“Our brains exist to keep us alive, not to create happiness for us.”

Joyful Living

2020 was the year when my primary focus was creating more joy.  It seems crazy that even as a life coach I have to intentionally create more joy in my life, doesn’t it?

But, I have a human brain (just like you!) and that human brain isn’t built to make me happy, it’s built for survival.  

So that means having more feelings of joy takes some work.

Tune into today’s “Become an Unstoppable Woman” podcast as I teach you how I create more joy in my life (and in the lives of my clients).  

IN THIS EPISODE, I SPECIFICALLY TEACH:

• The #1 thing that’s stopping you from feeling joy
• Why the brain isn’t naturally here to make you feel joy and how to overcome that
• What happens when you experience more joy in your life and then “unexpected problems” come up 
• My top techniques for cultivating joy in your life every single day (even when you’re going through a tough time)

…and so much more

Listen in to this powerful episode at the top of the page.  

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

→ Apply to coach with me

→ Continue the conversation in my free online community

→ Get The 4-Day Accomplish Your Dreams Free Training 

Tips on How to be Happy

Full Transcript

This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 92, Create
More Joy.

[music]

Welcome to the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting, fearfacing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston. I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world. I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better. We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient, and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.

[music]

Hi there, Miss Unstoppable, so excited to have you for this episode today. It’s a fun one.
We’re going to be talking about how to create more joy in your life and who doesn’t want
that? Man, I know I do. I want all the joy in the world. Today, wherever you are in your
journey, if it’s you’re feeling like you have no joy in your life, to feeling like you have lots
of joy and you just want to amp that up even more, this episode is going to help you. You
may not know this, but in 2020, my focus was all about joy and expanding my ability to
just have joy in my life.

This past year has definitely been a learning experience on how to create this feeling more
in my life and I’m so excited to share with you all the learning lessons I’ve had throughout
this past year as I’ve brought more joy into my life. So let’s jump in. You ready? If you
follow me closely, you already know this and you may be like, “Lindsay, okay. How many
times do you have to tell me this?” But just in case you’re new around here or you need a
reminder, our brains are not here to create happiness for us. They are only here to keep us
alive. With that said, our brains typically focus on the negative unless we train it otherwise.
With joy being a “positive emotion,” we have to intentionally train our brain to feel it.

Crazy, right? I wish I would’ve known this, gosh, so many years ago. I didn’t really
understand until I was coached as a client, I just thought there was something wrong with
me, “Why don’t I feel as happy?” I just thought maybe you had a certain special gene.
Granted, I felt happy from time to time, but I just thought, “You’re supposed to be happy all
the time.” That was the sign for success and if you weren’t, you were doing something
wrong. When in essence, that’s just the way life works. We are not meant to be happy all
the time.

I follow Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School very closely. She really talks about how
life is 50/50, meaning 50% great, 50% not so great. I am a big believer in the 80/20
principle, which means most of the time things are 80% one way and 20% another. That’s
just my belief. You can believe whatever you want. I like to think that you can create a
“happy life” 80% of the time and then about 20% is going to be hardship.

Now it’s tricky because I say that because I think right now in my life, I’m 80% in the gun,
and then 20% is just when I hit a new level and I have some growth to do. I’m very
fortunate that I have the tools that I teach my clients that we never have to be stuck again,
so we never feel like we’re just stuck in a pattern anymore. That 20% is more so of like,
“Ooh, I’m growing and this feels uncomfortable and I’m encountering new blocks and
barriers that I need to overcome.”

Sometimes we don’t quite see it as blocks and barriers at first. We tend to blame other
people, like, “Why is my husband so weird?” or, “Why are my kids doing that?” or, “Why is
work, blah-blah-blah,” or “Why is it that I just feel anxious?” Then we dig a little deeper
using those tools and it’s like, “Oh, okay, here’s what’s going on.” Then we all know the
process, we, meaning my clients and I, to go through and release that stuff. That’s our 20%.
If I look back on my life before coaching, it was very 50/50, if not 80/20 in the other
direction of 80%, not so great and 20%, pretty good. Maybe now my life is just in a phase
where it’s still on the big scheme of my overall, life is going to be 50/50, good and bad.

Again, that doesn’t really matter here. You believe whatever you want to believe, but just
know you’re not meant to be happy and joyous all the time. We need to know the extremes
of life. We need to know hot and cold, and we need to know light and darkness. Just like
we need to know “happy emotions” and “not so happy emotions” sometimes called those
negative emotions, then we just need to be able to have that variety of life.

