280: Holly Worton ~ How to Let Go of Pessimism & Feel More Optimistic About Everything

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today’s episode is inspired by both recent events in my life and a survey response. Massive thanks to everyone who has already responded to the survey! If you haven’t yet replied, you can find the link below.

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

What to do if you’ve been feeling lately like life is hard
How to focus on what you DO want so you can experience more joy in your life
How to make what YOU want to do a priority over what you think you SHOULD do
How to get an attitude that will help you create more joy in life
How to get the mindset you need to make joy a priority.

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 308. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about joy, and happiness, and how I think we can all be a little bit more joyful.

But before we get into to today’s topic, I wanted to draw your attention to a recent podcast that I was a guest on. So Janet Groom runs a podcast called “The Write Word Show” and if you go to http://HollyWorton.com/Janet2 (because I have been on her podcast twice now) that will redirect to the episode. So in it we talk about writing, we talk about my recent book, If Trees Could Talk, and all kinds of stuff, nature and trees and good stuff like that. So, I hope you enjoy that episode, and if you are a writer, or if you are interested in writing, or you enjoy writing, check out her podcast, subscribe to it and listen to it. She has a lot of interesting interviews with other authors and I think it is really good to get different perspectives on what writing is like for different people. So http://HollyWorton.com/Janet2 will redirect you to my specific episode on her podcast.

So, today’s topic is inspired by a few things one of which is a response to my survey. So you may have heard me talking about my survey in previous episodes, if you go to http://HollyWorton.com/survey you can get access to the survey, it is just seven quick questions that will help me create better content for you. It is basically: what do you want me to be talking about? How do you want me to talk? Do you want a podcast? Do you want blogs, videos? Whatever. Seven questions, super-quick to answer, it shouldn’t take you more than 2-5 minutes to answer and none of the questions are obligatory, so you can choose to answer one, or all, or anything in between. So the topic that was suggested was any tips on how to live happily like me? And my initial response to that was: oh, have I been putting it out there that I am happy? Do people think that I am happy? Because of course there are always ups and downs in life, and yes I am happy, but my life isn’t perfect by any means. And my kind of initial reaction was: oh my god have I been putting it out there that I am artificially happy or am I misrepresenting myself, and then I thought: no, I feel like I talk about a lot of my mind crap whether it is here in the podcast or in my newsletter and feel like I am pretty representative of how things are going both up and down. So, yes, I am happy and yes I also share the mind crap with you, so I feel like I have been fairly accurate in representing myself.

So, today I am going to talk tips on how to live happily like me or just to be happier. And, the other inspiration for this episode is a session I had a couple of weeks ago with Fabeku Fatunmise. And Fabeku, you have probably heard me talking about him a lot in previous years; when I was really, really, upset with online business and online marketing and I hated how everyone was doing things and I am still pretty much disgusted by that {laughing} and I still think Fabeku is a great example of how to market yourself online and how to build a community of people that just love what you do, because he has such a tribe of raving fans. And he is so marmite, you really, really like him, I am sure there are people out there who really, really, don’t like him. Some people probably don’t like the language he uses, I don’t know what people might not like about him because I think he is fantastic. Really, really, like the guy, did his MoneyLab a couple of years ago, and then I had been wanting to signup for a long time to this thing he does called The Rev, which is several hours of working with him and one of the things you get out of this session is to find what he calls your superpower, which is the core thing that you help clients achieve or experience. And that was what I really wanted from doing a Rev with him, but the thing about Revs there is always a six-month-waiting period from the time you sign up, to actually getting a call with him and that I didn’t like, because I change so much. I thought: am I really going to want this six months from now? Well turns out that I have been wanting this for a couple of years now, and he recently added this new “superpower call”, which is a one-hour-call where you just get the superpower and then if you want you can go onto work with him in other ways including the Rev. So when he put this up in his Facebook group a couple of months ago, I immediately jumped on it. I think there is about a month, a month-and-a-half wait, between the time that I booked and the time that I actually had the call, part of that was because I was not available on one of the days that he was available. So it took me a couple of months, or maybe six weeks, between the time I booked and the time that I had the call and I had the call a few weeks ago and it was kind of unsettling, because I went into it thinking, I don’t know what I was thinking, I really had no clue what was going to come out of it. One of the things that he says is that people are often very uncomfortable with what comes up in the session because our smallness is triggered by it, because our smallness – you know, the part of us that wants to stay small and hidden and doesn’t want to step into our greatness — is triggered by this superpower, because the superpower is who we are and how we help people when we are standing in our greatness.

