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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: The Transformative Power of Rocking Out with David Fishof    [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. Growing up, most of us dreamed of being able to meet our favorite musicians. But this week's guest has taken it one step farther. David Fishof is a legendary music producer and Founder of the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, which invites everyday people to play alongside world renowned rock stars. David has seen firsthand the incredible power of music and how it transforms people, just like you and me, both in their personal lives and their professional aspirations. His amazing story is told in the new documentary, Rock Camp, available now on Amazon, as well as in the book by the same name. Today, he's here to tell us more about how Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp began and how he has seen music changed the lives of hundreds of people along the way. Let's take a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:01:04] PF: David, thank you so much for coming on the show today. [00:01:07] DF: Really looking forward to it. [00:01:08] PF: I am so honored that you are taking the time to sit down with me. You've created something that has become legendary. So can you talk about, first of all, how the whole idea to do a Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp began? [00:01:21] DF: Well, it began when I was doing Ringo’s tour. I created Ringo’s All-Starr Band in ‘89. After four shows, people told me it was never going to work, and I'd get all these superstars in one band touring for 30 shows. It’s great. You can do a One Night Live Aid. You can do a benefit concert. But to get all these bands to become one band, leaders of all these bands, it's never going to work. I love when people tell me something can't happen, and I just love to do it, and I put it together. After the fourth show, all the musicians knew all the fear. They all hear that it was never going to work. So I was having dinner with the president of Radio City Music Hall because Ringo said to me, “I want to play Radio City.” So I said great. So I invited the guy to come see to the show, and we're having dinner. All of a sudden backstage, the late Clarence Clemons walks by my table, and he says, “Fishof, I'm out of here.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “This thing's not going to work. Too much fighting.” Second later, I turned to the other side, and there’s Nils Lofgren. He says, “I'm out of here too, Fishof. This thing's not going to work.” Now, you have to understand, as a promoter, I mortgaged my townhouse in Manhattan to make this tour happen. [00:02:34] PF: So you're feeling a little pressure at this point. [00:02:36] DF: I’m feeling a little pressure, yeah. The first visual that came to me was I saw my townhouse going down the Hudson River. So I said, “What's the problem?” They said, “Well, you know, this Joe Walsh and Levon Helm are fighting, and they're fighting over songs. You've got to go in there and break it up.” So the first thing I do is I'm going to go look for Ringo because these guys are 10 years older than me. He could talk their language, and he can probably knock some sense into him. I can't find him. He's nowhere to be found. To this day, I forgot to ever ask him where he went. But I go down to the dressing room, and the security guard says, “You better go in there.” I see – I walk in. They open the door. There’s Joe Walsh with a knife and blood on his hands, and there’s Levon Helm with a glass bottle, screaming at each other, “You F-ing this, and you –” They were crazy. “You ruined my song.” I walk in like, “Are you guys a bunch of babies?” You could see in the documentary, I'm scared. I'm literally scared. Then they push me, and they throw blood at me. Then they both turned around, and they stuck their tongues out at me. Jim Keltner, the great drummer, he filmed the whole thing. It’s so funny because when you see the video in the movie, it's amazing. Dr. John is there, Rick Danko, Billy Preston, all those superstars in that first Ringo tour. While my heart was beating heavy, I realized later that night. I said, “These people are having a lot of fun,” and I kept seeing how much fun we had on tour. I said, “Boy, if I could give this to the fan, if I could give this to the fan that they can hang with these rockers, and they were writing music. They were getting creative.” There was so much peace and love, as Ringo says, because they just wanted to be like Joe Walsh. We have a democratic band. Whatever Ringo tells us we do. [00:04:17] PF: Democratic dictatorship, right? [00:04:19] DF: Yeah, exactly. It was just seeing that vibe. I kept saying – I even told Ringo. I said, “Boy, if we can find a guy with a private plane that can just fly us around, let him hang with us.” I tried to find every reason to give people this experience because everyone kept thinking there’s fighting, and it’ll never work. That’s how I created the idea of a Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. I wanted to give people this experience to hang with these rock stars and just see how remarkable they are. They’ve gotten – They even got bad names, and people think they’re wild, and they weren't. I mean, five guys in that tour went to rehab but not in front of me. Not in front of me. [00:04:55] PF: Not on your dime. [00:04:56] DF: Yeah. They were so well-behaved and Ringo too. They were well-behaved. But what they did in the background. So it was amazing. That's how I came up with the idea of Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. [00:05:09] PF: Well, what is it that made you think, “I need to give this to the regular fan.”? Because as musicians, they appreciate the fan. They need the fan. But you had that insight of, “Gosh, I should bring them into this.” [00:05:23] DF: So as a producer my entire career, it's always been about the fan. Whether I created a baseball camp for kids years ago with looping all of the Yankees, or I would produce the Happy Together Tour. I came up with this idea to put these four bands together. I always insisted that these bands play only hit songs because I hate to go to a show and see when the artist says, “Oh, I want to play this deep cut from my new album.” I go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.” I call it the bathroom cut. That’s where everybody wants [inaudible 00:05:55]. I want to hear the hits. [00:05:58] PF: Exactly. [00:05:59] DF: I'm a believer that if you go to a show, and it's a two-hour show, and if you think of anything else but that show, and you're thinking about my issues and my problems, my relationships, my work, then the artists has not done a great job. So I’m always thinking how the fan is thinking, and I wish more artists would think that. But I know they want to promote their new albums and their new – But I'm always thinking about the fan. [00:06:21] PF: You created this experience. Did you have the expectation or the dream that it would ever become as big as it has? [00:06:28] DF: No. I thought it was a one-off. [00:06:31] PF: Yeah, totally a one-off. I did it for fun. I do a one-off. I'm never doing this thing again. I'll tell you what changed. I did one, I lost money, and then I didn't do it again. But every day, I would get an email. “When are you doing Rock and Roll Fantasy? What are you doing again? What are you doing again?” Then I was at this Pollstar convention, and Pollstar is our industry. They were playing a game with Sammy Hagar, Tommy Lee, and Tommy Shaw. They were playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I'm sitting there. It was like a fun thing because it's for promoters, and it's for different promoters, and it's for promoters and managers and agents to come together and talk about the music industry. So one night, they were having fun, and the host asked a question. Who created Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp; David Bowie, David Byrne, David Fishof? Sammy Hagar yelled out, “David Fishof.” I was walking out of the room, and I saw Bon Jovi, and he's hanging out by the bar, and he walked – He turns to me, and he said, “Fishof, they’re just talking about you.” I said, “What?” Then they told me what happened. I said, “Wow. If these guys remember it, let me do it again.” I decided to do it again four years later, and I called Bret Michaels. I called George Thorogood. I just called everybody that I met backstage at a Ringo show or I knew, and I said, “Hey, would you do this again?” They responded yes, so I did another one in Los Angeles to make some noise. Then I went over to England to see Roger Daltrey because we were friends. He did my British rock symphony, and we had developed a friendship. I said, “Roger, can I come over and see you?” So I went over to see him, and we're sitting at dinner, and he says to me, “So what's going on?” I said, “You know, Roger, I came over to see you because I wanted to turn you on to my Rock Camp, and I want to know if you would do my Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp.” He said, “Oh, no. You should –” I try to do his impression. I'm not good at it. He said, “You should do the Thompson Twins, and you should do Boy George.” The whole night he kept stalling me and stalling me and stalling me. Finally, after two hours, that's what he said to me, and I said, “Roger, what do you mean?” He says, “Well, in England, the word camp is campy, and you should use your village people.” [00:08:36] PF: Completely different interpretation. [00:08:38] DF: Yeah, totally different. So I grew up, and my parents sent me to camp, and it's really a place where you can go meet your idols. “Okay. Let me ask you this, Roger. If you had an opportunity to meet your idol, who would it be?” He turned to me and said, “You introduce me to Levon Helm, and I'll come to your camp.” Wow. So I knew I had that in the back pocket because Levon had just toured with me with Ringo, and I was working together with him, and he was a great guy. I said, “Okay, let me find out.” I went back, and I called Levon, and I said, “Levon, I need a favor.” “Anything you want, David,” he says. “What do you want,” he says. “I need you to come and meet Roger Daltrey at the bottom line, and he wants to meet you from The Who and da, da, da. And I'm doing this camp.” So Levon said yes, and he came, and Roger came. Roger came and did the camp, and he stayed for three days. I asked him to come for a few hours. He comes one day. He just enjoys it so much. He turns to me and said, “When are these bands playing their final show?” I said, “Tomorrow night at the bottom line.” He said, “I want to sing with each one of them.” I mean, that's how generous he is. [00:09:42] PF: That is amazing. [00:09:44] DF: Yes. It’s his idea. He got up there and he sang with each band. Then I realized that so much publicity came out of it. That’s why I decided to do another one and do another one. Then I decided, you know what, I'm going to make this into a full-time gig because I don't want to go on the road anymore. I had enough of the road. I've done it my whole life. Really, I got married again and two kids. I want to be there and do their homework. So that's the start of Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp now. [00:10:12] PF: It seems like the musicians get as much out of it as the fans. [00:10:17] DF: But that's what I wanted to share with you when he said to me did I ever think it would be a success. The reason it's kept so long is because exactly what you said. The rockers get as much out of it as the attendees. So for them, as you'll see in the documentary, it reminds them what it was like when they first started. Nancy Wilson, I’ll never forget what she said to me. She said, “David.” She said, “When we first started our career, it was about becoming a star, becoming a star. The once we reached stardom, we got our hit records, it turned out to be about lawyers, agents, managers, the whole business side. And your camp is pure music, and it's just so –” The hardest thing for me is to get rock stars to do this, no question. But once I get them to do it, and they come, then they come back. Here's what the key is. These people are musicians, the campers. They're just like them. So to me, I'm blown away when Jerry Cantrell walks to camp and sits down and has lunch on the table and so on. I love that. I love when they mingle and then the friendships. There's no question that every rock star said to me, “My best friends are people that have gone to Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp.” So the rockers never met these people. [00:11:28] PF: Right. Always there was a stage between them. [00:11:31] DF: There's always a stage. Then every show I was at, we ran out. We ran out. By the last song, I had to be on the seat in the van. We