[00:00:00] Christine: It’s hard to believe it, but Christmas is almost here. The kids are out of school. It’s the final countdown. And so I ask myself the question, what should we talk about this week of Christmas? What conversation can we have that will help you and I right now, what is relevant to our. And here’s where I landed.

[00:00:25] Every week on the MilSpouse Mastermind show, I leave you with the phrase, may you live filled, fueled, and full of joy. Now, we’ve talked about what it looks like to fill ourselves up, and we’ve talked about how we can live fueled by the things that light us up and give us purpose. But we really haven’t taken time to unpack the concept of joy.

[00:00:51] So that’s what we’re gonna do today. And I think it’s really appropriate because as we are entering into the week of Christmas and we are in the midst of what we call the holiday season, we hear all of these terms thrown around. Peace, love, hope. But do we really understand what these terms mean and do we really understand how they apply to our lives?

[00:01:21] So today we are unpacking the concept of joy. Is joy actually achievable? Is it possible to walk in joy as a military spouse? And if so, how do we find joy in everyday life? Let’s dive into the show and find out.

[00:02:33] Okay, friend, I have to ask you, have you taken. Two minutes of your time to fill out our milspouse Mastermind survey. This is a survey that will help us determine what content we produce in 2023 so that I can do the things to talk about the issues that are really relevant to your life that can really help you right where you are today.

[00:03:00] And it would help me out so much. If you would just take two minutes of your. Go to milspouse mastermind.com/survey. Answer the questions on there. Let me know what you have loved, what you would like to see coming in the future. If there’s particular guest you would like to appear on the show, let me know that as well, and let me know if you are willing to hop on a.

[00:03:26] Zoom call so that I can ask you some more detailed questions about how we can grow together in 2023. I am super thankful for all of you who have been a part of our community this year, and I really just wanna say thank you for being here, for listening, for leaving a review. And if you are looking for a way to.

[00:03:49] Support the MilSpouse Mastermind show. If you were looking to give us a thank you, a way to say Merry Christmas, the best gift you can give is to leave a review on Apple Podcast. That is super simple to do. Just go to Apple Podcast, scroll to the bottom, and click on rating and review, and just give us a one sentence review.

[00:04:13] Give us some stars. Let us know that this has been meaningful in your. This year. So thank you so much for doing that. Let’s get into this conversation about Joy, and I’m so excited to unpack this concept with you because if you go all the way back and listen to one of the very first episodes, I’ll link it below in the show notes where I talked about my plan for 2022, my word of the year.

[00:04:42] Was the word joy, because I realized I wanted to really press into this concept to understand joy better, to figure out how it is that we walk in joy and just be able to enjoy life and, and not feel like I’m just going through the emotions, but to truly live life. And so joy has been this journey that I’ve been on this.

[00:05:08] Trying to understand and unpack it a little bit more. And I wanna share some of the things that were my biggest takeaways in my research and trying to understand this concept and how to apply joy to our lives. So what does it look like to walk and joy to live full of. So what I want you to walk away with today is an understanding of what joy actually is, what we’re actually aiming for, and then how we actually cultivate joy in our lives.

[00:05:45] One of the most impactful books I read on the subject of Joy this year was the book Make Room for Joy by Vanessa Walker. And in it it’s, it’s a pseudo memoir. She shares her story of dealing with an abusive spouse, infertility dev, divorce. Multiple cancer diagnosis and all these things that we would say are not good things to happen in someone’s life.

[00:06:14] And she talks about her process of learning to walk joy despite her circumstances. So I wanna frame our talk today with this quote from the book. She writes, every moment is gifted with the possibility of. , but to experience it, you have to make conscious effort. So we’re starting from this point of there’s this possibility, joy exists, but it only comes through conscious effort.

[00:06:46] So what exactly is joy and how does it differ from. Happiness when we look at it is really based more on our circumstances, what actually happens in our life, and it’s that feeling we experience when something happens that goes the way we want it to, or that brings us a positive feeling in our. Joy, on the other hand, is less dependent on our circumstances and more based on our internal mindset.

[00:07:24] In the book Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown describes joy as an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation. And she says that joy is derived from the Greek word chiro, which the ancient Greeks described. as the good mood of the soul, and I love that idea of the good mood of the soul.

[00:07:52] So we understand that there is a difference between happiness based on our circumstances and joy, which seems to be a deeper emotion. Brene calls Joy a deeper, more meaningful experience than. So if joy is about our soul, about our mindset, how do we actually cultivate joy in our life? How do we unlock?

[00:08:19] Joy. Well, I wanna share with you five keys to unlocking joy in your everyday life and learning to live and walk in joy. But before we can ever step into joy, we first have to lay the foundation. I like to think of it as there is a difference between surviving and thriving. surviving. You are just getting by, but thriving.

[00:08:50] You are fully living and we can’t get to the thriving part. We can’t get to the fully alive part until we’ve done the hard foundational work. Until we are at least at the baseline of surviving. We. Get to where we wanna go. So first, before we start talking about these keys to unlocking joy, I wanna make sure that we have the firm foundation.

[00:09:17] And so the foundation for us to be able to experience joy is the ability to embrace and accept where we are today if we are still stuck in the struggle, in the frustration. Focusing on what we cannot control, then we cannot move forward into a life of fully living, full of joy, of feeling alive. So the foundational element is the this ability to be able to generate awareness, to be able to pause.

[00:09:59] Accept what is and to release control over the things that we cannot control. To be able to be okay with the fact that good things happen in life and bad things happen in life, and we cannot control everything that happens in life. The only thing that we can control is our response. To what happens. And so when we are able to get to this place of releasing control and embracing what is, this makes room for peace.

[00:10:35] We have to be able to show up to separate ourselves from our feelings, from our thoughts and emotions to make some space. To understand that what we are feeling and experiencing in the moment is just that it is a feeling. It is a thought. It is not us. And when we are able to separate ourselves to be able to take a step back and gain that perspective, that allows us to.

[00:11:08] What is right now in this moment, and then move forward into unlocking a life of joy. Now, if you are asking, how do I do that? How do I get started? I want you to go back to the episodes I did last month, and that is an excellent place to start episode. One 14, we talked about boosting your happiness and how happiness isn’t really what we’re after.

[00:11:34] We’re after a life of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. That’s what our soul actually craves. And then we talked about if you still feel like you’re stuck on the struggle bus, then three things you can do to begin to find the ment And, and this is really the foundation. Getting unstuck, breaking free from that place where you are today.

[00:11:59] And once we’ve done that, that is the foundational element that allows us to move into cultivating joy in our life. And there are five specific things we can do, ways that we can unlock joy in our life. And these five keys, the number one thing we can do is to choose g. To be grateful for where we are today, and not that we’re gonna love everything about our lives.

[00:12:28] There’s lots of things that still frustrate us, that annoy us, but it’s being able to look at where I’m at right now and find things to be thankful for. So for example the other day, I, I got to have a date, date with my husband. Yay. And we hadn’t had one in a while. And so we went out, we went exploring, and I dropped my phone, my screen shatters, even though I have a screen protector on, I end up taking it in and they’re gonna have to replace the whole thing, and I’m gonna be without a phone.

[00:13:02] And so the question in that moment is, Element of that day, am I going to focus on, am I going to focus on what I got to do that day? Am I gonna focus on what I got to see, or am I gonna focus on the fact that this didn’t go the way I wanted it to, that my phone got broken, that it’s gonna take time, that I can’t have my phone, that I’m gonna have to live without my phone?

[00:13:27] It’s all a matter of what my perspective is and what I am choosing to focus on, and that in every situation, and that’s just, you know, a, an average, normal day. There are plenty of major things that happen to us that really. We struggled to find joy in that moment, but in everything that happens, there is always something that we can find to be thankful for.

[00:13:54] We can choose to be thankful for the fact that we ha had. We had a bed to sleep in or that we have a house, or if we don’t have a house right now, you know, like we had a place to spend the night or that we got to drink a cup of hot coffee or that the place where we slept had heating or air conditioning or that our car turned on and started when we needed to go somewhere.

[00:14:20] There is always something that we can choose if we are looking for the good, something that we can be thankful for and. Idea of gratitude is tied in with the idea of. Again, going back to Atlas of the Heart, Brene calls this relationship between joy and gratitude and intriguing upward spiral. So we’ve talked a lot about negative thought spirals and how that is leading us into a deeper pit.

[00:14:52] But conversely, this spiral of gratitude and joy is an upward spiral leading. To who we want to become and how we want to show up. So the first thing that we can do to unlock joy is to really choose gratitude for where we are, for the beauty that exists, for the present moment, for what is good in our life right now.