So, yeah, the thing that came up and I keep hesitating to say this, because I am still really settling into it and I have done a little bit of the follow-up work that you do with yourself to have these kind of triggers to help remind you of what it feels like when you are in your superpower and you are working in your greatness, and you are standing in your greatness. So, my thing is: expansive joy. And the way we got to this was he keeps asking you questions over and over and over again, and really trying to distill, he looks for the words that you use over and over again, and he distills it down into a phrase which is a thing, which is joy and a modifier, which is expansive. When I got to the word joy I thought: I don’t want it to be that, I have a friend who calls herself the joy coach, I don’t want my thing to be joy. Obviously no one owns the word joy, but also it is a word that has never really resonated with me. I don’t know what it is, but I have never had like a “zing” for the word joy. When you do exercises and you have to come up with a number one value or your top three values, joy has never come up there. Freedom has come up for me a lot, that’s one of my biggest values, and whenever I do those values exercises, over and over again, one of the things that comes up is freedom. But I have realised that freedom isn’t the end goal for me, why do I want freedom? Because I want to feel the expansive joy that comes from freedom. Freedom gives me expansive joy and when I have been in situations in my life where I haven’t felt freedom, I haven’t felt any expansive joy. I have been completely shut down and it has led me to feel really trapped and unhappy and desperate and hopeless.

So, as I said, I have been settling into this feeling for a while and I have realised that it is right. When I was helping people with social media, that was so you can get your business and attract your ideal clients and that kind of thing; and when I was helping women with business mindset, I was also helping them with business mindset so that they could build the business they wanted, so they could create the lifestyle they want… why? What is the end result of all that? So you can feel expansive joy!!! My computer has gone to screensaver as I am doing this, and all of these images, I created this screensaver of images that trigger expansive joy for me. So I am really tapping into that feeling now as I am speaking, and I am doing this multiple times a day, whenever this screen saver comes onto my computer. And, I am realising that that is it, the times that I am happiest in my life, the times when I feel the best, are times when I feel that expansive joy. And another thing that I have recalled as I am easing into this superpower thing, remember the house last year that I was talking about in Avebury that I was so desperate to buy and eventually fell though, the reason I was so desperate to buy it, was because I felt this intense feeling of expansive joy whenever I was in that house. There was this conservatory that faced the back of the house and had this view, of what I always called an expansive view, which was the little garden, which had a low fence and beyond the garden were fields, a farmer’s fields and you could just see and whatever crop was growing that year, whether it was wheat, or rapeseed, or whatever else. It was usually wheat fields when I was staying there, but just this expansive field and I realised that expansive view made me feel expansive joy.

So, you could also look at the superpower as one of those core-desired-feelings, I know Danielle LaPorte talks a lot about core-desired-feelings, and I had identified what I thought were my core-desired-feelings and I realised they were not. If I could distill all of my values, and my core-desired-feelings, into one thing it really is this expansive joy. So that has been the core of the work that I do, of the reason why I have tried to help people in the ways that I have helped them over the years, whether that is through social media, or through business mindset. And I am realising now that expansive joy is at the core of my tree book, because the trees were helping people to connect with nature, and to connect with themselves through connecting with nature. Why do you want to connect with yourself? So that you can feel expansive joy. When I am out in nature, whether I am walking or sitting, or doing a long-distance trail, what I feel is expansive joy. I get that feeling of expansive joy from walking, from being in nature, from sitting in nature, from hearing the songbirds in the trees, from going camping, from being outdoors, that gives me, that feeds my sense of expansive joy.

