by Laura West
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.)