were getting out there to get on the plane to go the next city. We never met fans. [00:11:43] PF: As much as musicians get out of it, and that's like a bonus for them, but the fans – This is truly life-changing. I won't even call them fans. I'll call it the musicians that go and participate in the camp. [00:11:54] DF: Listen, they’re musicians. Joe Perry said a great line. He says to a guy at Foxwoods. He turned to a guy and he says, “What do you do?” The guy says, “I’m a lawyer,” and he says, “On weekends, I play guitar in my band.” He says to the guy, “You're full of crap.” He says, “You're a musician first.” He says, “You do that legal BS to pay for your guitars.” He says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s me.” So musicians are musicians. If you're a drummer, you're tapping in your mind all day. If you're a guitar player, you're thinking about that guitar playing all day. [00:12:23] PF: So what has this camp done for people in terms of – Gosh, I know that you've got so many different points to hit on. Talk to me about what it has done to transform people's lives, both in their personal life, on the stage. How has it changed people to come and be part of this camp? [00:12:41] DF: Well, first of all, when you play with musicians that are better than you, you're going to get better, and that's the first thing. So if you want to get better as a musician, and then you come to Rock Camp, you will get better. There's no question about it. But more important, the friendships that have come out of camp is just remarkable that you can have your best friend every day going to school. Now, you come to camp, and you're in a band for four days, and these people are like-minded. So you become – They become bands. They become friendships .They meet up all the time. You know Mark Slaughter? He invited his band and said they’re invited. They said, “We're coming, Mark. We're coming to your show, the whole band.” They came, and then Mark stopped the show, and he says, “I have my band from Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp here, and they know my songs very well. Let's bring them on stage here.” He told us his band, “You guys go,” and these guys are going to finish the show and -- [00:13:35] PF: That’s amazing. [00:13:37] DF: So the fantasy just keeps going and going. I mean, yesterday, we have a camper who's got cancer, and the producer of the film, Jeff Roe, calls me and says, “I went to visit this gentleman in the hospital, and he said camp has kept him alive. He said all his friends at camp just encourage him.” “You’ll get to the next camp. We're coming to visit you.” The friendship –Now, those guys are friends for life. But musicians, they find such passion with each other, and the stories are endless. Women, they love their husbands. Their husbands tell me, “My wife's the greatest ever, and she gave me the greatest gift.” Because we guys, we have a pair of brown shoes, black shoes, and a pair of sneakers. That's it. [00:14:18] PF: Right. [00:14:19] DF: We cheap on ourselves. So it's mainly women who buy this, and the women say to me, “My husband comes back. He doesn’t road rage anymore. He's happy.” Because what camp does, it reminds you from childhood with that first song or something that really made you happy. Then all of a sudden, you go through life, and you had no choice. You were a musician in high school or college. Then you have to go find a real job. You go find this real job, and you deal with your daily problems. But the music is really what's pure, and it really brings the happiness. At camp, we cover so many bases. Number one, we'd get you on that stage. So how many musicians haven't ever been on stage before that picked up a guitar? We get you collaborating with your bands and writing songs. So you can't get enough. The biggest issue I have – I don't have but these people have it, when they leave camp. [00:15:10] PF: Yeah. That'd be hard to walk away from because you've been learning, to your point, the fantasy camp. I think you have been living your dream for these four days. [00:15:19] DF: Four days. Now, it's not four days. It starts from the day you sign up. You get a list of songs, and you get Zoom calls, and the bands come together on Zoom in advance. So they come in prepared. With Zoom, we come in. We’re all prepared. But the day you leave, you go home. So inevitably, they call – Stories from like a guy who says, “I’ve been going to therapy for three years.” Finally, the therapist says, “You want your happiness? Go sign up to Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp.” The guy says, “That’s why I came back.” But one story I do want to share with you that was really – It didn't make the film but – Again, each one of these campers has a story. There's no question. There's a story. There's one lady who came to camp, and I invited her because she – Susan Komen Foundation, I reached out and I said, “Send me somebody.” The lady is – A woman had breast cancer, and she's a songwriter and a musician. She came to camp. I remember she came to the meatloaf camp, and I asked her to come back for the interview because she wrote a book after she left camp about how she got better physically and emotionally. She wrote a book called Rocking the Pink, and she credits her experience of Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. I said to her, “So when you left camp, did you get depressed? What happened?” She says no. She says, “I swore when I left camp, I'm never going to write another brief again.” She was a lawyer. “And I'm going to live like these rock stars. I'm going to be authentic, and I'm going to write books because that's really what I want to do. I want to write.” Her name is Lauren Rowe now. She changed her name because of the cancer. She's written 14 bestsellers on – [00:16:53] PF: That's amazing. [00:16:54] DF: Yeah. So I love those kinds of stories. [00:16:57] PF: What are some of the other things that you have seen how it has helped people change their lives? [00:17:03] DF: I've seen it help in business. I heard – I had one of the three owners of Oracle come to my camp. He walks into camp, and he comes with five friends because he can afford it. His wife said surprise them. He goes over to the rock star Bruce Kulick from Kiss, and that was his counselor. Each band is mentored by a touring rock star. He says, “Okay, we want to do this song by the band.” He counselor turns to him and he says, “Okay. Excuse me, sir. But I need to teach it to five other people first, and we can't just start playing the song. I got to make sure they do it right.” All of a sudden, after four days, he turns to me and he says, “You know.” He says, “I learned team building here and –” [00:17:43] PF: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. [00:17:44] DF: To run by company different. I think the success that you can learn from rock and roll is incredible. 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Rock Your Business because I really wanted to share how amazing what you can learn from these rock stars. I mean, how many businesses are 50 years old today and are successful? A lot of them went out of business, whether it's Kodak, whether – People – The only thing that's really maintained over 50 years has been rock and roll, and there’s Rolling Stones. I mean, they're grossing $10 million a night, Kiss a million dollars a night, The Who a million dollars a night. These bands get bigger and bigger, and younger kids want to listen to their music, and it’s on commercials. So from rock and roll, you can learn a lot. Number one is being in a band, the collaboration of being in a band, of having patience and dealing with people and writing. The power of music is just so much bigger than you could ever imagine. I know for myself, if I'm feeling low, I'll put my Spotify on and start my playlist. I'm a different person. I know Tony Robbins said, “Oh, make a move. You can change.” But one lyric can change my mood. [00:18:50] PF: Absolutely. Yeah. I have playlists that are designed for certain – For different moods, for different times in my life. That's how I get through my days. [00:18:59] DF: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that music is so powerful, and it brings so much happiness. [00:19:06] PF: So the fantasy camps continue to go on. You survived the pandemic, and it's going on. How are they evolving? What's coming up next? [00:19:17] DF: The pandemic was scary. Every – [00:19:18] PF: Because face to face was gone. [00:19:21] DF: Face to face. Every musician was scared. I have to say that I came up with this concept of master classes online, with all these superstars, along with my associate, Britt Lightning from Vixen. Every night, we did 163 master classes, whether it was Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey, the band Styx, the Scorpions. We asked campers to come on, donate money, buy a ticket. Most of the artists use the money to pay their crew and for their charities. Roger Daltrey did it for Teenage Cancer America. Everyone did it for a different charity. It was amazing that every night, 30, 40 people would come on. These musicians, they were scared. They thought they would never perform ever again. They thought it was over. So that was one way that we moved during the pandemic. Now, doing camps, I just did a great camp in New York, and I'm theming it, so I got a Led Zeppelin style camp coming up. Then we opened the woman's camp last year, which was a huge success. We did with Melissa Etheridge and Nancy Wilson, women only. What we did was Britt's idea and to give women an opportunity to come and not worry about some guy, John Doe, and feel comfortable. It was the most successful camp. Why? Because women were just more caring for each other. Well, final night after four days, people bring their families to the show. Once that band performs, they're all running out to dinner and with their family. “Hey, you saw me on stage, and I performed this and that.” At the women's camp, no one left to see – [00:20:54] PF: Really? [00:20:55] DF: Right. Oh, yeah. It was just so amazing. The camaraderie was just so much. It was my favorite experience, and I got to watch them at a distance, just to see the love and the passion. I'm excited about the upcoming camp, to see Lizzy Hale, who right away, when I reached out, “Yes, I'm in. What can I do?” Winona, she said, “I'm in. I'm going to create herstory.” So it's going to be an incredible camp. [00:21:20] PF: David, you are doing so much good for the world by bringing this music out of people, letting them really feel what all it can do for them. What is your hope going forward? [00:21:30] DF: I'm hoping with the documentary that while your listeners might not be musicians, I’m hoping that they'll get something out of it. What will they get out of it? That I can do – I want to write an app. I want to write a screenplay. I want to open up a new business. I want to do something new at any age. These people do it through music, but you can do it. I'm hoping that people will get motivated not to be scared, not to be fearful to change their lives in the midst of their – And find the happiness. That's really what it's about, finding your happiness. [00:22:01] PF: I cannot think of a better way to wrap this up, David. You are a delight. I love what you've done. I am – As I said, I look forward to seeing what happens next. Thank you again for taking so much time with me today. [00:22:13] DF: I appreciate it. No, thank you for having me. I love this. I can't stop talking about – As you see, I talk so much. But it's such a passion of mine to talk about music and happiness. So thanks for having me. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:22:31] PF: That was David Fishof, talking about Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. If you'd like to learn more about David and his fantasy camp, check out the Rock Camp book and documentary or follow him on social media. Just visit livehappy.com and click on the On a Positive Note podcast link. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note and look forward to joining you again next time. So 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: Exploring the Emotion Wonderland With Nadine Levitt  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 394 of Live Happy Now. Navigating our emotions can be a challenge, and that's especially true for children. But this week's guest has turned even our most complicated emotions into a magical adventure. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm joined by Nadine Levitt, an author, educator, music artist, lawyer, and parent who wanted to change the way children learn about their emotions. So she created Emotion Wonderland, a magical place where all our emotions coexist, and we get to meet them, befriend them, and better understand them. This week, Nadine explains how she created the Emotion Wonderland, what she hopes children and parents will get from it, and talks about how approaching our emotions differently can change the way we process our feelings. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:54] PF: Nadine, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:57] NL: Thank you so much for having me. It's awesome to be here, so thank you. [00:01:00] PF: You have done something so incredible with your creation of Emotion Wonderland. So I guess can we start by talking a little bit about your background and how that led you into the world of emotional learning? You have interesting background. [00:01:16] NL: That's true. First of all, thank you for saying that. So my background, I'm in education. I've been in education for about 10 years, but I definitely did not come through to education in a very traditional trajectory. I wanted to be a singer, and my dad really made me get a law degree. He said, “Please, please, please. No matter what you do, just get something behind you.” To make money as an opera singer, which is what I love to do, you really have to be in that top one percent, and he clearly did not believe that I would make it there. So he was just trying to look out for me. But I then got sucked into sort of earning money and in the corporate world as a lawyer. For six years or so, I literally argued about cheese. I argued whether Camembert should be called Camembert or whether it was a geographical indication, like champagne or port. One day, I woke up and I was like, “Gosh, I am not saving the world. Like this is not what I had in mind for myself,” and I ended up sort of taking up other opportunities, and there were other adventures sort of waiting for me. I came to America, and I did go back to law for a little bit in order to get my green card. Then I quit that once I could and started singing again. I soon became a mum, and I think this is where everything sort of started focusing on education. Because now, I had these little beings, whom I wanted to help guide through that world of education and that world. I wanted to set them up to be successful little beings, and I really noticed how emotions played into people's success, whether it's academic success, professional success, or relationship success, confidence. All of these things really played into how nice a relationship you have with your emotions. How healthy is that relationship? How respectful is it? I have two kids. One of whom has really big emotions, a highly sensitive child. It was really because of my kids that I made My Mama Says, and I turned it into a whole suite of tools. I had a curriculum around it that was in schools for social and emotional learning. The reason that I made it, let me just backtrack a little bit, because I would have gladly taken other programs. But what I realized was that I didn't love the approach for most of the programs. So the programs were either really complicated to understand or just not empowering at all. One of the big problems that I had was that every program I saw would teach kids about emotions one at a time. So this is happy. This is sad. There’s a frown, right? It just was this caricature of what emotions really are, and it made no sense to me because, I mean, I can't name a single time when I felt one emotion alone. [00:04:09] PF: Right. That’s so insightful for you to pick up on that. I love that component of it. [00:04:15] NL: Yeah. It’s just like, well, if we're going to teach kids about how to identify their emotions and how to maybe start thinking about what those emotions are trying to tell us, then we've got to start looking past that loudest emotion and start thinking about it as more holistic. So there's many emotions, and together they bring a message for us. So we have to listen to all of the messages. That's why we created – First of all, it was My Mama Says, and then Emotion Wonderland is sort of the latest thing that we've created, our latest baby, so to speak. This is sort of a course, and there’s a quiz to start with, which is a really easy, free, and simple, fun way to start talking to kids about how they're feeling and start thinking about emotions coming in groups, not just one at a time. [00:05:04] PF: Let me ask you because Emotion Wonderland is a stunning place to visit. It is all these different characters. Can you talk about that? Like how did you come up with the idea of this is how to present them? Because there's several ways you could have gone to show these different emotions. Talk about the approach that you took and kind of how you came up with that. [00:05:26] NL: Each emotion is reflected as an animal of some kind, and the reason that I did that is it's much easier to think of a village of emotions that are inside of us all the time, kind of like Inside Out, except in Inside Out, they really have all of those emotions are controlling that little girl. I don't think that they control us, but they're inside us all the time. So it's much easier to objectively see a character and say, “Okay, the Sad Sullen Pup is visiting me right now.” Or, “The Goofy Goat is in town. He brought a whole lot of friends with him.” I did it really because it's just a little bit easier to talk about when it's not this color or this faceless sort of thing. I wanted it to reflect how they're friends, and there's many different – They pull different emotions with them, and so this concept that they could have a life of their own. We weren't tossing around whether we should make them not animals but just like little blobs type of thing. [00:06:28] PF: Little Minion type of things. [00:06:29] NL: Yeah, minions. But then we workshoped all of these curriculums with schools, and what we found was that the kids, they understood emotions easier with the animals and they – [00:06:40] PF: Oh, interesting. [00:06:41] NL: Yeah. Because they actually put those behaviors onto animals, and the other ones were a little bit harder to differentiate, if they're just a blob. It's harder to give it a personality and to really relate to it. [00:06:55] PF: So how many emotions do we have in total in the Emotion Wonderland? [00:06:59] NL: Well, obviously, we have thousands of emotions inside of us, so – [00:07:02] PF: You didn't hit them all. That’s the sequel, right? [00:07:03] NL: No. I definitely didn’t hit them all. So in our coloring book, for example, we actually give lots of room for kids to create their own characters and say, “Who's in your village,” and think about ones that might not have been listed in the village. But we have 30. So there was some amazing work done by Brene Brown about how many emotions the average adult can reference. I think it was four total, happy, glad, sad. But if you say to people, “How are you doing,” and how often do you hear people say, “Good, good.”? [00:07:35] PF: That's the pat answer. Yeah. Or fine. [00:07:38] NL: Yeah, yeah. Or when you think about how do I feel right now. I love to ask this question on any presentations that I give. I say just check in with yourself for a minute and see how you're feeling right now. Usually, on average, people write down one or two emotions. So we really wanted to start saying, okay, what else is there? Now, if you've got those two loudest ones, what other emotions are there for you? What's nice about the visual, the 30, is that we've balanced them out between very, very challenging emotions to really easy emotions. I don't believe in bad or good emotions because they actually all have that purpose. Sometimes, there's similar purpose. So for example, happiness and grief actually have a similar purpose. So happiness tells us what we're connecting with, right? But sometimes, it's really hard to see exactly what we're connecting with because we're just so busy caught up in the dopamine hits and joy – [00:08:33] PF: Of course. [00:08:34] NL: When we feel grief, we've lost what we're connecting with. But the important piece there is understanding what exactly do you miss so much, and how can you maybe fill that void and lead a more connected life so that if we’re really purposeful about it, grief usually is easier for us to take that time to become reflective and really purposefully think about what it is that we connect with. [00:09:00] PF: Oh, that's so insightful. As you worked with these different characters, how did you determine what animal you would use? I mean, like your yoga deck is just absolutely incredible, how you really explain this emotion and then this pose that they can do and why they're doing it. So how did you come up with all of that? [00:09:18] NL: Well, for the yoga cards, specifically, I actually worked with a yoga master who's amazing, just to make sure that I was honoring also the yoga side to it, and I wasn't sort of saying the wrong thing. Exactly, exactly. But the philosophy is that all of these emotions are important for us, and so we have to honor all of them. One of the things that we hear parents saying a lot is don't be so angry or don't just start your day so frustrated or grouchy or whatever it is. But the reality is that if we just say, “I'm feeling really grouchy right now, and what else am I feeling? I feel like maybe a little misunderstood, or I feel like I'm maybe a little bit shy.” So there's like all these things, and you can start to piece it together. Before you know it, the person is not feeling grouchy anymore. They've honored it. So the idea, really, with the yoga deck and with all the characters was really to start thinking about creating spaces for kids to understand like where do they live inside your village. Where do you feel it? How can we honor it, and how can we create space for that emotion to exist? A lot of it, they relate very specifically. So frustration, that's actually a Kriya that releases frustration interestingly, so this twist. Some of them are very purposefully done that way. Others were more based on the character. Brave, for example, or Sad Sullen Pup. Like what would sadness look like as a body shape? What's nice about the yoga cards, though, is that they don't just exist as yoga cards. So some friends of mine who have young kids have shared this with me. I get this response a lot that parents have put the cards all over the room. Then they say to their two or three-year-old, “Where's the Angry Hippo?” They go find, and they jump on the Angry Hippo. It’s so exciting for me because you're creating that emotional literacy at such a young age, where they can start to also read it and see it and recognize it and talk about it and, again, honor it. [00:11:24] PF: How’s that going to change their growing up experience? Because we didn't talk about emotions growing up. We didn't – As you said, it was like are you happy, mad, or something in between. So how is that going to change things for them? [00:11:37] NL: Well, I hope, I think emotional intelligence is really awareness and then learning new skills and practicing them. I have been pushed. Somebody pushed back. A psychologist once pushed back on a podcast to me and said that they didn't believe that emotional intelligence is learnable. It's something that we're just born with. I just really disagree with that. Because at the end of the day, I think it really is just that awareness. It's understanding how things work and understanding how tools can be helpful in regulating them. When I say regulating, I don't mean control them. I mean, how do we listen to them? Then once they've delivered their message, they go away anyway. If we know how they work, and we know that there are certain tools that create more space around it, so we don't feel overwhelmed with all these big emotions, challenging emotions sort of getting in our faces, and I think things like breath work or things like listening to music and things like that, I think you do become more emotionally intelligence. I think you can recognize that in yourself quicker, and you can have a much healthier relationship with your emotions. So I'm hopeful that these will be kids that will not be scared to talk about emotions, that will be able to tap in for themselves and say, “How am I feeling right now,” and really, I think, just honor their emotions that they're feeling. [00:13:03] PF: I think what's interesting about the timing, I've been doing some writing about Gen Z and how they are the most aware of the need for mental health, that is a huge value for them. So I believe that's going to continue. Now, you're reaching some young people who are the Alpha generation, that post Gen Z, who are also growing up in an environment where mental health is talked about, where it's more accepted for you to explore that. So I think this timing is absolutely incredible. Because as they're growing up in this age, where they are supposed to talk about emotions, you have given them all these tools for learning about emotions. [00:13:41] NL: I agree with that. I think, interestingly, I just read a consumer report that said it was 84% of employees. They feel more valued and connected with their job if their bosses care about their mental health. It's a money thing. It's good for the economy. It's good for people. It's good for relationships, I think, if we start to think about the types of innovation that we can also unlock with people being more comfortable and having a more stable mental health based on their emotional regulation and so forth. Anxiety and fear stops so much innovation and stops so much development. I think if we can have a relationship where we're not scared of fear, like we don't let it stop us from doing things, we listen to fear, and we say, “Hmm, thanks for showing up. I like the exhilaration that you're providing right now, right? I like that dance. Let's dance, and thanks for making me more aware and alert. I will be careful.” But it doesn't mean I'm not going to get up on that stage and sing. It just means I'm going to be aware and alert, and thank you for being here. I think most people who, if you're an adrenaline junkie or if you're somebody who just loves the adrenaline rush of things, which is how I used to feel about performing, it really is more about that fear because you have that little bit of fear. So fear in small doses is wonderful. Fear, when you have it in large doses, it can be completely debilitating. I just think about what kind of a world could we have if people understood fear a little bit better. On the flip side, what about anger? [00:15:24] PF: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Put that in perspective. It can be a game changer. [00:15:28] NL: Right. How much anger are we seeing in the world today? We’re seeing a lot of conflict right now. But imagine if we could approach some of that by honoring it and saying no change in history of – As far as we know it, there has never been any real change created without anger. Think about that. [00:15:49] PF: It’s true. That is – You have to get riled up to want to change. [00:15:53] NL: Exactly. It takes effort. So I think when people understand that part and they also say, “Well, how can I use this anger in a positive way?” Or if you're encountering anger, think about why and what could that mean and how quickly it can be diffused by just giving them the space to actually be heard and say – I noticed it just with my toddler, and I work with toddlers, or when I work with my kids. My kids are no longer toddlers. They're now 10 and 9. But I remember, they'd be, “I’m so frustrated.” I'd be like, “Okay. I can see that. You're really frustrated. But tell me, what else are you feeling,” and how quickly it would deescalate. [00:16:35] PF: One thing that did strike me as I was looking at all the tools that you've created, and I want to talk about the specifics of them. But even though this is designed for children, parents will receive such a tremendous benefit. You've got the magnetic board, where you put your emotions. Casey, our marketing manager, and I were joking. It's like, “I need that in my office.” It’s like, “It's not for the kids. I'm doing that for me.” So it's something that everyone who works with it is really getting the benefit from. [00:17:03] NL: Absolutely. We've done a lot of workshops for kids. But, of course, the parents are always there. I've had so many parents afterwards say, “Oh, my gosh. I needed this. Like I absolutely learned something. This is great.” The magnet ball that you were just talking about is very cool, actually. So, Ella, my daughter, often says to me – We actually carry one on the car now, and when she's having big feelings, she'll say, “Mom, where's the magnet board? I need the magnet board.” I'm like, “Okay, okay.” But she likes having the visual aspect of it like, “If I've got this, what are some of the other options of other emotions that I'm feeling,” and she likes the prompt of it. Sometimes – [00:17:38] PF: Explain to us what the magnet board is and how that works. [00:17:41] NL: Yeah. We all 30 characters as magnets, and then it's in a sort of travel-sized magnet board sort of box. It’s got a pen in it as well, a whiteboard pen, so that you can draw on one side, and the other side is an actual village. So the idea really was that you could put up teachers or anyone else. Parents can say, “Okay. When you're feeling confident, what else are you feeling?” Then they could find the other emotions and put those on the other side. But what it's turned into is really cool prompt for story writing and thinking about and really just engaging with these emotions and thinking about who would be friends with who, where would they live in the village, and so on, so forth. But I think having a visual prompt that you can start to say, “Well, when I feel this, I often feel these other emotions too.” When you think about – So one thing we do in our house is this mindful minute, and it's literally – It takes a minute, and you say, “How are you feeling today,” and you pick out the emotions that you're feeling. A magnet board is great for that because you can just literally pick it up and put it up. It's helpful because it's not just the one. It's many emotions, and sometimes they look conflicting. You might be happy and sad. So you can talk about that. So it's a great prompt. [00:18:58] PF: That's terrific and what a wonderful way for children to let their parents know how they're feeling, without having to – They can’t always voice it or don't feel like voicing it, but just being able to put it up there. That's an incredible gift. [00:19:12] NL: It's definitely less confrontational than sort of sitting in front of your child and saying, “So tell me, how are you feeling?” [00:19:16] PF: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Tell me about the plushies. How'd you come up with those, and how do you see them being used? [00:19:24] NL: So we have the Angry Hippo, and we have the Sad Sullen Pup. The idea is that those tend to be pretty challenging emotions for kids. When some of the kids that we were working with were really, really overwhelmed with some of these big, big emotions, it's really helpful to hold something and feel like you're not alone, especially because it was also quite – They’re very cute. So not to be scared of anger, that it's got a really positive side to it. But it really is helpful for those tactile kids in particular to hold something, whether it's, “I'm so sad and I'm not alone and I love this little being,” to also practicing empathy, right? So my example here is I have a lot of kids who say, “Ah, it makes me so sad for the Sad Sullen Pup because it's always sad.” I'm like, “Yeah. It's nice to have that empathy, that you feel that way.” Then we think about what are some of the positive things about sadness. What are some positive things that sadness brings you? What are some of the messages that sadness brings you? So there's lots of different reasons for it, but it really works for those tactile kids in particular because it just – When you're feeling homesick or when you're going somewhere, just to take care of something, whether it's anger, feeling angry or sad. It really is helpful to be the caretaker of those emotions. [00:20:46] PF: That's fantastic too. I think about children who have lost a parent, lost a sibling, have gone through something very, very tough and traumatic and don't yet have the words for it, to be able to have Sad Sullen Pup and be able to share that sadness. I think that's such an amazing way to be able to approach it. [00:21:08] NL: Mm-hmm, absolutely. [00:21:10] PF: So what else do we have? We've got the magnet board. We've got the plushies. We've got a couple of books that we haven't talked about. Let's talk about the books that you have because those are very cute. [00:21:20] NL: Yeah. It started with the books, actually. So the first book is called My Mama Says Inside Me Lives a Village, and that introduces the concept that inside us live all of these different emotions, and they don't control us, and we don't control them. But if we listen to them, because they're messengers, then they'll go away. But with all of these emotions inside of us, then it means we'll never be alone because we have all of these feelings. So we're connected to something, and we're getting signs from something. Even when we are physically alone, we're connected to our emotions. The second book is My Mama Says Inside Me Lives a Superhero. This is sort of the follow up, and it's the idea that there are sort of a cause and effect, right? We have consequences to the things that we say and the things that we do and the things that we don't say and do. The superpower that we have is that we can make people feel things with our words, actions, and inactions. So it's a very fun kind of story about a mom saying you have a superpower, and the kid guessing like, “Does it mean that I can fly? Does it mean [inaudible 00:22:26] the sky? Does it mean I can do this?” [00:22:29] PF: I love that. [00:22:29] NL: Yeah. So it's like really cute characters of a snail that has super speed and a llama that can throw up protective orbs. We have a gorilla that can freeze things. We have – I can’t think. I can't remember now. Opossum that brings things back to life, I think. It's a very cute story, and it's this concept that we're teaching kids that their words, actions, and even inactions that may seem frivolous to them and was sort of just a passing comment can really, really hurt or can really, really hold somebody up and help people. So a smile can turn someone's day around or asking someone to play when they feel – It’s all on rhyme. It’s a cute story. [00:23:12] PF: You also have online resources. So there's things online, like is a wonderful starting point for parents to start exploring. Can you tell us, where do you advise that they start? [00:23:22] NL: So there's two places. One is go to emotionwonderland.com, and it really is this joyful, colorful place. [00:23:29] PF: It’s an adorable – I want to live there. Animate me, so I can just go live there, okay? [00:23:34] NL: Exactly, exactly. So it's a great place to start because you can see the video sort of that introduces the philosophy behind the program. It’s a free quiz, so you can come back to it as many times as you want, and it's for kids to really start thinking about how are they feeling. It’s based on which socks would you pick, which face are you most drawn to right now. So it's a really quick, simple, and fun quiz. Then you get your results, and the results – These are the top three emotions that you might be feeling right now, and here are some of the friends that often come with this emotion. Here's the purpose behind these emotions. It just starts a lot of conversations. That's a great place to start for sure. We have a course that we are on emotional intelligence, which takes kids through an exploration of this is what you think emotions might – A certain emotion might look like, and it might be the emoji, right, a smiley face. It was like, “But this is what it really looks like.” Then there's a video of all the different versions of happiness or excitement or whatever it is. The reason that I say that is because when you think about if I feel happiness and also excitement and also joy or a little bit of fear because I'm about to ride a roller coaster, it looks so different to happiness when you're in love and not built up on a couch and just grateful for life and calm, about to watch your favorite show. Those are both happiness. Very different looking and feeling. So the course really takes kids through the nuance of that. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What are the stories that we tell ourselves with this emotion? Because there's all these thoughts that we start to tell ourselves, and that really goes into sort of the pattern recognition of our brain. So if you ever are expecting a call from a spouse or something, and suddenly you don't, you immediately go to, “Oh, gosh. I hope they haven't had a car crash. They haven't had this,” da, da, da. Those thoughts start spiraling, right? Well, that's the same for kids, so realizing that certain thoughts come. The stories that we tell ourselves with certain emotions, some of them are helpful. Some of them are less helpful. So having the tools to fact check them is really important. It’s a short little course. We just did it for four different emotions. We do talk about their friends and things and their purpose, the sort of a nice way to arm your kids with emotional intelligence skills. On the My Mama Says website, which is M-A-M-A, My Mama Says, we also have a lot of free resources. So parent activities that you can use with your kids, and they're just fun games, ways to start talking about emotions because we really want this to be integrated. So it's not just I'm going to an hour workshop or I’m – [00:26:19] PF: Right. [00:26:20] NL: Right? [00:26:21] PF: Yeah. It becomes part of your life. It just is like – It’s play and it's fun and it's enjoyable. [00:26:25] NL: Yeah. So next time you listen to the radio or you're listening to a song, ask your kids like, “What emotions do you think are reflected in the song? What do you hear reflected and why?” Then how that changes the conversation in the car, you know? You can pick any emotion. What you think that would look like in body language or – [00:26:46] PF: Oh, interesting. [00:26:47] NL: Things like playing freeze tag, emotional freeze tag, or doing certain art. There's art games, and we've organized them into here are the activities that you can do in the car, here are the activities that you can do in the park, here are the activities you can do over a meal, with friends, so on so forth. So we've got them all in these different sectors, but it really came from all those workshops that we had with schools. [00:27:11] PF: I know that we're doing a fantastic promotion. You're part of our 12 Days of Christmas giveaway. So we're going to be sharing your Emotion Wonderland characters with some of our listeners. That's something they can sign up for, and we're going to tell them more about that in the outro. As we let you go, looking five years down the road, when you look at Emotion Wonderland, what do you see? [00:27:35] NL: I see it as a movement where people start to – It’s not just about me and our brand and our things. I think I would like to see a shift where people start to approach emotions from that group sort of perspective, and that it leverages play a little bit more. So I think having it be something that is just in your everyday integrated tool for people, that's really what I want. I want this to be a movement for a different way to think about emotions. [00:28:00] PF: Nadine, thank you for sitting down and talking about this. I know we'll talk again, but thank you. Best of success on this because this is just an incredible program that you've created. [00:28:10] NL: Thank you so much and happy holidays. I hope it's not too many big emotions. [00:28:16] PF: Only the good ones. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:28:20] PF: That was Nadine Levitt, talking about navigating our emotions. If you'd like to learn more about Nadine, get some free resources from the Emotion Wonderland or her My Mama Says website, follow her on social media, or find out more about her other offerings, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. If you aren't following us on Instagram, this is the time to start. Through December 13th, we are having the 12 Days of Giving, where we're giving away one great prize every day. On December 11th, you have the chance to win the free Sad Puppy plushie from the Emotion Wonderland. So follow us @mylivehappy to register to win one fabulous prize a day. That's @mylivehappy on Instagram. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Women Supporting Women With Caroline Miller  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 393 of Live Happy Now. December 1st marks Women Supporting Women Day, and this week's guest believes that's something we aren't doing nearly enough. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm joined by author, speaker, and coach Caroline Miller, who's concerned about women's failure to support one another led her to write the e-book, #IHaveYourBack, which is about creating mastermind success groups for women. This week, she's here to share what she's learned about why women don't support one another, explain what it's doing to our culture, and then tell us what we can do about it. Let's take a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:43] PF: Caroline, welcome back to Live Happy Now. [00:00:45] CM: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it so much. [00:00:48] PF: It has been a while since we've talked and had you on the show. But when I saw what you're working on, I knew we had to get you back on to talk about this. So tell me – First of all, before we jump in, why don't you tell us what it is that your new project is? [00:01:04] CM: Well, I have a new e-book out called #IHaveYourBack, mastermind success groups for women. It's available as an e-book download for purchase on my website. I decided to just self-publish because I had been obsessed for several years now with finding a solution to why we, as women, know but don't always talk about the women don't support each other and how we actually actively undermine each other. I finally got to the point where I was brave enough to not just write about it, but include an evidence-based solution because all I saw was the problem being made more beautiful. I wanted to put out something that was proactive that people could do something immediately about, and that's the project. [00:01:53] PF: Let's talk about what it was that you saw that made you say, “I have to write about this.” [00:02:01] CM: The fact that women were standing still and going backwards, in terms of female CEOs and fortune 50 or fortune 500 companies, the World Economic Bureau saying it's going to be even longer, 185 years that the women achieved pay parity, the Me To movement. Time's Up was all coming out. What I saw was a lot of demonization of men, but no one talking about the problem of women shooting at each other inside the tent. I thought, okay, yes, we have real problems with what men have historically done to women. The patriarchal culture is very dangerous and difficult. But it's not the only thing that women are up against, and I didn't understand or know why it's so dangerous to talk about this topic as a woman. I wanted to understand, first of all, is it just me knowing that this has happened to me and every woman I know, while we whisper about and talk about it? Or is it real? That's number one. I wanted to find that out from an evidence-based perspective. Number two, the thing was if I opened my mouth about this publicly, I want to put out a solution. So I had to name the problem. I had to put it in the context of the fact that, yes, men do need to pay a price for what they've done and continue to do to women. But that's not the whole shooting match because we're sliding backwards. Why? Why are women sliding backwards in terms of pay equity and reproductive rights and all these other things? Is it possible that women are also holding other women back? Can I talk about that? So that's what I took on board. As I said, I just hired two researchers. I went through thousands of pages of research. What I learned was sickening and upsetting but hopeful because I did come up with something that I believe can change women's lives. But you have to be thoughtful and strategic about how you do it and are prepared to talk about that, so yeah. [00:03:59] PF: Can you tell us some about what your research found, what you were finding? [00:04:05] CM: A bunch of things. I found that what – Scarcity theory. A lot of people just go, “Yeah, women don't support women in professional settings.” But that's just because there's only one seat at the table. Women have to guard their seats, just like Katie Couric saying, “I wasn't going to mentor Ashleigh Banfield. That's career suicide.” I think she said career suicide. So I found that, yes, there's a scarcity theory theory out there, but we continue to act as if it's true. So even when it's not true, if we continue to believe that there's only one seat at the table for a woman of power, we will continue to act as if there is no room for the rest of us. I'll tell you another thing, culturally. I remember watching a football game with my husband maybe a year ago, and I watched a kicker make a field goal, and the whole team celebrated, went out, hugged him. I turned to my husband and I said, “I can't think of a single time the bench is cleared theoretically in an analogy in any possible way for me because I did something well. It just hasn't happened for most women that the bench is clear when a woman supports another woman's individual success.” Women tend to be friends. What they don't do is believe and achieve together. So what I found were all these examples of sisterhood coming together to change communal causes, reproductive rights, the Jane movement, the domestic workers strike. This is why the sisterhood is considered so important and like that's the way it is. But what I can't find, what I couldn't find, were examples of women coming together to support each other's individual goals. Communally will come together and work for rights and this and that thing, but the minute you have women going for their own goals, if you bring them together to support each other, that's considered just like a unicorn. It's considered so unusual for women to support each other's individual goals that when it happens, it elicits this, “Oh, my God. Where are these people?” [00:06:18] PF: Yeah. You talk about this in your book. Like how do you then start turning this around? [00:06:23] CM: Okay. So here's what I really do believe is going to make a difference in is making a difference is if women get together in strategically formed mastermind groups, and there are a number of reasons why they have to be formed carefully. You can't just go to like a Sheryl Sandberg lean in group and be assigned a group of people. Too many women tell me they've been assigned to groups put together by organizations, and you have to pay for the privilege. They don't know anything about these women's backgrounds or character. How do you know who's in it? So what you have to do is you have to go straight with Shelly Gable’s research, active constructive responding. You have to pull together a mastermind group of women who have a demonstrated history of being curious and enthusiastic about another woman's individual goals and dreams. That's number one because she found that that's the Rorschach test. You want to know if someone's in your corner, float an idea or success or some dream of yours in front of them and just watch. How do they respond? Are they curious? Are they enthusiastic? Do they change the subject? Are they passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive? She found that those are all wrong ways to respond to another woman’s success or dreams. The only one right way that I think determines whether or not someone is invited to be in your mastermind group is active constructive responding. So that's number one. Women have to get together and be agentic. We have to talk in ways we haven't been encouraged to talk about, which is about our goals and dreams. We have to do it in groups where we're not interrupted, where we're not mansplained. Most women never even get their dreams and goals out of their mouths, let alone their ideas, because they're always interrupted. So if you're in a mastermind group that has guidelines, and that's what I published here. It's a 43-page e-book. I lay out the case, the evidence for why we're doing this consciously and unconsciously, and here's how you start a mastermind group. Here's how you do it. Step one, step two, step three. So that’s it. You find those people. You have guidelines about how long people talk. You state your goals and dreams. You have to create psychological safety. Then all these amazing things begin to happen when you have accountability to the right people in the right group for the right reasons. You find that there's more creative risk taking. You begin to believe in yourself because other people support your dreams. They believe in you. They see you the way you want to be seen, the Michelangelo effect. People sculpt you with their praise and their feedback because they see you the way you want to be seen. That's just some of the reasons why these groups work. [00:09:03] PF: Let's talk a little bit about how someone goes about putting this together. Someone's like, “Okay, yeah. I want that support from other women.” So where do you start looking at? You've told us what we don't want and kind of the people that we want. We can't really go around interviewing people and saying, “Hey, how about this? Are you going to fit in my group?” How do you get it started? [00:09:24] CM: Well, it doesn't have to be your friends. In fact, some of your friends will be very threatened if you dare to dream bigger than who you are at that moment or what you want life. So it has to be people who fit this criteria, active constructive responding. You can observe people how they talk about other people's successes. Take a look at your social media feed. How many people are actually trumpeting another woman's success? If this is someone you know or want to get to know better, maybe it's an acquaintance, ask them. Reach out and ask them if they want to be in your mastermind group. That's one way. So I would keep it small. My current mastermind group is four people. I think the biggest could be seven. So you can find them either through your social circle. Or let's say you have one person you know you want to be in the group. Ask them if they know someone who fits all these criteria. That's the first way. I go into the rest of it in the book. So that's where you start. But it has to be somebody who wants to become her very best self, who has, let's say, a future best self in mind. There are three ways that people live. They have an ought self, an actual self, and an ideal self. Most people, and I'm going to say a lot of women, live as an actual self, just the person they show up as or as the ought self, the person they think they should be, according to their relationships, the way they're raised, the culture they're in, whatever. But many people never shoot for that ideal self. You want somebody who wants to maximize their potential and do whatever it takes, have grit. I think the last time you interviewed me, it was about my book, Getting Grit. This takes grit. So you have to be able to have the grit to pursue that. It's so much easier when you have the wind at your back because other people are brainstorming with you, supporting you. So you start by creating that circle. I also want to say that it's really important, once these groups get going, that these benefits continue to go into what Barbara Frederickson talks about, the upward spiral. You begin to feel like you matter. All this new research on mattering and an organization, how many people actually feel like they matter in a group? Not a lot of women have an opportunity to feel like they matter in a group where other people have their backs. They do begin to feel like experts. We all longed to be experts. When you bring your expertise into a group, you have an opportunity to teach people something. You bring what it is you know about web design, or web hosting, or writing a book, or giving a speech. Those collective energies coming together allow every person in there to be an expert. That's another huge psychological boost. It's just massive, having the freedom to ask other people to give you their ideas, to support you. I've had female friends ask me to lead a round of applause when they take the stage because they're worried other people won't clap for them. It's often the people who should be leading the applause for you who are not. I think the thing I want to be sure I'm doing here is talking about the fact that I think we do these things not because we want to, but because we're acculturated to do this. We are supposed to believe that there are mean girls. That that’s just the way women are. I mean, and so when we believe this, we unconsciously behave this way. So I want to take some of us just off the guilty hook and say we don't always know why we do these things to each other. But I do think that there are too many women who also know better who don't make any effort to lead a round of applause, amplify another woman's success. [00:13:01] PF: Well, let me ask you the purpose of creating a group like under – There are several different reasons and several different flavors, if you will, of groups that you could create. What would be – To who's listening, like why would you want to – What would be your purpose in putting that together? [00:13:19] CM: Because not enough women voice their dreams period. Being be able to voice your dreams and your goals, and brainstorm your way with also goal setting theory behind the pursuit of these goals, you will maximize your chances of succeeding. So as everyone in the field knows, I wrote – Not everyone. A lot of people know I wrote the first book to connect the science of happiness with the science of goal success. That book was my capstone at creating your best life. It was reissued last year as kind of a global bestseller. But it was the first book to put science to goal setting. I think every woman should be in a group where people have her back, but she's pursuing goals with the evidence of goal setting theory behind how those goals, learning goals and performance goals, are set, pursued, and achieved. We have to make it possible from every angle for us to succeed. So this is not just about coming together to talk in a nice way about each other. This is a working group. This is your board of directors. But do not go into an organization and be assigned a group. That is a nonstarter, as far as I can tell because you have to know the character and the behavior of the people you're going to be essentially opening the kimono in front of. Too many women have been violated by other women who blossom about them, make fun of them, tear them down. I mean, this one woman said at some of the research I looked at that she had to choose between her sanity and her career because the more she succeeded at work, the more she was torn down by other women. So you have to be in that kind of group. Let me quickly say some of the – What I've heard as a criticism. People say, “Well, men take each other down. Men are critical of each other. Men bully each other.” Yes. Of course, that's true. However, men are socialized to be goal directed, and, and, this is more important, and they are not biologically wired to be in friendship dyads the way women are socialized and wired to be. This Tend-and-Befriend research from the year 2000 that came out of the UCLA nurses study found that women need other women. We often have best friends who are good for us, but generally we do not. So the Tend-And-Befriend research found that oxytocin is secreted when women get together, and they take care of each other, and they bond. Especially they nurture each other when they're down. So that's why this being thrown out of the tribe is so existentially hellish for women because it violates our chemical nature. So, yes, it happens to men, but women are relationship-oriented. Men are more transactional. So it's even more potent for us to be in the right group in the right ways at the right time, as much as possible. [00:16:17] PF: So by bringing this out and by, one, sharing the massive research that you've done on it and bringing it forefront to women, what do you hope to accomplish, and how do you hope this is going to change the way that we interact and support one another? [00:16:31] CM: I want every woman to have access to just the guidelines on how to support a mastermind group and all the reasons why we need to do it. Even Kristin Neff has said, her most recent book on radical self-compassion, she's like, “This is what women don't do for themselves. They're compassionate for the world, and they lack compassion for themselves to do this.” We all need to understand that it's a compassionate act for us to come together in support of our own dreams and goals. Especially when – Just go back to the diseases of despair. Women are dying in numbers disproportionately larger than men. As Case and Deaton, the economists, have found, often because they lack a sense of purpose, so alcoholism, eating disorders, depression, suicide, women are really paying the price more than men. So that's a piece of why I'm doing it. I want women to be armed with these tools. I want them to know why it matters, and I really want women to understand we're not doing this just because we're nasty people, meaning us tear other women down, or we're jealous of them, or we pass along gossip about them. I think we've all been conditioned equally poorly, some more than others, and we need to understand the conscious and unconscious reasons why we do it. But we all have learned to override yelling at our in-laws at Thanksgiving, hopefully. I mean, there's all kinds of wiring that we overcome in order to be socially appropriate, to be members of tribes. We can overcome this wiring and this conditioning if we want to. That's what I believe. [00:18:03] PF: I love it. You know I love that you've done this because I think it really does open our eyes toward our behaviors and the fact that we can change them. You give us a really great blueprint for making that change and starting our own little path to success into turning this ship around. As we let you go, what is the one thing that you hope everyone takes away from this conversation? [00:18:29] CM: When you hear of another woman’s success, whether you want to or not, pass it on in a positive way to somebody else. Override that instinct to be envious, which I have, which we all have. Share another woman's success on social media. Do it twice a week, and you're going to feel better, and the world's going to be better. [00:18:50] PF: I love that. I love that. Thank you for that. That is a terrific tip. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:18:59] PF: That was Caroline Miller, talking about the importance of women supporting women. If you'd like to learn more about Caroline and her research, follow her on social media, or find out where to download her e-book, #IHaveYourBack, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Just a reminder that today is the last day to take advantage of Live Happy’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday savings. Visit our store at store.livehappy.com and take 30% of everything in there. That’s store.livehappy.com, and no promo code is needed. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Setting Boundaries for the Holidays With Melissa Urban  [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 391 of Live Happy Now. It's beginning to look a lot like the holidays. For many of us, that can look more like walking through a minefield than a winter wonderland. I'm your host, Paula, Felps. This week, I'm so excited to be joined by Melissa Urban, whose best-selling The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free is changing the way people learn to say no. She's here today to talk about how we can set boundaries this holiday season with our friends, families, and coworkers to make it less stressful and more manageable. Believe me, once you've tried it, you'll realize these are habits you want to carry with you into the New Year. Let's listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:43] PF: Melissa, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:46] MU: Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to talk to you, Paula. [00:00:49] PF: What perfect timing to be able to talk to you because we have the holidays coming up. You have The Book of Boundaries. Oh, my God. Those two things go together. [00:01:00] MU: Don’t they, though? [00:01:01] PF: Or don't go together too often. Once I got this book, I really wanted to talk to you and especially wanted to do it with a holiday theme. Before we dig into all that, tell us how you became the boundary lady. Is that who you are? [00:01:14] MU: Yeah. It is now. At least that's how a lot of my followers spouses know me on Instagram. “Oh, you got that information from the boundary lady, didn’t you?” I've been helping people set and hold boundaries since the earliest days of the Whole30. So I'm the Whole30 co-founder, and I founded the program in 2009. If you're familiar with the Whole30, it's a 30-day elimination program. So you're eliminating foods and beverages for 30 days kind of as a self-experiment before you reintroduce them and compare your experience. For those 30 days, you're saying no a lot to break room doughnuts and your mother's pasta and the glass of wine at happy hour. I quickly discovered that people were uncomfortable saying no, especially in social settings, especially when faced with peer pressure or pushback. So I started helping people say no, in the context of their Whole30, around food and alcohol and talking about their diets and the food on their plate and their bodies. That naturally led to them asking me, “Okay. Well, what do I say to my mother-in-law who's always dropping by without calling, or the coworker who's always gossiping, or my nosy neighbor who's always asking if he can borrow power tools?” My boundary conversations just very naturally spilled over into that arena, and they really kicked into high gear when the pandemic hit. Because I think we all realize during the pandemic that we lacked healthy boundaries around work and home and kids in school. It was all starting to run together. Especially women and especially moms were really burned out and exhausted. So I've been doing this work really in earnest since then. [00:03:01] PF: This book is amazing. It is so comprehensive, and it covers everything imaginable. I was just so knocked out as I was going through it. In that book, you offer such a great definition of boundaries. I just loved it. It's like I was underlining it. H many times can I underline? Because we talk about boundaries, but we don't necessarily understand what they are. So can you tell us what you mean when you're talking about boundaries? [00:03:26] MU: Yes. I often think there's a misconception. Boundaries are about controlling other people or telling other people what to do. Or putting these big walls up between you and other people or holding people at a distance. None of that is true. So I define boundaries as limits that you set around how you allow other people to engage with you. So a boundary doesn't tell someone else what to do. It tells others what you are willing to do, the actions that you are going to take to keep yourself safe and healthy. Ultimately, boundaries improve your relationships. They're an invitation to the people in your life to say, “Hey, I have this limit. And you may not have been aware that I've had it but I'm going to communicate this limit to you clearly and kindly as an invitation. Because if you can show up in my life in a way that also respects this limit, our relationship can be so much more open and more trusting and more respectful and feel good to both of us.” [00:04:33] PF: So it improves relationships, but it also really improves our mental health. [00:04:38] MU: Yes. [00:04:38] PF: Can you talk about what does it do for us to be able to set and maintain those boundaries? [00:04:44] MU: So I want you to think about a situation in your life that brings on this idea of dread or anxiety. Maybe it’s – [00:04:51] PF: How many would you like? [00:04:53] MU: I know. Let's just start with one. Maybe it's a particular person, where every time you see their name come up on your phone or they walk by or you know they're going to be at an event, you just cringe like, “Oh, I do not want to be with this person. I don't want to engage.” Maybe it's around a particular conversation topic, where you know that if the subject of your weight or your body or politics or religion or when you're going to have a baby or your chronic illness come up, you just feel this sense of real anxiety or dread. Those are all signs that a boundary is needed. When you think about how a boundary can protect our mental health, boundaries are what help us eliminate or at least dramatically reduce that sense of dread and anxiety, resentment, mistrust, all of the things that cause stress and cause us to show up not as our full selves in relationships. They really help us reclaim our time, our energy, our capacity, our physical space, our sense of safety, and our mental health. [00:05:59] PF: Yeah. Your book really emphasizes how important it is to be able to create healthy boundaries. If they're so good for us, why are they so hard? Why? They should be easy, right? [00:06:10] MU: Well, first of all, and I'll speak for myself, but as women and then especially as moms, we've been conditioned our whole lives not to have needs. As a mom, I am praised the most when I am selfless, having no needs, having no wants, no desires of my own, and putting everyone else's comfort and sense of security and happiness above my own. Then when we do have needs and we express them, no matter how politely or kindly we do, we're told we're selfish or cold or that we have too many rules. Often we're told those things by the people who benefit the most from us not having any limits. I think there's a lot for us to unlearn before we think about setting boundaries. Then on top of that, I’ll acknowledge, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to advocate for your feelings, to point out a way in which someone you truly care about was overstepping. Even if their intentions were good, it's uncomfortable to advocate for yourself, and that does make the idea of boundaries feel challenging. [00:07:20] PF: So do you recommend that somebody starts with like small boundaries and then kind of works up to the bigger stuff? Or do we dive right in and tackle the big issues? What's the best way to approach this? [00:07:32] MU: I think there are a ton of entry points here. So for some, I'd say starting with boundaries around food and drink, whether you're doing a Whole30, which is essentially a boundary like boot camp, or whether you're just going into the next event, practicing saying, “No, thanks. I'm not drinking right now. No, thanks. I'm not eating gluten right now. No, I'm good. No, thank you.” Practicing that, I think, can be incredibly empowering because, A, you always have control over what you choose to eat or drink. Like I doubt anyone at that party is going to like sit on you and pour alcohol into your throat. Saying no to foods and drinks that you know don't serve you also brings you energy and better sleep and a happier mood and improved digestion. So that has a spillover effect into other areas of your life and can really help build confidence. In other times, when people read the book, they go, “You know what? My relationship with my coworker or mom or best friend has been bothering me for so long. I'm just going to go in and I'm going to like go in hard. I'm going to set the one limit that is going to bring me the most relief in my life. It's going to help me reclaim the most time and energy and mental health, and I feel prepared, and I have the script, and like I'm going to go in strong.” It kind of just depends on like what you're up for and how big you want to go. But I don't think there's any one way to start a boundary practice. I think the important thing is just to start practicing. [00:08:59] PF: Yeah. You just mentioned the script, and that's something that I love about this book because not only do you say this is why you should do it, and this is how you do it. You actually give a script to talk us through that. How did you come up with those because you have something for everything? [00:09:16] MU: I do. I have more than 130 scripts in the book, and each script has three different levels of boundary conversation. Your green level, which is sort of the kindest, gentlest. The yellow, which is, okay, you're getting some pushback, and you really need to reinforce the boundary. Then the red, which is like, “We are at code red here. The relationship is about to be permanently damaged if I am not able to hold this limit.” I started writing scripts many years ago because my Whole30 community would come to me and they'd say, “Okay, I need to set a boundary around going to my office happy hour but not drinking.” I'm like, “Okay, how can I help?” They were like, “What do I say? I know I need to set the boundary. I know how it would benefit me, but I don't know how to say it.” So I started helping people with actual scripts that sound very natural, very conversational. They don't sound like therapy speak. But because this is so uncomfortable, I find arming people with a script that they can practice at home. Tell your shower wall, “No, thanks. I'm not drinking right now,” right? Repeat it to your car, to your dog so that your body absorbs it somatically, and you get really comfortable with the phrase. I think it makes people feel more confident heading into the boundary conversations and makes them feel less like they have to wing it. It tends to help them not water down their boundaries so much that it's ineffective. Or come out of the gate so strong, too strong that they do end up damaging the relationship in an attempt to set the limit. [00:10:44] PF: What’s so great about it is the fact that you do give pushback, like if this is happening, instead of – Too oftentimes, if you're doing like a role playing type of thing, the other party is like too easy. They make it too easy on you. So that's something that's so great about that. People can really practice really setting that boundary. [00:11:02] MU: Yes. I want you to go into the conversations, assuming that the other person just didn't realize that you had a limit. Once you express it, they will be happy to meet it. Because most of the time, that's what happens. So you don't have to go in geared up for battle. I want you to assume the best. Also, of course, I'm going to prepare you if you do encounter pushback or peer pressure, or the people in your life continue to forget that you set this limit. I want you to have the words to be able to enforce it at the same time. [00:11:34] PF: That is so terrific and one area. This is why I wanted to talk to you. You've created scripts about the holidays. Oh, my gosh. There are so many minefields in the holiday season that I wanted to talk about. Can we start with families? This is so tough because the holidays are already challenging. Then we go home, and we start slipping back into these old family patterns and routines. So like, first of all, why do we do that? Why don't we remain the adults that we are when we go back home? [00:12:04] MU: I've never felt more like my 16-year-old self than when I sit down at my mom's dining room table. I think it's just childhood patterns and relationship dynamics run really deep. We absorb a lot of who we become as a person from our parents. So like my family, we didn't model healthy conflict. We kind of practiced avoidance. I'm going to want to keep the peace at all cost. I'm not going to want to bring up things that are uncomfortable or say something that I know someone's going to argue with. I'm going to want to be the peacekeeper. If your parents grew up fighting and always wanting you to pick sides, you may withdraw in family situations. There are so many reasons why setting boundaries with family and family dynamics can be really challenging. But at the same time, it's never too late to be the change agent in your family and start to create new relationships. The holidays can certainly feel like a perfect storm of boundary oversteps. I do want people to be prepared to go into all of these challenges thinking about, okay, what are the limits that I need to set specifically, and how can I communicate those effectively? [00:13:13] PF: Do you start setting those before the holidays? Do you wait till you're right there? How and when do you start unpacking all this? [00:13:21] MU: Anytime you can have a boundary conversation well ahead of the situation, when you are not enmeshed in it, when in the moment. Of course, I want you to set boundaries in the moment if needed but if you can set the expectation ahead of time. “Hey, mom and dad. Really looking forward to seeing you for Christmas this year. Just so you know, we're going to spend Christmas morning at home, just the three of us. We really want a quiet morning, and we'll come by at around noon before dinner.” Whatever boundary you need to set. “Hey, really looking forward to seeing you over the holidays. I know we disagree on politics, and it would make our visit far more pleasant if we could all agree just not to bring it up. Is that something we can all live with because it makes none of us happy when we have those discussions over the table?” Whatever the conversation seems like, if you can anticipate a boundary challenge and set expectation ahead of time and get buy in, that makes holding the boundary in the moment even easier. [00:14:17] PF: So what happens if they buy in in advance? But then in the actual situation, things start denigrating. Here come the political comments. What do you do then? Because you've already said it, and now they're breaking the rules. [00:14:30] MU: This is why I give you yellow scripts. You've already set the expectation. They say, “Yeah, we understand. It's not fun for anybody when politics come up.” Then you're at the table, and Uncle Joe brings up immigration. This is where you say, “Oh, oh. Wait, wait. We agreed. No politics at the table, Uncle Joe. But, hey, I know you just went on vacation. How was it? I don't think I even saw any photos. How did it go?” So you address the boundary overstep. You say, “I am not participating in this conversation,” and you quickly change the subject to allow everyone to move on gracefully. If they continue to talk over you and talk politics at the table, your red level boundary is, “I already said I won't participate in these conversations. Please excuse me.” You leave the table. You go for a walk. You step outside to make a phone call. You go in the other room with your kids, whatever that looks like. The red boundary is you holding the boundary by saying, “I am removing myself from this situation because it does not feel healthy to me.” [00:15:26] PF: You are teaching everyone at the table such a fantastic lesson because whether they want boundaries in that moment or not, there are other things in their lives that they're going, “Oh, I wonder if I can use this?” [00:15:38] MU: Yes, yeah. Often all it takes is for one person. It's a hard job to be the change agent in a family. But if you can do it, there's a really good chance that other people in the family have felt like you too, and they just haven't wanted to say anything. I have absolutely watched in my community the ripple effects of you setting your boundary trickle out very quickly to everyone else, who will then back you up in this limit. [00:16:03] PF: How can it change families if all of a sudden, gosh, we're not getting together, and we're not ripping open old wounds, and we're not fighting about our differences, but we're looking for ways to actually get along and be together and find commonality? How does that change your whole dynamic that time and going forward? [00:16:20] MU: Imagine what your upcoming holiday would feel like if you knew that when you showed up at your family's house, nobody was going to bring up politics. Nobody was going to comment on the food on your plate or talk about your weight loss or their weight loss or their diets or your bodies. Nobody was going to try to make you feel guilty when after the meal, you said, “Okay, it's time for us to go to dad's house now. It was so nice to visit with you. Thank you so much.” The sense of like immediate freedom and relief that you would feel, knowing you could go into these holidays with not only these preset expectations but the words to hold the boundaries, should you find in the moment that people overstep, I think would just absolutely feel tremendous. It would give you a sense of self confidence. It would remind you that you are in control and take responsibility for your own feelings. It gives you the power to actually hold the boundary because you're not relying on anyone else to kind of hold that for you or to join you. If they decide that they can't or won't hold this healthy limit, you know the action you're going to take to keep yourself safe. [00:17:29] PF: You also talk about managing that guilt of not spending enough time with the other side of the family. Once you're married, once you have children, it gets even more complicated. I've seen so many of my friends go through this, where they are just run ragged by the end of Christmas Day because they feel like they have to give both sides. Sometimes, it's like four sides because you have divorces with the parents and then the grandparents. Nobody's happy the end of the day because everyone's just exhausted. So how do you manage that kind of guilt and everything that's going on with separate sides of the family? [00:18:05] MU: This is what psychologists call unearned guilt. This is not guilt because you have done something wrong, and it is biologically serving you and your community by you feeling bad and remembering that you did something wrong, so you don't do it again. This is unearned guilt that we are choosing to take on. So in the simplest way, you don't have to feel guilty. You can just say, “No, thank you.” What I am doing now is creating traditions for my family. This is a time-honored tradition that my parents did when they had me and their parents did when they had them. We are creating a new family unit now, and I want to create traditions with my children the way that my parents did with me. There's a chance that your mom didn't feel comfortable setting boundaries with your grandmother. That might be a big part of the reason why they get so upset and defensive and hurt when you set boundaries with them from this sense of like jealousy that they wish they could have done this with you when you were kids. You're doing it now. That can be very challenging for older generations. But I think it's perfectly acceptable to think about and decide as a family together, what do we want our holidays to look like? Then to notify other family members what you are and are not willing to do. [00:19:24] PF: That's terrific because I know in our family, my partner's uncle, it was tradition. Christmas Eve was at his house. What was very funny is everybody complained. Nobody wanted to go there. For years, everybody has to go to Uncle Bobby's, and we're just like, “They're complaining the whole time.” So about three years ago, probably about five years ago now, her brother's like, “We're not going to do it,” and everyone's like, “Wait a minute. We don't have to do this?” “Let’s just say that's no longer a family tradition.” It’s amazing because it's like you get time back, and you get this freedom that just didn't seem to exist prior to that. [00:20:00] MU: That's such a good example of one person. Like everybody thinking it and just one person being willing to say it. Yes. I like to remind people, you can do it any way you want. So we have this nontraditional approach to Christmas with my parents, where it's like, “Hey, whether we celebrate it on Christmas Day or January 29th, it kind of doesn't matter. We're going to have Christmas in a way and a time that works for all of us.” They'll keep their tree up late, and we'll hold presents for my son. But we get to celebrate in a way that doesn't stress everybody out. So you can have those nontraditional celebrations. You can choose to not go anywhere at all, and you don't need an excuse to stay home. It doesn't have to be, well, we're going to take a vacation this year. It can be we just don't want to travel, and we want a quiet Christmas at home, and we're not accepting visitors, and we're not going to go anywhere. We'll happily FaceTime with you. If we celebrate Christmas in July, then that's fantastic too. But I encourage people to think outside the box because you can create traditions any way you choose as a family. [00:21:04] PF: We're just not used to thinking we can do that. We're just not used to thinking that we can go, especially in the holidays. That we can just say, “Yeah, we're not participating in that tradition. We want to create our own.” But how important is it for our children to see us taking that initiative and for them to understand like, “Yes, I can create my own boundaries going forward.”? [00:21:25] MU: Yes. It's so important for your kid. People often say, “How do I impart this idea of healthy boundaries with my kids?” It's setting and holding healthy boundaries on behalf of you and the family and modeling that for your kids. You're also doing this on their behalf. My son does not enjoy being in a car most of Christmas day, as we travel hours and hours between all of the families. But he loves that he gets four Christmases, one with us, one with grandma, one with Grandpa, one with his dad. He loves that we get to spread it out over the course of a month. So it really does make everybody's time easier, and you can acknowledge your family members’ disappointment, “I'm sorry that we won't be spending the day with you,” while still holding the boundary. We'll make sure we have plenty of time to visit two weekends from now when we come, and we'll do all of the Christmas things. We'll sing carols, we'll sit around the tree, we'll play games, and it will be just as festive. [00:22:21] PF: That is such a wonderful way to approach it. The other thing that really interferes – Not interferes. That can take some time is our work place during this time of year. You've got holiday parties, and those are often obligatory. How do we set boundaries around that? Because we're walking a fine line since it is work, and some things might be required. [00:22:43] MU: It is challenging, of course, to set boundaries in the workplace because of the power dynamics in play. I think a lot of times, companies sometimes – It’s not that they leave it until the last minute, but you've got projects. You've got deadlines. You've got goals kind of that you want to wrap up by year end. Again, setting expectations ahead of time is key. If you are going to be taking time off during the holidays, it's requesting that plenty early, reminding people ahead of time like, “Hey. Just so you remember, I’ll be out. I would send this email out like December 1st. I'm going to be out from this point to this point around the holidays. I will not be checking email or Slack. I will not be participating in meetings.” Make it very clear that you are out of office. If we need to have meetings ahead of time to set deliverables, let me know. I'm going to have XYZ cover my deliverables during this time period. So everyone knows who to go to. Those little reminders along the way can really help to set the expectation so that when somebody does send an email or text to you to ask you a question, you can say, “I am out of office and not responding to text. I'll be back in the office on this date.” So I think that's really important to communicate very clearly. But then you also have to set the boundary with yourself that if you say you're out of office, you're not checking email. You're not responding to just like that one Slack message really quick because now you're changing the expectation, and people will take as much as you are willing to give. [00:24:04] PF: Yeah. You have some great illustrations in your book about that. About the poor woman who was on vacation. [00:24:10] MU: That was my sister. That was my sister. It was – [00:24:13] PF: Oh, my God. I was horrified. [00:24:15] MU: Whose boss is like – [00:24:15] PF: [inaudible 00:24:15] story real quick because that's just horrifying. [00:24:18] MU: She worked in a very toxic workplace environment, where her boss tracked her down on her first vacation in over a year and like called her off of her paddleboard in the middle of the ocean for something that was absolutely not an emergency. Though my sister tried to set boundaries a number of times in that organization, they very clearly demonstrated that this was not a place where boundaries would be respected. So she did all she could to create a healthier workplace environment and could not and ended up finding a new job. But at least she tried. That's what I say to people in the workplace. Your only options are not to let your employer or coworkers continue to run you over or quit and get a new job. There are a number of options in the middle where you can try at least to set and hold boundaries around your work time, your personal time, your ethics or values or your personal space. If they don't hold and you're not able to maintain those boundaries because the workplace is simply not amenable to them, at least you know you've done everything you could to try to make your workplace culture healthy. [00:25:22] PF: Yeah. That is so terrific. Can you talk about what happens to us when we start practicing setting boundaries? Because it seems like once you've kind of mastered it, you're probably going to get pretty good at it in a lot of different areas that you didn't even think about going into it. [00:25:37] MU: I think you do. Boundaries kind of bring about this sense of inertia, where an object in motion stays in motion. What happens is it becomes like this self-affirming prophecy. So you steal yourself and you say, “I deserve to set this limit. My needs are worthy. My comfort is worthy. My feelings matter, just as much as anybody else's, and I am going to set this limit because I know it is for the best for my health and safety, and I know it's going to improve the relationship.” You set the limit, and the other person respects it, and your relationship improves. Now, you're like, “Okay. Now, I have the self-confidence to seek out other areas,” and you feel more comfortable setting them. You feel more comfortable holding them. Other people in your life experience this real sense of safety around you because they know that you mean what you say and that you will take responsibility for your own feelings and your own needs. That is a very comforting and reassuring place to be, and you're allowing other people in your life to say no to you. So now, you're both showing up where you want to, how you want to in a way that feels good to both of you. It has this tremendous cascade effect, this ripple effect that will move through all of your relationships at work, with family, with friends, with total strangers on the street. It really is such a powerful, transformative experience that anyone can start literally right now. [00:27:02] PF: That's so excellent. This book is absolutely incredible. It is so informative, educational, inspiring, and funny. There's just so much that we can take away from it. This is terrific. We are going to – In the wrap up, I'm going to tell people how they can follow you on social media, where they can find you, where they can buy your book. But as they enter the holiday season, what's the thing that you most want them to keep in mind? [00:27:27] MU: I want you to keep in mind that your comfort, your joy, the sense of magic and wonder that the holidays can bring are all at your disposal this year with a healthy boundary practice. [00:27:41] PF: I love it. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show, for writing this book, and for sharing this with us. [00:27:47] MU: Thanks so much Paula. It was a joy to talk to you as well. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:27:54] PF: That was Melissa Urban, author of The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free. If you'd like to learn more about Melissa and her work, follow her on social media, or buy 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. 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]