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Working moms often say, “I have everything I want, but I don’t feel happy”. What I have found is that higher achievers have patterned into themselves a feeling of “not enough” which makes it difficult to feel happy. So, to make feeling happy easier and more regular, it is something you must practice. Today on the podcast I want to teach you the simplest way to practice feeling happy, in 30 seconds or less. This daily practice will help bring you back into the moment and give your body a full happiness experience that will help to make all those “good feelings” more of the default.
Topics in this episode:
Circumstances don’t dictate your happiness
The “struggle story” many high achievers believe
Your brain is not hardwired for happiness
Something your kids do everyday that will help you be more present and happy
Remember when your kids would stop and smell the roses?
Announcing a brand new free audio series!
Show Notes:
Learn to be a more present and connected mom! Click here to sign up for a free 19-day audio series that will teach you tools & strategies for being present and happy in your everyday life. Click here to sign up: https://www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin
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Transcript
Intro
I hear this a lot from working moms - they have everything that they want in life for the most part, and yet they don't feel happy. And I have found this to be very common for high achievers that have sort of patterned into themselves this feeling of not enough.
So today on the podcast, I want to share with you what it takes to practice happiness, because it's not our brain's natural state. It actually requires effort to be happy and feel satisfied and feel like life is enough.
And I want to teach you the simplest practice that will take you 30 seconds or less, that is going to help you learn how to feel happier, faster.
Oh, and I have a pretty exciting opportunity for you, a new free audio series that I am putting out into the world just for you. And I'm going to share more about that at the end of the podcast, too. Okay, you ready to practice happiness? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working moms. I've had so many amazing women reach out to me recently, either to tell me about how much this podcast has meant to them or to talk to me about coming out to their company or their community group to speak to their people about work-life balance or going after the life that they want. And I've had a number of new clients start with me.
There's just been such an overwhelming amount of positive communication coming from so many of you. And it tells me that the work that we're doing here on this podcast and the work that I do as a coach and your intentionality about becoming the working mom that you want to be, it's really making a difference in the lives of so many people.
And on a recent breakthrough call I had with a working mom that was interested in working with me as her coach, she told me that her son, he had to have been between the ages of five and seven, I would say, apparently he knows my voice and he knows my podcast because she must listen to it in the car on the way to drop off or pick up or something like that.
He refers to me as the one who helps mommy work less and be with him more. I just love that. I think what she told me was they were driving in the car and he asked her, hey, is that the woman that helps you work less and be with me more? Isn't that just the best?
That is exactly what we're doing here on this podcast. And in this movement to help working moms stop over prioritizing work and doing more and learn how to prioritize their families, fun and rest and a whole lot more. I just love it so much.
The coach that helps you work less and be with your family more.
I might even just make that my new tagline on my LinkedIn description or something like that. The coach that helps you work less and be with your family more. Because that's really what it's all about. It's about having a life where work and family and fun and rest are all prioritized.
It doesn't mean that you're choosing one or the other. It doesn't even mean that there's an equal amount of time spent on any of them. It just means that there's an importance in all of them and you are prioritizing all of them at some point in your life. And it feels very well rounded and balanced.
And with all the good that is happening here on the podcast, and for all of the working moms that are listening and for the good that's happening in my business and in coaching, it feels like this is a really good time to have a conversation about what it means to practice happiness.
Because believe me, this is something that I am working on right now and on some level feel like I'm sort of in the thick of practicing. Because, just because good things are happening, it doesn't mean that you're actually experiencing good feelings. Just because good things are happening, it doesn't mean that you are feeling happy.
One of the things I hear a lot from women on their breakthrough call with me - that's that free coaching call that I offer to you if you're interested in working with me and coaching. One of the things that I hear from them a lot is I feel like I should be happier. I have a lot of the things that I want in life. A wonderful family, a supportive partner, a good job, I make good money, we have a nice house, good friends, and yet I don't feel happy.
Practicing letting all of those good feelings in.
And one of the things that we do in coaching together is we work at practicing letting all of those good feelings in. Because happiness does not come from our circumstance. It doesn't come from having a good job or a good amount of money or a house, or a loving spouse and kids. Happiness or really any good feeling does not come essentially from having a circumstantially great life. What? Let's take a pause and really think about that.
