Personal Creative Power | Laura West and the Center for Joyful Business

Do You Have a Foreboding Sense of Joy?

May 17, 2019 | No Comments

by Laura West

Today I receive joy We all want, in general, a happy life and a great business we love

With that as the ultimate goal you would think we would welcome in the joy.

It’s amazing how common it is to push away the joy. To not allow ourselves that peak experience of savoring the success, the laughter or the sense of accomplishment.

Brene Brown called it “a foreboding sense of joy.”

You sneak into your child’s bedroom in the middle of the night to check on her. You feel this overwhelming sense of love as your heart starts to expand and BAM! Your instincts take over and you shut it down. You start thinking about all the ways this child in their little bed could get hurt on their bike or later in their car. What if someone takes them away in the middle of the night or they stop breathing?

Nothing happened to make you think this way. Nothing changed from 1 minute ago.

And yet, it’s all too familiar of a dance. We have to take down joy, squash it, keep a lid on it.

A book on my all-time favorites list is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He talks about going to a banquet with his wife one evening. He was given a big award and acknowledged for his success. In the car on the way home, he picks a fight with his wife. Once they get home, he realizes what happened. It somehow felt wrong to feel this good, this proud, this happy… he had to take down joy before something else did it for him, so he picked a fight. (Yes, he apologized, and it opened up a conversation for how we hold back our happiness, love, joy and success and he wrote that amazing book!)

How do you take down joy?

I’ve had several occasions where a program was going so well with lots of enrollments that my excitement and joy overtook my body. I couldn’t think straight (I call that fuzzy brain) and I didn’t feel grounded. I usually find myself standing in the kitchen in front of the cabinet mindlessly crunching on something to help dissipate the energy.)

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Make Over Your Morning – Creating Morning Rituals to Support Your Success!

November 27, 2017 | No Comments

by Laura West

morning One of the things I love about mornings is that each new day brings new opportunities and it’s a chance to start fresh and do better. It’s like a menu full of possibilities!

How you start your day, or more specifically how you spend those first few morning hours has a big impact on the rest of your day. Think of it as setting the tone for your entire day. That’s why making over your morning is so important. It’s about much more than those first few hours.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself. You set an early alarm to make sure you have time for exercise, meditation, or simply some much needed “me time”. You have every intention of getting up and doing whatever you’re setting out to do when you set the alarm in the first place. Some mornings – hopefully most mornings – you get up when the alarm chimes and go for that walk, do your meditation exercise, or read a book for twenty minutes. Then there are those days when you just can’t make yourself get up. You hit the snooze button multiple times, or turn the alarm off altogether and go back to sleep.

Think about how the rest of those days went. Did you notice a difference in how you felt? How much did you get done on the mornings when you got up with your first alarm? How did those days compare to the ones when you hit the snooze button over and over again?

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the mornings when you got up as soon as the alarm went off went a lot smoother. I bet you accomplished what you had planned to do, too. Chances are that sleeping through the snooze button didn’t just affect your morning, but the entire rest of your day. You set the tone for how your day is going to go first thing in the morning. That’s what the old saying about getting up on the wrong side of the bed is about.

You have the creative power within you to start your day off in a positive and productive way.

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JoyFlow Sighting…

November 23, 2017 | No Comments

by Laura West

Today, I’m taking a moment to appreciate all the goodness in my life, noticing where the joy is flowing and feeling the gratitude for the creative amazing people who surround me.

So, at the top of my JoyFlow Sighting list is YOU!

Joyflow Sightings Sheet - YOU