[00:15:20] The second thing we can do to unlock joy is to choose. Hopelessness is an emotion. Hopelessness is giving up. Hope, on the other hand, is a belief that things will work out, that there is possibility for a brighter future, that there is joy to be found in the future, and when we do not have. We give up. I have been reading another memoir called The Choice, and it is another survivor from the concentration camps in World War ii and talking about the thing that kept her alive in that season was the hope that tomorrow they would be liberated and she would tell herself this over and over tomorrow I will be free.

[00:16:15] And that is, Kept her going, that hope for a brighter future. And so a huge element of joy is having hope for the future with hopelessness. We give up. We do not find joy, but hope is a part of the joy spiral. The third thing we can do to unlock joy in our life is to be generous. Generosity is the key to living a purposeful life because service fuels joy.

[00:16:53] A purposeful life is not about ourselves. That’s why I love to say fulfillment comes from contributing to something outside ourself, because it’s all about generosity. Life becomes not about what we can get or what we can achieve or what we can accomplish, but how we use what we’ve been given to, bless others to.

[00:17:19] Others up to make a difference. Oftentimes I hear people using the term abundance. It’s, it’s a popular term today, but I really prefer the term generosity because it reminds us that these blessings we receive are not about how much we have or the overflow of what we have. It’s really about using what we’ve been given to make a.

[00:17:43] In the lives of others and to be generous with all of our resources that we have, and generosity is a key to unlocking joy. The fourth thing that we can do to cultivate joy in our life is to choose self-compassion, and this was one area that I think is often overlooked because. It can be easy for some of us to hold failures against ourselves, to not take care of ourselves, to put ourselves last, and to berate ourselves when we don’t do the things we wish we would’ve done to feel guilty or to feel ashamed.

[00:18:26] If you are ever covering perfectionists like me, you will really. With this key. Perfection is the enemy of progress and the enemy of joy because we are all going to fall short. But when we hold ourselves up to an impossible standard, we cannot live and fully embrace life. And all that. It has all of the joy that is available if we are so focused on not taking care of ourselves or treating ourselves without compassion.

[00:19:03] We cannot show up with compassion for others. We cannot fully embrace life. And so a huge component of finding joy is giving ourselves plenty of grace and choosing self compass. And then I would say the last key to unlocking joy in our lives is turning towards God. If you go to the Bible, you’ll find all sorts of verses about joy.

[00:19:29] John 15, 11, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, in that your joy may be full. Sean 1622. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take joy from you. Proverbs 1722. A joyful heart is good medicine. James, one, two. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

[00:19:57] Philippians for, for rejoice in the Lord. Always. I will say it again. Re. So we see this concept of joy all through the scriptures, and even when we go back to the de definition, Brene gives an atlas of the heart. Joy is a spiritual connection, something beyond ourselves. It is found in God. The Reverend Ian Robertson writes that joy begins when the love of God washes over our.

[00:20:30] Nehemiah eight 10 says, the joy of the Lord is our strength. God is the source of joy and love, and when we turn towards God, we experience the fullness of joy, his love, and his joy. In our lives. And so all of these things come together to help us unlock a life of joy that is not dependent on our external experience.

[00:21:02] We can cultivate joy in our lives by choosing these five things we can choose g. We can choose to hope. We can choose to be generous. We can choose self-compassion, and we can choose to turn towards the source of all true love and joy and that is God, even when our circumstances are hard. There is still joy and we can still find and walk in that joy in the difficult circumstances of our life.

[00:21:38] If we are wired to be joyful, the environment cannot change how we are. So this week as we are moving into Christmas and as we are moving into all of the complex emotions and experiences that we are going to have, remember that we can choose to. Enjoy that we can choose to show up and choose to connect with this deep spiritual emotion that is not dependent on what happens to us.

[00:22:09] It is a choice that we make each and every day. Going back to the quote I shared at the beginning of the episode, every moment is gifted with the possibility of joy. But to experience it, you’ll have to make a conscious effort. I hope that you experience so many moments of joy this week. Whether things go according to plan, or not, whether you get the gifts you wanted, whether your kids are grumpy all day long on Christmas day or full of joy themselves. You can find joy in the moment. Have a merry Christmas. I will be back with you next week on the MilSpouse Mastermind Show. Until then, may you have an amazing week, truly living filled, fueled and full of joy.