A better job isn't going to make you happy.
Your kids growing up or tantruming less is not going to make you any more happy.
Making more money is not going to make you more happy.
Having a partner that helps out around the house is not going to make you more happy.
Living closer to your family so you have easier childcare is not going to make you happy.
Why? Because our emotions, our feelings, they don't come from our circumstances. And I talk about this a lot on the podcast - Basic Behavioral Science, what it teaches us is that our emotions come not from our circumstances, but from our thoughts about those circumstances.
It's what you are thinking about your job, about your success, about your kids, about your spouse, about how much you accomplished today, about how well you did on that presentation or with those clients, about how much money you make, about where you live.
It is your thoughts about your circumstances that make you happy or dissatisfied, that make you feel pride or not enough, that make you feel motivated or disconnected.
Change your thoughts about your life and about your circumstances.
Which means if you want to experience more happiness in life, the thing that you really have to change is your thoughts about your life and about your circumstances.
So in coaching, we do a lot of work on learning the tools of identifying the thoughts that make you feel unhappy or dissatisfied or inadequate, or learning how those thoughts affect you and your emotions and the things that you do or the things that you don't do. And you learn how to process through and identify those thoughts and emotions and behaviors and then ultimately learn how to change them in the moment. You learn how to course correct your thoughts and your emotions and your behaviors so that they don't take you down a path that makes you feel bad.
But here's the one thing that I've come to realize, particularly about myself, and now I see it in so many of the women that I work with, and this is really the first takeaway that I really want you to have as we talk about practicing happiness, this thing that I've noticed for high achievers is that they have an inherent belief or a default story of struggle, meaning things are not supposed to come easy for them.
Believing that hard work = achievement.
You work hard to achieve, you put in a lot of effort to do things that maybe don't come easy or require you to push yourself even when you don't feel motivated. It's a story, a struggle that high achievers essentially require hard work. And if it doesn't feel hard, if it doesn't require, on some level, a push within you, in other words, if it feels easy, they're doing it wrong and they need to be doing more.
So being a high achiever and things feeling sort of easy to achieve, that is kind of an oxymoron for high achievers.
Now, I'm not saying that that's a correct belief or the correct story to have. It's just simply what I've identified sort of within myself and other high achievers. And it's not useful to me, certainly not useful to you to believe, because it has us constantly feeling dissatisfied, not good enough, feeling like we have to push ourselves all of the time. It's exhausting. Instead of relishing in and resting in all of the goodness and the happiness of the things we've created.
Another way to think about this is that we, as high achievers, have practiced things feeling hard and not enough. And so that is a natural place for a high achiever's brain and body to go.
What high achievers have not practiced very much is being happy and feeling enough and feeling satisfied. So in order to make happiness a more regular or daily experience, you actually have to start practicing allowing your brain and your body to feel good, to feel happy.
And then as you do that, let me just be clear - when you start practicing, something inherent in that need to practice is the understanding that you're not very good at it yet, which means it's not going to come naturally. And that's the second takeaway I want you to have from this podcast that practicing happiness is not going to come naturally. It's actually going to require some effort.
And the reason why this is such an important concept for you to understand is because most of us think that happiness should just come to us, right? We think that we should naturally have a perspective of life and of our successes and our decisions that make us feel really good, when in reality, having a happy perspective of life is something that you need to get in the habit of doing. It's not the most natural place for our brains to go, not just as high achievers, but simply as humans.
Our brains are hardwired for survival, not for happiness.
And the reason for that is because our brain is hardwired for your survival, not for your happiness. Your brain is hardwired to keep you alive at all costs, not necessarily to ensure that you enjoy your life because you can survive and be unhappy your entire life. You probably just don't want to do that.
The fastest way to feel happy is not just to think happy thoughts, but to actually feel it.
Now, here's what I've learned for myself in practicing happiness. The fastest way to feel happy is not just to think happy thoughts, but to actually feel it. To experience it is to stop and smell the roses. And this is the third point that I want to make here on the podcast.
Now, I don't know about you, but my kids are the best at forcing me to stop and smell the roses to look at a ladybug or a roly poly for like the 10th time. Kids have this natural ability to just simply be present. Their brains haven't developed in such a way where they start thinking about the future and bringing on all of these worry, anxious thoughts. And they don't yet have the ability to hold onto their past either. So their most natural state is just simply presence.
And it's not even that they stop and smell the roses and look at that 10th ladybug or roly poly. It's that they have almost a visceral, full body experience of smelling the flower or looking at the ladybug. They're giddy with excitement and enjoy it. They are experiencing happiness in this very small everyday moment and experience. They are quite literally practicing happiness.
Every time they stop and they look at something or smell something or notice something, their brain is taking it all in through their five senses. The wonder of the flower or the ladybug or in my case these days, the lizards that are all over the backyard that the kids are super excited about seeing every time they see one.
Their five senses are taking in the experience and then their brain is labeling it as, good or fun or beautiful or wondrous. Their body is receiving that information. Experiencing all of these good feels, these good vibrations that come from it.
Now, as we've gotten older, these everyday experiences don't tend to bring wonder to us in the same way, but it doesn't mean that it can't.
The simplest way I have found to practice happiness and joy…
Practicing being present and noticing even the smallest of things that brings pleasure or joy or makes you smile, noticing these things, pausing and intentionally having a moment where you allow yourself to take in all of these good feelings - this is the simplest way I have found to practice happiness and joy.
But what's really important is that you start to do this regularly every day, multiple times a day. Because the goal is to get your body and your brain familiar with those good feelings of joy, of wonder, of awe, of presence. And the more you do that, the easier it will be to continue to do it and the faster you will be able to get into that space in bigger life circumstances.
If you're feeling confused, let me actually break this all down for you again in a very simple way. I want you to practice allowing your body to feel the experience of good emotions so that it becomes easier for your body and your brain to recall what that feels like.
Right now, you are very practiced in the feelings of not enough or any emotion, ultimately, that we're kind of labeling as being bad. You're practicing that. And so your brain and your body naturally gravitate towards those experiences in your body. If you want to change that default experience, then you have to start doing something different. You have to start practicing feeling good.
So here's what I want you to do. I want you to find at least ten moments in your day where you can essentially stop and smell the roses. Or you stop whatever you're doing. Maybe you can close your eyes for just 5 seconds and think about how good this moment is. It doesn't have to be earth shattering good, it could be how lovely something smells or how the sunbeam feels coming through a window. Or it could be the taste of a good cup of coffee or the quietness of your house after your kids have gone to sleep. Or it could be the satisfaction as you walk out of a meeting that went really well.
Practicing presence.
I guarantee you that you have dozens of these moments every single day that you simply gloss over these smell the roses sorts of moments. But rather than glossing over them, I want you to stop and close your eyes and think about the goodness of the moment. I want you to focus on how good it quite literally feels in your body all of those sensations that are taking place in your body because of that goodness.
This is actually amazing because I just had this moment, this smell the roses sort of moment. I'm writing this podcast by going for a walk, which, if you follow my podcast, you know that that's how I write my podcast. I go for a walk. It usually takes me about 3.4 miles, to be exact, to write the podcast, and I dictate it to my phone.
So I'm on this walk, and I just walked by this tiny little park with a couple of tiny little slides and a little climbing structure. The whole circle enclosure was super small, and I just walked by it. And there was a kid coming out of a stroller, maybe two years old, and they were with their caretaker. And I heard the caretaker say, do you want to take off your jacket? And then this little voice I couldn't even see if it was a boy or girl, but this little voice, I heard them say, yes, sweetest little voice.
And in that moment, I had a flashback of what it was like when my kids were this age and we went to tiny little parks that now they don't seem very cool at all. In fact, they're just not. But for them, they're so entertaining.
And my brain flashed back to this moment of me taking my children to these tiny little parks and how sweet those years were and how simple things brought so much pleasure to their life. And that memory of hearing that little kid's voice just made me smile. And so I stopped and I closed my eyes, and rather than glossing through the moment, took a couple of deep breaths, and I brought to mind a couple of those memories for myself. And I noticed how my heart felt sort of warm and cozy. And I did that for about 10 seconds, just almost imagining this kind of radiation of goodness inside of me. And then I kept walking again and kind of went about writing this podcast.