I believe that the “negative emotions” are ones that we’re meant to feel, and it helps us get
through things. If somebody passes away, are we supposed to just be happy about it? No,
we’re supposed to be sad and we’re supposed to grieve. Or somebody does something
wrong to us, are we supposed to just be at peace with it? No, we’re supposed to be pissed
off. That’s some effed up crap. I just had a client call yesterday where her boss did
something completely inappropriate. It wasn’t even a mindset thing. It was just completely
inappropriate stuff. She was like, “I’m just so mad.” I’m like, “Yes, I would be too. You
should be mad.” That is a normal emotion to have in that moment when we’re wronged.

Anyways, going back to this big thing here that I’m getting to is we’re not supposed to be
happy all the time. It’s okay that we’re not. There’s nothing wrong with you. Now if you
don’t feel like you’re feeling “positive emotions” at least 50% of the time, or with my
theory up to 80% of the time, I think there’s room to grow there. Again, when my clients
leave working with me, I want them to be, what we call, in their authentic self at least 80%
of the time on an average day, if not 90% of the time on an average day. If they’re below
that, I did not do my job as a coach.

If you don’t know an authentic self is that’s just the most, gosh, authentic. I don’t know
another way to say it. The most genuine part of you. That’s the part of you that feels these
really “positive emotions” and is able to take action from that place. When you do take that
action, it just feels really good. You feel a lot of peace and gratitude and this joy thing
we’re talking about today and all the yummy, yummy things.

Are we on the same page there with all of that? Good. Let’s talk about the next thing. With
it being said that our brain is not wired for happiness, we have to intentionally train it to
feel this joy thing that we’re talking about. How do we do that? Well, we’re going to talk
about that today, but before we get into that, I just want to tap in one more time why it’s
so hard to feel these positive emotions. Not just from a brain level of our brain is trying to
keep us alive but from an environment level of things that have happened to us.

The first is there is crap from our past that needs to be cleaned out for us to feel this
feeling of joy more. If you have things from your past that you haven’t fully emotionally
processed– The way that you can know if it’s not fully processed is if you are experiencing
emotional triggers that last more than seven seconds, especially often. You’re just
constantly feeling like you’re on a roller coaster, or you’re constantly just feeling stuck in
an emotion that’s “negative,” that is telling you that there is some deeper work there to do.
Because again, you should be able to feel these positive emotions and you should be able
to feel like you are getting your goals.

If you put your mind to something, you will accomplish that goal and you follow through
with that, you should feel like you’re showing up as your absolute best self. You should be
able to feel in your life of, “Okay, I want to generate X, Y, Z emotion,” be it joy or
something else and you should be able to know how to do that. That’s when you know you
are living a really good life. If you are not in that place, again, there is some deeper work
to do. There are some crafts to clean out in your brain. This is what I do with my clients,
but you can just take it for what it is on your own and just know that we can generate joy
right now.

I’m going to teach you, again, these strategies to do this today, but it’s really a lot like a
seesaw effect here. We can generate all of this joy but in essence, we’re going to just pile
it on top of these “negative emotions” that need to be released versus if we go out and
clean out those negative emotions and you fully process that shit from your past. Then
what happens is that negative emotion diminishes and again, it goes back to the seesaw
effect, your positive emotion starts to go up. It’s a lot easier for you to feel more positive
because you have less negative swarming around in your brain.

Get what I’m saying there with that seesaw then? Less negative so then the positive just
naturally goes up. It’s not even like you’re generating more or having to intentionally do
some of these exercises I’m teaching you today, although they will generate even more
positive emotion for you. Naturally, you’ll start to feel so much better by clearing out that
crap. That’s the first reason why it’s hard to generate negative emotion.

The second is we just don’t know how the brain works, and I explained that earlier. We just
don’t know that the brain isn’t here to create happiness for us. It’s up to us to intentionally
program it otherwise. Then the third reason why we don’t feel these positive emotions like
joy is something called the upper limit problem. This is a term coined by Gay Hendricks in
his book called The Big Leap, one of my absolute favorite books of all time. It’s a huge in
the personal development space among coaches. If you go to probably anybody’s
Instagram feed, at some point, they’re talking about The Big Leap.

This is a book I give all of my clients. We spend a whole training video on it, and we are
talking about this concept of this upper limit problem over and over again as we’re
coaching, especially if they coach beyond the nine months with me because they’re just
going to keep growing and growing. What happens is their body starts to freak the eff out.
If we go back to talking about the brain and how the brain is just here to keep us alive and
to survive and wants to keep us safe, even if we grow in really exciting fun ways, the brain
freaks because it’s different, and anything different to the brain is a threat.

When we have those threats come up, again, even if it’s something great, our brain is
sending these sirens of, “We’ve got to calm this down.” Gay talks about it more in the book.
Again, I encourage you to read it, but what happens is when we are growing up, we, in
essence, have this joy thermometer. I don’t think he calls it that but that’s what I’m going
to call it here today. We have this joy thermometer and we grow up with a certain
temperature of how much joy and abundance and all the yummy things we can take in our
life.

When that thermometer moves, either up or down, then again, it’s a threat to the brain.
What happens is our body and our brain are naturally, and most times subconsciously,
trying to get us back to that same temperature. What will happen is maybe we’ll get
promoted at work and then all of a sudden, we’re fighting with our partner. Maybe we
meet the love of our life and then all of a sudden, our friendships start to diminish and
everybody’s driving us crazy in our family. Again, it’s like something starts to grow and
then something else just– It seems like there’s this natural thing but really when we dig a
little bit deeper, what happens is we’re self-sabotaging other areas of our life.

I catch myself in this pattern all the time, my friends, all the time. My brain at the time
seems very justified, for example, if I’m growing in my business, like I’ve done this past
year, of why my husband is driving me crazy, and even presents me thoughts of, “Wow,
maybe I should leave my marriage.” Yes. It goes that extreme because I have grown a ton
in my business this year. It’s been hard for my brain to wrap around just how amazing life
can be. What happens is I have to intentionally again go in every day and do the steps that
I’m going to teach you here in a minute to create more joy.

With my clients, we do something called joy integration and integrating it into our body.
I’ll talk a little bit about that here today. Because it’s not that we just want to cultivate joy,
we want to absorb it in our body and in essence, change the thermometer inside of us and
allow our brain not to freak out by changing that thermometer to accept more abundance
in our life. Does that make sense to you? I hope so. I know when I learned about this, it
blew my flipping mind of like, “Oh, my gosh, this is why I’ve been stuck.”

I’ll give you a story here of when I first caught this. I went through coaching as a client.
This was late 2013, early 2014. Then I said, “Okay, I’m going to be open for business as a
coach.” Obviously, I did coach training and all that in this process too. I said, “Okay, I just
want to take on this certain number of clients to start with,” because I was also working a
day job. I was a single mom and so I didn’t take on very many. I got that amount of clients
in a weekend. It was crazy. Now granted, I wasn’t charging that much. My brain tells me
that, it’s like, “Why aren’t you charging that much?” It was easy for people to say yes to
you.

Still, for a while there, I thought, “Who is ever going to want to coach with me?” It was
weird how I got it in a weekend. Then I started taking those clients through the one-onone coaching process I had at the time. Then when I was done with them, they got great
results. It didn’t feel like so much that my brain couldn’t soak it in kind of results. It was
just like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. It really worked for them. They got these great results. I had
a really great experience.”

Then I thought, “Okay, well, I want to do this in a group setting.” I thought, “Okay, well, I’m
going to launch a podcast.” At that time, I launched a podcast called Life Luvers Radio, this
was mid-2015. From that podcast, I then launched my first group. I hit my numbers of what
I wanted in my group at that time, which was crazy because I didn’t really have an
audience. My podcast was on the new and noteworthy list. It was on the self-help charts,
which at the time was really fun and amazing.

I was just taking in like, “Wow, how is it again?” Then I’m like, setting my mind to
something and I’m getting this stuff but I was still pretty cool. My brain could still pretty
much handle it. I was also dating my husband, which at the time was my boyfriend. Things
were going really well with that. Then late 2015, I’m going through my coaching process
with my first group of clients, my husband proposes. He gives me this beautiful– I don’t
even know how many carats my diamond ring is. I think it’s two carats. It might be a little
bit bigger, but this beautiful ring. Even if it’s just two carats, it’s huge. It’s so stunning.

When he gave it to me, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” That was a lot of abundance for me to
take in. The fact that I was truly wanting to marry this man, so in love, all the things. Then
I’m trying to incorporate that. Well, then what happens is I’m still coaching my group
clients. I’m really focusing on that and trying not to fully absorb how I’m engaged to the
man I love because it’s just like, “Oh my gosh, so much is happening.” Then I finished with
my group clients about six months later. That’s when it hit me because they all got
incredible transformation.

I remember the day that we wrapped that call, the very last call, we were all just like, “Oh
my gosh, look at all the transformation that’s happened.” They were just soaking it all in,
and they were so grateful. I love that and I bawled my eyes out. My body, in essence, went
into a shock. I didn’t know this at that time. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, maybe I’m just
really sad that this is over.” This would have been April 2016, that this happened. After
that, I went into huge self-sabotage mode. I couldn’t even get out of bed. I became so
depressed. At this point, I’m planning my wedding. We’re going to get married in
September. All that is coming.

We decided we’re going to go to Bora Bora and stay at the Four Seasons, and that was
really huge. Anyways, all this stuff is happening. My body is freaking the eff out. It’s just
like way too much abundance. Then while we’re getting married too, my husband’s like,
“Well, I want to buy you these diamond earrings.” We ended up going to this jewelry store
and I’m looking around and he’s talking about how he wants to buy me these diamonds. I
remember thinking in my head like, “I can’t take anymore.” Like, “I can’t take it anymore of
this goodness. It’s too much.”

Remember too, if you know my story, just a few years before that, I was picking up the
pieces of my life. I was discovering my then partner had a double life. I had a two-year-old
on my hip all by myself. I didn’t have a job. It was a high conflict divorce. I was going into
thousands of dollars of debt. The job that I had at the time, I was a nanny making $8 an
hour. I’ve changed my life a lot. I of course, really attribute that to coaching as a client for
all that. But my brain could not take the abundance and I didn’t know what was
happening.

I ended up reaching out to my friend and coach buddy, Judy Eichhorst. Shout out to her,
and she coached me a little bit through that and got me to a place where I could at least
soak up enough abundance for my wedding and show up to my wedding without wanting
to, gosh, just totally run into a cave. Again, I could not figure out what was happening to
me. Funny side note story for you is even on our honeymoon, it was so beautiful and so
amazing. We ran into Usain Bolt while we were there. If you don’t know who Usain Bolt is,
he is an Olympian. He’s the fastest man alive.

What was so crazy cool about that is over that summer, I was watching the Olympics as
he’s running. I was realizing that part of why I was freaking out was because I didn’t know
how to celebrate success. I see him and he’s running across the track just fully taking in
how amazingly powerful he is and how he’s one of the best athletes in the world. I was
like, “I want to be more like Usain. I want to be able to soak up abundance like that.” I just
started to really visualize with him and being more like him.

What was so crazy was when we showed up on our honeymoon, Usain had just come out of
the Olympics, and to celebrate, he went to Bora Bora and stayed at a resort. I turn at dinner
and I see him there and it was so incredibly powerful. I can’t even begin to describe to you
how magical that felt in that moment of, “Oh, my gosh, how in the hell am I cross the
world, in essence, sitting next to Usain Bolt at dinner at this beautiful location, after I’ve
had this beautiful year with these coaching clients and all this growth, and I’ve married
this man,” and all these things. My body could not take it because the universe is just
forcing more abundance on me.

The last day of my honeymoon, I violently threw up all day. I just could not take any more.
I even went swimming with sharks in the ocean, which was crazy out of my comfort zone.
Again, it was so big and so life-changing to have that much abundance, and I didn’t know
this concept of upper limit problems. I didn’t know what was going on with me, as I keep
saying, and I just couldn’t get a groove back for 2017. It would not happen. I would, in
essence, have times when I was launching or putting myself out there to get more clients
and I was just not really getting anybody. Nothing was resonated, it seems like.

I didn’t really keep up with my old clients because it was just like I couldn’t take in the
abundance of it. Then we ended up getting pregnant with my son and the pregnancy felt
really hard. I’m like, “You know what, I’m just going to back out of my business.” That’s
what I did for the rest of 2017 and all of 2018. I was just like, “I can’t do this.” Then, I
believe it was when I was nursing my son, or maybe when I was pregnant with my son but
at some point, I just kept hearing about this book, The Big Leap, The Big Leap, The Big Leap.
I end up buying it, still don’t read it.

Then one day, it’s just calling me from my bookshelf, “Pick up this book, Lindsay.” I start
reading it, and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, this is why I have not been able to have more joy in
my life. This is why I just keep staying in this pattern of self-sabotage,” because my
personal life had just taken off so much and my business initially had taken off so much, it
was just my body could not handle it. That temperature had been raised so much that my
thermostat was just like, “Wow, we’ve got to sabotage something here so let’s sabotage
the business for a while and so we can just at least just soak in that your personal life is
somewhat good,” because even that was a stretch at the time.

Very long story for you there with lots of details. I hope you’re starting to see here an
example of how this upper limit problem can happen. I see it happen with clients all the
time. We grow, and they get their goals. Typically, they get them in a 90 day period and
their body’s like, “Holy crap, how did I do this?” and they start freaking out a little bit and
then all of a sudden, something starts to go wrong. We coach on it and luckily, we’re able
to catch it before it snowballs most times. Then they have to, in essence, regulate their
nervous system and say, “Everything’s okay.” They’ve got to do some mindset work to calm
the brain, and then we can keep going.That is why it’s hard to feel more joy. Got it?

Now let’s talk about some strategies on how to feel more joy. The first one is one that’s
very mainstream and that’s having a practice of gratitude. Every single day, spending some
time in a state of gratitude. Not just a way a little kid does it of like, “I am thankful for my
mommy and my daddy,” at Thanksgiving kind of thing but really taking some deep breaths,
slowing down and saying, “I am so grateful I am alive today. I am so grateful for my body,
for my heart that is pumping, my lungs that are breathing” and just going into detail of all
the things. I am so grateful for so and so because they do da, da, da.

I’m so grateful for technology. I am so grateful for this and that and this and that. Some
days, you may not be in the mood for it and you may not want to go that extreme. Most
days for me, I just say, “I am so grateful I’m alive today and I have another day to live,” and
that feels so powerful to me. Then other days, I go beyond that and I’ll talk about all the
little things. The more I’m able to cultivate and say in a practice of gratitude and really
feel that gratitude– For me, the way that I feel the gratitude more is I put my hands on my
heart.

Sometimes I’ll even put my hands on my heart and the other one on my Sacral Chakra,
which is down over your womb area. That allows me to just really tap into my body and
tap into what I consider my feminine energy. A lot of times, I’m in my head and I’m in this
go, go, go, go, go mindset. I want to tap into my body when I’m in that gratitude and really
feel my feelings in them and really hold space for that and spend a couple of seconds even
of just, “Oh, I’m so grateful I’m alive today.” Just sitting there and breathing that in, then
I’m so grateful that my children have another day to live and breathing that in.

Then if you have people who have passed, then you can be, “I’m so grateful for the time
that I had with them. I’m so grateful we had these memories together and I’m so grateful
their spirit still lives in me,” kind of stuff. Again, it doesn’t have to be that deep. You can do
other things like, “I’m so grateful for this warm cup of coffee. I’m so grateful for these
socks that are fuzzy and warm. I’m so grateful for the sun that’s shining.” It can be
anything, but that is going to be the quickest, easiest way for you to start to cultivate more
joy in your life because get this, gratitude is actually the highest emotional frequency that
we can feel. It’s even above joy. If you’re feeling gratitude, you’re going to naturally feel
joy with that.

The second practice to create more joy is to count your wins. If you follow me closely, you
hear me talk about it or if you’re a client of mine, you already know this concept because
we’re doing it all the time, but wins are basically just seeing what went well. I encourage
you to do this every single day. What went well the day prior? I encourage you to really
think about, “What went well inside of me?” “What awareness did I gain the day prior,” or,
“What choices did I make that were for the betterment of me?”

If somebody presents you with a cupcake and you say no because maybe you’re trying to
lose weight or cut sugar or whatever, that’s a win. You said no to that. It’s a win if you are
choosing to work on a project versus scroll on your phone. It’s a win when you don’t say
that hateful remark to somebody because maybe you’re working on being a more loving
and kind person. It’s a win if you’re trying to be more boundaried and you do stand up for
yourself in a loving, kind way.

I really want you to cultivate and think about all the changes you’re making because, as I
keep saying, the brain is always thinking about what’s wrong and thinking about the next
problem to solve. It’s going to just dismiss all of these changes that you’re making, and it’s
going to miss all of these little minute changes you’re making. You’re going to feel likely a
lot of times like, “I’m not doing enough. I haven’t achieved enough. there’s more to do.”
That’s what makes this whole hustle go, go, go mentality that causes a lot of anxiety and
all those “negative emotions” that keeps us from this place of joy. Versus thinking, “What
went well, yesterday, how did I grow? How did I change?”

Do counting the outside stuff too. I talked a little bit about the inside, but the outside of,
wow, so and so opened the door for me or so and so was kind to me or I made this extra
money or when I was driving, the traffic flowed with ease, kind of thing. Those are all
outside wins or outside of you of things that just happened. You can just say it was like, oh,
maybe so and so is having a good day or there wasn’t a lot of traffic because school was
out that day or whatever. I encourage you to instead, celebrate that and not blow it off in a
logical way. Instead be like, “Man, maybe there was something I did to create that
abundance in my life.”

Maybe, Billy Joe was nice to me today. I don’t know why Billy Joe came out of me as the
first name, but maybe she was nice to me yesterday because I have a different energy
about me. I’m just going to take it as there was something about me that made her be nice
to me. It’s so funny because I recently got fast food and the attendant who took her order
just had this crazy energy about him. He made my day better just from the few seconds of
interaction I had with him, and then when I went and he gave me my food and all that, he
was just laughing and he was having fun. He impacted my whole day.

I counted that as a win, to be in this space where I could accept that joy in my life of just
seeing him love his job. Because a lot of times too, we deem fast-food workers as not
successful or whatever but he was totally loving his job. My daughter was in the car, and I
turned to her, and I said, “You see that man right there, he is going to be so successful in
his life if he keeps up that kind of energy because he’s just giving so much value in the
world just from his joy,” and it made me more joyful. Again, I saw the win there as I could
see that. I was present enough to take it in, and I felt alignment in enough to be able to, in
essence, soak up his joy.

You see where I’m going here with this stuff? For a lot of clients, it takes them many weeks
to learn this concept so if this one is over your head, just know that’s totally normal and go
back to the gratitude one and start with that because, again, that’s so simple and easy to
see what we’re grateful for. Wins, once you get it, man, is it fun and man, does it cultivate
and create more joy in your life.

Another way to create more joy is to slow the eff down. [chuckles] We are moving so fast
in our lives, especially go-getter women. It’s like, “Let’s accomplish all the things, let’s do
all the things. I want to make these goals happen in my life,” and we go, go, go, go, and
what happens? We experience burnout, we experience anxiety, we get really tired. When
we get really tired, we experience those “negative emotions.” We’ve got to slow down and
what I’ve realized over the years is the more I’ve slowed down, the more I cultivate
practices like what I’m telling you today, actually, the more successful I become.

Crazy, right? It’s so weird because our society teaches go, go, go, do, do, do, be, be, be, in
essence. Instead, if we just slow it down and just enjoy the ride a little bit more, we
actually get more done. The way that I teach this to my clients is we do something called
do-you time, which is really just self-care. I have them make a list of all the things that will
fill their bucket. Meaning, fill their energetic bucket. For most clients, they think, scrolling
my phone or going to Netflix or maybe drinking out with friends initially as self-care doyou time.

Maybe at times, it is a little bit here and there but typically for clients, they realize that
those experiences, while pleasurable in some ways, aren’t necessarily filling their bucket.
Things that are filling their energetic bucket and allow them to slow down are things like
taking baths, going on walks, just sitting still and breathing, saying mantras, being present
and really being in their body and feeling all their senses kind of stuff. Going to the library,
reading a book. Again, slowing down activities. I really encourage you to put this on your
calendar and to say, “When am I going to get this in?”

For my clients, they build up to doing eight hours a week of do-you time. It doesn’t have to
all be in one day, they can put it in little spurts here and there. At first, it feels really
overwhelming to a lot of them. That’s why we work up to those eight hours but I will tell
you every single client I’ve worked with was like, “That practice was life-changing for me.”
Life-changing, who would’ve thought just by me slowing down was so impactful?
Especially for those women who tend to be very big caregivers. They tend to put
themselves last on the list so this practice is so important for them.

They realize the more they take care of themselves, the more everybody else gets taken
care of, and then it cultivates even more joy in everybody’s life including theirs. Instead of
them not having joy in their life and feeling resentment and all of that. Slow down, feel it,
and with that too, as you’re slowing down and feeling it, experience the pleasure of it. If
you’re taking a bath of wow, the warmth of the water. How does the water move? How
does it look on my skin? Maybe you put some flower petals, look at the flower petals.
Maybe you put some bubbles, what do the bubbles look like? If you’re reading a book, just
take in, again, the sensory info of it.

Some people do this very well naturally but some people don’t. I am one of those people
who does not. I’m in my head all the time. It’s very good for me to get back in my body and
slow down and take it in. Too, just smelling things like, “Let me smell these oils. Let me
smell this lotion. Let me look at my hands,” all the things. Then too, especially if you’re
doing exercises or activities that are pleasurable. For example, if you’re doing intimacy,
having sex. Really take in the enjoyment and pleasure of that.

That’s one of the biggest things I hear from sex educators is for women to be present in
their bodies and being able to accept pleasure because that is what’s causing them not to
have a lot of pleasure doing activities like that because they just don’t know how to slow
down, be in their body and accept pleasure, or in essence, joy coming their way. I will tell
you just by making this mindset shift in my own life, with my own sexual practice with my
husband, it has been huge. I’m just getting started on it. I can’t even imagine where it’s
going to go from here.

A lot of that was on me. For a while, I loved blaming every person I had been with. I’m like,
“Oh, sex is okay. It wasn’t that good.” No, it was totally on me and me slowing down and
being in my body more, feeling that pleasure, accepting that pleasure helped so much. The
other thing if you want to create more joy is to cut the false pleasures and distractions.
This is one of those things of if we cut something, then you’re likely going to do things like
that do-you time I just talked about. If you hear me on the show, you heard this a lot. If
you’re a client of mine, you definitely hear this a lot.

Distractions and false pleasures are things you’re doing that you don’t want to do but
you’re doing them anyway. You’re scrolling your phone and you’re like, “Man, why did I just
do that?” You’re watching the Netflix or whatever and you don’t want to be doing that.
You’re eating the things that you don’t really want to be eating. You’re gossiping when you
really don’t want to be. You’re shopping when you don’t want to be. You’re overworking.
You’re over caretaking, you’re overthinking. I’m going down my whole list. I’m trying to
think of everything on my assessment that we do of distractions.

Those are the big ones that I can think of. Sometimes even from your bullets, drugs, and
sex or alcohol. Those I don’t see as much in women, but they are there. Love can be a big
one for women. It’s just being so consumed with love and overloving, in essence. For me,
that used to be a distraction of, I really loved those first few months of dating and that felt
almost like a drug to me. I used that as a way to escape my problems and I would overly
love on little creatures like little kitties. Like, “Oh, let me just focus all my attention there
instead of thinking about all the shitty things in my life that I don’t know how to process,”
kind of thing.

When I learned to, of course, process my emotions, that helped so much cut my
distractions. Just become aware of it of when I’m doing something, I’ll be thinking, “Is this
really what I want to be doing? Is this truly how I want to spend my time?” Sometimes I
have to catch myself. If I’m getting into a pattern of being on my phone too much, I’ll say,
“What am I trying to avoid here? What’s going on here?” In essence, when I start to cut that
more, it’s so amazing how much joy I create in my life because, in essence, those false
pleasures, while I get a quick hit of an endorphin when I do it, it’s very short.

In essence, it takes me away from my goals. If I’m scrolling my phone, it’s like that’s taking
me away from time with my family or time working on my work, which is where I want to
be spending my time. Then it’s like I’m even more “behind” moving forward. I don’t want to
do that. If I’m eating a bunch of junk food or drinking a bunch of alcohol, it’s like, oh, that’s
really slowing me down or making a problem now, not the week that I want to be. That’s
not where I want to go. I hear some people define false pleasures or distractions, and some
people even call them urges. I think that’s a word I’ve heard people use. I feel like they call
it something else.

Anyways, it’s just things that like I said that you’re doing, you don’t want to do, and also
things that are taking you away from the things you really want to create and cultivate in
your life. The more you can cut those, it’s like that seesaw effect I’ve talked about before,
the more joy you’re going to create. The last thing too, it goes back to something I said
earlier, but the more you can clear out those negative blocks, that crap from your past
that’s weighing you down and causing you to have emotional triggers of more than seven
seconds of a “negative emotion,” the more you can clear that out, the more joy you’re
going to create.

