How to Successfully Get Back on Your Happiness Journey After a Pause EP#048

How do you Successfully get back on your happiness journey after a pause? Well, maybe not a pause, per se, but not being as diligent at using all your happiness tools and habits? In today’s podcast, we are talking about just that!

On a journey, sometimes you take breaks and pause, but you do NOT quit.

You get back at it, figure out what you have done well, ask yourself, what you could have done better, and maybe tweak a few things, then keep going. Getting down on ourselves doesn’t help, so skip that step and jump back in. No good comes from berating yourself. Reflection and review? YES. Nitpicking negativity? NO. HARD NO.

So join me as we talk about learning from our summer and heading into this fall and this new season recommitting to our positive habits and putting what we have learned to good use!

Welcome back to a new season of The Happier You Podcast! 

I am so very excited I even get to say there is a new season.  That means there was another season …and it was successful, and so we get to build on that and keep going.

I’m sorry if I left you off in June was not a super clear break for the summer.  I love that many of you reached out and asked if I was coming back.  Well, yes.  I missed you!!!  Ofcourse I’m coming back.

So, If you are new, Welcome to our happiness community.  I am so excited for you to be on this journey with this amazing community of people.  if you missed season1, don’t worry, and welcome to our Happiness Community.

Season one episodes will always be there to refer back to if you want, and we probably will use those episodes as refreshers sometimes, but honestly, this community can be joined at any time, so Welcome.

 If you have been on this journey with me for a while, Welcome back.  I missed you. 

I hope you enjoyed your summer and found things that recharged you and made your soul sing as often as possible this summer.

I am over the moon excited to get the podcast going again and share new content with you.  I have had time to contemplate everything I learned and all the personal growth I did during season 1, and now

I’m energized to head into season 2 and see if I can find more ways to encourage and inspire all of us to find and grab hold of our own unique happier. 

Whatever that looks like for each of us.

I missed the rhythm of the podcast and the reflection and review that is part of creating the podcast.  I also missed talking to happiness community members who are working on their happiness. 

I took the summer to move, renovate, rest recharge and spend time thinking about what fun and inspiring things we can do to grow our Happiness community and inspire us all to find and add more happy in our everyday lives.

Did you keep up your happiness practices over the summer or did you let some of them slip?

Maybe you just trusted that summer would be awesome and happiness would prevail.  Did it? 

I know for me, I had so much going on this summer that, more than once,  I had to remind myself to go into my happiness toolbox because some days I was completely exhausted, emotional and overwhelmed. 

We had an international move, a kitchen renovation, some travel to get in as much family as we could and make up for lost time, an emotional end to a very amazing chapter in our lives and an exhausted start to the next.  Ouf.

No matter what your summer entailed, at moments you probably needed some tools from your happiness toolbox.  Some of us may have needed more than others to stay strong on our happiness journey. 

I hope you had a chance to practice your new skills and change a rough moment to a gratitude moment, or make an amazing experience even better because you were fully present and grateful for it. 

Reflecting back on season one, some of the happiness tools I used this summer were:

Mindfulness: Who are am I being in all this doing?  Some of the days were just crazy busy and I had to stop and take time to realize who I was being in the doing.

Self compassion: Ahh, this one.  I am not perfect and this is hard.  I cannot do it all.  This is part of the shared human experience.  I said this to myself multiple times this summer.

Gratitude: I often stopped this summer and expressed gratitude for the experience, the people, or the moment that I was in.

Journaling: I was not super consistent with my journaling this summer, but what I did do was when I was feeling out of control, I took a moment to journal, just so I could get everything I was feeling out so I could deal with it.

Play and connection: I did not get a tonne of Play and connection this summer, but when I could I played hard and connected solid with the important people in my life. 

And I will re-enforce…gratitude.  Lots and lots of it because  no matter how overwhelmed and imperfect I felt at times,

I have so many amazing things, people and experiences to be grateful for. 

I could do a whole episode on all the amazing gems I am grateful for from this summer.  So grateful! 

I will put links to the episodes that I reference for the happiness tools that I used extensively this summer.   Just incase you are like me, and you like a refresher.

Now, moving forward  I am still in my year of pushing outside my comfort zone, so,  I’m continuing to go outside my comfort zone and I’m inviting you to come with me! 

We are stronger together and we each have our own journey, so let’s encourage each other along the way!

So, what’s coming up this year?

I have Interviews with inspiring people who you may not normally have otherwise met.  Real people who have found ways to add happiness to their regular lives.  I want to meet more of these people, but so far, I have met many and I am excited to share them with you. 

I think we can learn and be inspired from each other.

One of the things that drove me to start this podcast, was to find and share regular everyday people doing things, adding things, changing things in their life to find and spread happy. 

I have been inspired and encouraged by many of them and I’m excited to have them inspire and encourage you.

We are going to get back on our happiness journey by doing more challenges.  Together!

In October we are doing the Celebrating the Small Wins Challenge.  It is something we talked about last season, and comes up during the 21 Day Happiness Challenge.  The idea came to me after reading 2 of my favourite books.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

It is about implementing a new positive habit in your life.  Figuring out how to add it, stick with it, and celebrate all the small wins along the way!

If you haven’t listened to the episode on Celebrating the Small Wins in a while, I will put a link in the show notes for you to refresh what that is. 

To sum up, this challenge is about taking a positive habit that you want to add in to your life.  You then break it down into something that takes less than 2 minutes.  And finally, you add it into your life for 30 days.

This challenge is going to be quite different than the 21 Day Happiness challenge.  We are working on 1 thing for 30 days.  Not 21 things in 21 Days.  And we are going to support each other through it. 

Did I mention I’m excited about this?  One of the things that I reflected on was how much the supportive community is important to me.

I love when we interact and encourage each other.

As those of you that have been with me for a while know, I’m not the best Social media person.  So we are going to still use social media for those of you that are good with it…but we are also going to do live face to face encouragement and motivation.   

I am going to kick off this challenge on a live zoom call.

I will walk you through choosing your small win to ensure you have success, we’ll talk about some common pitfalls you will want to avoid, and I will give you some tips and tricks to help you Nail this challenge!

You are going to meet others embarking on the challenge, and we are going to come through October, and into November, well on our way to establishing a powerful new habit that will serve us moving forward.

Before I give you this week’s quote, Here’s what I want to leave you with and your challenge for this week. 

Our happiness is a journey.  There will be hills and valleys and pauses.  As long as we stay on our journey we will continue to move forward. 

Don’t waste energy berating yourself for missed opportunities or mistakes.  Take the time to learn from your experiences, be grateful you had them and find things to celebrate.  That’s how you get back on your happiness journey. You just start!

You Challenge this week is to reflect on your summer and notice if you used any of your happiness tools.  Which ones are becoming second nature to you and which ones you want to work on a bit more. 

That’s it.  Write those down and if you are comfortable, share those on the The Happier You Podcast FB page. Or as always, if you are like me, and you are not as comfortable with social media, you can always shoot me a direct email bona@thehappieryou.net.

I love to hear from you!

Here’s today’s quote, I’ve used it before, but I don’t care, I absolutely love it.

“Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else’s. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else’s journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?”

– Jon Kabat-Zinn

All right happy people. Go, honour your uniqueness this week and make sure to sign up for the Celebrating the Small Wins Challenge we are doing in October!

I can’t wait to meet you there!

Wait I forgot your send off!

All right happy people…Have a good one!  And go get your happy on!