I noticed that I smiled and I could have glossed through the moment and just took it in through my brain, essentially, just the memory of, like, oh, weren't those sweet moments. I just loved when my kids were that age, or that little voice. I could have taken it all cognitively into my brain and not let it connect to my body. But then I would not have been actually practicing that happy feeling, I would have glossed over it.
Getting out of our head and into our body.
So we're getting out of the head experience of knowing that these things feel good or that life is good or these little moments that we know are good, that we should be celebrating. We're kind of getting out of the cognitive experience of it, and we're making it more visceral. I want you to practice the visceral feeling, the embodiment of happiness, at least ten times a day. The more intentionally you do it, the easier it's going to be and the more likely it will be for your brain and your body to take you to this happy present place. On its own, it'll become more of a default.
Happiness is something that you can practice, and it's not a problem that your brain and your body don't go there naturally as high achievers. What I have found is that we just have simply patterned into ourselves this story of struggle, this story that things need to be hard, the story of not enoughness. And part of the unwinding of that story or that script is intentionally practicing something different.
The goal is not just to think it in your mind, it's to experience it down to your bones.
There's a lot of ways to practice feeling happy, but the goal is not just to think it in your mind, it's to experience it down to your bones to experience that, deep down, joy, satisfaction, love, calmness that comes with happiness.
Happiness and presence go hand in hand.
For me, I have found the most effective ways to practice happiness, also tend to go hand in hand with feeling present because it's very difficult to experience joy and happiness if you're actually not in the moment, if you're thinking about something else or dwelling on something else or thinking about what's to come or what has happened. Happiness and presence, they sort of go hand in hand.
I want to help you learn how to practice being present. I want to actually give you the tools, very simple tools, things that you could do in just a couple of minutes or less to help you practice being present, which is going to help you feel happy and make that experience easier as well.
We oftentimes think making shifts in our patterns and our behaviors and our mindsets take a lot of time, but they don't have to. If you think it's going to take a lot of time or a lot of effort or you give yourself a lot of time, it will. But just like this simple practice of stopping and smelling the roses can quite literally happen in about ten or 20 seconds. There's a lot of different ways to practice being present that don't take a whole lot of time and I want to share those practices with you.
So I'm really excited to be sharing with you something new that I have put out for you. It is a 19 day audio series with 19 different strategies and tools to practice being present in five minutes or less. This is a free audio series I am putting out into the world. I want everyone to have this audio series. And I made it an audio series because I know how much you love listening to this podcast and how much easier it is to digest information in this format, and so I really wanted to make it easy for you to take in this content and actually implement what it takes to be present and happy.
So when you sign up for this 19 day audio series, what you're going to get is a daily email with an explanation of the strategy or the tool to help you learn how to be present. And then an audio that's five minutes or less that you can listen to while you walk or while you're driving in the car or whatever it may be. And in addition to that, I give you a workbook that if you really want to dig a little deeper and make even faster progress, I give you a workbook that's going to have basically a ten minute journaling exercise in it that I want you to practice every single day for just ten minutes.
I'll give you the exact prompts, set an intention to be present and happy for the day. It's going to help you think through the roadblocks for the day and set a plan for when being present or being happy might be difficult for you. So I walk you all the way through that in that workbook as well. I will put the URL in the show notes, but here it is. To sign up, you go to www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/be-present-optin.
Working moms, practice happiness, practice being present. It's not a problem that your brain and your body don't default to a place of joy and happiness. That's something that you actually need to practice and pattern into your body in your everyday life. And I can help you with that.
Coaching is the most effective place to learn how to actually be present and happy and have the exact life that you want to have. And this audio series is free and it's a great place to start.
Working Moms, we are creating a movement, a movement that says work does not have to be the most important thing, where you could be successful at your job and not work 60 plus hours a week. You can do it. You don't have to choose between your work and your family. I am here to help. I want you to have a great week and let's get to it.