So I wanted to talk today about expansive joy and happiness and how you can bring more of it into your life, because I am now realising that this is the core of all I do. I look back over podcast topics, over recent months, the core is expansive joy. I did a solo episode, two episodes ago, about how to create habits that last, why do you want to create habits that serve you? Because they will bring more joy into your life. We talked about forgiveness, we talked about prioritising, why do you want to forgive people? So can you clear your mind of the crap, the stuff that is not serving you, the resentment and the anger, so you can feel more joy. Prioritising – prioritise the things that are important to you so that you can feel more joy. I did an episode with Cara Wilde about how to increase joy through nature. One with Joanna Hennon about: do you really want what you say you want? Alignment, personal power, so many of the topics that I have been talking about have had at their core, expansive joy. Why do we do these things: why do we create alignment? Why do we do forgiveness? Why do we create habits? It is all for — in my opinion, this is my motivation for sharing this stuff with you — to help you create expansive joy in your life.

So what the heck is expansive joy? Joy, I am sure you know what that means. It is that feeling of bubbly, effervescent, happiness in life, when you are doing the things that you love, or you are with the people you love. And expansive joy to me is, when I say the word expansive as I am talking to you now, and it is like I sit up straight and my chest kind of pops out and I feel this opening of my heart and joy is pouring in and out and all around me. Now that I have these words it is just really, really, powerful to me. So you are probably going to be hearing about it more than just this episode, it is probably going to become more apparent in the books that I write and as I update my previous books, because I still have plans to update my old business mindset books this year, I haven’t taken action on that, because it hasn’t been a priority but it is going to happen.

So, expansive joy, any tips on how to live a life of expansive joy? So many things, and you are not going to be surprised by any of them. So, one thing is to focus on what you DO want, and I feel that this is at the core of so much of what I talk about: focus on what you DO want rather than what you don’t want. So, what do you not want? So, examples from my own life: I became very disenchanted with the online business world, the online coaching world, in the last couple of years and so what did I do last year? I quit that and I focussed on my writing, and helping people through my writing, because I wanted to write, I wanted to keep on doing books and I wanted to dedicate my time, as much as I can, to writing books rather than doing online business stuff – that has created more joy in my life, I let go of the things that I didn’t want to focus on, to focus on the things that I did want.

So, think about what you have in your life, what you are currently experiencing that you don’t want? What you are currently feeling that you don’t want? Dig up all the crap in your life, make a list of the things that you don’t want, make a list of the things that feel heavy, the things that feel crappy and then maybe make a second column, or do it on a facing page in your journal, and include the things that you do want, what do you want instead? So instead of being unhappy with your job, or instead of being unhappy with your partner, or instead of being unhappy with your life, or instead of feeling stuck and frustrated because you are not making as much money as you would like; or feeling stuck and frustrated because of some people in your life, what do you want instead? What would you like to experience instead? And focus on that. Obviously you can’t change your entire life from one day to the next but prioritise, make a list of the things that you want, make a list of your core-desired-feelings, make a list of how you want to feel, what you want to be, what you want to do, and prioritise them. So, number them in terms of priority, work on number one, and work on that. Focus on taking the action you need to take to get that number one priority thing that you want to be, do, have, feel. experience. Focus on what you do want. And I say that over and over again because I think so many people are stuck in the trap of focussing on what they don’t want and I think that is really dangerous, because it just creates this downward spiral of: I don’t want this, so much crap. Oh! it is just really, really, difficult and it leads to more unhappiness. So if you can shift that around, and do that by like I said, bringing this stuff to light, don’t sweep it under the rug, bring it to light, make a list of the stuff you don’t want, flip it on its head and make a list of what you want instead and focus on that stuff.

