Harsh truth: Life is not perfect, and it never will be. Life is a rollercoaster, sometimes you’re on a high, sometimes you are on a low. But regardless, it is continuously moving and it won’t always be sunshines and rainbows. That was a harsh reality I had to learn after I realized that simply practicing the Law of Attraction, and thinking good thoughts would shield me from challenges, and bad things happening to me. I was wrong.
The good news? We are always in control of how we react to what life throws at us. Life is about experiences, and an experience is neither good nor bad until we deem it as such. We have the ability to look at any experience and see the good in it, if we choose to. The key is what you choose to take from your experiences. What did I learn? How am I growing? What will I do differently next time?
Those are all questions I ask myself when life throws a curveball my way, and if you know anything about my story, you know that I have faced many curveballs in my lifetime. But by letting go on the notion that life needs to be perfect, I’ve been able to create space for what needs to come into my life so that I can extract the good out of it, learn from it, and move on a better person.
And if I can, so can you! So join me in this episode as I break down how to live a Happy and Productive life no matter what.
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why the Law of Attraction doesn’t eliminate bad things
How asking the right questions can make any experience a good experience
The reality that life is going to happen no matter what you do
Why happiness always comes first
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello, hello, welcome to the Happy Productive podcast. I’m Jennifer Dawn, a business coach and founder of the Best Planner Ever. The Happy Productive podcast is your go-to resource for learning how to bring awareness into your daily productivity and start succeeding on a whole new level.
Today’s episode will be short and sweet and I want to talk a little bit about life and how it will never be perfect. I used to think that if I was really, really good at the Law of Attraction, I could basically eliminate all bad things from my life. And I’m not kidding you guys, I literally would like sit around and only think good thoughts and only focus on all the good things that I wanted to happen. And when something “bad” would happen, I would be like, what the hell? Like, why isn’t this working? What did I do wrong? Like, I’m only going to attract good things into my life. And you know what? It didn’t work. Why? Because it’s not how it works.
Here’s the deal. Life is about experience. That’s really what we’re here to do is to experience. And it’s us that makes that experience good or bad. And it’s coming from the judgments that we put on it. Okay, it’s our judgments that are making this experience either good or bad. When I started to understand this, I’m like, whoa, whoa, wait a second. If that’s the case, then I actually do have the ability to look at every experience in my life, and be able to always pull the good from it. And that made a lot of sense to me.
And so, here’s one of the things that you can do to kind of test this theory is that if you look back in your life at any “bad” experience that you have, okay. Think of something in your life that you didn’t like you didn’t enjoy. And I want you to ask yourself, what did I learn from this? And, you know, it might be easy in the beginning to say, oh, I learned never to trust people. Okay, that’s not really what you’ve learned. That might have been, you know, your defense mechanism of how you might have survived that bad experience. But that’s not really what you learned. And so, really get real and honest with yourself and ask, okay, what did I learn from this? Negative, bad, unpleasant, whatever experience?
Ask yourself, how did I grow? Right? How did I grow as a human being? or How did I get stronger? Right? That’s a you know, mental toughness and strength and power. Maybe it was something that really required you to tap into yourself and own your power, right? How did you get stronger from that experience? Or maybe because of the experience, it caused you to do more good for others, right? How did that experience help you help others? How did that experience help you put better into the world? These are really powerful questions to ask yourself.
So, I grew up I had an abusive childhood. My father was sexually abusive. My mother is a very toxic, narcissistic person. She knew what was happening, she did absolutely nothing about it, nothing to protect me. And so, I’ve often been like, why, you know, I’m a good person, I deserve to have really good parents. And of course, I did. But I didn’t have very good parents. And so instead of feeling sorry, for myself, I’ve asked myself these questions. Well, what did I learn from having parents like that? How did I grow? How did I get stronger, and I learned so much you guys, like I learned exactly what not to do as a parent.
I have three beautiful children. We have really deeply loving relationships with each other. I just love watching them grow up and the amazing human beings that they are becoming and what they’re doing out in the world. And you know, the reason why I am a good parent to my children, is because of the horrible example that I had growing up. I learned what not to do. And guess what, that’s a really powerful lesson.
How did it make me stronger? How did it make me better when situations come up with my children and their difficult situations, I get to ask myself, well, who do you want to be in this situation? And I get to decide how I want to show up. And the example that I had growing up is right there to be like, hey, Jen, do you want to do what your parents did in this situation? Or do you want to do something different And I am so grateful for that experience, and how it’s helped me to be a better person, how it’s helped me to be a better parent, how it’s helped me to put more good into the world.
So, these questions have a lot of power. And one of the things that you might find when you ask yourself these questions is you might start to see that some of those bad things actually have had really beautiful outcomes. So, what I really want to do is I want to encourage you to stop clinging to this idea that everything in your life should be picture perfect, right? That you deserve it to be perfect that you want it to be perfect. And that when it doesn’t go perfect, it’s because you’ve done something wrong. Or you start beating yourself up because guys, this is not realistic and is not healthy.
Life is going to happen, no matter what you do. Think about it for a second. We have billions of people on this planet, animals, we’ve got Mother Nature, everything all just like banging up against each other. It’s really kind of crazy to think that all these things have got to like line up in perfect order, right so that you can be happy.
Think about like the weather. Have you ever complained about the weather? I know I have. I don’t do it anymore. But I used to think about how insane that is to complain about the weather. Okay, zoom out your focus a little bit, we have this amazing blue green ball in the middle of a vast universe where they have never discovered any other life on any other planet. We have this amazing planet, right? And it is filled with life. And it is such a gift. So, the idea that the weather isn’t necessarily going to line up to your expectations, it kind of seems crazy, right? When you zoom out, and you look at it from a different perspective.
But there is a way to go through life where the weather, you know, people banging up against you, these things really won’t bother you quite so much. And the way to that is through happiness. And happiness is absolutely a choice that you can make, you can choose to be happy no matter what. Now, this does not mean that we don’t process our emotions or feel negative things. You know, it doesn’t mean any of that. But it does mean that at our core, we commit to being happy to being in a good place, no matter what. You want to win in life? Be happy. Right now, today, There’s a great quote, and I’m so sorry for whoever said it. And I can’t remember the name. But it’s you know, in the pursuit of happiness, we have to just stop for a moment, and just be happy.
Okay, and it’s so true. Right? We’re all on this journey of like, Oh, my God, I got to do all these things that I can be happy. Well, why don’t you just stop and actually just commit to being happy right now today? Why do you think that I call this podcast Happy Productive, right? Because being happy is first in the key to living a full productive life. We even have a new hashtag for our company, which is #winhappy.
Where does this come from? Right, it comes from first win winning the day, which means that we don’t overwhelm ourselves, we don’t try to do everything at once. We take it one day at a time and we win the day. Then we do that too from a happy state, win happy. Everything that you’re facing in life can be overcome, if you just take it one day at a time. And if you commit to your own happiness, and then do the work that you need to do from that higher emotional state. Win happy. You can show up in your day, this is your choice, you can show up in your day angry, tired, pissed off, resentful, mad at everybody or you can show up in your day happy.
And let me ask you, which state do you think gets better results, showing up mad at life feeling like a victim with no power or showing up in a state where you’ve chosen to be happy no matter what comes at you? Which state of mind do you think is going to get better results? Which state of mind do you think has healthier relationships? Which state of mind has more love and abundance and gratitude in their day? And which state of mind do you think makes more money? And which state of mind do you think is the healthier choice? You know the answer.
And it’s been proven time and time again by science and studies that they’ve done. Happier people, they do more, they have more, they are more. So why not get on board the happy train? When you commit to happy even when life isn’t perfect? Guess what? You’re way better equipped to deal with it. So, when life throws you a curveball and you’re in a happy state, think about this for a second. Life throws you a curveball and you’re in a happy state. Don’t you just handle it and then like get back to being busy or happy or whatever, right? You just you just deal with it and you move on.
But when you’re in that lower emotional state, you’re in anger, you’re in frustration, you’re in overwhelm, you’re beating yourself up, right? You’re in those lower emotional states and then life throws you a curveball. It drags you even lower. You might do on this for days or weeks years people do on this stuff, sometimes for lifetimes because they’re in these lower emotional states.
And then when you’re in that lower emotional place, you might react to that curveball in a way that’s not really in alignment with who you want to be in this lifetime. You lash out at somebody you say unkind things. And then guess what, then you get to deal with that embarrassment and that shame of acting like a jerk, because you are in that lower emotional state. None of that is very fun.
But this is why I wanted to share this with you guys today. Let go of this idea that life needs to be perfect. It doesn’t and it won’t ever be. Life is actually perfectly imperfect. And every experience that comes to us has the opportunity to bring us joy to make us happier to help us learn to help us grow to help us evolve, no matter what it is. Commit to happiness first. This is the best way for you to be the best equipped to handle whatever life sends your way. Win happy every single day.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with somebody. We don’t do paid advertising, we never will pay the goodness forward. You don’t know how it could help somebody who might be struggling even in ways that you can’t imagine.
If you’d like some more help, come check us out. We have our Best Planner Ever which is our daily planning tool. If you need motivation, community and support and meeting your life goals, check out our Goal Achievers, you can find that at bestplannerever.com. And if you’re a business owner and you need help in your business, come visit us at jenniferdawncoaching.com. We coach the mindset to succeed and consult the changes necessary to transform your business. Thank you so much for listening, you guys. Now get out there and have a Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer