Welcome to Happy Productive Episode #4 where we ask the question: What Kind Of Productive Are You?
Every day you are taking actions – and those actions cause us to get results – and those results will generate emotions within us.
The emotions could be anything from happiness on one end of the scale to sadness on the other end.
When I ask what kind of productive are you, I’m really asking…
Do your actions each day produce the emotions you want to feel more of?
Or do your actions produce stress, chaos, overwhelm, shame, disappointment, or failure?
Listen in as we dive in further.
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
The different kinds of productivity
How to plan your day to be both happy and productive
How to incorporate more happiness into your day
The secret to productivity
FEATURED ON THE SHOW
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello, hello hello and welcome to episode number four of Happy Productive. And before I get started I have to tell you guys I’m so excited. We’re a podcast have submitted it, we’re on Apple, we’re on buzzsprout. We’re on a couple other platforms that we’re working on the final approval for. So yay, just super excited.
So now you can listen as a podcast you can watch on YouTube, or you can of course watch on my websites best planner ever Jennifer Dawn coaching and the blog section. So whether you want to watch or listen or do both, you can now do it all.
So yay, super excited about that. So today what I’d like to discuss is what kind of productive are you and here is what I mean by that. So every day you are taking actions right? You’re busy doing stuff. You might even be busy taking non actions which technically is still an action Because you’re deciding to do nothing, okay? So it still counts.
So all those actions or non actions that we’re taking will cause us to get results. And those results are going to trigger or cause emotions within us. Now, the emotions can be anything from happiness on one end of the scale, or it could be sadness on the other end. So when I ask what kind of productive are you what I’m really asking is, do your actions each day produce the emotions that you want to feel more of? Or do your actions produce things like stress, chaos, overwhelm, shame, disappointment, or maybe even failure.
One of my wake up calls was exhaustion. I can tell you this was super true for me. So you know how people will have their theme For the year and I love that. It’s like, Hey, what’s my theme for the year? It’s about more joy. It’s about more abundance. Okay, wonderful. Well, at the end of last year, my theme word, like the only word that was in my head was exhaustion. And let me tell you, that’s not the theme I wanted for the new coming year.
But that was the theme that I had created for myself was because I was in a daily state of exhaustion. And my husband and I, it was really amazing. We gone on a cruise a two week cruise to the Caribbean and the first three days all I did was sleep, which sounds wonderful, but it was a big wake up call for me. I’m like, Wait a second. Why am I so tired that I literally need three days of almost nonstop sleep just to feel like a human being being again. And I actually use the time on the rest of that cruise. to really rethink everything.
I rethought my business. I completely changed my business model. I rethought my life. My De everything that was being set up because my theme was exhaustion. And so really my true theme is to eliminate exhaustion for this year. And that’s really what I’ve been in the process of doing and have been very, very successful with. So how did I get myself in that stage? Well, because I wasn’t saying no enough, I was putting everybody else before myself.
And then the other thing that I was doing, which was actually quite brilliant on my part was that I was using the excuse of being a person who was quote, driven, right? I’m super driven. And that’s why I have to work so hard, and that’s why I have to do so much. And that’s why I have to, like micromanage myself into exhaustion all day long with all the things that I should be doing. And that was a big wake up call for me you guys have of identifying that belief and and taking something that you think sounds positive, like hey, I’m really driven and understanding that for me, the meaning behind it was a excuse to keep myself in this state of exhaustion.
So a big wake up call. I was very, very happy to discover that one. And, you know, yes, I was busy so I was successful by society’s standards. But when I stopped to ask the question, what what am I really producing here, I realized my result was I was producing exhaustion. So here’s another thing that I would do and this might sound familiar to you. So every single day, I’d set this goal that I was going to eat better, right?
Okay, today is the day I’m really going to do it. I’m going to eat salads all day long. I’m going to feel so good that maybe you’ve done this. And then the day moves along and then in the normal stressors like pop up in our day, and then of course find myself breaking the promise to myself blowing my I’m only eating salads today. feeling awful about myself.
And then of course, I’d beat myself up for a while often while I was like stuffing my face, and then I would resolve Okay, well, tomorrow’s the day I’m gonna you know, try again tomorrow will be better day. So even in a situation like that when I started looking closer at it, I realized what was my productivity for the day? Well, I was producing a lot of guilt and shame for myself. So this is a topic I really have lived and I know how hard it can be and why I’m going to be really diving deep into this in my upcoming workshop that I’m working on.
I’ve mentioned to you guys making your goals inevitable, because the daily systems that we’re subscribing to, they’re either going to set us up to succeed and produce those positive emotions which help us feel good, they build our confidence and they’re really just a lot more fun to do. Or those systems are going to set us up each day to fail and produce emotions like frustration, disappointment, when you’re feeling frustrated and disappointment. I don’t know about you, but it makes it feel like almost impossible to meet our goals.
And so what we really want to do here is create a day where we are producing seeing more of the emotions that we want things like satisfaction and fulfillment and growth and love. But if we want more of those things, we’re going to have to intentionally plan a day where we’re asking the question, is my day a recipe for happy or for something else?
Okay, so think for a second baking a cake. When you put in the right ingredients and you follow the recipe you get the desired results are pretty close to it right? I remember being a kid and I wanted to make those beautiful sugar cookies where you have to make the special icing that’s kind of liquidy and you pour it over the top of the sugar cookie and then it makes this beautiful glazed finish right on the sugar cookie.
I’m like 10 or 11 and I found a recipe and my mother’s cookbook for this special icing. And the recipe called for sugar but it called for confectioner’s sugar and I didn’t know what confectioner sugar Was and so I just kept using regular sugar. And if you’ve ever made icing before, and you can think of substituting regular sugar where it calls for confectioner’s sugar, really all I got was just this horrible, horrible, gloppy mess, right.
But once I learned and I understood what confectioner sugar actually was, from there, I could make a very nice icing. And so it was just funny that little bit of not understanding change the whole recipe and the whole result from a disaster, right. But when you use the right sugar, I was getting a success, which was awesome. But here’s the deal.
Our day planning our day isn’t much different. So to better understand what we want our day to look like spending even just a few minutes on getting clear on which emotions we want more of in the day, can make a big difference. It can be the right kind of sugar we’re putting in our day versus the wrong kind from just not taking the time to understand what we want to do.
Now, I love the cake analogy. So if we’re going to bake a cake, you’d probably like look for some recipes right on Google or Pinterest or whatever until you found just the right one that you wanted. Well, your date, your day is no different. So by taking just a few minutes with yourself and asking the question, like, hey, what kind of emotions do I want to bake into my cake today?
That could be any sorts of great things. It could be maybe a little fun. Maybe you want to bake in a little laughter today, some peace or some calm, or maybe you want to bake in some more happiness, right? Happy, productive. That’s what we’re here to talk about. So if you want to bake a little more happy into your cake each day, let’s break down I think this is really good to understand.
Let’s break down what happy really is because we can bring happiness into our lives in many, many different ways. And when we understand the different ways we can bake in some Happiness, it makes it a little bit easier. So the first way is through experiences. The second way is through growth. And the third way is through contribution or meaning. And so let’s dive into those individually just a little bit. So experiences. We know what these are.
These are things like driving your new car, I tell you guys, when I drive my truck, and I listen to my favorite music out to the barn, it just makes me happy. Or maybe eating some of our favorite foods or maybe taking a trip or sometimes even planning to take a trip, maybe just sitting outside in nature. It’s those things that we’re experiencing that bring us joy. And so when you sit to plan your day and you’re baking your day cake, are you planning some experiences into your day that will make you feel happy?
And yes, it’s easy to say, Oh, well, I’m too busy for all of that today. But what what emotions is that going to produce and it would be Much better to just say, Hey, wait a second, like, I want to experience some more positive emotions and maybe these experiences will definitely help me do that. So plan some positive experiences into your day.
The second way is through growth. When we learn something new, it really makes us happy. I know you’ve all experienced this, maybe you’re learning something new on this episode. And it’s like this Aha, or this little epiphany, whoo. And it’s fun. And it feels really, really good. And it makes us happy. Back in the old days when I was just working non stop, and I need, you know, no time whatsoever for learning or personal growth. It would make me so unhappy and so mad because I was like, I knew I was missing out on something that was really important to me.
And I’ve always loved expanding my skill set and learning and growing. And as I started to make this transition away, and this has actually been going on for a fair I look probably the last few years of my life and it didn’t happen overnight. You guys it was absolutely horrible. transitioned away from daily exhaustion. And it did take some time. But I wanted to bring more personal growth, learning reading, especially back into my life because I had this huge stack of books, right. And I knew that I should be reading them.
But I didn’t want to. And it just wasn’t happening even when I tried to force myself to do that. And what what switched it around for me was I came across a book that I really, truly wanted to read. It was called Happy money. And it was written by Ken Honda. He is like the Japanese Zen millionaire. And I was very intrigued by what he had to say. And I got the book happy money, and I literally just devoured it. I think I read it in like two days. And it was such a good book.
And that’s when the light bulb for me kind of came on. I was like, Wait a second. This was a book I wanted to read. I loved reading and as soon as I realized will stop forcing yourself to read these books you should read that you should read and you don’t want to read and you’re not reading And instead just start reading things that you actually want to get into.
And once I flipped that switch, it was like the books just started pulling me in. I even pulled one or two out of the bottom of the stack because I was like, Oh, wait, I really do want to read that book. And now I’m usually reading two books at a time, not four hours a day, but you know, 15 or 20 minutes a day, and I’m loving loving the process. And so it was almost like I rediscovered the happiness in reading, just by making that switch away from what I should be doing to what I wanted to be doing what my soul was calling me to do, calling me to learn. And from that growth came happiness.
Okay. So when you’re planning your day, even just 15 or 20 minutes, what are you doing to improve yourself, learn grow, whatever that means for you that will create that positive emotion that you’re after. And third is contribution contracts. Motion is about being in service to others. And this gives meaning to our lives. And when I say contribution, I am not talking about slaving away for everybody putting everybody else for so that you’re bitter and resentful.
I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about showing up in a good place because sometimes the contribution is to ourselves first, so that we have a full battery, right. And then from there, we can serve others. So I want to be super, super clear about that. Serve yourself first and from a full cup serve others. And when we are in service to others, it helps to give meaning to our lives. And this could be anything from being just a great parent to your kid, it could be just a five minute thing. It might mean volunteer work for you.
Or maybe it just means showing up at whatever your place of work is whether you’re a business owner or a corporate person, but showing up there in a spirit of love and compassion, instead of showing up to your workplace. in a state of resentment or anger, because we’re mad that I have to be here, if you think back to a time in your life, where you were maybe you had a moment where you were a great parent or you were super awesome best friend, or maybe you help someone and that joy that it brought to you, my family we were visiting the beach one one year and there was a lot of trash and we just started like picking it up.
And as we got to the end of the beach, I remember thinking I really need to manifest a trash bag. And you guys it’s it’s absolutely true. I walk kept walking a little further, I just kind of felt pulled to do it. And sure enough, I found one of those big black hefty trash bags completely brand new half buried in the sand, pulled that sucker out and we walked back and we filled it up with trash. And as we were picking up trash, other people on the beach, they started to see us and they started picking up trash. It was one of the most joyful, fun moments in our lives. It was completely unplanned.
It was just something that we spontaneously started to do. So maybe you have a moment like that, or you just started doing something to give back, give back to the earth, give back to other people. And it caused you great joy. And so why not bake a little bit more of that into your day. Now one of the things that helped me start to kind of make this shift away from all the things I should be doing. Instead, I started doing the things that were in my heart that I really wanted to be doing. It was a super subtle shift you guys, but it was incredibly powerful.
And so I just want to explain it just a little bit. So my husband, he’s so wonderful and love him. And I had mentioned to him that I wanted to learn how to play an instrument and I said, Oh, you know, it’d be really nice to play the violin. And God bless him. He bought me a violin for Christmas. This was like two Christmases ago. And I’m like, crap, now I got this violin. Now I’m actually gonna have to learn how to play it. And so I think it sat for probably a good six months before I did anything with it. And then I’m like, Okay, I’ve got to pick up this violin, which I did.
And I found a teacher and I started taking lessons. And I was regular in my lesson because I scheduled it. I was paying money to be there. I showed up for the lesson. But I wasn’t practicing at all because I was always just too busy. And the way that I shifted This was I took a few minutes to get clear on what was the experience that I wanted to have by learning to play the violin? Well, the experience I wanted to have was, I thought it was so cool when a musician can just pick up an instrument and they can just start playing from memory.
And I’ve always been fascinated by this. And when I was younger, I played the piano and the flute and so I had some musical background, but I just haven’t done it for most of my adult life. And so I just wanted that experience of being able to basically be a musician. And so when I got clear on the experience I wanted to have which is I want to be able to pick up an instrument and play beautiful music from memory. Not close yet I’m not even close you guys but that’s the experience. That I’m after.
But as soon as I got clear on, that’s the experience I wanted to have it turned it around for me instead of I should go practice my violin. Instead it started the practice actually started to pull me because my soul was like, hey, I want to have this beautiful experience. And the only way that I’m going to have this experience is if I become a musician. Okay, can you feel the difference there?
The becoming a musician is like this beautiful thing and it just like pulls you into it, which is so different than I have to practice my violin because my husband bottom wore me and I know we should be doing it. Blah, blah, blah. There’s so much more joy to be found in the becoming the living up to your potential, even if it’s something small, every little action forward matters. And you can do this because once I made the shift around, wait a second, I’m looking Want to become a musician and there’s great joy in that.
Then I was like, oh, look out, I started looking at all kinds of things. I’m like, look at my workout. Why am I working out? Well, I’m working out well, I didn’t even know why I was working out. But then I started getting clear on what experience do I want to have from working out? Well, my sister runs Spartan races, and she’s so ridiculously cool for doing this. And I’m like, wait, I used to be an athlete. When I was younger, I want to do this too. So my experiences I want to run Spartan races all over the world, hopefully with my sister.
