1. Intro to Happy Life Story

Welcome to Happy Life Story, I’m Melissa. And I’m Lani. We’re discussing how to create your Better Life Story.

In our first episode, we discuss what is your happy life story. What is happiness to you? And what story do we tell ourselves about our own sense of being happy? And did you realize that you are in complete control of how you think?

Exercise:
Describe yourself in three sentences. And then later, look at what you wrote down? Did you pick the three best things about yourself? Did you pick the three neutral things? Or did you pick the three worst negative traits that you can think of? 

Those are all stories that you're telling. They're all what you believe, but you have the choice of picking which one you want to think about. 

Hey, I'm Lani Yamafuji. I help unhappy people learn the habits of being happy. You can learn happy habits, just like you learned how to brush your teeth every morning.

I'm Melissa Madden and I help women live the life they want and stop pushing away their dreams.

Lani: Caregiving Philosophy
Melissa: Wandering Missy - Start Living the Life You Want. How to find Joy + Purpose in your Life.

Transcript

M: Welcome to Happy Life Story. I’m Melissa.

L: And I’m Lani. We’re discussing how to create your better life story.

L: Want me to start?

M: Go for it.

L: Hey, I'm Lani Yamafuji. I help unhappy people learn the habits of being happy. You can learn happy habits, just like you learned how to brush your teeth every morning.

M: I'm Melissa, and I help women live the life they want and stop pushing away their dreams. Through stories, exercises and firsthand experiences, I help women discover that they're capable of so much more than they currently believe. So that they can take action and create their desired outcomes.

L: Ooh, that sounds awesome.

M: Sounds like a little bit like what we're gonna do here. Right? There's a lot of stories, exercises and firsthand experiences, each being exactly.

L: So tell me where people can find you.

M: Well, I am on Instagram and my website. So those are the two places you can find me.

www.melissa-madden.com
https://www.instagram.com/melissa_m_madden/

L: Okay, great. You can find me on YouTube and my website at expanding happiness. I made mine easy.

Expanding Happiness - YouTube
Expanding Happiness - website

L: So this week's topic is, what is a happy life story to me? Yeah, I don't think everybody knows that we're concocting stories in our minds all the time. All our thoughts are just stories that have been made up about what we learned in the past.

L: The stories we tell ourselves are our thoughts. Our thoughts are what drives our emotions, what drives our actions, and that becomes our whole lives. So, the stories we tell ourselves are so important, because they become our whole lives.

M: Yeah, exactly. And again, I think I'm going to get the saying wrong, but we've all heard it 1000 times. What you think is what you create. You know, what you put out really put out in the universe is what ends up happening. So if you have negative thoughts, negative things are going to happen.

L: Right? People think that the negative things just happen to them and they have to deal with it all. But people don't know that they have different choices of looking at the things that happen. They have different choices of perceiving things that happen.

M: There's real tragedy and real horrible things in people's lives that can't just be changed by changing a thought. But when we're talking about life approach, you know, basically, how you approach your life. I think that if you wake up as an optimist every day and have a rosy view of what could possibly happen in your life, the chance of something good happening, far outweighs if I wake up every morning and think, wow, what horrible thing is going to happen to me today. Chances are something horrible is going to happen or something that doesn't fall under the umbrella of happy. So I think it's true. Like you said, it starts with basic thoughts, because you're thinking, what, 20,000 thoughts a day. So it sounds so basic change your thoughts or change the way you're thinking.

L: I don't even think people know that they can change their thoughts.

I was thinking about this experiment.
Describe yourself in three sentences. And then later, look at what you wrote down? Did you pick the three best things about yourself? Did you pick the three neutral things? Or did you pick the three worst negative traits that you can think of? 

Those are all stories that you're telling. They're all what you believe, but you have the choice of picking which one you want to think about. 

M: Exactly. That's a great exercise. Because that's something I think I've never done and I think I could benefit from that exercise myself. I'm sure other people clearly could try.

L:  Right? There's so many different ways of looking at the same thing. And we're not saying  make up something or pretend you're happy. We're saying what else do you actually believe? What are you choosing to believe that you already believe? 

M: Let's use an example.  Let's say, you don't have enough money in the bank and you think 'I'm bad with money'? Or you could think, Oh, well, at least I have some money in the bank. Give me some assistance as to how that line of thinking would go. 

L: Yeah, I have enough money to support myself. There's like a million things you could think. 

M: I want to look into that exercise a little bit more and come up with some good examples to use myself. Because I think that's a great, that's a really good exercise.

M:  So, I was thinking what happiness is and I think some people misconstrue happiness is,  I made a ton of money or one great thing happened to me. You know, there's that dopamine hit, or whatever psychological thing happens for you, when you win the lottery and you're excited or you buy a new car, then you have this temporary feeling of excitement or an adrenaline rush. But, it doesn't last. So buying something doesn't lead to happiness. It just leads to some  temporary emotional high. So, maybe what happiness isn't first. It's not exuberance, it's not, something that's adrenaline fueled, and it's not necessarily having a great job, although having a great job can make you happy. Just the fact that you get the job of your dreams doesn't instantly mean you're going to be living a happy life. And it's not something you chase, you can't really hunt down happiness. It has to evolve.

L: Yeah, happiness is first of all a feeling, and feelings come from your thoughts.

M: Good bringing this all back to your original point. What you think definitely falls into line with creating happiness. Again, it's creating happiness, it doesn't magically appear. I think it's more of a state of being or striving towards.

L: People are trying to find happiness by material possessions.

M: Like that old expression, you find love and all the wrong places. If you're going to look for happiness in all the wrong places you're going to be less happy.

L: I don't really know what it means to say, I'm going try to be happy or I'm going to search for happiness here. That doesn't even resonate with me at all.

M: For some, I think they think that an object or a person or something else is going to swoop in and fill some void in their life. And that is going to create happiness.  When really,  obviously, someone else can't create happiness for you. You need to create it yourself, again, back to your thoughts and how you view a situation or how you approach your life. And, I think optimism can be one of those things that really factors into it. Not that you should be like ridiculously optimistic, but you know, approach life have full, the glass half full versus half empty will have better outcomes.

L: I always hear this thing that pessimists say, they always say it's delusional to be optimistic. They always say that's just fake. That's just lying to yourself. But I think what's happening is they're just catching on to the first thing that pops into their mind and saying that's real. And everything else that you think about after that must be fake. We're programmed to have a negativity bias and fear things and stuff. That might be the first thing that pops into our mind. But we can still have other choices by seeing things a different way.

M: Absolutely. That's a great way of talking about that because it's so true. It goes back to how much you are in control of your mind. If you make it into something that you immediately attach a negative connotation to, then you're off and running in that direction.

L: Right. Everything we learned in our mind our whole life growing up, that's what causes our thoughts.

M: Yep, absolutely. I know that we've heard the example of being in an aquarium or something where all you know is what you know. Without allowing your thoughts to break out, to realize there's so much more, so many more possibilities of what you can think.

L: I don't think people know that. I think people think that what I'm thinking is just the way it is. They're not seeing that there's a lot of other viewpoints and things like that. They're just looking at things the way their mind is not the way it is.

M: Exactly. And that's why I think self discovery is a very important component of the road to happiness. You don't want to be without that self reflection, self discovery, trying to evolve and learn, continuously learn. That brings joy to my life, and I don't know that bringing joy is exactly happiness because it's not, but it's on the happier emotional side.

And then I think accepting what is within my control versus thinking that circumstances are creating the happiness or not.

L: It's our perception that's creating the happiness, not the actual circumstance. Yes, that's a deep topic. What are you choosing to believe: the best, the neutral or the worst about everything, but still all in the realm of what you believe?

M: Exactly. Very well said.

L: So to me, to me, our goal of the podcast is to show you that you have options, you have choices in the stories you tell yourself and they can be happy stories.