should leaders be doing to foster that creative thinking and to really encourage it in employees? [00:11:14] SK: First thing I'll say is clarify the purpose, the reason why people's creativity should show up. Because if it's just about the routine or if it's just about delivering business as usual, creativity won't show up. The thing about that is it's so sad to me when people are in jobs, or their work is sort of routine day to day, and they start to think, “I'm not creative.” The truth is the work that I'm doing, I'm not being asked for that. My manager, my leader is not being asked for that. He’s not asking me for that. So I say the first thing that leaders need to do is to clarify the purpose, the reason why people's creativity should come up, come forward today. Why do we need something different than the status quo? So that's number one. The second thing is we all have a tolerance for ambiguity in our self, and I find that leaders often limit the degrees of freedom that they allow for folks to do their work. So if I'm a leader, and I've got a low tolerance for ambiguity, and I don't give degrees of freedom, I need to see results right away. Creativity needs room. There's exploration that's part of it. There's prototyping and things that work out and things that don't work out, right? If I'm micromanaging or if I'm stuck in having it done my way or the way I think it should be done, I'm not getting the degrees of freedom that are necessary for creativity to emerge. So those are two things I might answer in a short answer. We could talk about that. [00:12:49] PF: Exactly. That could be a whole episode right there. So what then happens to the individual, as we're allowed to use more creativity on the job? How does that make us happier? How does that make us more productive at work? [00:13:03] SK: Yeah. I immediately go to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think self-actualization is kind of at the top of that pyramid. It starts out with things like safety and security and just getting my basic needs met. At the top of his pyramid is self-actualization, and I think creativity is part of our feeling like we're self-actualizing. We're making a difference. We're learning. We're transforming in ways that we're seeing changes in our lives. So creativity is intimately intertwined with some of these processes that make life meaningful and help me connect with others. [00:13:40] PF: Then as we become happier, we're going to take those feelings home. There are so many studies that show if it's not working out on the job, you're taking that home. You're not going to feel great when you get home. So obviously, the reverse is true. So what happens? What have you seen in the people that you work with, as they begin implementing more creativity in their work? How does that spill over into their home life? [00:14:04] SK: Sure. I'll share a story about an IT professional, a leader in the IT department of a company that I worked with. We were talking about the voice of judgment and how that inner critic that we have – Arianna Huffington calls it the obnoxious roommate. There are so many names for it. We were working in this concept because the inner critic can really stifle the expression of creativity. The inner critic is there to keep you safe, right? So we were talking about the inner critic, and we weren't focusing in on business, and what are some of the declarative statements that stakeholders are making, that customers are making, that we're making about what's possible and what's not possible? Sure enough, the next time we got together, she said, “You know, I went home, and I really reflected on my relationship with my 15-year-old son, and I realized there was so much critic operating and running in my head. The stories I was telling, the questions I was asking him, that I was shocked and stunned at how this was getting in the way.” So the practices that help us access our creativity and bring it forward more effectively also can help us in our relationships, and in our communities, and the work we might be doing with nonprofits and all kinds of things. I think that's some of the ways that people can see this interchange between work and life. [00:15:26] PF: Yeah, because you can't really compartmentalize creativity. Once you let it out, it's going to take over. Let's talk. You mentioned someone with their 15-year-old son. What is it that we as adults, as parents can do to bring up children to nurture that creativity, so they don't have to wait until they're on the job, and they're in their 30s or 40s and trying to figure out their creative side? How do we nurture that creativity as they're growing up? [00:15:51] SK: I'll tell a story. When I was young and I was expressing my creativity through art and I would take what I was working on to my parents. It was only partially done, or I had just started. They will say, “Well, bring it back to me when it's done.” Now, of course, if anyone who's familiar with agile and agile methodologies, right? One of the tenants of agile is early and frequent customer input. So in a way, I was there looking for input early and often, and I was getting shut down or like, “Don't come to me till it's done.” So sometimes, we don't even realize how we may be setting up weird assumptions and rules for our kids by just the simplest behavior or not even being aware. But I would say encourage exploration. If a kid comes to us with something that they're working on or something, provide some input. Ask them questions, instead of giving answers. These are maybe a few things that I think we could do in response to your question. [00:16:49] PF: I like that. Then the more you practice it at home, you're also going to keep doing it work. [00:16:54] SK: Mm-hmm, asking questions is one of our – [00:16:55] PF: It’s an upward spiral. [00:16:57] SK: It is. It is. Asking questions is one of our four superpowers that I talk about in Creative Together, and asking questions is such an important part of encouraging creativity, not just in ourselves but in others, whether it's business colleagues or kids or elderly parents or whoever it is. [00:17:15] PF: Yeah. We get caught up in the talking, especially we're in a high-output society. We got to tweet our opinions. We got to make our posts on Facebook, Instagram, and we don't ask enough questions. We don't listen enough. So I love the fact that you really emphasize that and show us the value of doing that. That's a big part of it. Now, let's talk about creative styles. I really enjoyed this part of the book because it's fun to say, “Oh, I can see myself in that one and that one,” but then find out like, “Okay, yeah. I definitely skew toward that, over it.” Let's talk about the three creative styles and that fourth thing with the styles. [00:17:52] SK: That's great. So this came out of my doctoral research at UCLA. During my dissertation, I saw in the work that I was doing in the research I was doing these different styles showed up. Because I was at the Department of Education, I was looking at teachers in a very bureaucratic school district most of them are. So how do teachers in that context express their creativity in relationship to this social system that they're in? That's all of us. Me and my job, I'm in a social system. Anyone in any industry, anyone in any, whether you're a nonprofit or healthcare or corporation or whatever, we're all in a social system. So the styles that showed up then that have stayed true over the years, the soloist, the soloist said – You're saying – You're putting your hands up. [00:18:42] PF: Yeah, yeah. That's me. [00:18:44] SK: I'm a soloist at my core too, and soloists love to sort of create within the sphere of influence that they have and share the products of their creations. I'll just say our creations because I'm there too. Once they're done or pretty far along, so that other people can benefit. But it's not really like a co-creating kind of thing. I have my space of creative in that space. I share with others. But let me do it in my space. So that's a little bit about the soloist. The second style that I talked about is the rebel. The thing about the rebel is the rebel’s motivated. The rebel’s creativity gets activated by the gap between what is and what could or should be. There's this sense of like what's right and just. So we saw this in any number of folks in the school system, and I see it in myself as well. When something's not right or words don't match actions, there's a part of me that gets activated. I want to deliver solutions or help solve that. My creativity gets activated there. But the thing about rebels is that right can sometimes turn into righteousness. If I go on a crusade, I’m going to alienate the folks I very much want to join me, right? So that's a little bit about the rebel. The entrepreneur, there's a lot of us that can relate to the entrepreneur, and anyone starting a business and anyone sort of initiating things inside of a business also might relate. We have this strong vision for what could be some kind of solution, a new service, a new product, a new marketing angle, a new market base. So the entrepreneur sees these opportunities, looks kind of broadly across the system. Okay, how am I going to work politics and resourcing and investments and all kinds of things to make this happen? The trick with the entrepreneur is that sometimes the vision that I have is so strong that it's hard for people to join me. When that vision may need to evolve or change, as it meets the real world and the realities and constraints of the real world, I may become disengaged or not lose interest. That's a little bit about the three styles. One of the things all three styles share in common is they believe that the ideas that they're having are mine, my idea, my idea to arrange the classroom this way, my idea to fix an injustice, my idea to start this company. You mentioned that fourth style that I suggest in Creative Together that we all need to bring forward a little bit more. The collaborator doesn't have the same sense of ownership of ideas. It doesn't matter who has the idea. From the collaborator’s perspective, it's like, “Let's move it forward. I'm playing a part. I'm contributing. We're co-creating.” You're not creating over there and then sharing it with me. We're actually making it together. We're jointly tangibly producing something together that we couldn't produce alone. So that's a little bit about – That was kind of long-winded. Sorry, but that’s – [00:21:59] PF: No. No, it wasn't. [00:21:59] SK: Talking about the four styles. [00:22:01] PF: That was great. So why is it so important for us to understand our creative style? Once we do, once we know that, what do we do with that information? [00:22:11] SK: Yeah. So I talk about developing a practice plan for bringing the collaborator forward because that's what I see in this new world of work, where things are so interdependent, where what I do here today impacts all sorts of possibilities for others and other parts of the system today and tomorrow. So bringing that collaborator forward is really critical, and first step is to understand my style, and maybe challenge some of the beliefs and assumptions that are behind that. For example, as a soloist, I may think that it's possible to create alone. But creativity is actually meant to be shared, and it's kind of an illusion that we can create alone. Even if I'm sitting in my room, and I'm doing something, I cannot separate myself from all the influences that are around me every day, the entire world that's around me. I'm taking fragments of ideas and fragments of conversations and pieces of information from something I read. I'm connecting them, right? So it's an illusion that we actually create alone. It’s also an illusion that the idea is mine, right? Okay. So maybe I realize that. I've come to terms with that. I want to develop some practices to you know, to help me open up, to help me join others sometimes, instead of having others just join me. [00:23:34] PF: I like that. I like that. There's so much wisdom in this book, and it's also fun. I was surprised like how fun it was because I thought it would feel more scholarly. This is something that everyone can really dive into. I wondered, as the author, what is it that you really hope that readers take away from this book? [00:23:54] SK: I think the big message is in this new world that we're in post-pandemic, with the pluses and minuses of how we're all connected with through technology, all of these kinds of things, in this new world that we're working in, strength will come from creating together. But it's not something we're schooled in. It's not something we're practiced in. It's not something we've been conscious about. So the book is organized as a journey to first change the story of what creativity is and who I am as a creator. If I had left it there as the author, I would feel that it was incomplete. Because the reason to do that inner work, the reason to reflect on what gifts I bring, what challenges I face, what tests I face, what my superpowers are, all those things that are in the first part of the book. The reason to do that work is so that I can create more effectively with others in business, in life through my communities, through my social activism or advocacy. Whatever ways I might want to express that, that's where the strength is going to come. So that's my core message. In the new world of work, we have to get creative together. [00:25:08] PF: That’s so excellent. Steven, I appreciate you taking the time today. This was a wonderful conversation. It's a great book. I've really, truly enjoyed this book, and I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of it as well. [00:25:21] SK: That's great. Thank you so much, Paula. [00:25:22] PF: Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:25:27] PF: That was Steven Kowalski, talking about how to discover our creativity. If you'd like to learn more about Steven and his book or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're on the website, I'd like to invite you to check out our new podcast channel, Live Happy Presents. This sponsored podcast sees us partnering with like-minded brands to bring you information about products or services that can help improve your well-being. For our first episode, we talk with Megan McDonough of the Wholebeing Institute and learn how times of uncertainty often are the best opportunity for bringing positive change into our lives. We hear Megan's own story of how such an inflection point led her to leave corporate America and pursue inner peace and how that led to creating the Wholebeing Institute. Then we'll tell you about their program to help you take the next step toward personal happiness. You can find that episode called Take the Next Steps to Happiness with Megan McDonough on our podcast tab under Live Happy Presents. That is all we have time for today. We will meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Take the Next Steps to Happiness With Megan McDonough [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PP: We all have times in our lives that are filled with uncertainty and stress. Maybe it's career upheaval, a change in our life stages or the end of a relationship. Even as we wrestle with the challenges at hand, we wonder what the next step is. I'm Paula Phelps and this is Live Happy Presents, a podcast sponsored by the Wholebeing Institute, that looks at what to do when those inflection points arise in our lives. Megan McDonough is founder of the Wholebeing Institute, which is the world's leading educational organization, teaching the science of human flourishing. She is here today to talk about how the challenges we're facing right now, no matter how daunting they seem, actually hold the opportunity to explore, strengthen and reshape your life. Then, she'll tell us about an online program offered by the Wholebeing Institute to help you take the next step to move toward happiness. [EPISODE]   [00:00:59] PP: Megan, this is an incredible program that you're going to share with us today. I have so many questions, and I'm really excited to hear about it. But I wanted to start out by learning, how did you develop this and what got you here? [00:01:12] MM: For that, we're going to go back to the year of 1999. You remember that year, that was the year everybody was saying, computers are going to crash.   [00:01:21] PP: The end of the world.   [00:01:21] MM: End of the world when computers go from 1999 to 2000, the world was going to crash. It turns out thankfully, that the world didn't crash. But in a way, my own life crashed. I remember specifically the day I was working for DuPont, and I was in their corporate offices in a meeting. Even the day I recall, it was a gorgeous spring day, one with the depth of the sky, it was a beautiful baby blue. And there were these cherry blossoms all ripe and opening. It was incredible beauty outside. But inside, it felt like I had my back against the beauty, like I couldn't see it. This was metaphorical. Actually, literally, because I was sitting in a meeting thinking, "Ah, I'm just dying here." It wasn't because I didn't have a great job. I love my job, love the people. But I remember writing on my notepad, "This is killing me."   [00:02:20] PP: Wow.   [00:02:21] MM: So for me, that day, something became very clear. My work here was done, that this was an inflection point in my life. The reason I start with that sort of background back in 1999, is because we hit these, I think of as inflection points all the time in our lives. That was a big one in my life. But many people, as part of being human, because there's no getting around it. We had times when we feel like we've hit a termination, either we get a – either our relationships come to an end, our work feels like it's dying out, our health might be going downhill, our loved ones' health might be going. We look at these points as times of great change ang angsts. It feels entirely like a terminus and it's really a very rich place. Might feel really difficult at the time. That's when I started changing and moving in different ways in the world that looked at the science of flourishing, how we can go forward in a way that really liberated us to live more into an authentic life, in a way that feels rich, and happy and satisfying. [00:03:30] PP: Well, how do we know that we're at an inflection point versus just having a bad day at work? We all have those moments where it's like, "Okay, that's it. I'm going to go home tonight. I'm going to write my letter." How do we know? [00:03:43] MM: It's a great question, because life is full of little stress points anyways. Why is this an inflection point? One of the things that your listeners can pull from your website is a handout that's related to sort of this discussion we're having today. In that handout, I listed sort of all of those who have felt sense of when life is changing for you. When do I know that this is more than just a bad day? That it’s really an inflection here. Part of that answer is, it lasts longer than just a bad mood. It's like a chronic outcoming of this sense that maybe there's got to be something more, a clarity like I had that data. I've run my length around this thing or it might come from an external situation where you lost your job, or the kids moved out of the house and all of a sudden, you have an empty nest. In many ways, these inflection points, they become ways in which we have to actually redefine who I am. Actually, look at the different ways in which we're shaping ourselves because who we knew ourselves to be before is not who we have to be in the situation, as an empty nester, as a single person, as a person who realized their job no longer works for them or has been retired. These are all things that happen. So if you look up that list of handouts, your listeners can get a sense of, "Ah, maybe this is bigger than just a bad day." Part of that is, what is the felt sense. I mean, for me back in 1999, this wasn't just one episode. This was sort of a building of a felt sense over time where I'm just – there was a sense of dryness, a desiccation and it wasn't enlivened by this very sacred life. So those are sort of the key points that point to, "Ah, this is an inflection point. This is a change of who I see myself to be and where I'm headed." [00:05:48] PP: As you're getting that sense, and you realize this is an inflection point. That realization is one thing, but what to do with it is a whole big, scary next thing. What do you do once you've realized that you need to do something? [00:06:06] MM: It's so funny, because what is the first thing we do when we're having difficulties? Where do we go? Let's ask Dr. Google. [00:06:15] PP: I was going to say the bar, but I knew that was the long answer. [00:06:16] MM: Maybe the bar. So, still, maybe we go for a drink, maybe we talk to our friends, maybe we ask Dr. Google. But what we're really doing is just sort of splattering this – not desperation, but this angst that we're feeling, and we're reaching out and trying to find answers. Interestingly enough, when I was going through that inflection point in my own life, I mean, that's exactly what I did. I was reading, I was taking a little bit from this. I was Googling and getting all sorts of junk. Because when you Google, how do I live happier, you don't get your wonderful side of living happy, because that wasn't around back in the '90s. W What you end up doing is creating a smorgasbord of, "Let me try this. Let me try that. Let me try this. Let me ask the same people that I've always asked about and they're –." They might be wonderful, supportive people, but they might not have the answers either. So the first offer is to find a place, which is what we're talking about today. So program that systematically in step by step takes you through the process of living happier now, as you move into that definition of new self. Because what we're really in and this is actually in your handout, you can feel free to fill in these blanks. The place we're actually in right now is a place that the anthropologist, Victor Turner called the liminal space. When we know that one thing is ending, we don't yet know where we're going, that's a place of uncertainty. It's that liminal space of no longer and not yet. [00:07:51] PP: That's a very scary place. [00:07:54] MM: It's a very scary place. That's why we ask a lot of people, and we have a lot of conversations, and we ask Google and we go to the bar and drink. We try to forget about our problems. Because we're searching for this sense of stability in the no longer and not yet. We don't like uncertain places. It's very scary. So when you ask, "What do we do?" First, we realize, "Oh, this is an inflection point. This is a liminal space. This is a no longer and not yet." There are other words too for it. I think this place of inflection points is a really sacred time. It's interesting when you notice these inflection points when you're younger. You might have the graduation from high school, or college, or getting married, or having children, or finding a partner or landing a new job. There's lots of sort of inflection points when you're younger that are noticing as, "Ah, this isn't change." But when you're my age, I'm 60 this year. In midlife, all of a sudden you realize, "Wow, where are the big sort of milestones? Where are the inflection points?" That's why I wanted to elevate this for your listeners that this sort of challenge that you're going through with emptiness, retirement or even younger than I am into second jobs or more children. This no longer not yet time, along with being uncertain, scary is also a sacred time. It is deeply sacred time to do some deep work about who you are as an individual, and where you're heading in doing so in a conscious way. So that it comes from within out, versus the pressure of society, of norms, of expectations driving what you should be doing. When I think of the liminal space of no longer not yet, it's a sacred time. It's also the time that the mythologist, Joseph Campbell said, "This is a hero's journey" or Jack Mezirow in learning and development called it disorienting dilemmas. They're really times where we think about, "Ooh, what’s next for us?" So instead of this trial and error of going out to Google, to the bar, to your friends. How do we apply and study the evidence-based approach to move towards happiness? That's what our certificate in holding positive psychology does. It takes these uncertain times and it spells out clearly, step by step over the course of nine months, so that you can really use the sacred time to craft not only how you're standing in this present moment, but how you're shaping yourself towards the end. [00:10:39] PP: How important is it for us to prioritize personal happiness in this journey, because we – especially as women, I will say, we take care of our families, we take care of our spouses, we take care of the people we work with. We're caretakers and we tend to put ourselves last. As you hit an inflection point, what happens when you begin to prioritize your own personal wellbeing. [00:11:04] MM: It’s so interesting. When I made this change for myself, and I was just miserable at work. Again, not because it was a horrible place to work, but because I had reached the end of my rope that of doing work. I had two young children and my husband was a stay-at-home dad. In one way, it was extremely selfish of me to leave that role. I was the breadwinner. I had all the benefits. Talk about fear when I decided to stay home, but I would leave in the morning, and my kids wouldn't be awake. I would come home at night and they were asleep.   [00:11:35] PP: Oh my God.   [00:11:37] MM: This isn't what I was leaning into. This isn't what I wanted. My husband was 1000% behind me saying, "Yeah, let's do something different. Let's experiment with this." So part of that task of prioritizing happiness is first, realizing that it doesn't just serve us. We serve our children best when we're in a place where we're open, and giving, and loving, not when we're stressed, and unhappy and demanding. The other thing I would say is that, many times it's hard. We think that happiness, we think that prioritizing the successes will bring us happiness. If only I got the right job, if only I had more money, if only I had more time, then I would be happy. It says backwards, because we know that happier people actually set the conditions for more success. So we're actually starting with the primary view. This is what Live Happy teachers all the time, right? This is the basic premise that if we begin with a sense of grounding, and who we are, and using our strengths of showing up in the world in a way that's pointed to the best of who we are. People will enjoy being around us, we'll get more done. So what is selfish about that? We tend to think as women, we need to be martyrs to flagellate ourselves to do more, get more done, to give more, give more, and let me sacrifice myself on the martyrdom of motherhood or womanhood. It's just – how's that going for you? [00:13:09] PP: Yeah. There's a lot of people I'm sure who are seeing themselves right now in that, because I think we all do. It's become so second nature for us. So give me this high-level view of the steps that you took, and that you've learned and you use toward creating personal happiness. [00:13:27] MM: Sure. This was at first a struggle for me, because this didn't come about until I created the Wholebeing Institute. With that creation of Wholebeing Institute in 20 years of evidence-based work, both in yoga and mind body, medicine and in the field of positive psychology, I was grappling around. What I hope to do is give you an overview of how to save two decades of trying into a really cohesive path. I wish I had this program 20 years ago; I would have saved myself a whole lot of time. So I'm going to give you in the next 15 minutes or so an overview of the steps that we take our students through in nine months. This is nine months of community connectedness, where we're all working towards our highest and best and learning what does it mean to live a happier life. It begins at the very start of the course with the understanding that who you are is more than who think yourself to be. What I mean by that is the concept of self. It isn't just one self that lives within us. We identify the different selves of sometimes, we have an ought self speaking to us. I really ought to just work harder and give more to my kids and give more to my family. I really ought to bring on the paycheck, stop complaining, be – I really ought to be grateful for what I have. This ought self voice inside of us that is one voice of a self. We have our authentic self that in this moment might be happy, sad, challenged, angry, all the things that can come up now. But we also have these things in our head, these concepts of ourselves that are called possible selves. That when we do this mental time travel into the future, we see ourselves in different ways. Sometimes we see ourselves a successful business people, or a loving mother, or becoming a loving grandmother. Or sometimes we have these possible selves that scare us, "I'm going to want to die broke" or "I'm going to retire and be all alone or won't have enough money to get by" or "I'll never find happiness" or "I'll never find a mate." These possible selves are all mental concepts in our head about either what we want, or what we're afraid of. Usually, at 2:00 a.m. in the morning is when we’re creative, right?   [00:15:49] PP: Exactly.   [00:15:50] MM: The first thing to do is identify all of those selves that live in this ecosystem of your own experience. Then, when we get them on paper through this process of working together in this course, you can then decide upon the narrative of the possible self that you want to start taking action on and working into today. So we actually pick a possible self that we need for ourselves, the ideal self. This is my ideal. Why that's important and why it's different than goals? Then we have some sort of measure, "Oh, this is the direction I'm heading. This is how I want to craft my life." This becomes a deliberate shaping instead of a, "Let me try this, and let me try that." It's a deliberate shaping of today towards a possible self. And you'll find that, "Wow! There were times when my possible self is here right now and today." That's what's so brilliant about it. As we go through day by day in the program, we realized that there were times as we work towards our ideal self, that we have to understand the concept of learning as a goal before we perform as a goal. I know early on 20 years ago, when I left my corporation, started my own business, I was do, do, do in a performance type mode. Let me do this, let me try that, let me get this done. What we're saying in the sacred time of a liminal space of moving towards your ideal that there is a learning goal before you get to the performance. That's why we take nine months to do it. It's interesting when I think, even in the last few years with the pandemic, a lot of people are in a place of asking themselves. "Oh, that was a completely different experience. What did I want to take from that and shape from that into the next steps?" Because we're all of a sudden entering back into the workforce and feeling, "Wow, that pace has picked up again. I'm right back to where I used to be. How can I shape this more than ever?" [00:17:51] PP: Right. And you wonder, am I still willing to tolerate that? Is that still what fulfills me even/ I think that has changed the way we receive work. [00:18:01] MM: So true. Part of that is, we look at the course in the possible selves. Part of it is about defining ourself, our ideal self. I call that selfing. Selfing in a way in a positive way.   [00:18:15] PP: I like that,   [00:18:17] MM: Right. How are we constructing who we are in our experience as humans, such that it's enlivening, and engaging, and it’s being an expression of divine expression of who we are at the core of our being. This is what I would call selfing. But there's also another part of this work that's equally important. This I like to call unselfing. What are we letting go of? What are we realizing that this isn’t helping us anymore, this way of thinking, of believing. I don't need to hold on to. One of the things we teach in the course is a five-pointed a methodology for wellbeing. It's called SPIRE. [00:19:01] PP: I love this methodology. Yes, explain this to us.   [00:19:04] MM: Each of those belong to a different category of wellbeing. First is spiritual, mindfulness and meaning. What is it that you believe in that's bigger than yourself, that you can let go and trust into, meaning in your life? Because if you go at this happiness thing as you're carrying everything on your own shoulders, it really becomes heavy in and of itself. It's just builds on the ego, so what do you need to let go of and spiritually connect with? Could be your religion, divine, nature, God, the peace, your physical wellbeing. Not only your nutrition, your eating, your exercise, but how are you using your body as a container to express that idea itself? How do you move in the world? I is for intellectual or inquiry. What are you interested in? Curiosity and openness to experience enlivens us, so what are those things that do that for you? What's the relational wellbeing you have? We know that relationships are the number one predictor of wellbeing, so cultivate consciously in its course. How to map your network of relations? Which ones are you using in a way that's elevating? Which ones might you have to just clip back a little bit because they're actually not serving you? The last one of the models is emotional wellbeing, speaking about the power of positive emotions and how to use them to broaden and build your experience. So that the power of the negativity bias that we all have is decreased. So that's the SPIRE model that we use to both build the positive self and unself, letting go of what we don't need. [00:20:38] PP: That's fantastic. I know you've seen it change your own life. You're seeing it change the lives of others. What point in the program does that hit? Is that about halfway through, three-fourths of the way through that you've hit this point of being able to let go? [00:20:52] MM: Well, it's a process. It's so interesting to watch people go through the course, because it is sort of this unfolding. This unfolding doesn't have a specific timeframe. We've had people start at the very beginning of the program, where we unveil that SPIRE methodology and say, "Ah. This is a whole different way of thinking about how I'm working in the day" to then moving on to really defining happiness for ourselves. Actually, in defining that happiness and understanding the components of it emotionally, using our strengths, and using a meaning, it opens us up. So we begin not only to learn the content, but connect with others, the faculty, the group, because we all go through it as a cohort together. In that conversation, community is one of the most powerful. We hear again, and again, it's the most powerful, is working in connectedness around this topic, this content. Because in module three, what we do is we put people into small groups. We call the learning pods. So, you will be working very closely with other people in the group, define how you're using that content for yourself, and talk about how your day is unfolding and how you're utilizing it. That's usually a game changer for people this unfolding of angst, not just about happiness, it's not just about content, it's really working with others who are defining their next step in life. Or imagine, if you're in a small group, someone thinking about retirement and you're working with a woman who is looking at a career change, right? Or a coach who's looking to build this in their business. Those rich conversations inform. Then, in the next module, you talk about what habits am I building on a day-to-day basis. This is all about habit change. So we spend a month on what are you doing every day that's elevating you and bringing you towards your ideal. It could be something as simple as taking pictures or something beautiful every day. Could be doing a vision board, clipping a picture for a vision board every day for 30 days. It doesn't matter what you do, but what you're doing is activating over 30 days, a habit creation. We talk a lot about the science. Then, because no man is an island and a woman is an island, we talk about relationships. How do you really have conversations and relationships that are active and constructive? Mapping out that relational list is so important to understand. It's only then, after we've gone through all of this work, that we asked you what goals are important to you. [00:23:32] PP: That's the opposite of what we’re used to. I love that. [00:23:37] MM: Most people will start with – and then, do you ever find yourself picking a million goals, because you don't know which one is the right one to pick it and try –here, it's almost – with the start of this new year, people have already probably saying, "Oh, that was the wrong goal. I don't want to do that one." But after you understand what happiness is, how you're applying it in group conversations, and how you're creating habits, then you can ask yourself, "Okay. What's important to me? What goal do I want to reach?" So we have a change model where we get clear on what we want, we activate hope. We then activate our actions, and we go forward and navigate this change going for those things that are important to us. So this is the change model. We spend a month on this. Because our goals never go the way we planned them out in our head, right? Obstacles arise, difficulties arise, irritating people arise. The next month we spend on resilience, right? Things are not going to go the way we expected. Resilience is key. How do we have a setback, and then move forward, and then life happens and we move around? How do we think about in context of mindset, and a way of moving forward where we become better at resilience, of moving, of expounding no matter what happens, we're bouncing back, or bouncing forward passed where we were before. I teach the next module, which is the module on leadership. Because at the end of the day, you're becoming a leader in your own mind? How do we think about the power of leadership in our own life? What that does that mean in context with others? So we begin to actually be a hero in our own journey instead of the victim played out by others. Then we come together again, the last module, which is where the students present their final project, which is what was most personally compelling to them. You started this question, when does the unfolding happen? Anywhere and everywhere again, and again in that process, because this human life is about unfolding. What we try and create in the connectedness of the program is a positive, upward spiral that is ever broadening and growing over time. We keep seeing more, and more and more. It doesn't end even after – [00:25:59] PP: Even after the course.   [00:26:00] MM: It doesn't end.   [00:26:02] PP: Let me ask you. What are some of the most compelling stories you've seen in people, some of the transformations that you've seen in people who have gone through your program? [00:26:11] MM: What’s been really interesting, and one of the things that we look at is, what difference does this make in your day-to-day life. There was this one woman, I remember specifically was in tears when we first got together, because she was so miserable in her very highly successful job. She's just – you could tell, she was one of these goal getters, she would just get things done. She says, "But I'm miserable. I'm just absolutely a cranky woman." Her final project was about daily blessings. She set up this mason jar in her home, so when she got together with dinner with her husband and her children, they created a family ritual of counting blessings, and they would put blessings into that jar. Talk about it and put it into the jar. And it became sort of a habit in the family. So it changed not only her life. She came back like a completely different person, because her final project was about counting blessings, not burdens. She came back a completely different person. Her family life had changed, because of that interaction. Another example are people who are coaches, and I've been approaching their coaching work from the premise of how to be a good coach. What they wanted to do is understand how to ask questions that elicited the best out of the clients that they were working with. So they actually wanted the skills of positive psychology to increase their practice of coaching. What they found happening is that, help them get clear about who they were coaching, what they were coaching people towards, so they get clarity on their own business and their own self in it. So we have a lot of solopreneurs, who – whether they have therapists, or coaches, or teachers, wellness practitioners that not only want to use this in their practice, but they use it for themselves. So they go through this program, and they realize that their life is happier as they help others in their life. [00:28:13] PP: What a benefit of – you're doing it for somebody else, but then you end up being able to give this gift to yourself and a lasting one. I love the fact that people are going through this with someone else, because I've seen that power of connection. I know, I've been in programs where, say, a woman didn't feel supported by her family, or by her husband for going through this. That is so important to have that little community. So even if the rest of your world is kind of disintegrating or not supportive, you've got that community that you've built. I imagine that that community lasts long after the program. [00:28:51] MM: Long after. We've been in business for 10 years; we still have our first small groups back 10 years ago tell me that they're still meeting as a group. I guess, this is sort of close out this conversation by asking viewers to think about. If you stayed on the trajectory of doing what you're doing now, where will you be in nine months? If you took the program and helped you shape possible self future into your ideal self, what would look different in your day, nine months from today? That's really the promise of stepping into the science of human flourishing. [00:29:24] PP: That is so powerful. Megan, we're going to tell our listeners where they can learn more about your program. We're going to send them to our website. You've got some great handouts that we're going to let them download from there for free. Tell them more about the program and let them know how they can sign up for this. As we finish this out, is there any other message that we haven't covered today that you really hope everybody hears as I walk away from this? [00:29:50] MM: I want to say thank you to you. We've worked together for years. So my first thing is just gratitude for you in the work at Live Happy. The second thing I want to say is I look forward to seeing your listeners in the course and getting to work with them, and a certificate of Wholebeing Positive Psychology. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:30:10] PP: That was Megan McDonough, founder of the Wholebeing Institute, talking about how we can take the next step to move toward happiness. If you visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab, you can download a free set of worksheets to help you identify what internal signals you're receiving about personal change, and help you think about how this can become a time of positive growth. We'll also tell you more about Megan, the Wholebeing Institute, and the certificate in Wholebeing Positive Psychology and how this nine-month program can help you walk through the changes you're experiencing. We'll also give you a special link just for live Happy listeners to learn more about the program and how you can be a part of it. Enrollment is underway now for the program that begins in March. Again, just visit livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. We hope you have enjoyed this special episode of Live Happy Presents. From Megan McDonough and myself, Paula Phelps, thank you for joining us and remember to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Making the Most of Your Time with Cassie Holmes  [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 401 of Live Happy Now. Do you feel like you have plenty of time to do all the things you need to get done? Or are you like the rest of us, who are just trying to fit it all in? I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with Cassie Holmes, an award-winning teacher and researcher on time and happiness and author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. Cassie is here today to talk about what it means to feel time poor, and why that has become so prevalent today. Then, she'll explain how we can learn to better structure our days and begin using our time, instead of losing it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:45] PF: Cassie, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now. [0:00:48] CH: Thanks so much for having me, Paula. I'm excited to chat with you. [0:00:52] PF: Well, you have written an amazing book that takes on a huge topic that so many people are dealing with today. I think, before we really dive into that, can you clarify by telling us what you mean when you say time poverty? [0:01:05] CH: Yeah. Time poverty is the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. I am sure, even if you haven't heard that term before, everyone knows exactly what that is, because they felt it is really prevalent. We conducted a national poll that showed that nearly half of Americans feel time poor. That they don't have enough time to do what they set out to do. [0:01:33] PF: That's amazing. Because I mentioned this book to my nurse practitioner when I was seeing her a couple weeks ago. She was like, “Time poor. I'm not familiar with that.” I explained, not as eloquently as you just did, and she was like, “So that's what you call it.” [0:01:48] CH: Yeah, exactly. [0:01:49] PF: Like you said, and even if they haven't heard the term, everyone has experienced this. I find myself saying a lot like, okay, our parents didn't live this way. What happened? Where did the time go? Why is it that we are all living in such a time crunch? [0:02:04] CH: Yeah. It's a really important question. Because it is such an issue. It's an issue, because it's so prevalent, as I said. It's an issue, because it has really negative consequences, which we can speak to in a second. In terms of why, why is it that we feel this way? I think there's a couple of factors that contribute to it. One is cultural. That there's been this taking on as viewing busyness, almost as a status symbol, a signal of competence, and that you're needed. Then we take on so much, because we feel like we should, right? It's that productivity orientation. Also, recognizing that it is a feeling of having too little time to do all that you want to and think you should be doing. That expectation of what we think we should and could be doing is influenced by technology, to be honest. I think that our smartphones are so useful in so many ways. They help us do those things that we should be doing, to check tasks off our to-do lists. We can order groceries at any moment. We can coordinate schedules. We can respond to emails. Also, it's the idea of all the things we could be doing at that moment. With social media, you have this constant view into other people's lives, but only their happiest moments of their lives. [0:03:32] PF: Like the highlight films. [0:03:35] CH: Right. It's like seeing. Well, you're waiting in line at the coffee shop, or at the grocery store, you're looking at your phone and seeing the amazing vacation, or the fun meal that someone is having and have like, “Oh, I could be doing that right now.” As well as we could be learning Spanish at any moment, watching a performance somewhere. Of course, there's no way that we would have time to do all this notion of what we could and should be doing. I think that that's also one of the culprits of why we feel time poor. [0:04:11] PF: Right. We're going to obviously get more into what it means to be time poor and what it's doing to us, but one thing that I found so interesting early on, that you talk about having too much free time is just as detrimental as not having enough free time. I've found that so fascinating. Can you explain why? Can you also talk about what that sweet spot is of that perfect amount of free time? [0:04:37] CH: Yeah. I think that's a really important learning from the data for all of us who feel time poor. Because in those days and in those states where we feel so time stretched, oftentimes, I know for myself, for instance, I have been like, I don't know if I can do it. I need to quit. There's no way, so I should quit this job that I love so much and I've worked so hard for it, but it's just not possible. We day dream. “If only I had all the hours of my days. Living on a beach somewhere.” [0:05:07] PF: I'd been Costa Rica picking whatever is in Costa Rica. [0:05:11] CH: Yeah. Surely, I would be happier. But is that true? In our work, we looked at with Hal Hershfield and Marissa Sharif, what's the relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness? Among our studies, including looking at data from the American Time Use Survey. Looking for among tens of thousands of working, as well as non-working Americans, how they spent a regular day. We could calculate the amount of time they spent on discretionary activities. Across studies, we found this consistent pattern of results. Namely, it was a upside down U-shape, or like an arc, or rainbow, suggesting that on both ends of the spectrum, people are less happy. In that data, we found that folks with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in the day, they were unhappy. Those were the time for folks. That's because heightened feelings of stress. On the other side, we saw that those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time in the day, were also less happy. The reason is, because we are driven to be productive. We are averse to being idle. When we have all the hours of our days open and available, and we spend them with nothing to actually show for how we spent that time, it undermines our sense of purpose. With that, we feel dissatisfied. I also want to note that it's not just that paid work is a way of spending that gives us purpose. For many of us, it actually is. Volunteer work, engaging in a hobby that's really enriching and develops us, that's also worthwhile ways of spending. Actually, we see that when people spend their discretionary time in worthwhile ways, that you don't see this too much time effect. You don't see that more is better. You don't see that too much time effect. This is, I think, important for all of us, in those heady days to not quit. Don't quit. Don't sell your house and move to the island, because a weekend, you will be bored and looking for a sense of purpose. [0:07:29] PF: Yeah. As I was reading that, I was thinking about some of the research that exists on people, how the death rate goes up when people retire. It's not really associated with declining health. It really ties back into what you were talking about, when they lose a sense of purpose and their overall happiness goes down, their overall well-being goes down, I feel like, that's got to be connected. [0:07:48] CH: Absolutely. Related to that you see among retirees who actually do volunteer work, that you see higher levels of satisfaction. When you have that available time, is making sure that you invest it in ways that do feel worthwhile, that give you that sense of purpose. Again, our days living on the beach might not be quite as happy as we daydream about. [0:08:16] PF: Absolutely. One exercise that you offer that people can really help to figure out their days is time tracking. I thought this was so excellent. We'll make sure that we have a link to your site, so people can go and download these, because you have given some wonderful worksheets and exercises. Can you talk about time tracking and how it works and why it is so important in the way we see our days, and the way we start shaping our days? [0:08:42] CH: Absolutely. In terms of how to live days that feel fulfilling and satisfying, the trick is to really maximize the amount of time that's spent on activities that feel worthwhile. Minimize the amount of time that is spent on activities that feel like a waste. Then, the question is, well, what are those activities that are worthwhile? Research does time tracking to pull out tracking for that individual, or among a broad sample of people, what activities they spend their time on, how they feel over the course of their day, so they could pull out on average, what are those activities that are associated with the most positive emotion? What are those activities that are associated with most negative emotion? You see that on average, activities that are socially connecting, so whether intimately, or spending time with family and friends are the most positive. You see the most negative are commuting, working and doing housework. Maybe not surprising. What's important is that this is based off of averages. There are some folks and I would like to put myself in the category of work is actually a great source of satisfaction. Also, there are instances of socializing that are not at all fun. I suggest that people track their own time for a week. The worksheet is on my website. It's so simple. I mean, granted is somewhat tedious for that week, but it's worth it. [0:10:12] PF: It pays off. [0:10:14] CH: Is that for every half hour, write down what you're doing, the activity. Being more specific than just work, or socializing. What work activity are you doing, so that you can pull out what are those activities that are the good ones? Also, whether those ways of socializing that are the good/bad ones. Because in addition to writing down what you're doing is rating on a 10 point scale, how it made you feel coming out of it. Of satisfied, happy fulfilling. Then what's wonderful is at the end of the week, you have this fantastic personalized data set. You can look across your time and see what are those activities that were your most positive. Also, what are commonalities across them. You might see, for instance, that actually, it's not socializing per se, or being not at work. It's for me, it was like, I really value one-on-one time, whether with a family member, or a friend, or a colleague, that was actually time that was really fulfilling for me. Then I also recognized in groups, less fulfilling. But that's me. You, as you have your own data, you can really hone in on what are those activities that feel not satisfying. To dig into the commonalities to figure out why. Also, you can see just how much time you're spending across your various activities. Helping you pull out like, “Holy cow. I had no idea that I was spending that much time on social media, or watching TV, or burning like, oh, email.” It's like, my entire life is spent on email. Recognizing that, in fact, maybe not surprising for email, but for some, it's actually quite surprising that social media doesn't make them feel very good, even though they have it in their head like, “Oh, this is my fun time. This is my me time.” It's really helpful to have this information to see where you're spending your time, such that there are opportunities to reallocate away from these times that are actually somewhat of a waste, according to you, not according to me, but according to your own data, so that you can reallocate them towards those activities that are more worthwhile. In the context of time poverty, where so many of us feel we don't have enough time, this is really important information to find pockets, where actually, we do have available time. If we spend it on ways that are more fulfilling, then perhaps, and I experienced this myself and have heard from readers, perhaps at the end of the week, even if you're busy, you look back and you feel fulfilled and satisfied and happy, because you spent on these worthwhile things. [0:13:09] PF: That exercise really reminded me of when you're going to go see a nutritionist, or something, they say, write down everything you eat for a week. You're like, “Oh, I got this. I'm going to blow it away.” Then you're like, “Oh, wow. I didn't realize I really picked up that many little pieces of chocolate, or whatever.” It's like, it really does make you sit down and think, “Wow, okay. There are areas where it's not just time has been stolen from me. I am generously giving it away.” What a great way to reset and figure out how to change that. You also give tips for making chores, or things that you don't love doing. Say, housework. How do you make that more enjoyable and feel more fulfilling? [0:13:48] CH: Time tracking, or even in your reflection, there are activities that are not fun. That's just – [0:13:53] PF: We can't just quit doing them, I guess. [0:13:54] CH: You can't quit doing. They’re necessary. Unless, you want your family, or housemates to kick you out, because you're not contributing to chores. We do have to do them. I do share some strategies to make them feel more positive. One of those is bundling. This is out of research by Katie Milkman and her colleagues. It's so simple yet so effective. Is basically, you bundle this activity that you don't enjoy doing, like chores, like folding the laundry, and you bundle it with an activity that you do enjoy, such that that time that you're spending becomes more worthwhile. It becomes more fun. For example, folding the laundry, if you bundle that with watching your TV show. Actually, one of readers was saying that her husband is now bundling ironing with watching sports and he is now so excited to iron each week, because he sets up the ironing board in front of the TV and that is his dedicated time to watch sports. Commuting, that was one of those other activities that is just so painful, because you're waiting through it. You just want to get there already, and it feels like a waste. During your commute, if you're driving, listen to an audiobook. Or if you're on the subway, or bus, read a book. When in this work on time poverty, I ask people to complete the sentence, I don't have time to. One of a very frequent response is, I don't have time to read for pleasure. If every time you got in your car, or that you're on the train going to work, you are “reading,” then you'll get through a book every week or so. All of a sudden, that time that was a chore, or felt like a waste feels more worthwhile and fun. [0:15:49] PF: One thing that you bring out and we all know this is true that when we feel pressed for time, the first things that go out the window seem to be those things that are going to make us feel better and are good for us, things like exercise, things like preparing our meals, so we're eating more healthy. How do we change our mindset and realize that those are the things we need to schedule in first, so that we don't just disregard them? [0:16:12] CH: Exactly. Exercise is a really important one, because exercise is an activity that has direct implications, not only for your health, but your emotional well-being. It's a mood booster. It is very effective at offsetting anxiety, which so many people are suffering from. Also, offsetting depression. It makes us feel really good about ourselves. Once we do make that time, we realize that we can do it. Actually, in terms of our feeling of being time poor, a part of that is that we don't have the confidence that we can accomplish what we set out to do, given the resources that we have, namely the time that we have. If you actually spend your time in ways that increase your self-efficacy, like exercise, then and I can speak to myself and I share this as an anecdote in the book is that, like you said, when I feel busy, my morning run is the first thing I give up. When I make the time and I'm out there running, it's like, “Oh, my gosh.” Thank, gosh, I did, because I'm feeling good. I feel like, I can take on the day on those important things. With that sense of accomplishment, it expands my sense of how much time I have available to do and complete what I set out to do. Both exercise, as well as doing acts of kindness. I have research that shows that when we actually spend time to give a little to someone else, that increases our sense of accomplishment, and self-efficacy. It actually increases our sense of time affluence, too. But it's important that it's giving time, not that time is being taken from you. [0:18:07] PF: You're an expert at this. How do you tell yourself, go ahead, invest the time, do the exercise, take the time to prepare your meals, whatever it takes? We can make a habit out of it. Once we get into that groove after 30 or 60 days, it's not that difficult, but how do we then, we're at this time of the year where people are trying to develop new habits anyway, so this might as well be one. How do we do that? [0:18:30] CH: It's such an exciting time of the year as people with that fresh start, looking for it and becoming more intentional. Actually, towards the end of the book, I have this chapter on time crafting. Pulling all of the strategies together from across the book, how do you design your week, such that you are protecting, carving out time for those things that matter, putting them into your schedule, so my Monday morning run. In many cases, it's the time and investing in those relationships that are so important to us that often do get neglected, when we're in a hurry. Putting those things into the schedule first. Protecting them. Also, placing them in that important work that you love so much. Your deep-thinking work. Put it into your schedule, so that it doesn't get filled by unnecessary meetings, or even responding to email. So that you make sure that you do have that time in the part of your day where you're most alert and most creative, and then seeing, consolidating the activities that you don't enjoy doing, because as we start activities and our anticipation of those activities have a big effect. If we condense them, then all the bad stuff, it's less painful if you get it all done together. Whereas watching TV, for instance, that first half hour is great. Five hours in on binging, less enjoyable. In fact, quite anxiety producing, because you feel really guilty and bad about yourself and it's not even fun at that point anyway. Putting those half hours and being really intentional. I do talk a lot about how to design your week, so that you are making time for the things that matter. Highlighting and increasing the impact of those activities that really matter. This is so important to do, because – Can I share an analogy that I think is – [0:20:35] PF: Please do. [0:20:36] CH: - really helpful for folks to have in their heads? I continue to touch back on it, when I'm making my own time saving, or spending decisions. It's an analogy about prioritization. It's nicely depicted in a short film that I share in actually the first day of my class that I teach to MBAs on how to be happy applying the science of happiness. In the film, a professor walks into his classroom and on the desk, he puts this large, clear jar. Then into the jar, he pours golf balls up to the very top, and he asked the students, is the jar full? The students nod their head, because it looks full. Nope. Then he pulls from a bag on the side, pebbles, and he pours the pebbles into the jar and they fill the spaces between the golf balls, reached the very top and asked the students, “Is the jar full?” They’re like, “Yes.” But he's like, “Nope.” Then he pours sand into the jar and it fills all those spaces between the golf balls, between the pebbles, up to the very top and he asked the students, “Is the jar full?” By this point, they're laughing. They’re like, “Yes.” He explains like, this jar is the time of your life. The golf balls are all those things that really matter to you. Your relationships with your family members, your friendships, that work that you truly care about. The pebbles are those other important things in your life, like your job, your house, the sand is everything else. The sand is all of that stuff that just fills your time without you even thinking about it, whether it's social media. For me, the email inbox. For some, it’s TV. It’s like, those never-ending requests that come in that it's easier to say yes to than no. Even though, you don't really care about what that task is. What's really important to note is that had he put the sand into the jar first, all of the golf balls would not have fit. That is if we let our time get filled, it will get filled with sand. We won't have had time, we wouldn't have spent the time on those things that really matter to us. We have to identify what are those golf balls, put them into our schedules first. Protect, prioritize that time. Then the sand will fill the rest, absolutely. We need to be really intentional and thoughtful. The time tracking exercise that I mentioned was one way to really identify, what are those golf balls for you, such that when you are designing your week, you're doing the time crafting part of it. That goes into your schedule first. That morning run, or whatever your form of exercise is actually really important. Put that into your schedule for us. Because actually, for exercise for instance, not only does it influence how you feel while you're doing it. You get that mood boost and sense of self efficacy, but also it colors how you experience the rest of your day. It has a really big impact, beyond just the experience itself. [0:23:34] PF: That is so huge. I know we have to let you go, but there was one more strategy you talked about that I had never heard of. Absolutely fell in love with, and really want you to share this with our listeners. That's the idea of time left. That was so powerful. Can you talk about what that technique is and why it works so beautifully. [0:23:55] CH: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked about that, because I do think it's a really important one. It is recognizing that some of those golf balls are really, actually from simple, ordinary moments in our life. These everyday moments, like a coffee date for me with my daughter, or having dinner with your family. Or, it's just these everyday moments that sometimes we're moving through them, because they're so every day that we expect they will continue to happen every day. But that's not true. Our time is passing, our time is fleeting, and circumstances in our life are changing. If those sorts of activities that bring joy involve someone else, circumstances in their life, too, are changing. One way to make it so that we do pay attention, we prioritize time and pay attention during these sorts of simple joys that are right there and the time we're already spending is to count the times left. Picking a experience that brings you joy and calculating, how many times have you done it in your life so far? The next step is to calculate, how many times do you expect to have do this activity in the future, accounting for the fact that circumstances in your life will change, if it involves another, circumstances in the other person's life will change. The last step is to calculate of the total times doing this activity in your life, what percentage do you have left? More often than not, it's way less than you think. Initially, it's sad. But the benefits of seeing this is really worth that initial sadness, is because what it does is it makes me protect the time. Then also, it influences how you experience that time, knowing that it is limited, that it is so precious, we remove those distractions, so that phone gets put away, that constant to-do list that's running in our heads, that gets quieter, because we realize that this is the time of our life that really matters, and to really make it count. It doesn't have to be a whole lot. All of us who are time poor, it doesn't have to be a lot of time for these activities to have a really big impact on how satisfied we feel in our weeks, how fulfilled we feel in our lives. I think that the counting times left is a very lenient and impactful exercise to make us spend our time on the activities that matter, as well as make the most of those times when we're spending them. [0:26:29] PF: I would say, that is correct, because that, like I said, it just stopped me when I read that. That's absolutely incredible. This book is so full of strategies, information, hope, techniques. What is it that you really hope readers take away from it? [0:26:46] CH: I hope that people just become more intentional in the time that they're spending and to really soak up. There's so much happiness and joy right there that's available, no matter how time poor, no matter other constraints that we have facing our lives, that there is a lot of happiness and joy available to us, if we are that intentional about the way that we spend our time. [0:27:13] PF: Cassie, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We're going to tell our listeners more about your book, where they can find it. Thank you for writing this. This is something we all need. It's presented so incredibly well. I really appreciate it. [0:27:28] CH: Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. It was a treat. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:27:35] PF: That was Cassie Holmes, talking about how to make the most of our time. If you'd like to learn more about Cassie and her book, download some free worksheets to help you plan your time better, or follow her on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. While you're on the website, be sure to drop by the Live Happy Store and check out our great selection of Live Happy gear and merch, so you can show the world how you live happy. That is all we have time for today. We will meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Choosing Your Word for the New Year With Matt Derrenbacher  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 397 of Live Happy Now. It's the very last episode of 2022, and that means it's a great time to talk about setting our intention for the New Year. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm sitting down with Matt Derrenbacher, a fifth year rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and a chaplain candidate for the US Air Force. Matt is here today to talk about how we can set an intention, not a resolution, for our New Year and how choosing one word to guide us through the year can serve as a touch point in the months to come. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:42] PF: Matt, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:45] MD: Hey, thanks for having me. [00:00:46] PF: It is a pleasure. You know, I had an idea that I wanted to do something about choosing a word of the year because that's a practice I've had for several years now, and it's been very effective. So I turned to your wife, who is a frequent flyer on Live Happy Now, and she's our resident pet expert, Brittany Derrenbacher, and she said, unbeknownst to me, that this is something that you are very familiar with. I didn't know that choosing a word of the year, setting that intention, that that's actually a practice within the Jewish faith. [00:01:18] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Just a little bit of context, so there's also a Jewish New Year. There's a few Jewish New Years, but the big one is Rosh Hashanah, which is the start of the year. So Judaism is based on a lunar calendar, which means our dates kind of move around in the secular calendar because that one's based on the sun. So we just have the High Holy Days end of September, early October this year. So during that process, when we have the New Year, and then Yom Kippur, which is like the Day of Atonement, there's one word that is really central to the experience of the New Year, and that is the Hebrew word to teshuvah. It's generally translated as repentance. But that's a terrible translation, a terrible translation. [00:02:07] PF: Just for the record. [00:02:09] MD: Because it comes from the word shuv, which is to return. So the word that I've chosen for the past few years, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and through the whole period of Yom Kippur, and the High Holy Day period, is that to shuva, to return. It's really nice and sort of freeing to choose a word, rather than like set resolutions or all of these grand things because it's simple, right? So return, what can I do to return to myself, to return to what I want to be, to set new goals, return to my inner child, to all of these pathways of possibility? Because it's a word, we can keep returning. Yeah. We can return back to it. [00:03:00] PF: What is the purpose of choosing a word that you want to guide you through the New Year? [00:03:06] MD: So the purpose of choosing a word, rather than setting, I don't know, some grand sort of resolution is that a word can sort of serve as a mantra in a way, right? So we can continue to go back to this word, and it can look backwards. So when we return to ourselves, we're evaluating what has happened, we're returning, and then we're looking ahead to what we hope for the next few hours, few days, weeks, months, years, whatever it is. But it's freeing. It doesn't put us into a little box. It's an opportunity, rather than a constriction. [00:03:49] PF: Then unlike a resolution, you can't break it. Like you can't really fail at it the way you can with a resolution, and the failure rate on resolutions are like higher than new businesses. It's just like, man, what is it? Like six weeks into it that something like 80% or some astronomical number, these resolutions have already failed. It seems like with resolutions, once we've missed the boat, people tend to be like, “Oh, okay. I'll just give up and try again next year,” whereas having a word that you keep coming back to is completely different. Is that correct? [00:04:22] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Just a little more background, the Jewish understanding of time is very cyclical. Our lunar calendar is cyclical. We begin with the year, and then we re-begin with the beginning of the next year. We read the entire Torah, our sacred text, all the way through every single year, and we return back to the beginning. So the beginning of the cycle of Torah and the cycle of the New Year is this opportunity to engage in this act of creation because we as human beings have influence in our world. So we are actively creating the world that we're in and the world we want. So by choosing a word, we're able to continue to actively participate in that cycle, rather than sort of, well, I missed this resolution. So I’ll get it next year. It gives us something to keep evaluating and reevaluating and jumping back in. That’s important too because we may set some goal or intention for ourselves, and we may realize partway through, this isn't actually what I wanted, or this isn't actually how I want to interact with my world. So let me just recalibrate a little bit and just take another path. [00:05:37] PF: How does that help us stay motivated or reach a goal in a way? I kind of see it as if you have goals that you want to reach, and I'm not going to set a resolution because that's crazy. I can still set a goal, and then I use this word kind of as that motivation too. That is a practice or the mindset that I'm going to use to achieve what I want to achieve that year. [00:06:04] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Because a word serves more as an invitation. Let’s break it down a little. So if we think of a resolution, like here's a resolution that people across the world set every year, right? Like this year, I need to lose weight, and I need to be healthy. Okay, great. Now, instead of approaching it that way by just having a word as an invitation, we can sort of reframe that, right? So we can ask ourselves, instead of commanding ourselves, “I need to do this. I need to do this,” and putting that stress, that anxiety, and creating this sort of overwhelming weight that we're sort of carrying, until we just can't carry it anymore, and we chuck it off, and we say, “Hey. All right, that's it. I'm not doing that resolution this year.” It's an invitation, so we can say like, “Oh, imagine if this year, instead of all of the time I sat and binge-watched Netflix, imagine if I just broke that up a little bit and did maybe like 30 minutes of exercise and then two hours of Netflix?” It’s an invitation, right? So you're still interacting with that goal that you want to reach, but you're not sort of putting it in this little box that makes it seem almost overwhelming and impossible. [00:07:27] PF: I like it. I like seeing it that way, and it can help us reset throughout the year when we get off track. The very first time I did this practice of choosing a word, I was in Cincinnati, and I went to a church with a friend. They handed out these little white stones and a Sharpie, and they said, “You're going to choose your word and write on that stone.” So then the idea was like you can keep that stone in front of you, and it becomes a literal touchstone to what you want to accomplish or what you want your mindset to be. [00:07:58] MD: Yeah, absolutely. I love that because it takes this word and this intention, and it makes it a process of being instead of doing. [00:08:08] PF: Right, right. One thing that really surprised me was I didn't leave with a word on my stone that day. It's amazing when you sit down to do this. Now, let's see the – Okay, the other people in the church had a little advantage because they knew it was coming. I was a first time flyer at this service, and so I had no idea. They knew. I think they had been putting some thought into it. For myself, I really had to take it and think about, I mean, for a long time. So let's talk about that. How do you get down? When you want to choose your word that's going to guide you for a new year, what's kind of the process that someone can go through to think about what they want for that year? [00:08:48] MD: Yeah. That's a phenomenal question. I think that one of the best things we can do is just be intentional and honest with ourselves. So really thinking about and evaluating who we were as a person in the past year and how we feel about that, the things that we wish we could have done differently. Celebrate the things that we did do, that we're proud of, and then hold on to all of that, and sort of use that as the lens in which we view the New Year. [00:09:19] PF: That's really effective. [00:09:20] MD: Yeah, yeah. [00:09:22] PF: Because for myself, I know I will brainstorm. I still remember that very first stone, I wrote mindful. I decided like I'm going to be more mindful this year. [00:09:31] MD: Nice. [00:09:31] PF: And I've done different things since then in like a year of gratitude. What I've tried to do is every time I select a word, then I decide to put a practice around it. So not just saying I'm going to be more mindful, but it's like, okay, what am I going to do to put that into action? Because I think that's important too that you have that mindset, but then you also need to know what your action plan is that goes behind it. [00:09:57] MD: Absolutely, this idea of being mindful and stopping and listening. Once we sort of get that feeling, the beginning of that direction, then we can start the doing of creating ritual, of creating different ways to interact with the intention that we've set in a meaningful way that's renewing to us and helps us achieve some of those goals that we set based on the lens of this word that we've chosen. [00:10:25] PF: That's excellent. What's great about this too is there's like no right or wrong answer. I mean, you shouldn't use a word like annihilation or anything like that. But you can really – It’s like what word works for you and where you're at. I think something that surprised me is how easily those words – I already had my word for 2023 like in October, and it just struck me. I mean, it's not something I was going out like brainstorming what am I going to do. But it just dawned on me at one point like this is what I need to look for in 2023. This is what it needs to be about. So it does start becoming a habit where you incorporate that into your life, and you start figuring out ways to use it. In terms of reminding us what our word is, like I said that first year, I had it written on a white stone. I did that for a couple years after that, and then I've found other ways that I can symbolize it. Like when I did gratitude, there's a lot of things that say gratitude out there. It’s not hard to find it. So you can incorporate other visuals to remind you. What are some of the things that you could suggest to people so that it is, especially when they first start doing it, the first month or so, where it's like, “Oh, I got to remember to be mindful. I want to remember to incorporate this into my thinking today.” What are some ways that they can remind themselves? [00:11:46] MD: Yeah, absolutely. So in this way, the Jewish calendar is sort of an advantage because we have like the Jewish New Year in September, October. I mean, it moves around, depending on what cycle of the moon we're in in the year. But then we have a couple of months, and then we have the secular New Year. So there's a couple-of-month period where we can sort of we set an intention, start living out that intention, and then reevaluate, right? Because – [00:12:14] PF: But you get like a trial run is what you’re saying. [00:12:16] MD: Yeah, exactly, exactly. [00:12:18] PF: Like I need to see if this word really works for me. [00:12:23] MD: Yeah. But, no, I think that's perfect. So maybe in choosing a word, we also think about it as like a trial run because I know commitment can be scary for a lot of people, especially when it involves like personal self-growth and change and introspection. Looking at ourselves is one of the hardest things to do. So thinking of it like a trial run, okay, so my word is return or my word is listen, and I'm going to try to be more mindful and intentional about listening for the next month. How do I check that? Well, as I set my intention, I go to my calendar one month from today, just put in a little alert. How have I been listening? Then set the alert. Let it go. Because if we forget, if we sort of let it go, the alert pops up. We take that moment to recalibrate and say, “Hmm, I haven't really been listening. Why?” Then we can start over again, and maybe we need to choose a different word. But the idea is intentional growth within ourselves. So latching on to a new word or sort of reevaluating or thinking about why the word didn't work for us. Or if we get into a really nice groove, like we've doing a really good job of just stopping and listening and meditating. This is really working for me, cool. Then we're reenergized for the rest of the year or to our next checkpoint. [00:13:48] PF: I like that. I really, really like that. I love using technology as a tool to facilitate that because there's other things we can do. Some people might make a vision board out of it. Some people might journal. There's several things that we can do to kind of supplement it along the way and help build that up as an experience. [00:14:10] MD: Absolutely. So my word for this year, even though I sort of latched on to the idea of teshuvah, of returning to myself, I realized that the main thing that I wanted to focus on this year was listening. By setting that intention and then choosing that as the theme for my service, which was in December, there's a couple of months to really think about that and just exploring all of the incredible change and transformation that can come from just listening. [00:14:39] PF: That's powerful because we don't listen in. I mean, we have so much coming at us that it's hard to listen. It's hard to get still and explore a quiet place where we can listen. So that's very cool. What a great word. So how does it change our lives? Like what have you seen in your own life when you're able to focus on a word and give intention to a word, give intention to a year, and let that guide you throughout? [00:15:04] MD: I think the best thing about being able to choose a word and to just live very mindfully and intentionally is discovering all of the really small things that you'd miss otherwise. So in like this year, my word is listen. I'm going to go back to it. But really sitting and being intentional about not only how I'm feeling but how I feel sitting in this chair right now, sort of the light white noise of the fan that's going on right now. Our voices back and forth, the conversation and sort of the linguistic music that we're creating together, like a lot of these things we kind of just take for granted. Just taking one second to think about, all of the things that we take for granted going on around us can open up the entire world for us to just the sheer beauty of everything. [00:16:04] PF: That's fantastic. I love that. I love that. What a great way to just kind of sit and become more introspective, as we start the New Year. Thank you for sitting down, having this discussion. This was very insightful. [00:16:18] MD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is great. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:16:25] PF: That was Matt Derrenbacher, talking about setting intentions for the New Year. Speaking of that, I'm bringing in Casey Johnson, our Live Happy E-Commerce Marketing Manager. Casey, thanks for coming to the show. [00:16:36] CJ: Thanks for having me. It's always good to be back. [00:16:39] PF: It's always fun to have you on, and I want to talk to you because we have this New Year coming up. I don't know if you've heard of it, but I wanted to find out. Are you a resolutions gal or not? [00:16:50] CJ: I am, although I like to call them intention. So for me, intentions are like a constellation of purpose and values. So like resolutions and goals tend to be more focused on future outcomes, and intentions are more about how we want to show up in our lives in the present moment. So by shifting this mindset, it helps me channel my energy into what matters most. [00:17:16] PF: I like that. I like that a lot. That's a great approach to it because I’ve never been a resolutions person. I have been doing this, picking a word for the last at least five years. Maybe a little bit longer than that. That's what Matt and I talked about this week was choosing that word of the year. It's something you and I had kind of talked about a little bit, and I wondered what your thoughts were on that, if you were doing that or if you're like, “Paula, you're crazy,” or what are you thinking about that? [00:17:44] CJ: Well, to be honest, I haven't really done this before, but I am interested to try it out in the New Year. For me, by like choosing a word, it's kind of like a gentle reminder or like a mini affirmation. [00:17:55] PF: This will be great. We should check in at the end of the year, as we're looking toward 2024, and see how we did with it. [00:18:01] CJ: Yeah, let's do it. [00:18:02] PF: So what else? Like we have New Year starting before we wrap it up. What's going on in the Live Happy Store for the New Year? [00:18:09] CJ: Yeah. Right now, the Live Happy Store, we have the cutest journals, in my opinion. My favorite at the moment is the Stay Grateful Journal. Fun fact, research shows that by writing down your intentions or goals, it makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. [00:18:25] PF: That's very specific, Casey. [00:18:26] CJ: Very specific, 42%. [00:18:30] PF: I like that. That's very cool. We just send them to store.livehappy.com? [00:18:34] CJ: Yeah. Head over to store.livehappy.com to shop our happy journals and stationery. [00:18:39] PF: Awesome. That’s fantastic, Casey. Thank you for sitting down with me, and that is wall we have time for this week. So if you’d like to learn more about Matt or follow him on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. Then don’t forget, while you’re there, to go to store.livehappy.com and check out the journals Casey was just talking about. Then we will meet you back here again next year for an all-new episode. So until then, this is Paula Felps and Casey Johnson, remind you to make everyday a happy one. [END]