And that felt really good. When I shifted that to the becoming of an athlete again, that really changed my workouts now it didn’t seem like I have to go work out. It’s like, Oh, I really want to go do this because I’m loving the joy of the becoming something better. So when you’re doing those things in life that really matter to you, that result is going to be more and more positive emotion. Can I pick up my violin and play for memory? No, I still totally suck. But it’s okay. Because I know every time I practice, I’m getting a little better.
I’m getting a little better. Am I ready to run a Spartan Race? No, but I’m having a blast becoming an athlete in training for that first Spartan Race, okay, which is happening in June in New York. I’m doing it. Okay. So if you were to actually compare the productivity from one of my old days, when you looked at the things I was doing, to my productivity from now, in my new days, I’m doing a lot of the same things. But the difference is that my results produce happiness. They produce bliss.
Sometimes guys, I’m so excited at the end of the day, because it just feels good that I read something amazing. I practice my my violin, I worked on becoming an athlete that feels really good. Some of those exact same things that I was doing the old way, was just this list of existing sauce, Jen that I was pushing and forcing myself to do. So let’s circle back to what kind of productive are you? Are you the kind? Who is producing more love more joy, more accomplishment more pride each day? Or is your productivity producing something else?
So I would really encourage you to just take a few minutes and look at your day. Just break it down into segments without any judgment whatsoever. But are there areas in your day where you would stay the same? Because that’s a great thing I’m doing maybe I’m meditating every day and I love it feels really wonderful. Are there segments that you need to change so that you can produce a different emotion from that segment?
For example, maybe you hate doing dishes? I totally get it. Okay, you guys I do I do a fair bit of dishes every day myself. But one of you turned this around in your dishwashing time or you’re doing the dishes time, and during that time you started listening to your favorite podcasts or a personal growth program. So now, that same time that you’re using the during the dishes, you might actually start to look forward to because it’s like, Oh, I love this time when I’m doing the dishes because I get to learn and grow. And that might be really fun. What if you look at your day? And you’re like, yeah, I’m working out, but I am not loving it at all.
So what if you looked at your workout and you got clear on the experience that you were after. And when you got clear on the experience that you wanted from the working out, maybe it could change the way that you were looking at your workout and maybe for you, it might be the becoming of something that brings joy to your life. So now your workout, you start to actually look forward to just take your day piece by piece. Look at any areas where maybe you’re just using the wrong kind of sugar, right so it’s coming out of disaster and see if you can’t put the right kind of sugar in there.
To get those results that you want, this was easier for me when I started doing the work because of my planner, best planner ever, I could just flip back through the pages, see where my time was going and then start breaking it into segments and asking myself of these individual segments, what which are generating the emotions I want and which are producing the ones that aren’t. Even if you don’t have a tracking tool, just start paying attention as you move through your day.
Or if you have a best planner ever, maybe just make a little note as you go through your day, like which emotions did I produce? Which with the actions that I was taking? And you can even start asking yourself a beautiful power question. How can I make my day today spectacular fun? How can I produce more fill in the blank emotion in my day today? At the top of my planner, there is a space for affirmations and you can totally write an affirmation in there.
But some days I’ll just write my power question so that it stays with me as I’m planning my day in the Beginning of the day and moving through my day, on the day is when I write a power question and they’re like, how can I make today spectacular fun. It’s like I put my brain to work on that task making tech today spectacular fun. And what it comes up with is so much fun.
Okay, you guys. So that’s our lesson for today. I really hope that you enjoyed it. And I really encourage you to take some time and look at the emotions that your daily actions are producing and to get clear on what kind of productive Do you want to be, and what kind of emotions do you want. And then once you’re clear on that, start setting up your productivity around those, maybe making some shifts in your beliefs or how you’re looking at things so that you can start to produce those emotions that you really want to see more of in your day.
If you enjoy this, I also want to invite you to come and check out my coaching programs. Goal Achievers is my life coaching program where we take all of this material and We apply it to our lives. We dive deep into one life topic each month and we focus on it and we apply it in a way that’s fun, and achievable and never overwhelming.
If you’re a business owner, you might love Inner Circle I know I love inner circle. We do the same deep dive on just one business topic per month but we also learn ways of eliminating the frustration the stress and stress and the overwhelm from our businesses so that we can have spectacular fun in our day every single day with our work.
So if you’re interested you can of course learn more either of my websites bestplannerever.com or jenniferdawncoaching.com. Thank you guys so much for being here with me today. I think I’m getting a handle and getting a groove on this. And if you are listening through podcasts, you know, please I would love it if you would maybe just take a few minutes and give me a review.
If you’re on YouTube or on my website. Pop a comment in there. I’d love to hear how this is helping you or if you have a question about it. Just pop a comment in there. I definitely answer them. And I would be so appreciative and grateful to keep this conversation going with you. Okay guys, that’s it. Thank you so much for listening or watching. Now get out there and go have a Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer