Notice the small things that bring you joy!
When we feel joy, we feel most alive! When you notice the small things that bring you joy and consciously create and receive moments of joy in your daily life, your experience of life will change for the better.
Jacqueline Kelm, fellow-author and coach, has developed an easy 3-step process to achieve just that. In her book, The Joy of Appreciative Living, Kelm shares her personal story and the success stories of the participants of her “joy study”. An engineer by training, Jackie shares her research of happiness and backs her personal discoveries and the results of her study with the newest scientific discoveries in the field of positive psychology.
She addresses the misconceptions that keep so many of us chasing happiness in all the wrong places. The Hollywood dream of the house by the ocean, the new shiny car and the diamond ring don’t compare with the simple treasures in life. A smile exchanged on the sidewalk with a stranger, laughter shared with friends, smelling the fresh air after a rainstorm, to name just a few.
Kelm’s honest and personal style make it easy for the reader to follow her guidance. I could feel the joy and enthusiasm for her work in every page. I loved reading the quotes from the study participants filled with gratitude for the difference the 3 steps to happiness made in their lives. Here’s one of my favourite quotes: “Doing the joy exercises is like the discipline of cleaning off your joy glasses. It doesn’t take that much time to clean them off.” Their lives have transformed for the better and they are experiencing a greater level of happiness even 6 months after completing the 28-day commitment of following her 3 easy steps.
Here are Jackie’s 3 easy steps to joy:
1. Write down three things you appreciate every morning. As you write them down, let yourself feel the gratitude.
2. Answer the daily question: “What one thing can I do today, no matter how small, to increase my joy?”
3. Once a week, spend fifteen minutes envisioning your ideal, joy-filled life.
Please share your experience with this simple, yet powerful technique on my blog.
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Ok – so I’m biased because I wrote the Appreciative Living book. This sounds like a commercial, but after being depressed off and on for most of my life, I was shocked to find an easy way to deal with it. The exercises looks too simple to make much difference, but they really work. Just give it 28 days and see. And reply back to this post and let us know how it went! (And if you don’t have a copy of Julia’s book on mini-retreats I would get that ASAP – it’s full of things you can do to answer that second question on how to increase your joy)
Thank you, Jackie for sharing your story! I have found that small, consistent, positive changes make indeed the biggest difference to our well-being.
The daily practice of writing down what I am grateful for as well as deciding what I am going to do to increase my joy is a wonderful Mini-Retreat by itself. It is something I look forward to every morning. :)