Hello and welcome to the Choosing Happy Podcast.

In this week's episode, we discuss all things joy and happiness.

And it's not a light subject.

It's about going really deep to see if you are resisting happiness and joy in your life.

And can we help you shift some of that before you start the new year in 2025?

So stay tuned for this and more in this week's Choosing Happy Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Choosing Happy Podcast.

I'm your host, Heather Masters.

And this week it's Boxing Day and I want to take a moment to reflect on happiness, to reflect on the podcast over the year and some of my key learnings for the year, but also to invite you to go really deep into checking out why you might not be as happy as you like and why you might be self sabotaging yourself around allowing joy and happiness into your life.

So let's get started.

What I'd like you to do for this episode, first of all, is to grab a paper and a pen or pencil and be ready to make some notes and be ready to take some time for reflection.

Obviously, if you're driving a car, you might not be able to do this, but you can go through it in your head and do the exercises when you have the space and the time.

And I do kind of invite you to do this and to take it seriously because it could make a massive difference to how you show up in 2025 and the results that you get, not just in your life, with your family, with your friends, but also in your business and in terms of your success.

Happiness and joy are one of the key reasons that we self sabotage, that we, we stop ourselves from going to the next level.

There's often that feeling of not being worthy and we sometimes don't relate that not being worthy or not being enough to happiness and joy.

So to begin with, today I want to invite you to just sit, take a deep breath, relax, and I want you to notice your response to this sentence.

I'm willing to feel good, feel joy, and have life go well all of the time.

So do you believe that your life can be joyful the majority of the time?

What's your response to that?

And that's your initial without thinking, without rationalizing what came of up for you, what was present?

If you close your eyes and really get present to that, what were the statements that came up?

What were the beliefs behind that?

What were the supporting arguments or the arguments against that being true?

What were the flashes of past experiences that came up for you?

Were they supporting it were they against it?

What was present?

What was were the elements behind that?

What was absent?

What were the thoughts?

And just to note all of them down.

And I'd like you to take a moment after you've done that, maybe pause this and come back.

I want you to think about the last time you were truly feeling joyful and that life was going your way.

I want you to go back to that moment, close your eyes, really take yourself back there so as if you're seeing it through your own eyes, so your presence to that time, and feel what you felt, see what you saw, hear what you heard, even smell what you smelled and taste what you tasted and feel what you felt inside and out.

So what did you feel on the outside physically, for instance, the wind against your skin, and what did you feel on the inside?

What were the emotions that were present?

I want you to sit with that, that joyful feeling, that joyful place for a moment.

And then again I would like you to notice what's present, what's helping you feel so joyful and what is absent.

What are the elements that make this moment so special?

What are the thoughts that are reinforcing this moment?

And again note these down so that you can go back to this moment and you can notice what's present, what is truly for you, a joyful moment, what comes up for you.

And coming back to the statement, I'm willing to feel good, feel joy, and have life go well all of the time.

If this was a New Year's resolution for you, what comes up for you?

What are you telling yourself about the statement that would make it true for you?

What are you present to what may you not have noticed before that's coming up.

What's been revealed from that statement?

You just sit with that statement in 2025, I'm willing to feel good, feel joy, and have life go well all of the time.

What's there for you?

What's the story you're telling yourself about that statement?

What's the story you're telling yourself about believing you can be joyful, feel good, and have life go well all of the time?

Again, take a moment to write it out, make it conscious and sit with it and keep asking yourself what else?

What else is coming up for me and what else and why is that important?

It can be really quite revealing.

I did this for myself today and I noticed some very negative self talk around being joyful all of the time, or believing we can live our lives being joyful and having things go well.

Of course we get what we focus on if our first thoughts when we go to do something new that should be joyful is this isn't going to work out, I'm going to get hurt, whatever it is, then notice that and choose something different.

Choose that being joyful and having things go well is safe for you, if that's what's required.

And notice that you can choose something different.

It might take practice, but this bringing this to your awareness means that you have a different choice as we enter 2025, that in the moments when you catch yourself denying joy, that you can choose happy, you can choose something different.

Once you've written your stories out around all of this, ask what's true for each of the statements.

Ask what is true for you and then ask when it wasn't true.

Come up with some statements around why it's not true for you.

Once you've got what's true and what isn't true, provide some evidence for both.

Go back to events which back off both and find three, three pieces of evidence for both.

What do I mean for that?

If I'm looking at the statement I'm willing to feel good, feel joy, and have life go well all of the time, I might come up with three times in my life when that wasn't true.

Things don't work out for me.

Things, things always go wrong, people get hurt, whatever it might be.

And I will have evidence somewhere in the back of my mind because that's what my unconscious is telling me to try to keep me safe.

So I'll have evidence somewhere from the past of when that was true.

Now I might also have occasions where things did work out, where things were joyful and did unfold and go well all of the time.

There might have been a period in my life where that was absolutely true, even if it was way back as a child or, you know, when I first fell in love or got married.

But I have that evidence there.

So I can list those three events and I can provide the story and the evidence behind them.

Again, it's about contrasting and looking at what was present, what were the elements that made those situations special, what was absent from each?

And what was the thinking, the feeling?

What were the beliefs I had around each of those events at the time?

You know, if I take myself back and think of those beliefs, those events, what were the beliefs, what did I see, what did I feel?

What was going through my mind?

When we notice these and when we look at each of the contrasting beliefs, we can see that we have a pattern for joy and for happiness and for things going well.

Now, obviously there are times in our lives where we aren't in control, but we're always in control of our response to a situation, and we can always choose our perspective on something.

There might be areas of our lives where we are naturally skeptical, for instance, and other areas where we're naturally joyful.

So as a parent, I might be more naturally inclined to find joy and happiness with my children than maybe I do with aspects of my work.

It's about knowing and becoming aware of these, because in the knowledge and the awareness, then there is choice of perspective and response.

And that's the gift I want to offer you to have the opportunity to try on some of these exercises, to be able to contrast what works, what didn't work, and notice the difference and identify where you have the choice, where you have some control over what happens.

Begin to notice the immediate responses and choose something different.

Choose to believe that you can have joy, life can feel good, you can choose happiness and have life go well all of the time.

You are not only willing, you're committed to that for 2025.

Because when you're feeling good, when you're living fully in the full expression and aliveness of yourself, embracing the joy of everything, think of the gift that that is for everyone around you.

I hope you've found some value in today's short podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for listening throughout the year and thank you for being a subscriber, for being a fan of the podcast.

And I wish you all the best for an amazing 2025 health, wealth, happiness, well being and much, much love and joy.

Thank you for listening and I'll see you again next week on the Choosing Happy Podcast.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this week's episode.

If you enjoyed it or think it would be valuable to others, please do share.

And if you really enjoyed it, please leave me a review.

It really helps the podcast.

All of the links are in the show notes and I look forward to seeing you next week on the Choosing Happy Podcast.