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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Playing It Forward with The Accidentals   [INTRO] [00:00:04] PF: What’s up, everybody? This is Paula Felps, and you are listening to On a Positive Note, where I sit down with a songwriter, recording artist, or music insider to learn how music can lift our spirits and heal our hearts. Sav Buist and Katie Larson were shy high school students when a music education presentation changed the way they saw their future. A decade later, they front a trio called The Accidentals, and have earned glowing album reviews, while packing venues with their live shows. But because they've never forgotten how that high school presentation changed their lives, they also host and lead workshops around the country to inspire young musicians to find their voice and use music to improve their mental health. They're here today to talk about all those things and how they are changing young lives one song at a time. Let's take a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:53] PF: Sav and Katie, thank you so much for coming On a Positive Note. [00:00:57] SB: Thanks for having us. We're excited. [00:00:59] PF: You have such a fascinating backstory of the way that you got into music as your lifelong career. Can you talk about how you met and how that grew into your career? [00:01:12] KL: Yes. Sav and I met, what, 11 years ago now. [00:01:16] SB: Oh, goodness. [00:01:17] KL: It’s been a lifetime, and we were both really shy high school students interested in music. The thing that brought us together was our high school orchestra program in Traverse City, Michigan. Our public school had a great strings program, but most importantly a conductor who was really interested in alternative styles and opportunities for young musicians. So Sav and I were in a quartet together at one point, but we also were in the alternative styles for strings club, which was this really dorky group where we'd get together after school and play sheet music arrangements of Coldplay and Led Zeppelin on our cello and violin. So we do our little pop and rock music and and folk tunes and jazz tunes, and make our own arrangements sometimes too. There is a duo called The Moxie Strings, who came in to teach a workshop on improv. That also kind of opened our eyes to musical opportunities, and there's not just one way to carve your path in the music industry. Like you can be in a band. You can write music. You can produce and record and tour and teach. So that really inspired us. From the beginning, Sav and I just started playing tunes together around our hometown in Traverse City, Michigan, and writing music, and recording, and touring. 10 years, 11 years later, we're in Nashville, Tennessee and still playing music full time. We see each other like every day. Yeah, so still making music. [00:02:56] PF: That's terrific. So prior to having that experience with Moxie Strings, did you see yourself having a career in music? Or did you know how much that you could do with it? [00:03:05] SB: We did not I don't think. I mean, we definitely knew music was always going to be a part of our lives, but I don't think those dreams would have come to you as much fruition have we not had role models not just in The Moxie Strings, but in the Michigan music community as well. Both sets of our parents are musicians. So that kind of told us it was possible for sure, and they were super supportive once we decided that's what we wanted to do. I definitely had like all kinds of passions, and Kate does too. What's nice about the career that we have is that we've been able to get to a point where we can pursue all those passions and have music as a full-time job, which is pretty amazing. We're really, really lucky to be able to do that. [00:03:48] PF: One of the things that's so impressive is how big you are on music education and giving back to youth. Do you think that was inspired by the experience you had as high school students? [00:03:58] SB: Oh, definitely. Yeah. Because we wouldn't be a band had it not been for our high school orchestra program, like a public music program. That's the thing is that Kate and I were also introduced to sort of unorthodox instruments from the time we were 11 because there was like a local public music program that helped kids come up from like age 11 to the end of high school, just playing instruments, saxophone or violin or cello or any of those instruments. Not every public school has one of those programs. Or sometimes, they'll have an orchestra but not a band or a band but not an orchestra. I even heard one instance where the school no longer had a budget for musical instruments, and so they threw them away. So there are some really – I mean, we can acknowledge that we're really lucky to have grown up in that program because we literally wouldn't be a band without it, and we wouldn't have been shown these instruments and gotten the chance to do something really new on them. But also, it's important to us that every kid has the opportunity to try something new and to find a way to like vocalize or, I guess, verbalize their emotions through music. [00:05:08] PF: That’s a great point I wanted to bring up because when someone who's not musically inclined or doesn't put a value on it the way that we do, they hear music education, and they think, well, they're taking band classes, and they don't really think about all the things that you learn through music education. Can you talk about what students are getting emotionally when they start going through a music education program? [00:05:31] SB: Totally. We like to joke that music is cheaper than therapy. That's like how we opened – [00:05:37] PF: [inaudible 00:05:37]? [00:05:38] SB: Yeah. We're [inaudible 00:05:38] because it's true, though. Like we use music and writing lyrics or sometimes even just writing instrumental pieces as outlet because we're both really introverted. Especially back in high school and middle school, we were really, really shy and didn't make friends easily and playing music in an orchestra for kids who don't want to play a sport. It’s really nice to have that community, and you can start forming friendships, without even talking that much. Because music is sort of its own language, and it sometimes can do all the talking for you. So, yeah, that’s really important for us. Go ahead, Kate. [00:06:12] KL: Yeah. I was so bad at sports. I tried every single one. I think what it came down to, for me, I'm definitely a perfectionist. I'm competitive with myself, but I don't do well in other competitive settings. Whenever we play sports in gym class, I would just feel like, “Let me get out of here.” I think it took like extra math classes to get out of gym once. [00:06:37] PF: That's hardcore. [00:06:39] KL: What I liked about music was I was having a hard time like solidifying an identity in school. When I picked up the cello, like it just felt like something that I instantly bonded with, and it was a portal to songwriting. Like I can strum chords on the cello. I could write music on the cello. I could play my favorite songs. I could – It was almost like meditating, practicing sometimes. So that was really good for me personally. But like Sav said too, when you're playing in an ensemble, like you're learning all sorts of teamwork skills. You're learning listening skills. A lot of improv is really 90% listening and then, I don't know, 10% being fearless and jumping right in, which I took jazz band for two years at our public school, and that taught me like just keep going. Even if the tune is flying by, if you get lost, like just keep going. Just so many skills. We both were in the pit for our musical theater production. Later, we went to an art school called Interlochen, and we took like choir classes and poetry classes, and learned how to incorporate things like history and current events and art into our songwriting and music. So there's a lot of education where music is like a really good portal. [00:08:03] PF: Then how did you start becoming involved in music education? Because it's a lot of work just to be a recording artist to be writing songs, to be touring, doing all that. Then you've added this whole other dimension to it. How did that start? [00:08:17] SB: Well, it's actually kind of been around for a while for us, simply because like when we're touring, oftentimes, we'll be in a town for like maybe six or seven hours, mostly at the venue. But there's like a little bit of time before that, where we can probably go into like a elementary school or a high school and do a workshop. Oftentimes, we'll just ask teachers like, “Hey, what's your curriculum currently like right now? Like what are you guys struggling with?” They’ll be like, “Oh, we need kids to like find an emotional outlet, or we need them to like learn how to take chances and be fearless.” We'll go in and kind of structure workshop around that. But that's something that's always been really consistent with who we are, and we've kind of had that almost since the beginning of the band. [00:08:59] KL: Yeah. I think almost there's certain benefits of going into schools, while you're still 17, 18, 19 years old. I think when we were first doing that, a lot of the first opportunities were us just coming in and playing songs and doing a Q&A or just talking to other students about what we did because we were basically their age or a few years older. [00:09:23] PF: Right. And they're going to listen to you. [00:09:26] KL: Yeah. I noticed. So we've definitely like shifted our approach. Now, I'm 26, and Sav is 27, and we've evolved and adjusted but definitely feel a distance growing every year from us when we go into the schools. So the very early stuff, I mean, it was us just talking and performing. It was a lot less formal. It doesn't always need to be really structured, I think. [00:09:53] PF: That's great. Then is that the Play It Forward, Again and Again initiative? [00:09:57] KL: So Play it Forward, it kind of combines two different things that we were passionate about, and we finally got nonprofit status in 2020. That was one of the benefits of – [00:10:06] PF: Congratulations. [00:10:07] KL: Being off the road is that we were able to get the paperwork done for that. But really what we've been working on prior to that was one part is getting instruments in the hands of young students and also mentorship. Because we've seen so many students who've had to give up playing like viola or another instrument because it's too expensive. So before the nonprofit, we would do fundraising campaigns. Like one time, we did a kick starter for a young girl. I mean, it was instantly funded by – [00:10:39] PF: Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. [00:10:41] KL: And she got an instrument right away. So part of Play It Forward, Again and Again is based on that. Another part is to get more musicians and more bands into schools to do performances and workshops, sort of like what The Moxie Strings did for us and what we've been trying to do for students who were on the road on tour. [00:11:03] PF: How hard has it been to get other musicians involved? [00:11:07] KL: There's definitely a different approach. You kind of have to get your feet wet in it because I think a lot of time, touring musicians, we get into like our flow. We do like a show every night for a similar audience. Then when you get in front of a school, like a group of students at any age range, it's like a totally different experience. Like a group of five year olds, they're going to be honest with you. If you're not entertaining, you'll know. But in a way, that's like the most pure form, I think, because they're not there to judge your technique or to think about your – Overthink the lyrics or anything. They're there to have a very pure musical inspirational experience. So anyone that we've talked to who has gone into a school, like they've gotten out of it with like just such an appreciation for music. [00:11:59] PF: What do you consider a success when you're walking out of a classroom situation? [00:12:04] SB: Honestly, I think it's just successful if somebody takes away even a little piece from it, which oftentimes one of the songwriting workshops that we do is we like pass out a bunch of books, and then we'll ask students to pick a sentence out of every book. Then we'll go over to the wall to like a whiteboard, and they'll read off the sentences. We'll write them down, and then we'll show how you can change a couple of words and start to put together an actual verse, even from widely different material. I think we used like an RV Cookbook once. [00:12:33] PF: Oh, my gosh. [00:12:35] SB: We've used like all kinds of crazy books, and we always get something out of it. Then we'll ask students to finish the songs. Oftentimes, we'll get like these songs through our email that are like completely finished, like either lyrics. Or they'll like pick up some chords and start putting it to that. That, to me, is like peak success from a songwriting workshop or from a workshop in general is just seeing them be excited about it and take it home and like apply their own creativity towards finishing it. Because just knowing that somebody believes you can do it, I think, is a huge aspect of actually finishing something. Not everybody believes that they have the ability to do something. There are lots of times where we go to a town, especially like a smaller town, and we'll teach a workshop, and the kids will be like, “Yeah, that was great. But I don't think I could ever do that.” So we've really had to restructure to make it like, “No, this is something everyone can do,” and made it really inclusive because that's what art is supposed to be, and that's what art is to us. [00:13:32] PF: In doing that, you're completely changing the way they're thinking about it, right? [00:13:36] SB: I hope so. [00:13:36] PF: Now, they're going to – Their mind is going to start seeking that out like, “What could I do with that? What can I do with that phrase?” You're like really opening up the way that they think about how they discover their creativity. [00:13:47] SB: Yeah. Like there's a song we have. A friend of mine, a childhood friend, passed away really suddenly, and I didn't have any closure. So I was trying to figure out how to write it down because that's sometimes the first step towards acknowledging and healing. I was having a hard time describing what grief actually felt like, and so I started looking around at household objects. The line ended up being “Grief’s a sheet of tin foil that I crush inside of me.” So I tell kids about that line because it's like you might think it's stupid on paper when you first look at it, but somebody is knowing exactly what you're talking about in that moment. Most importantly, you know exactly what you're talking about. That's helping sort of unravel some of these things that are super hard to find the words for. Sometimes, it's easier to sing it. I'm really interested in neurobiology too, not to go on a big rant. But like there's some really interesting stuff about music that pulls people who are having sort of debilitating memory issues. It's almost like an entirely different aspect of memory that music is attached to, and I think it also is attached to an entirely different aspect of emotions, where sometimes it's easier to express how you feel through music rather than having like a full hard conversation. [00:14:57] PF: Absolutely. Right now, with kids having gone through such a difficult last three years, and they're not able to process – Adults aren't able to process what all has happened and how it's affected us. So do you see that coming out through music? Do you see them being able to manage their emotions better and deal with what they've been through? [00:15:17] SB: I hope so. I think it's important that we try. It's important that we keep workshops like this going and initiatives like this happening and not to bring it back to public music programs. But I really think that's a huge aspect too is accessibility and belief and having the right tools is important. [00:15:35] KL: Yeah. We just did a collaboration with a youth studio orchestra in Cleveland called the Kaboom Collective. [00:15:42] PF: That was my next question, so good. I'm so glad you brought this up. [00:15:46] KL: I think that was a really good example because we had to stop touring in 2020, like everyone else did, and we were doing upwards of 200 or 250 shows. That tour with the Kaboom Collective was really one of the first big tours we did back and, exactly what you're saying, was the experience of a lot of students, who they were between the age of 15 and 25, and a lot of them had missed out on their high school graduation, prom, like – [00:16:17] PF: Turning 21. [00:16:18] KL: Yeah. Senior trips, college, like freshman year. These are all things that they kind of had to experience in isolation. I know for sure like a few of them were having maybe a difficult relationship with music at the time and nothing quite like being on a stage. We had one show on tour that was in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Frederick Meijer Gardens Amphitheater and performing in front of 4,000 people live and feeling that energy. I thought that was really cool to talk to the students after that show and see a lot of them say like, “Wow, I didn't know this was part of music. I didn't know this connection was part of music.” That was a really good feeling. [00:17:06] PF: Tell us a little bit more about that collaboration because you had the album with them. What was that like, both for you and for the students, to have this entire experience together? Honestly, you could have done it yourselves. For you to bring along a student orchestra was just incredible, and what a ride that you gave them. [00:17:26] SB: Well, what's funny is I think we really couldn't have done it because they did all the arrangements. The students did. Again, they're like 15 to 25-year-olds, who took the initiative to like completely figure out our songs and then the emotion behind the songs and what it should be and how they could amplify that beat arrangements, which is a super amazing skill set to have at 15 years old. To have your name on a record at 15, to have like your name in an old music guide, it's just ridiculous to like be able to actually do that. I mean it in the best way. It's completely amazing. So I wish like I had done this when I was their age. [00:18:05] PF: I know. It's like you wish you had been there for you when you were that age, right?   [00:18:08] SB: Yeah. But like, tangentially, we're so honored to just be able to work with them because it really was like kind of a treat for us, as much as it was for them. Touring together, yeah, the logistics of taking like 40 students on the road with like all their instruments, including like upright basses and tubas and everything we had, that was quite a process. It took like a whole amazing team of people to put it together, including our manager, Aryn Madigan. But, yeah, it was just a wild time. So we're really excited that it happened and panned out. We learned a lot, just by being around them. They're all like so nerdy. They knew like every classical piece that you could name. Then also, we're like listening to these cool punk indie bands, and it gave us a lot of not to say like hope for the next generation because there's always something good in every generation to find. But it's really amazing to hang with the future of music and to kind of see where that's headed. Both of us were just really excited about it. [00:19:12] PF: That’s terrific because your music is – It's not just about the music. You are about spreading joy, and you are really working to make this world a better place. Why is that so important? [00:19:24] KL: It helped us. I think that's a big piece of why we keep doing it. I mean – [00:19:31] SB: Yeah. It’s a selfish aspect of our – [00:19:36] KL: I mean, music is not always – It's like a long-term relationship. I mean, it's a way to express creativity. It's something that, I don't know, we live and breathe, and it sounds kind of cliché. But we see it impact people day-to-day. We also have that experience with people who are not musicians. We have like a page on patreon.com, where people support us, and we do just random things. Like we do a tour blog every week, but we also interact with our patrons on Zoom, doing like book club, and we review favorite albums that everyone submits. Having that relationship, we see and we hear stories from our patrons about like how music totally changed their lives, even if they're not a musician, and just like listening to music or seeing a show how maybe changed the relationship with their parents or their children or relationship with themselves. So I think that those little things inspire us because some days, you go online, and you're like, “Why am I making music? TikTok is – I just spent like three hours on TikTok and like five people viewed this thing.” You know what I mean? But then when you hear a story like that where you see the impact, then it's like, “Hey, we should keep doing this.” [00:21:04] PF: Yeah, because you're making such a difference. Now, you're in Nashville, which is where I'm located too, and it's such a great songwriting community, such a nurturing community. Has that changed your relationship with the music? Has it changed your songwriting? What has it done to be here? [00:21:21] SB: Yeah. So what's funny is that we have kind of shifted to another side project. So we have The Accidentals generic rock band, and then we have Kaboom Collective and like collaborations and workshops and use music initiatives like that. Then on top of that, we have a co-writing project, where it's a series of EPs that we write and record. We write them with people who inspired us to become writers. So these people include Tom Paxton, Gary Byrd, Georgia Middleman, Maia Sharp, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Gretchen Peters, Mary Gautheir, Jaimee Harris. Like the list kind of goes on and on. But we basically write songs of these people, and then we compile those songs into EPs that we self-record and engineer right here in my very messy studio, Crooked Moon Studios. Yeah, so that's been going on for the past couple of years. It kind of started right before the pandemic hit, and one of our first co-writes that really kicked off the idea of putting them into a record was with Kim Richey, and it was over Zoom. We just love the song so much, and we love the idea of writing over Zoom so much during a time of isolation, we'd say, to keep it going. So a lot of the songs were written in isolation. Now that we live in Nashville, luckily, we can actually be in the same room with the people who inspired us to become songwriters in the first place, as we write the songs together. So it's just a really amazing experience. I like to joke that co-writing in Nashville is like the equivalent of getting a cup of coffee everywhere else. Or it's like the first thing that comes up half the time is like, “Oh, yeah. I've heard about you. We should write a song together.” It's happened so much while we – Since we moved here. That's been a really great aspect, and we've also done a ton of session work this year. Kate and I, we played violin, cello, viola, and upright bass. We essentially serve as our own quartet or orchestra if we're doubling parts. So we've done a ton of session work this year. We've gone to a lot of studios. We've recorded a lot remotely here at Crooked Moon Studios, which is our studio here in Nashville. Yeah, it's just been a really awesome time living in Nashville and getting to actually hang with the people who inspire us. [00:23:23] PF: That is terrific. So looking down the road because even though you've been doing this for 10 years, you're young, and you've got a lot of highway ahead of you. What is that future going to look like? What is your legacy that you want to leave behind, as you do so much good with the next generation? [00:23:42] SB: Man, I think we just want to leave something behind that continues to sort of unite people's emotional platform. Not everybody knows how to find what works for them emotionally. I think like leaving songs behind shows that – It sounds like cliché, but like you're not going through something alone. People have experienced the same kinds of grief or the same kinds of pain. Just having a song that speaks to you sometimes helps unravel that not. So I think that's why we write songs. That's why we put music. But it just does a lot of the really difficult work of sort of untangling what's hard to verbalize, and it’s like an initial step to healing. That’s like sort of the intangible part of what we want to leave behind. I think our idea of like physical success is just to be able to do this for a living and to continue to record or continue to write, continue to do workshops, and continue to put out albums of music that speaks to us, whether we've written that collaboratively, or we've written that therapeutically for ourselves. [00:24:43] PF: That is terrific. Katie, do you have anything to add to that? [00:24:46] KL: Like Sav said, that hopefully some of these students that we're teaching when we're retired, and Sav is like studying wolves in Alaska or something, and I'm like on a goat farm. Hopefully, like the animal life that there'll be more music and people stepping in our shoes and continuing to try to make the world a better place. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:25:14] PF: That was Sav Buist and Katie Larson of The Accidentals, telling us how they're inspiring the next generation of musicians while living their dream. If you'd like to learn more about The Accidentals, check out their music, or follow them on social media, just visit livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note and look forward to joining you again next time. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Discover Joy with the Unicorn Challenge from Andrea Goeglein, PhD [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 403 of Live Happy Now. Would your life be better if you are a unicorn? This week's guest invites you to find out. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm sitting down with Andrea Goeglein to talk about her 60-day Unicorn Challenge. Andrea, who is also known as Dr. Success, holds a PhD in organizational psychology and hosts the Hey, Boss Lady! Podcast. She created the 60-day Unicorn Challenge to offer small daily tasks that will help you take steps toward reaching your goals while making yourself a priority. In this episode, she tells us how the challenge came about, why she picked the unicorn, and how you can get started on this free challenge. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:48] PF: Andrea, thank you for coming back on to Live Happy Now. [00:00:52] AG: It is me being allowed to live happy. The amount of information that your podcast enriches my life with, even though this is my field, you're one of the podcasts I personally come to to learn from. So anytime I'm asked to share what new inventions I've come up with, it's an absolute joy for me. Thank you. [00:01:14] PF: Well, thank you so much for saying that. Because, obviously, we at Live Happy, all of us respect who you are and your opinion, and it means so much. I so appreciate your support. You have something so fun, so unique that you're doing. I was on LinkedIn and saw it, and I immediately reached out and said please come on the show and talk about. So tell us about your unicorn challenge. [00:01:40] AG: Yes. My 60-day Unicorn Challenge is as much an expression of how I work with my clients and in turn work in my own life, how this came to be. But I will just start with one of the opening quotes, and I have to read it. If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately, William James. Now, William James was a psychologist whose work grounded a lot of the work that I was first introduced to in psychology and how the unicorn challenge came to be. I want our audience to really think about this in their own lives. They're going about their daily life, doing their jobs, doing the same things that they always do. Then one thing happens that inspires another. So I'll just start with that one thing to pay attention to the average things you're doing. Here was mine. Every year on Halloween, I have some sort of a costume. I actually generally go and give out candy downtown. I would dress up and all these different things. It was just a way that I loved being in my community because I live in a condo. People don't come to my door, yada, yada. Well, on this particular Halloween and for the last few years, I've been a unicorn. I have this fabulous unicorn head that I bought at some party city or something like that a few years back. I had a business lunch. A very high-powered Hollywood executive and I were going to be having a conversation, a check-in conversation, and they were planning out some fairly big moves. I showed up perfectly dressed for the restaurant, however, with my huge unicorn head in tow. [00:03:36] PF: Of course, you did. [00:03:38] AG: Of course, I did. It sat down right next to me. What I realized in that moment was that I was feeling joy, the person I was with was feeling joy, and we had some pretty heavy business things and life things to discuss. So I went home. I did my post. That was the beginning. I didn't have in that moment the idea to create the 60-day challenge nor the e-book that people can get for free. That was the next thing I want people to pay attention to. You don't have to know everything at once. Be inspired by something, flow with it, take a step, and then see what else happens. [00:04:24] PF: Oh, that's so well put. So tell us what a unicorn challenge is. Yeah. Let's just start with that. What is it? [00:04:34] AG: So what it is, one of the many positive emotions. Well, the top positive emotion that I work in in order to help people achieve their next level of success is the overarching emotion of love with the 10 most research attributes of that. One of which is joy. Now, I am a really – My image meant a lot to me, especially businesses. I've owned businesses. I work with people that own really big businesses. My image has always meant a lot to me. So joy and being joyous and being silly may not have been in the criteria. But like the rest of the world, the last 36 months has allowed a shift in my thinking, bigger than any other shift before. So it was me taking the one emotion, positive emotion, joy. I went from remembering the feeling of this one little lunch to the next day setting a personal challenge. There’s things within my work and many people that are listening may need to use social media as – I'm not a social media expert. I am an expert in the application of positive psychology. But social media is very critical. So there are things I am challenging myself with to learn. Of course, I don't like learning them. Not what I do for a living. I'm cranky as anybody else. So joy, how do you add joy to the work and the tasks specifically that you have to do so that, in fact, even those mundane things, even those things that you don't want to do, you can move forward? So I focused on that, and I'm going to be straight. I was doing it for me. I was setting me a challenge. I went to lunch with someone. I did a post for my work, I. There's nothing wrong with that. Every second of our days, we are informing ourselves of what new opportunities may lie ahead for the things we do, and I made a choice to focus on the emotion of joy. Unicorns happen to be – The legend around unicorns happens to be about joy. William James told me to start immediately and be flamboyant. I succeeded. So then I became thoughtful about it. I started doing one of the sets of tests. That's one of the many things I want to share. This did not all come together like in one big thought and all of a sudden – Honestly, it was this. First, I did one thing and did a few steps towards it. Then I did another thing. Then by the time enough pieces came into being, I said to myself, “Well, wait a minute. If I'm investing all of this energy doing this, in what I was doing –” One of my challenges was to put a one minute short on YouTube, on my YouTube channel, every day because I think that's a silly way to spend my life. Not silly in a good way. I think it is a time suck. The only way something can't be a time suck is if I'm helping someone else. That gets me personally over the hurdle. All of us have that thing, where not my choice. I always categorize certain things like cleaning toilets are not my choice, but I do like a clean house. So maybe I'll clean the toilet. [00:08:18] PF: Cause and Effect. Yeah. [00:08:20] AG: Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's what the unicorn challenge is about, taking time in the smallest bites to shift a habit in a joyful way that adds to your success. [00:08:36] PF: How did – At what point did you realize this was not just a set of tasks you were doing for yourself, that you saw this is something that will generate real good for other people? [00:08:48] AG: Yeah. Feedback. I had my little list of why I was doing it. But then all of a sudden, I started getting feedback because people who have worked with me or who are working with me knew that this was the same exact work. All of it grounded. All of the tips in this free e-book are the exact tips you find in every reputable resource on how you do habits and how you take care of yourself, all those things. However, it was done in a different way, especially for me. So