00:00 

You're listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 6, "Happy All the Time." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Hey there everybody, I am happy to be here with you today. Today we're talking about being happy all the time. Doesn't that sound great? Wouldn't it just be fabulous if we could just be happy all the time and not have to go through those sad times or those angry times or those frustrated times? It does sound really great until it doesn't sound great because there are times that these other feelings are very appropriate and very necessary and very wanted. Let me give you an example when either one of my parents passed away. I didn't want to feel happy. I wanted to experience the grief and it was the right emotion at the right time. 

01:05 

So we need to start thinking in terms of having the right emotion at the right time as opposed to just always being happy. But you know what? It does sound like a good thing. I remember sitting in a Sunday school class one time and somebody said, "well, what's it going to be like when we all get to the celestial kingdom?" As most of us would tend to do, an answer was put out there, you know, "we're just going to be happy all the time. We're not going to have struggles. We're not going to have trials," and I didn't agree with that. I think that a huge part of what we do in life is learn to take tough situations and become better and stronger because of them. 

01:48 

You know, I grew up in the 70s and it seems like that was just such a...in my home anyway, my parents just got along so well. I never saw them fight. My mom was about as even keeled as they come and I rarely saw her getting angry or frustrated. She just was happy most of the time and and so as I looked at that, that was my model for how we should be and I grew up thinking that I should want to be happy all of the time. But I found that as I've gotten older I don't. I want to feel the variety of emotions because the everyday becomes pretty mundane if we are happy all the time. We get pretty bored with it. 

02:33 

For example, relationships that are always good, where there's never any up or down, we get pretty lackadaisical with those and we don't we don't we tend to not work as hard on them. If we were to eat the exact same food every single day, even if we loved it, we get pretty sick of it over over time. Think about those people that live in California. They have great weather for the most part of the year in Southern California, but they don't always appreciate it. Take somebody from Idaho in January and send them down to California and they have a very different feeling about the weather than the locals do. When I went to Switzerland, I remember walking outside of the little house that we were staying in and looking up and there were just the Alps, just huge and gorgeous and beautiful in front of me and I was in such awe. And yet the locals walk out of their house every day and don't even notice it. 

03:27 

So if we have the good all the time, it becomes very mundane and we don't appreciate it to the level that we can if we have some ups and downs because that's how it works. Our depth of appreciation really suffers if we never have opposites. In fact, we've been told in the Book of Mormon that there must be opposition in all things, and that includes our emotions. We need to have opposition in our emotions and we need to realize that God gave us all these emotions. And these emotions, I think we have a tendency sometimes to want to say, "well, this is a good emotion and this is a bad emotion." 

04:10 

I would love to see us stop labeling emotions as good and bad. And I would love to see us start labeling them more as positive and negative, because I don't even think the negative emotions are necessarily bad. A lot of times we want to put  emotions on a spectrum, good on one end, bad on the other end and we're either feeling good or we're swinging to the other side and feeling bad but we just had in that situation only have the opportunity to feel one emotion at a time. But I think that if we start labeling them as positive and negative, it's kind of like sticking them all in a bucket and they all get mixed up and sometimes we feel a negative emotion and a positive emotion at the same time. 

04:55 

I remember especially when my dad died, he had been ill with cancer for several months and he was just at the end so grateful that he could be done and so grateful that he could be with my mom again. And yet the grief and the sorrow that I felt was overwhelming. But I was feeling these two emotions at the same time. It's not like they were on a spectrum and I had to choose which one to feel. I actually had several emotions all at the same time and I think that that's kind of an amazing thing that can happen to us. 

05:35 

But emotions are really a great thing because they give us an indication of things that are going on. For example, if we're feeling happy and positive and optimistic, generally we can assume that things in our life are good, things are looking up, we're happy, there's good things going on. If we have negative emotions, that is also information. Information that something is going on that we need to be aware of. I love the fact that having grown up mostly just trying to be happy all the time and then throughout the years learning to suppress a lot of my negative emotions at this stage in my life. When I feel grief or when I feel sadness, I am very grateful for those emotions because they help me to feel more connected to other people. They help me feel more love for other people and they help me feel like I am more loved and so those feelings for me let me know that I'm normal and that I'm a feeling person who is capable of loving and being loved. 

06:44 

Negative emotions don't mean that we're bad people. Negative emotions mean that we're human. Negative emotions mean that we have connected and and whatever's happened to that connection is hurting when we have a negative emotion. Basically negative emotions mean that our heart works and I love that for me. That was great news to find out because I went a lot of years not knowing whether or not my heart really worked and to know that it does really helps me a lot. 

07:21 

But, you know, the thing is we have these negative emotions and our brains are wired to seek for happy and to seek to get out of the negative. Our brain wants the positive emotions and so we have a lot of coping mechanisms and some of them are healthy and some of them are not. Mostly if we have healthy responses to negative emotions it's because we've learned about it. But if we don't ever learn, like I don't feel like I ever learned growing up, a lot of the ways that we deal with negative emotions are to ignore them or to deny them, pretend like they're not happening. We may start to blame or accuse somebody else. In some way we find a way to bury them. 

08:02 

This is referred to, I found in two different ways, one it is sometimes called numbing. So we're trying to numb out the emotion or we buffer, and buffer means, again, that we're trying to to stay away from that emotion as much as we can. Now both numbing and buffering, basically the same thing. Not good things to do because over time those emotions, those negative emotions that have not been dealt with, can start to cause some real physical and emotional issues. How do we numb out? I may pick up my phone and start playing a game, anything to take my mind off of the emotion that I'm feeling or to try and not feel it anymore. I may pick up a book and read, I may turn on the TV, something like that. I may become a workaholic, I may, you know, something that I can do to take my mind off of the emotions so I don't feel it. We're trying to ignore the emotions that we have, not a healthy place to go. 

09:08 

It is really, really important that we start allowing our emotions to run their course and that gives us an opportunity to work through them, to feel the depth of what we feel and then to move forward. And when we do this, I found in my life that this brings deeper relationships, stronger connections with people, which is really what I am after in my life. I want to have better relationships with other people. Relationships that I've had that never have any kind of a struggle or a trial are, in my life, very shallow relationships. There's no depth because we haven't learned to go to hard, difficult places with each other.Sso relationships are better if we can work through these conflicts in positive ways. 

10:05 

Negative emotions have an incredible benefit when we've gone through them. I know that before either of my parents had  died, I didn't understand funerals much and I didn't understand viewings and I just, I wouldn't go a lot of times. I remember one in particular, I had a good friend whose grandmother who raised her died and I didn't go to the funeral and I didn't really think about it until my mom died. And my mom died before my dad and I remember at the viewing being there and having people come up and tell me how much they loved my mom. So many people came up and said that she was their best friend, and for me that was very healing. It was a beautiful thing to me. 

10:57 

And so since that time I have had a much greater empathy for other people whose parents have died or siblings or someone close to them. I rarely miss a funeral if I can help it because I realize how important those times are and it gives me empathy for people. When someone has someone close to them die I have a semblance of what they're feeling. Obviously I'll never know exactly because everybody's relationships are different, but I do understand the hurt and the pain that comes when we lose somebody that we really love. And these experiences, these negative emotions, that I have had allow me to feel a greater compassion and a greater love for other people when they're going through struggles. And that is such an amazing blessing of negative emotions. 

11:52 

And then this is where it kind of comes all the way back around and it's kind of brilliant. Because I go through these negative emotions, as I work my way through them, I develop empathy, I develop compassion, I develop a greater love, and I have grown. I've moved forward and the struggle that we go through as we work through those negative emotions brings growth. And growth brings happiness. What? How does that work? I love it because those negative emotions, when we choose to work through them, circle right back around and bring us back to the happiness that we really are searching for and wanting to find in the first place. 

12:40 

And it actually goes a lot faster when we don't numb and when we don't buffer. The process of working through those negative emotions and getting back to a place of happiness or contentment goes much faster and it's much easier to get there. And we eventually just get right back to where our brains want to be. But the thing that I love about this is I feel that in my life, as I go through deeper negative emotions, I'm also able to get into deeper positive emotions. I can feel a greater happiness. And I think that that's pretty amazing. That's something that I absolutely love about life. And as I've learned to stop just burying or ignoring or denying my emotions, as I've learned to really start feeling and appreciating those negative emotions for what they are and for what they give me, I'm finding a greater capacity in my heart to feel more love and more compassion and a greater growth. And that's something, that is something that I want. I want a greater ability to have stronger and deeper connections with people that I love and people I appreciate. 

14:01 

And so that's what I've got for you today. I think we can just, this is how we get to be happy with our struggles. We work through them. And then our happiness grows and develops. So, there we go. Let's work through our emotions. Let's stop denying them and start filling them and acknowledging them instead of pretending they don't exist. And I think we'll just be in a much better place. So with that, let's finish up. If you want some personal help from me with anything going on in your life, you can go to tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free 20 minute coaching session. And if you are enjoying and loving what you're hearing, please share this podcast with other people who would love it as well, whose lives could be blessed and benefited by a little bit of extra life coaching. So have a terrific day and I will talk to you next time. Bye. 

14:59 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and to learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.