You’re just going to, in essence, unpack some boxes and then be able to create more
abundance in your life, more brain space, in essence, to program in more joy. That’s why a
lot of people, too, they’re not happy adults. We see so many happy kids all the time and
then things happen, especially during those teenage years when our brain is just so highly
emotional, and we create all this baggage that we carry around with us. It’s so unfortunate
we don’t know how to fully process those emotions because by the time we’re in our about
mid-twenties, our brain is ready to process that stuff and get rid of it and then we can
create so much joy and abundance in our life.

It’s so unfortunate when people don’t do that work because they just stay stuck in their
life. They’re not happy people. You want to have happy people. You got to have joyous
people and granted, we’re not going to be happy and joyous, as I said, all the time but you
should at least be in that space 50, if not 80% of the time in your life. That’s what’s
possible for you and maybe somebody would even argue more than 80%. If you’re at an
80%, that’s where I’m like, “Dang, I’ve done my work as a coach to really help get you to
that place.” That to me is like, “Man, you’re living the good life,” because I feel like, again,
I’m at that 80, 20 and my life is pretty effing good. It’s so good.

It’s not perfect but it is good and I am so glad I did this work. I am so thankful for Lindsay
who took the last few thousand dollars she had in her savings when she didn’t have a job
and she was a single mom and put it on coaching as a client. I am so grateful to her. She
was so scared. She thought, “Oh my gosh, is this the worst decision ever?” and it was the
best decision ever. I thank her so much, and I thank all the teachers I’ve had in my life to
teach me these kinds of tools to create this joy. I’m so glad I focused in on joy this past
year of expanding my ability to take in joy.

Next year, I’m going to be working even more in joy, working on integrating this joy even
more because although I’ve expanded my ability to take in joy, I want to just soak it in
even more and really take in that I have this life that I’ve created for myself. I have an
amazing marriage. I know I give my husband a hard time here on the show from time to
time but the reality is that goes back to my upper limit problem. I have a really great
husband and a really great marriage. It’s not perfect by any means but I am tired of my
brain telling me it’s worse than what it is. It is so good and I’m ready to fully accept that.

My business, as I said, has grown a lot this past year that I am ready to fully take in that I
make a very good salary doing this work. Excuse me. It’s gotten to a point where I talked
about is like at first I just wanted a career that I loved. I got that and then I saw that I was
helping people and that felt like way too much abundance at the time and then it was like,
oh. Now, I can charge people a decent amount for that, which I’ve done this year. Now it’s
like, okay, I can charge people this amount and I can make a really good living at this. It’s
mind-blowing all I can get from just my career alone and how amazing that is. My family is
great and all the things.

Joy is a great thing. I encourage you to do these exercises, create more joy, and just know
what’s possible for you in your life. Your brain may be telling you all the reasons why
creating more joy could not happen for you, but I challenge you to look otherwise. You can
absolutely have a joyous life, a beautiful life, an amazing life filled with all the things that
you want. It is going to take some work. It is going to take some intentionality. It’s going to
take some reprogramming, in essence, of your mindset but it is so worth it.

Again, if you’re ever ready to start coaching, that’s where we’re going to create the most
massive change. You’re going to be held accountable. You’re going to show up because
we’re going to get some big results. Remember, I guarantee results. We go in and we say,
“What do you want to gain these next nine months?” We really get clear on it. Make sure I
can deliver on that and then we get to work. What a great feeling to know in nine months,
you can create something. You’ll get guaranteed that you’re going to do that thing. Instead
of just putting it off, you go and make it happen. How cool is that?

Link is always in the show notes and on the outro to take that first step and apply for that
consult call. I hope I’ll see you on a consult call soon, but otherwise, go cultivate this joy in
your life and I’ll see you in the next episode. Bye.

[music]

Hey there, Miss Unstoppable. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. If you enjoyed
it, share it with a friend. Send them a picture of this episode via text, via email, share it on
social media, I’m sure they would be so appreciative to know these strategies and tips on
how to accomplish your dreams. If you are ready to guarantee you’re going to accomplish
your goals and dreams, then it’s time to start coaching with me.

In my nine-month simple success coaching system, I am going to walk you every single
step of the way to ensure that you get the goals and dreams that you want. The first step is
to apply for a free 60-minute consult call. Just go to LindsayEpreston.com/apply to get
started. As always, my friend, remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can
be, so believe in yourself. You got this.