Greetings and salutations!
There are a lot of definitions of what joy is and why it’s important.
And whether we think of it as a need, a value, a discipline, or an emotion, we can all probably agree that it’s awesome and we’d like to experience more of it.
Here are some of the benefits of joy:
- It helps us to be resilient
- It makes us healthier physically AND emotionally
- It motivates us to reach our goals
- It invites abundance into our lives in the forms of love, knowledge, friendship, money, and more
When we unlock joy, we start to enjoy the journeys we’re on instead of constantly looking to our end goals for happiness.
How many times do we catch ourselves thinking, “once I have X, I’ll be happy?”
The truth is that who you are when you’re on your way to a goal is who you are.
That can be a hard pill to swallow.
It’s true, though.
We spend most of our lives on the way to one goal or another.
There’s this shining period of time after we achieve a goal where we feel triumphant, joyful, proud, accomplished, and happy.
Then we find a NEW goal, and the struggle, the stress, the self-criticizing, and the overwhelm all return again.
That makes me tired just thinking about it!
One of the clients I’ve been working with for quite a while told me in his consultation with me that he wanted to enjoy his journey on the way to his goals.
He used a beautiful analogy to describe this to me.
He said Meadowlarks are the only birds that sing while they’re flying, and he wanted to learn to sing as he flew.
And that is such a wise goal for all of us!
What does singing while we’re flying look like?
Joy!
I’m going to focus on one particular way to usher in joy because I have found it is by far the most successful, instantaneous, and universal.
Gratitude, yo.
One of the things that makes gratitude such a superpower is that it calls back all the joy we experienced from our previous wins.
Can you think of something you have in your life now that you once would have given ANYTHING for?
Maybe it was a career, your own house or apartment, a badass coffee maker, a relationship, a degree, a child, a friendship, or a skill.
Whatever it was, you wanted it so badly.
When it came to you, you got a big ol’ dose of joy!
Over time though, we get used to having those things in our lives and we can take them for granted.
Spending some time thinking of what we already have physically brings joy into bodies.
And when we start to notice what there is to be thankful for today, we see it in the little things, too.
Green lights on the way to work, a take out order being right even with the 6 modifications we added, a funny exchange with a stranger in line at the grocery store, the way the sun feels on our skin – all of it counts.
Paying attention to these things changes how we experience our lives.
We see what we look for, and we receive what we expect to receive.
I cannot possibly stress that enough as it has been the key to so much of my happiness and the happiness my clients have found.
We see what we look for.
When we look for reasons not to show up for ourselves, we find them.
When we look for rejection, we find it.
When we look for failure, THAR SHE BLOWS!
The good news is that it works in the positive sense just as well.
When we look for hope, we find it.
When we look for opportunities, we find them.
And when we look for gratitude and joy, we find those, too!
We are so incredibly resourceful as the sweet little humans we are, and when in desperate times, we often find strength we didn’t even know we had.
There’s a magic in being backed into a corner sometimes because we are able to, without resistance, fully apply ourselves in our quests.
That same magic is available to us all the time through gratitude that manifests joy.
Gratitude all by itself can actually give us the same FEELINGS we get when we complete a goal before we even get there.
And the joy it unlocks is like a plane ticket – an all access pass to a better, brighter experience than the one we usually have in hard moments.
Focusing on gratitude is not about resisting the tough stuff.
It’s about shifting our perspectives from the draining things in our lives to the most energizing parts so we have the motivation to keep rocking it out.
Joy eclipses what’s NOT ideal yet and reminds us of what IS.
You can call on it any time.
And before you know it, you’re singing while you’re flying.