One of the things that I think really shifted this around for me, and I know a lot of people criticise this book, but I think it is a big game changer for a lot of people is The Secret. Now, I think it focussed too much on visualisation, and that side of manifesting, rather than actually taking practical action, but I think it has got the first step in place. And I think that mindset shift from what you don’t want to what you do want is the first step and I think a lot of people can benefit from taking that first step which is focussing on what you do want rather than what you don’t want. That’s super, super, important. Also, do what you want to do, so make decisions based on what’s important to you. what you do want to experience in your life. Whenever you are faced with decisions, don’t necessarily feel what you should do but do what you want to do. So if you have been invited to go out with some friends, or to go to this event and you don’t really want to and you think: ah, I would so much rather stay home and read a book, listen to podcast, do whatever, do that. Do what you want to do. Obviously we can’t always do what we want to do in every single situation in life but start making decisions based on what you do want to do, on what you do want to experience, rather than what you think you should be doing, or you should be experiencing. Give yourself permission to do what you do want to do, this is a huge thing, no one else needs to give you permission for this, you need to make yourself a priority and make your wants and needs a priority and do the things that you want to do. And that kind of follows on from focussing on what you do want to experience in your life, do what you want to do, focus on what you do want, and that’s all…I could probably create a whole episode or online course out of each of these. I know it is as not as simple as what I am saying but start with this. Start focussing on what you do want and start doing what you want to do and that will make a massive, massive shift in your life and will hopefully lead to more expansive joy in your life.

Other tips on how to live happily and experience expansive joy, I think it is an attitude, I think it is having the right attitude in life and realising that you are responsible for your life. I was browsing Reddit this morning, and someone asked a question: why is life so hard? And, God, it is such a disempowered question, I mean yes, life can be hard, life can be challenging, life is not always easy, it is often not easy but focus on the stuff that you can do, focus on the stuff that you can change. Step into a more empowered place and stop thinking: why is life so hard. If you are one of those people who keeps thinking: life is so hard, why is life so hard. If you feel like life is really, really, hard, sit down with your journal and make a list of all the reasons why life is hard, why your life is hard, why life is hard in general. Make a list, bring this stuff to light, don’t sweep it under the rug. Bring it up to light, because only when you do that can you do something about it, write in your journal: why is life so hard? This, this, this and this. Why is life not fair? This, this, this and this. Make lists. And leave space to maybe go back and add stuff, why is your life so hard? Make a list and then think about what you can do to change those things. You can’t change everything from one day to the next but think about what is causing you the most pain. What is making you the most unhappy? And what can you do to fix those things. Now, sometimes they are external sources, sometimes they are things that we can’t do much about, but oftentimes we can take action to change things. So maybe you have a job where your job is an arsehole and is bullying you and you feel stuck and frustrated, you can’t probably change your boss, but you can change your job or you can look for a different role within that company, or you can look for a different role at a different company. Maybe you might need to take a salary hit, or maybe you need to work further away, but you need to prioritise what is important to you. Are you willing to drive a little further to get to work and have a better boss and be happier? Sometimes we need to make shifts, sometimes we need little adjustments, but take action on improving the stuff that you find most painful in your life.

You will find that a lot of my suggestions here involve journalling because I personally find that a really good way to bring the crap to light so that I can see it, you find whatever works for you. Maybe journalling doesn’t work for you, maybe you don’t enjoy it, but I find that – I am also a list maker – making lists, what makes me unhappy? What I am stuck and frustrated with, why is life so hard? I find that making lists is really enjoyable. Years and years ago, I think when I was in high school I used to make lists of the list that I wanted to make {laughing}. I realise how ridiculous that sounds but if you are a list maker you will probably understand, and I think that lists are a really good way of bringing this stuff to light. So, do what works for you but I am a big list-maker, I am a big journal-er, that’s why I suggest these things. If you don’t think any of those things pop me an email and I will see if I can figure out a better way to deal with this and bring this up.

So attitude is really, really, important, get an empowered attitude, if you have read my book about Trees there is a group of trees in the book called the Grandmothers and the Grandmothers have this chapter that is all about personal power, it is really, really, good, it is really, really, powerful. My book is now available as an audiobook and you can get it for free if you sign up to a free 30-day trial of Audible, so I will share that link in the show notes, and you can get the audiobook for free. The eBook is also very inexpensive, it is £2.99 or thereabouts on Amazon and the paperback is a little bit more, I think it is £9.95 but if you are interested in hearing the story from the Grandmothers it is really, really, good. I think that choosing empowerment, empowerment is a word that gets tossed around a lot, it is… It can lose its meaning from hearing it so much but you know whether you are feeling empowered and you know whether you are feeling disempowered and I felt disempowered so many times in my life, there was a period of about 10 years, I felt totally disempowered and I was living with an abusive narcissist who did not treat me well, and I allowed myself to not be treated well for a decade, it was not good and I am very happy now that I am out of that situation but I had to take action to get out of that situation it was one of the scariest thing that I had ever done, oh my god it was so scary! So if you are in a similar situation I totally get it, it was so, so, hard and it took so much courage and my life is so much better now. So, try to help yourself get empowered, get out of situations where someone else is disempowering you and you are allowing yourself to be disempowered and choose empowerment, step up and choose power for yourself. Power is a good thing if you use it for good ways and good reasons, power is not necessarily a good thing. Choosing an attitude of empowerment and choosing to live from a place of empowerment goes a long way in creating that sense of expansive joy for yourself.

And mindset, I will probably never stop talking about mindset. Get a bring to light journal, make a list of stuff that’s contributing to a disempowering mindset: what are your limiting beliefs, what are your fears, what are your blocks that are keeping you from living a life of expansive joy. So, what I did when I was tapping into this super-power thing of expansive joy, I made a list of all of the things that triggered that feeling of expansive joy for me. So I would invite you to do something similar, so what sounds trigger expansive joy for you? For me it is songbirds in the woods, leaves rustling in the trees, wind chimes, my cats purring, one cat in particular is a big purrer. Those are sounds that give me that feeling of expansive joy, so what triggers it for you? What sounds trigger that feeling for you, what images? So for me, when I created my screen saver with these images that trigger expansive joy, it was rolling hills, rapeseed fields, I love those yellow rapeseed fields, they are just absolutely beautiful, I have got a picture in there of the garden of the house in Avebury, because that’s such an iconic image for me of expansive joy. I have got a picture of the Alhambra in Spain, when I studied abroad in Granda, that was an absolutely life-changing year for me and every time I see that view of the Alhambra, it triggers that sense of expansive joy. I have got an image of my tent, when I took a wild camping course last year, because we were in this beautiful little clearing alongside a stream, no one else was there, it was just beautiful and green and there wild ponies everywhere and I could hear them come down for a drink to the stream in the night. And seeing that picture of my tent on my screen just brings that feeling of expansive joy. Sunflowers, fields of sunflowers, oh I love them! So, all of these images are in my screen saver. So think about what images trigger that feeling of expansive joy for you and maybe make a screensaver that you can put on your computer, or the image for your phone, or the wallpaper for computer. I also have a really gorgeous picture of a raven, raven is my power animal, and I do my shamanic journeys with ravens, so that also triggers that sense of joy and empowerment.

What, I got really into detail here: smells, colours, plants, animals, minerals and what books trigger expansive joy for me? So not last year, but the year before, you may have heard me mentioning Juliet Marillier wrote Daughter of the Forest and these other kind of historical fiction books. They just bring me so much joy, I just love being in the worlds she creates, so those books bring so much joy. I am almost about to finish, there is 30 minutes left in the book and I am so sad, the last book in the Clan of the Cave Bear series – I have loved those books so much, because I love reading about the hunter-gatherer-lifestyle and I love reading about the strong woman, who is a healer and a herbalist and she works with plants and they are so connected to nature. So those books really bring me a lot of joy…walking books, I have been reading a ton of books this year on the Camino Santiago, because I really want to do that walk. And reading about other people’s long distance trails and reading about people doing the things I love to do, I love, it brings me so much joy. I can’t walk a long-distance trail every week of the year, or even every month of the year, but I can read about other people doing it and it brings me joy. So, films, music, places, Avebury for me has for the past couple of years been a place of expansive joy for me, if you read my newsletter from this week, you will realise that that is no longer the case. And, I am may be feeling a bit of disconnect with that place which maybe temporary or permanent. But forests for me bring me expansive joy and long distance trails, actually one of the images of my screensaver is just this view of this trail. Foods that bring expansive joy, feelings, locations, where do I feel it, I really feel it in my chest. And what experiences bring me expansive joy? Being in nature, walking a long distance trail, camping, those things bring me expansive joy and I am actually going through my journal as I say these things to you.

So get out your journal, make your list of all the different things that trigger that sense of expansive joy for you. So experiences, visions, images, sounds, books, movies, songs, what things can you tap into that will give you that sense of expansive joy? And the idea is that the more you do these things, or tap into this feeling, the more that you will bring that feeling into your life. So, that’s what I have been working on now, finding things that trigger my sense of expansive joy. Interestingly, when I was making my list for this, one of the things that I wrote for minerals, what minerals or crystals, bring that sense of expansive joy? I wrote opal and I remember thinking, I have always liked opals, but I don’t know, I wasn’t convinced, but when I was in Glastonbury last weekend for the summer gathering for my Druid order I found this green opal from Madagascar that I bought, because it was this big chunky green, it didn’t really look like an opal but I went to this shop and it was the first thing that I saw and I picked it up and I love it and I have got it in my office right now. So find what things and when you write these things down don’t censor them, because I was going to censor the opal, but I didn’t, and then weirdly a couple of weeks later I found this opal. So just don’t censor the stuff that comes up when you try to make this list of things that bring that expansive joy.

I was talking about mindset, and then I kind of veered of onto this thing. So once you have this feeling, once you have this sense of what things bring you this sense of expansive joy, work on your mindset around that. So, what fears, blocks and limiting beliefs do you have that might get int the way of experiencing expansive joy? So, for me, my experiences, walking a long-distance trail, I haven’t done that in a while, I have got the South Downs Wey booked in September, and I am super excited about that, but, I haven’t done a long-distance trail in a while. What got in the way of that? Not making it a priority. So what blocks, what limiting beliefs were in the way of that? Figure out what limiting beliefs are getting in the way of you doing the things that create expansive joy in your life. Practical things also got in the way, I was working on the tree book last year and that was the number one priority, it wasn’t doing a long-distance trail, so that’s why I didn’t do it last year. So look at the practical reasons why you might not be making these things a priority but also look at the mindset stuff, maybe you believe that you don’t have the time, but maybe you are just not making it a priority? So think about all the things, big and small, that give you that sense of expansive joy and look at the mindset crap that might be stopping you from experiencing those things.

So, I hope you found this episode interesting and useful. I guess that I will probably be talking more about this in the future. I am really drawn to writing a book about this {laughing} now that I think about this or I don’t know doing an online course. I hate online courses, you may know this about me, I know the online business experts always say that they are the best way to make money in your business because of the perceived value, because people get audio and video and worksheets and all that crap! I have always hated them because I don’t like all the crap and I don’t like being overwhelmed by all the stuff, and despite the fact I have created online courses in the past that is not my preferred method of learning. Just give me a book that I can underline and highlight and make notes in the margins and implement. But I am doing this online course now, it is done by the guy that runs the Meaningful Money Podcast, and I will link to that in the show notes, he has this online course called Learn How To Invest, the website is: http://learnhowtoinvest.co.uk. If you use the coupon code “podcast25” you will get £25 off the course. So it is £175, £150 with the discount code and it is so simple! He has really easy to consume, bite-sized videos, they are between 10-20 minutes, and I am learning a lot and I am taking tons of notes and it is really, really, good. That is not necessarily related to expansive joy, but I wanted to share that with you, because I am currently doing it and loving it! I signed up to it on Sunday night and I spent an hour and half yesterday watching videos, and two hours today, and I am just really, really, loving it. So I highly recommend it and a link to that will be in the show notes.

So expansive joy: do what it takes to get it, if you want it, but why wouldn’t you want it because it is such a good feeling. So please, drop me a line, let me know what you thought of this week’s episode. You can email me at [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. Also I would love for you to join me on Patreon, I don’t know how I am going to be adding expansive joy into my Patreon community, but you can bet it will be there. But all the stuff I offer in my Patreon community leads to expansive joy: I offer HEW®, done-for-you and PSYCH-K® done-for-you and other stuff; so, if you would like to get some help with that, head over to: http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton and join me there. Membership starts at $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff that I don’t share anywhere else.

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And remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/308 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

308 Holly Worton ~ How To Create More Expansive Joy In Your Life