it caught their attention. Once I realized – What they were saying was, “That was so fun. I love seeing you do that.” They were telling me that that little one minute showed up at the right time for them. So as I said, for me, in my work, the impact on another is my return on investment. Always has been, always will be. So it was the feedback that others were feeling joy. Others were being moved in a way. That's what hooked me, and all of us have those things. I would say know your thing and start looking for it. [00:10:07] PF: So it's for anything that we want to improve, want to change in our life. It's not a I'm going to lose weight. It's not a I'm going to exercise. It's a whatever you need it to be for you. Is that correct? [00:10:20] AG: Yes. First and foremost, it's a commitment. So in one of the many things that I put out online for years, I have said, “If you don't do the free stuff, my fee is not the problem.” [00:10:36] PF: There you go. [00:10:37] AG: Okay. So what I will challenge everyone, hey, it's free, if you don't start there. What is free? It is a systematic thing that is helping you nudge you each day in one minute to see. Is this an action I want to take, will take? Is it one that eats at your brain after you hear it? Because what we know in human development is you don't have to do all 60 days. You may do one day and spend the next six months working on that one task. Just the one step get you closer to what it is you're trying to achieve in whatever area of the life you're focusing on. [00:11:23] PF: Yeah. You say something very interesting about why you chose 60 days. I wanted you to really explain that to us because we see all the time all this 21-day challenge a 30 day challenge. We don't see 60 day challenges, and I think that's because we're like, okay, we're lazy people, and who's going to last for 60 days. Like imagine if you had to do dry January and February. [00:11:47] AG: Thank you. Thank you – [00:11:48] PF: Why 60 days? [00:11:50] AG: Therein lies the reason. I want to get you out of the conversation that there's really a time limit on it. I actually somewhere in the last week or so put up another video out in the playlist on my YouTube channel, but it’s not linked in this, where I basically say, “So you think 60 days is too long, eh?” This is about 60,000 days of your life. This is about you, taking the moment to make you most important. I start with a 60-day challenge. But when you really look at it, I'm saying take 60 seconds. The same way that my fee is not the problem if you're not doing the free stuff, if you're not taking 60 seconds to pause back and say, “Is there something I can do to make my situation better at this moment,” if you aren’t willing to give yourself 60 seconds, I could have put 60,000 days up there, it would not matter. [00:12:54] PF: Absolutely. So really, you're just resetting the way that we think and the way that we're looking at things. [00:13:01] AG: It's all an illusion. At the spiritual level, I work in the concept that we make everything up. Now, 21 days has been researched. So we have good solid research about 28 day things and 30 day things and 21 day things. What we don't accept is that's the beginning of these processes, not the end. This unicorn – Like joy should be in your life forever. It is not a 60-day challenge. [00:13:30] PF: Right. Don't check that one out the door when you're done. [00:13:33] AG: Exactly. And it is that kind of a thing that the more we can appreciate, the more breaking down of the illusions, these artificial barriers that we've put around, that success looks like this, and I've got to wear a suit jacket if I show up at this lunch with an important person, and I've got to work in an office 12 hours a day. Otherwise, I'm not productive. Illusions, illusions, illusions. So break them down, but rebuild it with habits based in joy, working towards you paying attention to what does matter in your life. [00:14:12] PF: Love that. So we'll talk, first of all, what it did for you before you even launched this course. What did it do for you? Because of your experience, you then knew that was going to work for other people. So talk about your experience with that first place. [00:14:26] AG: So as a business person, as I said, I have a team of people that work with me, with social media posts and videos and things of that nature. One of them came to me. The video person came to me, and he said, “You really need to do a bunch of shorts.” The minute he said the algorithm likes it, the minute you tell me an algorithm likes it, my New Yorker comes out. You would not be able to put it on this podcast. I do not live by algorithms. However, I do live to engage audiences because the work you and I work in and all of the people you have on the show work in works. It shifts the quality of your life, no matter who you are or what you're doing. So he planted that seed. I got snotty. That's why normal – I'm going to tell you something. [00:15:17] PF: Things don’t work sometimes. [00:15:19] AG: Know your learning pattern. When I am resistant, when I catch my resistance, when someone makes a suggestion, I am trained well enough in my own psyche to make note of that. So what this did was I started challenging myself. The challenge was get a video up. It started out with the proverbial one day at a time, and I already knew from past experience that trying to do something every day doesn't work in my work schedule or my life. What does work for me is blocking out time and doing a few things. So that's what it did for me, it caused me to examine my resistance about a goal and then create a system that works in the way I mentally and physically like to work. [00:16:15] PF: That makes so much sense. So then you put this together. [00:16:19] AG: Right. So the first thing – [00:16:21] PF: Like how did it all come together? Because you've got so many parts to it. [00:16:26] AG: Yes. So probably around the second week of me doing, working through the process of I went from every day to then one day, like I built on that. Then I thought, “Oh, gosh. It’s silly to let this all just go away after these 60 days.” I will have learned what I need to learn about putting videos on YouTube in a consistent fashion, but that means the people I care the most about in this process, those that engage with me, I know that it goes away. The thing about habits, the thing about repetition is that it's the most important thing for us to achieve next levels of anything. I wanted to create something that, in fact, solidified the work, and that was satisfying to me. I needed to see something because numbers on algorithms do not satisfy me. One of the many other things that I am known for in my social media post is that I would rather have my name on your heart than my name on a building. That's my legacy. I don't have visions that you're going to remember me after I'm gone, and I'm good with that. That is a very deeply grounded spiritual belief for me. It is not one that most people I work with align with. I work with a lot of people who have lots of names up on lots of buildings, and we talk about that, though. So I wanted something that left joy, respected the work I had done, is helpful. So by about the 15th, the 20th day, I had made a commitment that I was going to do the draft. [00:18:16] PF: So let's talk about these tips. Let's tell people what kind of tips they can expect to find. I think I'm just sitting here smiling as we're talking because I've looked at the book. I've been through it. It just makes me smile, even thinking about it. So talk about the tips and what people can expect to find in there. [00:18:35] AG: Okay. So the very first one, I love the very first one because this is the one we generally don't do and tortures us the most. I made a dump list. One place, all of the notes and ideas, all of the things that you think you have to do, want to do. Make it in one place. Then the other tips actually start taking you through. Okay, what do you do with the stupid dump list? Like I am a person trained in org dynamics. I was to be a consultant in companies and to build reports and have the one, two, three, four, five steps. But I was resistant to that because I knew he didn't use it. So a lot of the other steps will call you back to the dump list because I know you really didn't stop and do it like, “Oh, this is cute. Let me watch the video.” [00:19:23] PF: At some point, it’s just like, “Oh, man. I better go do that.” [00:19:26] AG: That's exactly right. I'll tell you very functionally how it worked today. I was having a conversation with a millennial who's part of the tribes of people, who have decided to relocate their work and their entire lives to a geographic different location. But in the process of doing it, and they realized that they were becoming overwhelmed by all of the things from childcare to where's the work going to come from, to where are we going to live, all of those things, who's going to be my tribe in this location? Everything that we do that keeps interfering with our thoughts on what I want to achieve today. They said to me, “I stopped, and I decided to make a list of everything.” We had a conversation. I said, “You have just lived a dump list because that's all it is.” Then from that point, you have a record of all of these crazy thoughts that we know through research just blocks up our minds. You've got a landing place for them. Then you can start to put it into procedure of, okay, what do I really have to do? Like do I really have to start buying Christmas presents in March so that I’m set up at the end of the year? No. I may need a new place to live. Or I may need new clients, that kind of thing. Yeah. [00:20:47] PF: Then as you went through, I like that you bring in other people. Like we have to think about what other people mean in our lives and how they affect it. Can you talk about that? I really – [00:20:56] AG: So what I did was merge the functional. How do you create a habit repetition? Have it written down, categorize, with all of the psychological skills and physiological skills that we know work through good research. So I did the daily habits that you should have, whether you ever want to achieve another goal or not, such as the reading, the writing, the meditation. Things like pick someone 10 years younger than you and go play with them for a day. Then another tip may be pick someone 10 years older than you and go play with them for a day. All the time trying to take what the crap that's going around in your mind and apply it to the process. Because once you step into the possibility that you can be joyful as you go through the angst of figuring out what you're going to do next and creating a habit, that alone helps. So it is a merging of the functional tests that we know works in creating good habit, with the spiritual and psychological tasks that research has shown us as you add them into your life that helps. [00:22:13] PF: Yeah. I could see this being applied in so many environments because I could see workplaces using it. Like if you're a manager who wants to enact change, this is a fun way to do it. But I also could see it being really effective for families to do together and make something fun and be able to create more joy and make a real difference in their dynamic. [00:22:38] AG: So here's one of the things that actually cause this to come to life. In the same exact first week, when I had done the lunch with the business person and I had my unicorn, a few days later, I was asked by a classroom, a fourth grade classroom, with Teach For America school to come in and do a career day. What is a success catalyst, and what is an applied positive psychologist? I showed up in this fourth grade class with my unicorn. I walked in, and I said to them, “Did you ever think you could have a job where, in fact, you could do this, and that job have a very serious aspect to it?” So it is your point about the spectrum. I have right now a one sheet being prepared because one of my many loves is the one-hour Zooms that I do, especially for hybrid teams now. I've always done it on the language of success and all the things in positive psychology, the tips that you apply to make the workday better. This is the next iteration or an additional iteration. So one sheets being prepared for my corporate clients, where when you're calling your people together, and they're all on these different schedules now, they'll have the factual stuff to do in a way that is more humorous. [00:24:01] PF: That's so huge. There's just not enough levity in the workplace, and we understand business is serious. But sometimes, we take it so seriously that we suck the lives out of ourselves and others. [00:24:12] AG: Yep. [00:24:12] PF: We're going to tell the listeners how they can find you and get this free book and start doing their 60-day Unicorn Challenge. I feel like this has so much potential to really put a smile on people's faces, like it's done with me, and really make a difference in how they live their lives every day. [00:24:28] AG: Okay. I'll challenge you to just pick one of the 60-day things. And when we get to talk again, let's come back, and we'll compare notes on what worked and what didn't. [00:24:37] PF: You got it. I love it. Andrea, thank you again for sitting down. It's always a treat to talk to you, and so looking forward to sharing this with our audience. [00:24:45] AG: Thank you, and I appreciate the opportunity as always. The more happy, joyous people succeeding in our world, the better our world is going to be. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:24:57] PF: That was Andrea Goeglein, talking about her 60-day Unicorn Challenge. If you'd like to download your free Unicorn Challenge e-book, learn more about Andrea and her other books, follow her on social media, or check out her Hey, Boss Lady! Podcast, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Now that the month of February is here, we're starting to think about our annual Happy Acts campaign, and we'd love for you to do the same. Throughout March, we're offering a full month of daily suggestions to help you make your world a happier place. It's kind of like an advent calendar for happiness. We invite you to visit the Happy Acts section of our website, livehappy.com, to learn how you can be involved and how you can host a happiness wall in your home, office, church, or school to celebrate the International Day of Happiness on March 20th. 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 have 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: Journaling as a Therapy Practice With Lori Gottlieb  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 396 of Live Happy Now. If you're looking to make changes in your life, well, Maybe Yoxu Should Talk to Someone. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm sitting down with Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist, author, and podcast host, whose book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, became a runaway best seller and, as you're about to hear, is even being made into a television series. Now, Lori has developed a guided journal based on the immense feedback she received on her book. Just like therapy, this journal walks users through the transformation process one weekly session at a time. She's here to tell us how the book and journal came about and what she hopes to see happen as a result. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:47] PF: Lori, thank you so much for being on Live Happy Now. [00:00:50] LG: Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. [00:00:52] PF: It's such an honor. You are doing so many wonderful things, and I'm super excited about this interview. Obviously, we're here to talk about your journal, which is based on your book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. So before we jump into the journal, let's make sure we talk about that original book, the OG that started this whole movement. [00:01:11] LG: Yeah. So Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is really an interesting book because it follows the lives of four of my patients, as I help them through their struggles as their therapist. Then there's a fifth patient in the book, and that is me, as I go through my own struggle at midlife, and I go to seek therapy with a therapist. So it's kind of looking at how we get through the difficulties and the challenges in our lives from both sides of the couch, as they say. But really, it's not so much about therapy, it's about the human condition, and it's about the universal challenges that we all go through. But it's also a very funny book, and there's a lot of humor in it because being human is sometimes ridiculous and funny, and all of that is in there. [00:01:58] PF: I think that's what's so important to know is it doesn't read like a therapy book. It’s a storybook. It's the story of humanity, and it's incredibly well written and so thoughtful and engaging. So people don't need to feel intimidated by this idea of eavesdropping on therapy. [00:02:17] LG: Right, right. It's kind of like what you don't get on social media. On social media, we get the curated version of people's lives. We get the highlight reels. What you get in this book is you get the things that everybody wants to be talking about, but they don't know how to bring up those topics or how to start talking about them. [00:02:35] PF: How did you choose who you would focus on because, obviously, you've seen a few patients in your time? How did you think like this is really what embodies what someone needs to learn and grow from? [00:02:47] LG: Well, what's interesting is that I think that every single person that I see in therapy, even if they come in with something that seems specific, is really universal. You find those commonalities. I feel like we're all more the same than we are different. Even at the beginning of the book, I say my greatest credential is that I'm a card carrying member of the human race. I know what it's like to be a person in the world. So it was hard to choose which stories to include because there were so many that I wanted to. But I wanted to choose people who seemed very different from one another on the surface, meaning you would say, “Oh, I don't relate to that person at all,” or, “I really relate to that person.” By the end, you say, “I see myself reflected in every single one of these people.” I think that that helps us out in the world when we feel like, “Oh, I don't know if I'm going to have anything in common with that person.” After reading this book, I think you see, “Oh, I'm going to find my shared humanity in pretty much everyone I meet.” [00:03:41] PF: Yeah. That's a beautiful way to look at it. Did you have any reluctance at all to share your own self and your own journey? I mean, that's really vulnerable. What was your thought process going into that? [00:03:52] LG: Well, absolutely. In fact, it's really interesting because – And I write about this in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness, and the happiness book was making me depressed. I could not miss the irony in that, that I was trying to write a book about happiness, but it was making me miserable. It was very clinical. It was about all of these studies. I feel like as a therapist, what you see over time, the more people you see, is that happiness as the end goal is kind of a recipe for disaster. We all want to be happy. But happiness by finding connection and meaning, that's what we want. That's where we find our happiness. I decided I wanted to bring people into the therapy room because I feel like that is the key to what is going to help us find meaning and purpose and connection in life. I'm very privileged because I get to have these conversations with people. Most people never get to have these kinds of real, intimate, deep conversations with people in the numbers that I get to. So I feel like I get to see humanity from a very different perspective that I think a lot of us would benefit from. Originally, when I said I don't want to do the happiness book, I want to just bring people into the therapy room and let them be a fly on the wall, everyone said, “Oh, no one's going to read that.” The publishers said, “No one's going to read that book.” So I thought, well, that's okay because for the three people who read it, it will really change their lives. So I was really open about my part of the story because I thought, well, no one's going to read this. No one I know is going to read this. So it's okay. I don't care. It's not going to be embarrassing for me. Then, of course, now it's sold almost two million copies, and lots of people have read it. I'm glad that I didn't know how many people would read it because I think I would have had the instinct to kind of edit myself and kind of make myself look a little bit better, a little bit cleaner, a little bit more together. I just presented myself really authentically, and I think that's why so many people have read it because they relate to the authenticity. [00:05:49] PF: Yeah. I was going to ask if you thought that that was one of the reasons that it resonated so well is just because it is so honest. Like you said, it's not a Kardashian selfie. It's just a real photo of us as people. [00:06:02] LG: Right. It's really a snapshot of what we all go through at different times in our lives. I think it's about the triumphs as much as it is about the struggles. I think you root for every single person in the book because you're seeing yourself reflected in that you've either had that experience or you know someone who's had that experience. I think that one thing we've learned, especially through COVID, is just how important connection is, how important it is to feel like we are seen, heard, understood. I think that this book does that for so many people. [00:06:33] PF: Very well, very well. So you say you didn't expect it to take off. When it started taking off, what were you thinking? Obviously, this was a surprise, and that interests me that you said that because as authors, people, we go in thinking, “I'm going to sell a million copies.” They've got the sticky notes all over, like the affirmations, like, “We're going to do this,” and you're like totally the opposite, like, “That's all right.” So when it started taking off, what were you thinking? [00:07:00] LG: It was interesting because so many people wrote to me and told their personal stories. So many people were sharing things with me. All over social media, everyone was recommending it to everybody else, and people were talking about just how funny it is too. I think that we don't see the humor in our lives enough. That, of course, there are things that are painful and difficult and challenging. But I think that it helps us also to see the joy, and I think that that was part of it. That I was really glad that people could see the ways in which it showed the full spectrum of our lives. I think, especially as women, we don't focus a lot on our joy. We don't focus a lot on our desires. We don't focus on what we want, and we don't really get to say all the things that maybe we think we shouldn't be saying, and that all happens in this book. I think that, vicariously, a lot of people really enjoyed that and then maybe started doing that in their own lives. [00:07:57] PF: Yeah, yeah. Now, I understand that you’re talking about making a TV series about this. [00:08:01] LG: Yes, yes. [00:08:02] PF: How does that work? [00:08:04] LG: Well, I'm very excited about that because I think on TV and in movies, therapists have always been portrayed as either the brick wall who doesn't say anything, right? Nobody wants to go and talk to a brick wall. Or they've been portrayed as sort of the hot mess, the person who just doesn't have anything. They're breaking rules. They're being unethical. Their lives are falling apart. They're addicted to things. Whatever it is, they're really, really struggling. I'm just portraying a normal person who's going through normal stuff, and I think that's really refreshing that your therapist is just a human being. They're just like you. They're not a hot mess, and they're not this person who has everything figured out. They're just a person who is trained to help you through what you're going through. [00:08:48] PF: That's excellent. Well, so what was your inspiration then for creating a journal? I know that you created a workbook, and I'd like to talk about the difference between the workbook and the journal. But then what was it that made you decide like, “Hey, let's get this journal involved too.”? [00:09:02] LG: Right. The journal, it was actually created by popular demand, in the sense that everybody who read the books so many times, people would say, “I highlighted. I underlined. I have quotes from the book pinned on my bathroom mirror, on my desk, all those things.” I would love a place where I could kind of, in a guided way, focus on many of the themes and many of the things that resonated with me. That would be so helpful for me to have that in one place, and if there could be some structure to it. That's exactly what I did in the journal. I structured it like therapy sessions. So you go to therapy. We always say that insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world. But if you don't make changes out in the world, the insight is useless. So someone might say to me, “Oh, I understand why I got into that fight with my spouse the other day, right?” I'll say, “Great. Did you do something different?” They'll say, “No, but I understood why.” I'll say, “Okay, that's a good first step. But now, you need to do something different.” I think what I want to do with the journal is I want to structure it like therapy, where you come in. You're thinking about something. You're given a prompt every week. Like what was kind of the moment that made you think about something differently? Then you have seven days. They have the days in between to kind of noodle on it, to kind of think about it, and every day to kind of expand upon that. What is the change? How do you think about it differently? What is this going to do moving forward to the next session? When I do it different ways, there are prompts. There are kindness check ins because especially as women, we can be incredibly self-critical and unkind to ourselves. There's a weekly wrap up. There's coloring pages because sometimes we think in visual images, as opposed to written words. What I like about a journal is that you get to see your progress. So a lot of times, in therapy, people will say, “I don't know that anything's changed in the last three months.” I know it has because I take notes after people’s sessions. But I have to remind them of that. When you have a journal, you can look back and say, “Look at where I was five months ago, and look at where I am now. Or look at this thing that was so difficult for me to do five months ago. And now, I'm getting better at setting that boundary. Now, I'm getting better at saying no. Now, I'm getting better at speaking up at the time, as opposed to waiting three weeks and then being resentful and exploding, right?” So these are the things. Or now, I understand more about the relationship with my child or the relationship with my parent that I didn't understand back then. So I think having a written record is really helpful for us to be able to reference. [00:11:40] PF: Yeah. The prompts are really good too. Can you talk a little bit about those, and what kind of thought process went into the order in which they're presented? [00:11:49] LG: The order was so important because I wanted each prompt to build on the one from before. So every week is very intentional in terms of the order. That's the structure that I wanted to give people. It's like here's the theme. Let's build on that theme. This will help be the building block to this next thing that we're going to explore the next week. It's very much structured with absolute intention. It took so long. I thought, “Oh, I know, all of the different prompts and quotes that everybody's responded to that have resonated most strongly. This isn't going to be so hard to put this together for people.” It was really hard because I gave so much thought to what is the exact order that this should be in to give people the experience that they're asking for. [00:12:33] PF: It is so well done, and it walks you through this process. The great thing is it's not dated, so they can jump in at any time and start doing this. [00:12:42] LG: Yes, yes. You can go at your own pace. You can come in any month that you want to come in. You can write as much or as little as you want. But I think the thing about journaling, and the reason that a lot of people feel like, “Oh, I'd really like to do that. But it might be too much for me to do,” is because they don't understand that it literally can be five minutes a day. That's it. So some people like to journal in the morning to kind of clear their heads before the day, and they find it really helpful because you wake up, and you have all these things on your mind. So if you just sit there for five minutes quietly, have your coffee, have your tea, just sit quietly for five minutes, and do the prompt, that's a great way to start the day. Other people like to do it right before they go to bed because they've got all the thoughts from the day. When you put your head on the pillow, you want to kind of release that. So a lot of people release it into the journal, and then they put their head on the pillow, and then they sleep well. [00:13:35] PF: As a therapist, as a practitioner, what kind of changes do you see in people when they start being intentional about their journaling and really start just putting their feelings down on the page? [00:13:47] LG: Well, one thing is they stop avoiding things. So we say avoidance as a way of coping without having to cope. [00:13:54] PF: I like that. [00:13:57] LG: I think when you actually write something down, it becomes real. Once it becomes real, you can deal with it. If you deny that something is happening like, “Yeah, maybe I'm sad, or maybe I'm anxious, or maybe I'm having trouble in this relationship, or maybe I'm drinking too much,” or whatever the thing is, you don't really have to deal with it, and it doesn't get better. It just keeps getting worse, and so nothing will change. If you want to make change, and there's a chapter in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone called How Humans Change, it goes through stages. One of the stages is that you have to acknowledge that the thing exists. So writing it down helps you in a non-scary way. I think sometimes, we're so afraid to just acknowledge that maybe this is a problem. Well, write it down, and it's not so scary. You see it on the page. You're like, “Okay, there it is. That's okay. That feels better. Now, it's out there. Now, I don't have to just sit with it in my body, where I feel it, and I just feel the anxiety all the time.” One thing is you avoid avoidance. The other thing, when you journal, is that you clarify your thoughts. So, often when the thoughts are just spinning around in our heads, we can't really make progress with them because they're just coming at us from all directions. There's no organization to them. So when you write it down, you clarify, oh, this is how I feel about that. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. So you start writing about it. By the end of the week, you're pretty clear. Oh. Now, I understand where I stand on that. Now, I know where I need to go with that. [00:15:28] PF: What I like about your journal is – Obviously, so many different kinds of journals, and some of them are just – There might be a writing prompt, and you just kind of go for pages. Or there's no guidance at all. It's just whatever you would like it to be. What I love about yours is the way that it does kind of bring it back, closes the session, and gives you something to think about, and then guides you into the next week. So how is this book in particular helpful for someone who say they don't want to seek therapy? They don't want a therapist. Talk about how this can really help maybe move them along in their process. [00:16:01] LG: Yeah. So one of the things that I tried to do with everything I put out there is give people the experience of healing, self-reflection, living better. So it really doesn't have to do so much with therapy. It's really about sometimes we are holding so much inside and just to have the outlet of, oh, there I am. I found myself on the page. I think, especially as women, and again, this is a generalization, but we have so much responsibility in terms of taking care of other people that sometimes we forget to take care of ourselves. I think the journal is a concrete way that you can take care of yourself. You can say, “Oh, wow. All this stuff has been – I've been holding it all inside, and this is a place for me to just spend a little time with myself, understand myself better, see what I need, see what I want and relax.” It can be really relaxing. Just pen to paper can be so relaxing. The fact that it's private, that it's just for you, is another thing. We don't have a lot of things that are just for us. Things are moving so quickly in the world. We have so much to do every day. This is a space that is just for you. [00:17:12] PF: So people don't need to have the book to go through the journal. That's really important too. [00:17:16] LG: They don't. No, they don't. It's a standalone. So if you've read the book, you'll recognize a lot of the prompts. But if you have not read the book, and you just want to start the journal, it's the same experience of just go right in there. The prompts will stand alone. [00:17:32] PF: Terrific. How is it different from the workbook because you also have a workbook that goes with it? Can you talk about that? [00:17:36] LG: I do. Yes. So the workbook, as the name implies, is actually a lot of work. [00:17:43] PF: So if you're lazy, if you're feeling lazy, don't get the workbook. [00:17:47] LG: The thing about the workbook, so I gave a TED talk, which is about how we're all unreliable narrators and how we walk around with these faulty narratives and how changing our stories can actually change our lives. We walk around with these stories like, “I'm unlovable, or I can't trust anyone, or nothing will ever work out for me, or nobody understands me,” or whatever our story is. These are old stories. These are stories that someone else told us about ourselves that are just not true. But we did not understand that. Now, here we are as adults, but we're still thinking that we don't believe those stories. Yet we do because we act them out in our relationships all the time. We act them out in terms of what we think we can have, what kind of life we can have, what kind of relationships we have, how we get along with people, professionally, what we can do. So the workbook takes you through the process of looking at the stories that you carry around and then editing those stories so that they're accurate, and then helping you to take action based on what you now know. It's great work. It's deep work. I'm getting so much good feedback about that. This is, again, for people. Maybe you don't have access to therapy. Maybe you don't have an interest in it. This is exactly what we would be doing in therapy. But again, you don't have to be interested in therapy. It's more about are you interested in kind of editing those stories that you're carrying around that maybe are keeping you stuck and holding you back. The workbook is a very in-depth structured way of going through that process. [00:19:22] PF: Excellent. I think it's so interesting, the way that you have unwittingly built this empire around your book, when you really thought nobody was even going to pay attention to it. What does it feel like now when you sit and you look at what all you've created, and there's more to come? How does that strike you? How does that land with you? [00:19:43] LG: Well, I think it's exactly why I wanted to write Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. I had a feeling that this is what people were really craving, especially in this world of social media, where people are not really connecting in those ways. People will post on social media something like, “I'm being really vulnerable here, and I I'm going to share this.” But it's with a lot of strangers and not face-to-face with someone that you're actually in a real life relationship with, right? So it's different from sitting next to somebody and saying, “I'm going to talk to you about this thing that feels very vulnerable to me.” Or I'm not really talking about something between us that's an issue in our relationship. How do we talk about that? I feel like people really want that and crave that, and that's why I also put out this podcast called Dear Therapist, where I have a fellow therapist – [00:20:32] PF: We got to talk about this. Yes. [00:20:34] LG: It's kind of like people, when they read, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, said, “I wish I could hear the sessions.” Guy and I, we decided that we would do sessions with people. We do these live sessions with people. What we do, though, is we want to show people – I think there's this big misconception about therapy that you go to therapy, you talk about your childhood for years, and you never leave. That's not what therapy is. It’s very active. [00:20:55] PF: Like a hostage crisis. [00:20:57] LG: Right? It's very active. It's very much about like, yes, we want to know how the past is keeping you stuck in the present or causing difficulty in the present. But then we want to focus on the present and the future for you. So we want to show people that even in one session, people can make really important changes in their life. So what we do is, at the end of the session, we give them advice because we both have advice columns. I have an advice column called Dear Therapist in the Atlantic. He has an advice column for Ted called Dear Guy. So we come together, and we do a session as therapists. Then at the end, we give them homework, and they have one week to complete the homework. Then they come back, and you hear it all in one episode. But they come back after one week, and they tell us how the advice went. Did they do the homework and what happened? Then we also follow up with them a year later so that you can hear, wow, how did their lives change. Not only in that week because there's such significant change in one week, which is always great to see. But then what's happened a year later? I think that so many people relate to that because so many people really do want to hear the stories because they see themselves in them, and they get really good advice for their own lives as well. [00:22:08] PF: Yeah. I think everyone's looking for that. We're looking for more direction. People are in a challenging spot in a post-COVID world and so much uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of trauma that's happened. So I think this is so very timely for us to be able to explore that. As we go into the New Year, it's a time when people are starting to think. We just tend to think more it’s a new beginning, and we tend to think differently. So why is that a great time to really sit down and start journaling? Two-part question, then how do you kind of set an intention for that year to know what direction to go with it? [00:22:43] LG: I think that when people make New Year's resolutions, the reason that they don't work, generally, is that people think that you just make a decision like Nike. Just do it. Then that's your decision, and that's going to last. It doesn't last because that's not how change works. There's different stages to change. There's pre-contemplation, where you don't even know that you're thinking about making a change. There's contemplation where you're contemplating it, but you're not really ready to do anything about it. There's preparation where you're preparing. You're like, “What do I need to do to make this change? Is it looking for a new job? Is it doing something different in my relationship? Is it I'm going to be healthier, and this is what I'm going to do?” Then there's action where you're actually taking the action to make the change, and people think that's where change ends. It is not. The next phase is the most important, which is maintenance. How do you maintain the change? The big misconception about maintenance is that it's not as if you slip back, and then you failed in making the change. Built into maintenance is that it's kind of like Chutes and Ladders. Remember that boring game? So it's like you're going to slip back because if change is unfamiliar, change is hard because we have to do something that is not familiar. The reason that people stay in like relationships too long or jobs too long or a bad situation too long is because it's familiar to us. Even if we're miserable, at least we know it. So when you make a change, you have to do something different. In maintenance, you're going to slip back to the familiar thing, and that's okay. We need to have self-compassion. We need to be kind to ourselves. Just because you have self-compassion doesn't mean that you're not accountable. So self-compassion comes with accountability. I always say to people, think of it like this. If your child comes home from school and says, “I did really badly on this test,” are you going to scream at them? Or are you going to say, “Let's look at what happened, and so that you can do something different next time. Did you not understand the material? Do you need to talk to the teacher? Do you need to study harder? Do you need to study more in advance? Is there a different way of studying? What can you do?” Then the kid will probably do better on the next test. If you just scream at them, they may or may not do better on the next test, but they're really not learning anything, and it's not going to last. So we need to be kind to ourselves and know that when you have compassion for yourself, you hold yourself accountable. They're not two mutually exclusive things. When you want to start a journal, a lot of people think, “Oh, I'm scared to start a journal because I may not keep up with it. I might not do it every day. I don't know if I have the self-discipline.” You can do it any way you want. It’s up to you how you do it and what you're going to get out of it. The great thing about starting the journal is know that you don't have to be hard on yourself. Use it as you want to use it. Try to find a consistent time because I think that helps people. Again, like some people like doing it in the morning. Some people like doing it at night. Just see how it helps you. The more that it helps you, the more you're going to want to do it. Main thing is, and these are built into the journal, again, there are these like self-compassion, check-ins and kindness check-ins, I think it will help you to be kinder to yourself overall. It’s not so much about whether you write every day because that's beside the point. It's about how you use the journal in a way that works for you. [00:25:56] PF: Well, excellent, Lori. I thank you so much for being on the show. I know this journal is going to be as life-changing for those who use it as the book has been, and I just really look forward to seeing what else you're going to come up with because I know that you've got so much more new as well. [00:26:13] LG: Oh, well. Thanks so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:20] PF: That was psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb, talking about her book and journal, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. If you'd like to learn more about Lori and her books, listen to her TED Talk, check out her podcast, or follow her on social media, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast 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: Why Sports Fans Have More Friends With Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 390 of Live Happy Now. If you're a sports fan or you know someone who is, you're going to love today's guests. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I have the pleasure of sitting down with David Sikorjak and Ben Valenta, authors of the new book, Fans Have More Friends. These two strategy and analytics experts are diehard sports fans, who set out to prove their hypothesis that being a sports fan leads to happiness. Their research proved them right. And this week, they're here to talk about why cheering on your favorite team is doing more for you than you might have realized. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:38] PF: David and Ben, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:41] BV: Thanks for having us. [00:00:41] DS: Thanks for having us. [00:00:42] BV: Happy to be here. [00:00:43] PF: Well, this is exciting because this is something we have not touched on at Live Happy, which is unusual. It feels like a lot of things we've looked at from so many different angles but not fandom. Sports are such a huge part of our culture, and I don't think we've ever touched on how it really affects us psychologically. So I guess for starters, how did the two of you meet, and how did you decide to write a book about this? [00:01:08] BV: Our relationship goes way back. We've been working together for, I don't know, 10, 12 years. We've always been kind of collaborators and like-minded in how we see the world and have been working in the sports business in some way, shape, or form for the last, I don't know, 8 of those 10 years and have constantly had some insight into – Or maybe the better way to say it is we had an intuition that sports fandom was all about social connection, and this came through kind of years of spending time with fans, of thinking about the sports business, of working in sports media. At a certain point, I think we became convinced that that intuition was actually a truth, and we could elevate it to the level of an insight, something that kind of defined how people approached the space. At a certain point, I think we decided we should prove this out. We should sort of see. We should put our insight to the test and see if it really does hold water, if we really can define fandom as a social enterprise. Eventually, we landed on – I think a testable hypothesis is what we're looking for, and that's where we got to. So the fundamental insight was that to be a fan is to be a part of a community. That’s a line that we landed on years ago, working for the New York Knicks. That stuck with us for some time. We decided that if that's true, if fandom is all about community, if it's all about the social connection, then fans would enjoy more robust social networks, more robust social infrastructure. So the shorthand way to say that is fans would have more friends. So we set out trying to devise a way to reliably test fandom and compare it to the number of friends in one social network. What we found over the last several years and 30-plus surveys and tens of thousands of respondents is that it's true. In fact, fans do have more friends, and that's the title of our book, Fans Have More Friends. [00:03:03] PF: So how long did it take you to go from an idea to a finished product? [00:03:09] DS: To be a fan and to be part of a community was something that we coined back in 2016, where we got to the point where like, “Let's test this out.” We’re seeing it come up in different contexts around sports over and over with different types of people, men, women, white, black, all sorts of people, younger and older. The same thing held that we were observing social relationships as the incentive for the devotional behavior of sports fandom. We didn't start testing this until – Devised a way to test this until the end of 2018. Then once we kind of landed on a method, it kept coming back. Fans have more friends. It's not only that. The bigger fan you are, the more friends you have. The bigger fan you are, the closer you are to all your friends. The more you interact with those friends, the closer you are to family. Just every single – It kind of – This is what we thought all along. We never thought we would be able to prove it out in such a consistent and robust way, and it's kind of held now for three years now in testing this. [00:04:16] BV: Just to draw a line into that, like the way to think about it is the bigger fan you are, the more likely you are to have a positive healthy relationship with your mother, right? It extends a great aspect of your social life. So it's not just that fans have more friends, as Dave points out. It’s that you have a close relationship and closer ties with your family, both as parent to child, child to parent, kind of working both ways throughout one's life. [00:04:39] DS: Just to give you an example on that, we ran surveys recently where if you have measured from non-fans, so basically the general population, and then rated them across the scale on how big of a fan they are, if you have children living out of your home, we ask if there are adult children, how close do you feel with child number one? How close do you feel with child number two? What we found for whether kids are at home or not, but it's really the most acute for when you are an empty nester, the bigger fan you are, the stronger of a relationship you report having with each of your children. [00:05:12] PF: Were you able to determine why that is? Because that's super interesting because people – I mean, parents struggle like, “How can I be close to my children?” Now, it's like go to games. Yeah. [00:05:21] BV: Well, it's really like the reliable rhythm of being a sports fan keeps you in constant connection. So I have three brothers. We all live dispersed around the country. I'm from Colorado, and my folks are still in Denver. The thing that we talk about most often is the Denver Broncos, right? That will anchor those conversations. Now, that will unfold into how are the kids and how's work and all that kind of stuff. But it usually starts with the Denver Broncos. Actually, this just happened. It's the NFL trade deadline when we're recording this. The Broncos made a big trade at the deadline, and my phone just lit up with text messages mostly from my family, my mom included, but a bunch of friends as well. When you start to see your fan engagement as that social connection, you sort of can't unsee it. Then you begin to recognize, “Oh, this is actually the thing incentivizing my fandom, but it's also the benefit of my fandom.” It results in more conversations. It results in more text messages. It results in more frequent interaction that is ultimately good for us and leads to strengthened relationships. [00:06:27] DS: Build on the point is it's like a covert way of just saying how are you doing. But sports just gives you many times over and over like your mom texting you have how's it going and after a while could be braiding. But if it's around sports, if the sky has something else, that conversation keeps on going, and it's just a fluid back and forth, which is just more pleasurable for both parties. [00:06:51] PF: That can even work if you are on opposing teams because I know in our house, there are friends who do not support the proper teams. When we'll have it, it's like that back and forth of like really just talking trash, but you feel closer. I mean, it really does kind of – It keeps you in contact, even though that's the way that you're going about it. [00:07:11] BV: Absolutely. I mean, that's the one thing we – The one question we get most often is like, “Well, what about the tribal nature of sports? What about rivalries and things like that?” What we find is that those things actually tend to make the experience of being a fan more engaging and more fun. That means that they animate those interactions and those connections in the same way. In other words, like they make those conversations with those people more fun, right? When you're talking trash, it's all with a tongue in cheek. It's all in good fun. We're able to kind of play in this space that is ultimately very playful, and we can have that kind of conversation, that kind of interaction, which leads to just more intimate conversations down the line that aren't necessarily about sports. It just kind of creates this space where we can bust other’s chops, and it's all good. [00:07:54] DS: There's not many spaces where we can do that, where we could actually mock a friend, a family member, or a stranger because of sports affiliations. With sports, you actually have that permission to do it in a way that is just – It’s fun. It's playful. It's childish. All those things are really good. [00:08:11] PF: What about right now? Because it seems everyone's pretty sensitive to people who don't agree with them. There's a lot of polarization. There's a sensitivity when someone disagrees with us. With sports, that disappears. Can you address that? [00:08:28] BV: Well, that's exactly right. I mean, because it's playful. Because it sort of seem to matter so much but not matter at all, that gives us that permission to not be so sensitive and to recognize that this is one space in my life that I cannot – I'm not taking these things personally, right? I'm not going to be overly sensitive. I can just go in there and have fun. I can receive the comments, and then I can take a lick in it. I can dole one out. It’s all good natured, and it's all in good fun. [00:08:55] PF: How can that help us? Or can it? Maybe I'm assuming. How can that help us in the real world? Because, again, there's so much polarization. Is there a way that sports fandom can help us get past some of that? [00:09:09] BV: Well, yeah. We addressed the notion of polarization, so we can get into that in the book. Before we get into the polarization piece, though, just to address the question kind of point blank, the way it can help us is we just have more interactions, right? So we have this safe space where it's fun to interact, and that incentivizes us to get involved and interact. As it turns out, we're social creatures, and those interactions, those connections are really good for us, right? We've talked a lot about so far fans have more friends, and they interact with those people more often, and they have better relationships with their families and so on and so forth. But it turns out that those connections have a meaningful impact on your wellbeing. So it's not just that fans have more friends. It's because of those friends, fans are happier. They are more satisfied with their life. They're more optimistic about the future. They're more confident in themselves. They're more trusting of other people. They're more likely to give to charity. They're more likely to be registered to vote. There's this whole cascade of wellness markers that come out of this connection, and it's partly because it's fun, probably because it's entertaining, probably because it's all of those things. But the connection is what's most important. [00:10:15] PF: Did you find what the connection is between being a sports fan and having those tendencies? [00:10:20] BV: The connection, I would say, is connection. Like it is that you're just more plugged into the world around you. You're more plugged in your community. You are more engaged in the world because you have all of these different touch points to draw on. [00:10:33] DS: You saw a game with friends, and your friends will tell you about, “Hey, there's this thing going on in town. You should go to it.” Probably you're going to go or you're out in the world, connecting with other people, and that's how you learn about other things. You're getting depolarizations. That's how you're exposed to people who may be slightly different than you. It doesn't mean that you kind of adopt their views, or it shifts your views. But it just means you feel a closeness to somebody else that's different to you. That's important, where – We talked about this in our book, and we mentioned there's this feeling thermometer to kind of get into the polarization piece that is used in political science. They're used in political science for years, and it measures how – It's a 0 to 100 scale, and you're taking the survey or asked, “How do you feel about Democrats with zero being cold and 100 being hot? Then vice versa, how do you feel about Republicans?” What we lay out in the book is the bigger fan you are, if you separate the sample out into Republicans and Democrats, Republicans have warmer feelings towards Democrats, the bigger fan they are. Democrats have warmer feeling towards Republicans, the bigger fan they are. To be clear, the feeling is cold from opposing views. That's the nature of our polarization. But the fact is, and we've read a lot about polarization in writing this book, and it often left us depressed. Like there's no way out. We're just growing apart as a country, as two separate countries, and we don't talk to each other. What kind of the psychology teaches us is that in group and out group becomes more solidified. Therefore, we don't talk. Therefore, we dislike each other more, more and more, regardless of how much we are into the politics of it. But our contention is sports fans, and it actually gets us to mix those in groups a little bit. If you're a Dallas Cowboys fan and you are a liberal that lives in New York, when there's a lot of Dallas Cowboys fans here in New York, you know there's other fans that are not – Don't share the same views as you. You also know that it crisscrosses race and religion and education and income. You're part of this one Dallas Cowboys tribe, and that actually has an impact on you. So that's why we see the warmer feelings towards the opposing party within both kind of Democrat and Republican tribes. [00:12:52] PF: That is so interesting. So how can that be used by individuals, if we start understanding that? How can we use this as a tool for trying to build a bridge? [00:13:04] BV: Ultimately, that's kind of what we're advocating for is to, I want to use your words, use this as a tool. We all – There's a lot of people who are sports fans. This cuts across a major segment of the American populace. So it's a mainstream behavior that people are engaging with but not necessarily consciously aware of the benefits that they're receiving because they're fans. So what we want people to do is become aware of this thing as a tool. Now, that tool can be used to mitigate polarization. It can be used to mitigate loneliness. But these problems that kind of befuddle us can be lessened, can be decreased, can be dampened by recognizing that that fandom is this thing in your arsenal that you can pull out at any time to create connection, to expand your worldview because it's going to create the interactions with other people around you and create that engagement in the world that we were talking about previously. [00:14:01] DS: Even if you're at the airport and see somebody with an Alabama jersey on and you make a comment about Alabama, it's a 10-second interaction. The science says you both are uplifted as a result of that interaction. You as a sports fan, if you're conscious of what's going on in the world, and you can go up to a complete stranger and talk about the Phillies and Astros game tonight, those interactions are really good. We encourage – As Ben was saying, this was our motivation of if you're a fan, lean into it. These are good things. It's good for you, good for others, good for society. Realize that this is the impact of it, and it's already happening. Now that you know it’s happening, lean into it more, and more good should come out of it. [00:14:41] BV: I guess what that means is, specifically, recognize that sports can be the anchor to a interaction, right? So one thing that I've changed in my life is I will say yes to anything that comes my way that sports-related I will say yes, right? To where I was kind of like falling out of love with the fantasy leagues and the pick’em pools, I will now say yes. Let's go do it. I realized that this is not a fatuous kind of obnoxious thing but actually something that's really meaningful for my life, right? But I'll also extend that invite. So whenever I see some – I’ve even started going through my contact with my phone. If there's somebody I haven’t talked to for a while, I'm aware of kind of like the teams that they follow. I'll use that as a way into sending you that message. Hey, I saw so-and-so traded so-and-so. What do you think of that? Oh, by the way, it's been a while. How you doing? Right? Or I'll invite people over on a Sunday to get together. Whether I care about the game or not, it almost makes no difference. It's just the device that gets people together, and then you're reaping the rewards of that togetherness. [00:15:36] PF: That's great, and it's interesting that you talk about fantasy leagues, things like that. So it's not just straight up fandom for the game. It reaches well beyond that. [00:15:47] BV: Absolutely. I mean, again, let's just change how we think about fandom for the game and all these different activities. The activity almost doesn't matter. It's the activity that creates connection, right? My fantasy league with 10, 12 college buddies generates on a weekend probably 250 text messages on average, right? Those would, otherwise, not happen. If I see now that the fantasy league across whatever 24 weeks of NFL season is generating 250 text messages a week, like that's a lot of interaction that I would have otherwise not had, if I didn't have that fantasy league. Now, all of a sudden, I've reframed how I think about and approach that entire enterprise, and it puts it in those terms. Now, I know it's impacting my wellness. I know it's actually causing oxytocin to be released and flow through my bloodstream. Like it's changing how I see the world. If you're aware of that and you can lean into it, then all of a sudden, you can really start to reap the rewards. [00:16:39] DS: I can give another example, a more personal [inaudible 00:16:42]. We wrote the book and we’re – Ben and I talked about this. We're living the book, so to speak, as kind of a – What we found is it’s like it's telling us to think of things differently. So I'm a Yankees fan. The Yankees had a great start to this season, looked like a dominant team. Then in August, it all fell apart. It often left me depressed on days, and I would go into work and work on stuff and be angry about going home to watch the game or having to watch the game. I have an eight and six-year-old boys, two boys who are obsessed with the games. Our family time, and my wife who is not a sports fan or who was not a sports fan, has now kind of signed up, as it is our best family time. Well, it's seven o'clock. We are – The four of us are on the sofa. We are talking. They’re asking questions. We're engaged in things. We are together as a family, watching this thing called baseball. So like learning from the stuff that we're writing in that book, it's like, well, just forget about that and stop being angry about all the stuff that's wrong with the Yankees and what's right with the family engagement around it. We just have this beautiful time every night when the Yankees are on that, otherwise, would – We’d still have beautiful time, but it just wouldn't be as kind of cohesive as sports has made it in our home. [00:17:57] PF: Yeah. How does that bring it together? When you're cheering together, when you're bemoaning the loss together, how does that tighten you as a family unit? [00:18:06] DS: Well, it gives you something else to talk about, and it's great that you bring up the loss because we often – Another question we get is, well, is this true for winning teams that you're happier, as opposed to perennial losers. It works. It works both ways. You can celebrate together, which is great to commiserate and find the occasion to do something together and celebrate. It's also great to commiserate. Yankees lost. When I get together with Yankee fans, I – We all want to like vent about it, and like venting is good. Like in other things in life, you keep it in, and you boil inside. With sports, we all vent, and it’s actually just like a positive release, and somebody else is listening on the other end and understands and gives examples of it. There's not much stuff that we can vent and do that stuff and have that kind of dialogue so freely with other people, whether it's somebody close or a complete stranger. [00:18:56] BV: You know, Paula, the way to think about it I think is you're going on an emotional ride together, and like all of those components are important. The emotional aspect amplifies the togetherness and vice versa. But ultimately, the celebrating, the commiserating doesn't really matter. It's just the fact that you're going on this ride together. [00:19:14] PF: I love that. I love that. One thing that you talk about is the importance of passing down fandom in your family. Two questions related to that is like why is that so important, and then how do you do that? [00:19:26] DS: Well, the first one, I think the reason it's important, we talked a little bit about the impact that this can have on your relationships with your children or your parents, kind of going both ways. So I think just recognize like in the data, what we see is that relationships are improved or the likelihood of relationship being improved are correlated with fandom. So basically, it’s just a way of trying to kind of stack the odds in your favor to ensure that you have a close relationship with your children or with your parents. Because, again, you come back to just the cadence of communication increases, and that's ultimately good for relationship. The way to do it, Dave and I are kind of like working through this right now. We both have young kids. My son is just kind of getting into it, and he calls every sport on TV baseball, whether it’s baseball or not. He calls every team the Los Angeles Rams, even though the Rams only play football. But it's getting them into the space where they can use sports and create social connections around sports, right? Like that's, I think, ultimately, what you're handing to your kids is a tool that will help them socialize, right? We see. We just did some polling with teens that this all holds true with 13 to 17-year-olds. So if you're a highly engaged sports fan as a teen, you're going to have more friends. You're going to be happier. You're going to do better in school. You're going to have closer relationships with your family. It's not so much the fandom that's doing anything there. It's just the fandom gives you a way to connect with people, and the connections are good for us. If I think about my kids, like one of the things that I want for them is to have close friendships. I think that that's an important to a fulfilled life. By giving them fandom, by kind of indoctrinating them in this school of fandom, what you're doing is giving them a tool that allows them to connect. It increases the likelihood that they will have more robust friend networks, if they're fans. [00:21:08] DS: One more thing of it kind of goes back to the playfulness of sports fandom. There’s not many things as a parent with kids that it doesn't matter. Like there's not an expectation. You have to do these things for school or even if you're playing in a sports team. Or did you work out? Did you prepare? Did you think about these things? It's all freedom sports fandom, and it creates a playfulness within the family that is highly beneficial. [00:21:31] PF: You also say that it can help us build confidence in other people. I found that interesting. What mechanism is at play there to make that happen? [00:21:40] DS: Well, it's all the same mechanism at work, right? You're interacting with people, and you will then kind of view them more positively. So we have several questions that we ask around. How trusting are you of other people? Do you typically trust somebody when you meet them? Or do you not trust them? So as you can predict, that the bigger fan you are, the more trusting you would be of that person, whether you're meeting a stranger. It really just comes down to your interacting with more people, and that exposure to other people [inaudible 00:22:10] them. You’re not always on guard in these interactions because you're happy to walk up to a stranger and talk about the Cowboys. Again, that's good for you. We see this time and again, and then we measured it further in confidence in institutions. How you feel about whether it's the police, the military, religious leaders, the news media, professors, scientists. We see with that that the bigger fan you are, the more confidence you have in those institutions. [00:22:39] BV: I think one way to just sort of sum up everything that Dave just said is a line that we include in the book. Actually, we quote Brene Brown, who I would assume, Paula, you're familiar with. [00:22:48] PF: Most of our listeners are. [00:22:49] BV: I would – Yeah. I guess we're playing to the right audience here. But she has a line that I love, and that resonates with us and really encapsulates a lot of what Dave was just saying, which is it's hard to hate people up close. The idea – [00:22:59] PF: I love that. [00:23:00] BV: Effectively, what we're saying is fandom puts you in a place where you are connecting with more people, both intimate connections, relationships, family, close personal friends, etc. But also just strangers on the street, right? You're going to have those interactions with the barista because she's wearing the Dodgers hat in Los Angeles, and you can have that brief 10-second interaction about the team that's going to impact your day. But it also exposes you to other people, right? It just kind of like helps build that muscle of connecting with other people. Ultimately, that's the thing. That exposure is the thing that changes your worldview. It creates that sense of trust in other people, it creates that sense of confidence in other people, and it just sort of broadens your perspective on the world. [00:23:39] PF: I like that. This is so well researched, and that's what's interesting too. How difficult was it to get research on this, put this all together? [00:23:47] DS: I mean, this is what we do, the research and fielding surveys, conducting focus groups, doing ethnography. So we feature a lot of people in the book that we tell stories about, and those came about. We met them in focus groups. We conducted ethnography, so I wouldn't do – We went into homes with people, with the games with people, with the sports bars. I mean, this is what we do. So we enjoy doing it. We felt like early on, we had an interesting thread to pull on. The book is about just continually pulling on the thread. Fans have more friends. Their measures of wellbeing, it leads to a broadened worldview. All these things just came out through the research that we conducted. [00:24:28] PF: Very interesting. So this is a terrific book. We're going to tell the listeners how they can find you, how they can find a copy of the book. As I let you go, what is it that you hope people take away from reading this book? [00:24:42] BV: I hope that they take away that they should lean into their fandom. If they’re fans themselves already, lean into that. Embrace it. I think maybe more broadly, we take kind of a step back. It's really to – We want to reframe the conversation we have around sports fandom. I think the current cultural conception of sports fans is sort of the obnoxious face painter bro, maybe a little drunk in the stands and making you feel uncomfortable. That person does exist, and that thing does exist. But when we focus exclusively or we frame our conception of fandom exclusively around that person, we miss all of this other connection that's really good for us. So what we want to do is get people to recognize, “Oh, this is actually really good for me,” right? I can lean into it. I can enjoy this. I can use it as a tool. But I should lean into it because it's going to impact my life. Dave on his line earlier, being a sports fan is good for you, good for others, good for society. We want people to recognize that. That's the ultimate takeaway here. [00:25:37] PF: I love it. [00:25:38] DS: It's available for anyone, everyone, young, old, male, female. Sports crosses everything. [00:25:45] PF: Yeah. There's a few sports out there that you can choose from. You can find one. [00:25:48] DS: We have a lot here. Yeah. [00:25:51] PF: Well, I thank you guys so much for sitting down with me. I just – I love this topic. I love the approach that you've taken and the way that you're opening this door that just really hasn't been walked through yet. So thank you so much for the work you're doing and for sitting down and talking with me about it. [00:26:05] BV: Thanks, Paula. It was a lot of fun. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:11] PF: That was Dave Sikorjak and Ben Valenta, authors of the new book, Fans Have More Friends. If you'd like to learn more about their research, follow them on social media, or buy their book, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. A reminder that November is gratitude month, and what better way to show your gratitude to others than to gift them with a plate of homemade treats. The Live Happy Store has a brand new giving plate, which you can fill with your favorite treats and share with a neighbor, your kids’ teacher, a coworker, or anyone else in your life whom you'd like to show appreciation to. The poem on our Live Happy giving plate encourages them to continue spreading the joy by doing the same for someone else. You can check it out right now in the Live Happy Store at store.livehappy.com. 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: Make Space for Happiness With Tracy McCubbin  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 387 of Live Happy Now. If you're like most people, you probably have a little bit of extra stuff laying around the house. But by the time you finish listening to this episode, you just might be ready to let it go. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week I am joined by decluttering expert, Tracy McCubbin, author of Make Space for Happiness: How to Stop Attracting Clutter and Start Magnetizing the Life You Want. Tracy has some surprising things to say about the relationship between clutter and happiness. And what straightening up the space in your house can do for this space in your head. Check it out. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:43] PF: Tracy, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:45] TM: Paula, thank you for having me. I love the title of your show. I love it. [00:00:51] PF: Thank you so much. Yeah, it pretty much tells what we're about. [00:00:55] TM: You know, I think there's this – I see it. I'm a professional declutter. I own a decluttering company. And I see with so many of my clients that they are waiting for something to happen to get happy, “Oh, if I get that bigger house, then I can start being happy.” Or, “Oh, if I just get my kids out of middle school, then I can be happy.” And my feeling from my own life is that there's no waiting. It starts now. You're not guaranteed tomorrow. You're not – so much can happen. And so, sort of putting off finding the happiness, I think we waste a lot of time. [00:01:32] PF: We do. And so, that's why we're here. We're here to give the little shortcut. [00:01:36] TM: I love. Happiness hacks. [00:01:38] PF: That's right. That's right. Well, you have several. I've got to say, I spent time with your book over the weekend, and I love everything about it. Because you connect decluttering and happiness in a way that I just have not seen done. And it's so concise. And you simplify it. And I guess before we really dive in, can you tell me how you discovered that connection between clutter and mental health? [00:02:05] TM: Well, I kind of came to being a professional declutterer. I've had my company for 15 years. I have nine people who work for me. We are unbelievably busy. I'm so grateful for all of our clients. But over the years of doing this, I just started to see – I live in Los Angeles. I have a lot of very – like, celebrity clients, and wealthy clients, and all stratas. And I just started to see that there was no correlation between stuff and happiness. And actually, what I really saw is that the more stuff people had, the more burden they are. It wasn't storage units full of stuff, or big giant houses, that wasn't equating happiness. And another component is I'm a child of a hoarder. My dad is an extreme hoarder. Diagnosed. And we're dealing with that right now. I've also watched the extreme end of someone really being a prisoner to their stuff, and how it's affected every relationship in his life. Everything about it. For me, just working with people, and then starting to do my own research like you, like, “Well, how can we be a little happier? What can we do?” And sort of realizing that it comes back to the same principles. Get some exercise. You don't have to run a marathon. Just take a walk around the neighborhood. Move around. Just move your body. Be of service. Help somebody outside of yourself. Connect with your friends. And have a gratitude practice. And know where in that stuff is buy more things. Nowhere in that as shopping will make you happier. [00:03:48] PF: That's such a great point, because how big of a problem is clutter in our world? I mean, when you said you have 15 people working for you? [00:03:57] TM: Yeah, yeah. [00:03:58] PF: Started answering my question right there. [00:04:00] TM: Yeah. Yeah, we are in a clutter crisis. This country especially is in a clutter crisis. And it's a perfect storm of a lot of things. And one of the things that I talked about in the book, Make Space for Happiness, is that what we don't realize today, 2022, that we are being marketed to 24 hours a day. Back in the old days, when I was a kid, I'm 57, there were three TV channels. You knew the commercials came on at 18 minutes. And you kind of knew the drill. And now, we are – commercials marketing to 24/7. And it's also never been easier to shop. You don't even have to put pants on now to go shopping. We're just buying, buying, buying at this breathtaking, breathtaking speed, and we're not any happier. [00:04:56] PF: Yeah. One thing, as I was reading your book, it made me think about how – as a kid, you and I are about the same age. And as a kid growing up, you get the newspaper. And if there was like a sale going on, that was a big deal. Like, Sears has having a sale on something. And now it's like you get the paper every – Okay, what's on sale at Target this week? What's on sale here? There's just a constant barrage of print as well that's hitting you. [00:05:21] TM: Yeah. And we have a thing around our house. I was at the grocery store the other day, and it was like, literally, almost everything was on sale. Buy three, get – And I was like, “Wow! If everything's on sale, nothing's on sale.” That it's sort of this. And also, speaking to you went school clothes shopping. I wasn't getting a new outfit every weekend. You went school clothes shopping. And you got some stuff for holidays and your birthday. But this constant I need, I need, I need, I need something new, it's really flipped our priorities. And so, for me that was taking the jump of working with so many clients. Dealing with my dad. Just going like, “This isn't fixing things. This isn't fixing things.” And look, I say this, I'm not saying that you're never going to shop again. I'm not saying there are some amazing people have done in podcast about not spent money for a year. And I think those are fantastic. I'm not saying that. I'm saying I want us to have an awareness. What are we bringing into our homes? Are we being mindful about it? Are we just shopping and shopping and shopping and shopping? And thinking that it's going to give us happiness? There's a little bit of science – there's a lot of bit of science, around shopping. And what happens, especially if you online shop, is you get a hit of dopamine when you put the thing in your cart and you hit by now. You get a hit of dopamine when the package shows up on your doorstep. You get a hit of dopamine when you open it. You've kind of had these little events where you're like, “Oh, I'm a little happier. I'm a little happier. I'm a little happier.” But it's not sustainable. It doesn't stick around. So, then you're like, “Oh, well, I got to buy more to get that feeling back.” Not unlike that first cookie made me feel good. Maybe the fifth one will make me feel better. You know? And so, it's understanding the shopping, the acquisition cycle, and really seeing what it does to go like, “Oh, right. I'm actually not getting any happiness from that.” And getting a good feeling for a few minutes. One of the things that I want people to realize about clutter, especially about bringing it into your house, is that there are forces working against us. It's not necessarily that you're weak, or that we're lazy, or we're bad housekeepers. It's that we're being told to buy all the time. All the time. And I think when people kind of realize that, they can sort of see their part in it and also not beat themselves up so much. [00:08:05] PF: Mm-hmm. Well, it happens once they look around and they say, “Well, I have all this stuff.” Do they then want to stop? Or do they keep going? Typically, when you're working with people, what happens? [00:08:16] TM: I define clutter as the stuff that gets in the way of what you really want to do. If you want to, every morning, cook yourself a really healthy breakfast so you can start your day off right, but your kitchen counter is covered with appliances that you don't use, and mail, and all this stuff, and it's not set up to cook, then that becomes clutter. If your closet is so stuffed with clothes that getting dressed in the morning literally brings you to tears. I cannot tell you how many people are like, “I cry in the morning.” I'm like, “That's not a good way to start your day.” [00:08:49] PF: No, it's not. [00:08:50] TM: That's when your stuff becomes clutter. It's realizing when it's crossed over, when it's become clutter, and how that clutter is affecting you. Your home should be the place of respite. It should be the place of refilling your well. That you come home, and you sleep, and you nourish yourself, and you connect with your family, or your partner. Or if you're by yourself, you take some downtime. But if you're moving your stuff back and forth laterally to make room for yourself, that is adding stress to you. It's understanding the effect that the clutter has on you. And in this book, it's really about understanding why you're bringing the clutter in. What do you think that's missing? What's the hole inside of yourself that you're trying to magnetize something to fill it? [00:09:38] PF: And one thing in your book, and you identify seven clutter blocks that keep us from getting rid of things that we don't need, we don't want, we don't use. I loved the way that you break those down. Can you talk about those a little bit? [00:09:53] TM: Absolutely. The clutter blocks are the emotional stories we tell ourselves about why we can't let go stuff that we don't want need or use. It's a complicated story. And the funny thing is we all tell ourselves the same story. This ranges from everything from clutter block number one, which is my stuff keeps me stuck in the past. This is maybe you have grown kids, and you still have their rooms exactly the way they were. This may be clothes that you don't fit into anymore. And let's acknowledge, let's acknowledge that there is gravity, and your body is going to change over time. It's going to change over time. Things that you wore 20 years ago, you may not be able to wear anymore. And I see so many people hanging on to that stuff, especially those clothes, “Well, I used to be that size.” And I remember – what that stuff does is tells you that your best days are behind you. [00:10:52] PF: Oh my. Wow! What a powerful way to look at it. [00:10:57] TM: Yeah, that you're not moving forward. Another clutter block is clutter block number three, the stuff I'm avoiding, which is, full disclosure, that is my clutter block. That is I hate to open mail. I hate emails. Everything about being a grown up is really stressful for me. And so, I avoid it. But it doesn't get better. That letter from the IRS, ignoring it is not going to make it better. [00:11:26] PF: I got to confess, that's my thing, too. [00:11:29] TM: Yeah, it's funny. Oftentimes, very productive, successful people fall into this, because they kind of are doing so much other stuff that they don't deal with being a grown up. We got to be a grown up. Another great clutter block, this is one of my favorites, and this came up so much during the pandemic, I'm not worth my good stuff. This is my people who have beautiful things, but don't use them. They don't burn the fancy candle. They don't wear the nice sweater. They're saving for a special occasion. It's always this time down in the future. And what I like to say is use the nice stuff. You're worth it. Even if you're just heating a piece of pizza, put it on the piece of China. Burn the nice candle. Why have all these beautiful things if you don't use them? What are you saving them for? Big part of my company, dClutterfly, our business is that we help families after someone has passed away. We'll help empty out the house. And I cannot tell you how many times I've been in homes where, literally, their wedding presents from 40 years ago that were never opened, that were never used. That they're sort of waiting for that special occasion. And then life comes and goes and they never used it. I'm like use it today. Today is the special day. Today is the special day. Another great one, and I really see this. This is clutter block number six. And I really see this with people, especially women kind of between 40 and 60. We're really starting to kind of get the impact of being the sandwich generation. Still have kids. And your parents are aging. And clutter box number six is trapped with other people's stuff. And this is really about inheriting. Someone has passed away. Someone has gifted you things that you're sort of got all this stuff from someone else and you feel guilty letting go of it. But you have no use for it. I work with people all the time who have rented a storage unit to pay to store the furniture that they don't want from their parents or grandparents, but they can't imagine getting rid of it. They're really trapped in this cycle of holding on to things that they don't – will never use, but can't let go of them. [00:13:53] PF: In that case, you're really dealing with a lot of guilt, aren't you? [00:13:58] TM: Yeah, so much guilt. So much guilt. And what I really say, this one, is start to have the conversations now. Everyone is so nervous, or they think it's morbid, or it's too emotional to talk about what happens when someone passes. But I am very big on getting your house in order, getting your stuff in order. Telling people what really is valuable. Not what's imagined valuable. Who you want to have stuff? I have a lot of my – I call them my little old lady clients. They're sort of 85 and above. And they're at their last chapter. And they're enjoying it. And they have started – I see more and more. They're starting to give their jewelry away now before they pass with the idea being – And one of my first clients said it to me. She was like, “I'm never going to wear this ring again. I can't get it on my fingers. But I want to see my granddaughter wear it.” I don't want to wait until I'm gone. I'm going to go to lunch with her and see it on her finger and know that she's enjoying it. And so, I think that we, when this generation starts to do that, accept it. Understand. Don't shy away from it. Really know, “Oh, they're celebrating. And this is something that we can share together.” [00:15:16] PF: I love that. And you don't have to wait until you're 85 to do that, right? [00:15:19] TM: Nope. No, no, no. My niece just went up to visit my mom. And she's like, “Nana was giving me all this stuff. What does that mean?” And I was like, “Because Nana doesn't need it anymore. Nana's retired. Take the cute clothes. She wants to enjoy it with you.” I think that if you're out there, and you're listening, and you're trapped with other people's stuff, remember this. You don't really want this stuff. You want the connection to the person who's passed. And so, we think by keeping all the stuff, we're going to keep the connection. And what I say is, if you're keeping more stuff than you're comfortable with, if you're keeping stuff and it's a financial burden, if your garage is full of stuff, you start to actually lessen the connection because you start to get resentful. And so, what I'm saying is maybe you just keep a small amount so that you can truly be happy. And when you look at it, you remember that person enjoying. Not like, “Ugh! I have a $400 a month storage in it full of my grandma's furniture. You know? That really honor that connection. I think that people are so – they think they have to keep everything. And it really becomes a burden. I mean, it's called trapped with other people's stuff for a reason. That people are really stuck. And I do gently joke with my clients, because they're like, “I don't know how I'm going to get rid of this. My mom would be so mad.” And I was like, “I've been doing this for a long time. No one has ever come back from the great beyond to be mad at you about –” And I feel like if people – Honestly, if people – If you were able to, let's say, have an hour with someone who passed away just by magic, they would want you to be happy. They wouldn't want you to be burden. They wouldn't – I really know this with all my heart, because they’re at the end with so many people. And so, if you're in this, if you're trapped with this, just change your lens on it. Just look at it a little bit of a different way. Would that person really want you to be beholden to their stuff? [00:17:28] PF: Yeah. Yeah, because you tell a really compelling story in the book about the woman had a whole storage unit full of precious moments, figurines, and it was costing money, and it was creating problems in her marriage. [00:17:40] TM: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That she was paying to store these things that were her mother's. And she had a very fraught relationship with her mother. And she was like, “Well, this was so important to her.” But it was really financially a big burden to them. And so, here she was financially putting her and her husband. And they were trying to start a family. They were trying to do all these things. And they have this giant storage bill for stuff that she didn't even want. And so, it's like she had to get real with what she was doing and the choices that she was making. And that those precious memories weren't her precious memories. [00:18:15] PF: Right. And so, how big a shift is it? Because it's not as simple as you sitting down with someone and saying, “Okay, here's what you're going to do.” And then they say, “Oh, that works.” And now everything's fine. How big a shift is it to turn around? Because we didn't get into this spot overnight. [00:18:33] TM: Well, I’ll use my favorite expression. Rome was not cluttered in a day. I think that it's a shift. It's a mindset shift for sure. And I think to start – before you even start decluttering, before you even get into it, the most important thing is to figure out why. Why do you want to make this change? Because the change will never stick if you don't have a compelling why. Do you want to declutter and have less stuff because you want to have friends over for dinner and feel comfortable at that? Do you want to be able to shut the door and go on vacation and not worry about it? Do you want to downsize to a smaller house? What is your why? And notice, in all of those whys that I list, it's never about, “Well, I want to just be a good housekeeper.” It’s not what it's about, right? It's just not there. And it's not about the shame. It's about what's the positive actionable thing that you hope to do by having less stuff? One of my favorite phone calls I ever got from a client, she had a cute little apartment, but the stuff had taken over. She had two bedrooms in it that she couldn't use. She hadn't had friends over in I think she said like 10 years. And so, we decluttered. And she did great. And a couple of weeks after we worked together, she called me and she said, “A friend of mine called me and said, “Hey, I'm just down the street. Do you want to meet for coffee?” And she said in the first time in 10 years, “I could have them come over to my house and have coffee.” And she said, “The joy that that brought me, that I wasn't like rushing to meet them at a coffee shop, or embarrassed about my house.” She said it changed everything. [00:20:25] PF: That’s amazing. [00:20:26] TM: Yeah. That for me is what's your why? Why do you want to go on this journey? And you know, Paula, it can also simply be as simple as like I just want a little empty space. I just want a little corner to breathe. I just want some peace. Right? It can be that. And so, it's definitely click into your why. Go easy on yourself. Start small. Be aware of why you've held on to the clutter. Why you're bringing the clutter in. Just start to make some changes. And don't be a weekend warrior. Don't think you're going to get it done in one weekend. It’s just not. You're just not. I think we got to go a little easier on ourselves. [00:21:14] PF: And then how do we remind ourselves about our goals and our purpose in this journey? Because just like a diet, or an exercise program, you can get gung ho at the beginning, and then get off track. [00:21:27] TM: You know, sometimes it's as simple as writing it out on a piece of paper and sticking at your desk where you see it every day. It's some visual reminder. It's also when you do declutter, like, let's say you do a shelf in your linen closet, or you do the junk drawer in your kitchen, take a moment to see how good that feels. When that the next time you've got to go find a rubber band, you know exactly where they are and they're not old, broken ones. Go like, “Oh, right. That's why I wanted to get decluttered, because it works. This just made my life easier.” If you celebrate those wins, if you celebrate how it feels and the change that came out of it, then the behavioral change starts to stick. [00:22:09] PF: That's terrific. And what about, at the top of the show, we talked about the constant marketing? The emails? The text alerts? All these things? How do we kind of put a bubble around ourselves to minimize or eliminate as many of those as we can? [00:22:27] TM: I think it's understanding, especially around social media. Look, I love social media, I have a big Instagram and TikTok presence. I love connecting with people. I do these five things you can declutter in under five-minute challenges. It's great. But also, having literacy, media literacy and understanding it's still a sales platform. People are still selling to you. Somebody went said to me about television years ago. They said, “Oh, the shows, we're just the filler between the commercials.” You know? And so, I think it's having literacy and understanding, “Oh, right, that influencer is not my friend. I may like them, but they're not.” Even though it looks like it's my girlfriend saying to me, “Oh, try this thing. That's not the case.” And so, understanding the reality of it, right? Understanding the cycle of acquisition. When you order something online, “Bing!” You get a dopamine hit when you buy it. The next day, “Bing!” When it shows up on your doorstep, you get a dopamine hit, “Bing!” It’s this. And that dopamine hit doesn't last. So, you're like, “Oh, I got to buy more to get it again.” Just really understanding what – just educating yourself. Like, everything, right? Educating yourself. How can you – when you understand, “Oh, these things can hack my happiness.” One of the most fascinating things, they did a study, and I think at Yale. And they found out, if you write a handwritten thank you note, you raise your serotonin for 30 days. [00:24:14] PF: Oh, my gosh! [00:24:16] TM: One handwritten note, you raise your serotonin for 30 days. That's amazing. Like, amazing, amazing, amazing. [00:24:26] PF: That’s a heck of a payoff for one night. [00:24:27] TM: It’s a heck of a payoff. And if you think about that, happiness hack, that not only are you raising your own serotonin, but you're also doing it for someone who gets the note, right? You're being of service. You're having a gratitude practice. It’s those little things that makes such a big difference. [00:24:48] PF: Yeah. And let's talk, because I know I have to let you go, but I don't want to. Talk about the payoff in this of reducing clutter and what it does for our happiness? Because you spelled it out so beautifully in your book. Can you tell us that? [00:25:03] TM: Absolutely. First of all, on the kind of simplest scientific clutter equals stress. They’ve proven it. They've done millions of studies. Visual clutter, it raises our cortisol levels. And women especially, and especially women who are perimenopause and menopausal, it is – You know, it's a real thing, this cortisol. It's kind of where the tummy comes from. And more clutter raises your stress. The other important piece of information is that every piece of clutter in your house is a decision you have to make. Do I want this? Where does it live? Will I ever use it? Do I spend too much money for it? And all of those constant decisions put you in decision fatigue, which is basically your brain is just tired of making decisions. So, what will default to making bad decisions. If you think about the science of this clutter, it's definitely working against you. This isn't – I really want people to take this in. This isn't about being a perfect housekeeper. This isn't about looking like a page from Pinterest. This is about creating a home that supports you. A home that makes you happy. [00:26:22] PF: And everybody has a different level of what they consider cluttered. And I have a friend who is very proud of being a maximalist. And I'm very much of a minimalist. And for her, it's not stressful. It stresses me out to go to her house, but she's great with it. Different people do have kind of like this different barometer of what they consider clutter, right? [00:26:45] TM: Of course. Yeah. And like in our house, my partner, his kids are older. I don't have kids. We're two people. But if I go into a house where there's a family of five, it's a very different amount of stuff. That's why there's no recipe for, “Oh, you should only have 30 books. And oh, you should only –” No. What works for you. But the caveat to that is, is it really working for you? [00:27:09] PF: Right? [00:27:10] TM: Is it really working for you? If you walk in your closet in the morning to get dressed, and you burst into tears, I'm going to tell you, it's not working for you. And that's another thing on the decluttering journey that I tell people, is just spend a day or two going through your house, living your life, and seeing where the log jam happens. Where are you not cooking a healthy meal because the kitchen is too cluttered? Is your bathroom full of expired makeup? And all that kind of stuff. Where's the log jam? And start there. [00:27:47] PF: That's terrific. Tracy, you have so much we can learn from you. I really am excited to tell our listeners about your book. We're going to tell them how to get your book. How to follow you on social media, because they can get all kinds of tips and great advice that way. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Because like I said, you've just got a lot that we can learn from you. [00:28:07] TM: Thank you. I love it. I love connecting with people. And I really love connecting with people who are on a happiness journey, and realizing that so much of it is in our own hands. And there are things – Look, life is hard. We just got through – I don't know if it'll ever be replicated in my lifetime what we just went through, you know? And so, the things that we can do within our power to bring ourselves and our community a little more happiness, I think we got to be both feet in. I think we got to – how can I make my world a little bit better? [00:28:45] PF: Yeah. And this is such a great way. It's simple. Not necessarily easy, but it can be done. [00:28:52] TM: Exactly. [00:28:55] PF: That was Tracy McCubbin, author of Make Space for Happiness: How to Stop Attracting Clutter and Start Magnetizing the Life You Want. If you'd like to learn more about Tracy, follow her on social media, or download a free chapter from her book, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast 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 Phelps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]