307: Rebecca Morrison—Women, Are You Ready To Find Your Happiness? Is It All Around You?

Hear how to find your own true happiness

Each podcast is a story for our guest to share with you, our audience, so you can “see, feel and think” in new ways. Today’s podcast is with Rebecca “Becky” Morrison. She shares with you a recurring theme which we have found with many of our own clients: success is not what it is meant to be. Happiness, that thing we all aspire to achieve, is somewhere beyond the job, the career, and even the home life you have built for yourself and your family. But where is happiness? And how do you find it? Becky has great answers, which I know will speak to you.

Watch and listen to our conversation here

Rebecca video

In our conversation, Becky and I talk about her discovering:

  • Happiness is for every day, not just someday.
  • Happiness is for everyone. You, yes YOU, were born to be happy.
  • Happiness and challenge are NOT mutually exclusive.
  • Happiness isn’t one-size-fits-all. You have your own happiness recipe which will change as your life does.

Her recipe, captured in her book, The Happiness Recipe, is all about simplifying your life.

Rebeccas bookSome of these themes echo our own work at SAMC with the Challenge of Taking Care of You. I love Becky’s ideas about decluttering your day. Eliminate the painful “should” and “have-to’s.” Refocus on what matters. But what matters to you? For our clients, it is often the elusive sense of purpose and meaning. For you, it could be personal well-being or belonging to a community that helps each other enjoy life. Maybe it is hiking, or being still, or spending more time with your children and their children.

Rebecca MorrisonAbout Rebecca Morrison

Rebecca C. Morrison is a mom, wife and lawyer turned happiness coach. A graduate of Wellesley College and Georgetown Law, she also received an executive coaching certification from UC Berkeley. Having worked in finance and Big Law for over 20 years before starting a business doing what she loves, she now helps other people become happier and more successful by applying the principles of priority-aligned living. You can connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn, her website untanglehappiness.com or her email: becky@untanglehappiness.com.

Searching for that thing called happiness? Here are some places to start

Additional resources for you

Read the transcript of our podcast here

Andi Simon: Hi and welcome to On the Brink: A fresh lens to take you and your business to new heights. I’m Andi Simon, I’m your host and your guide. And as you know, my job is to help get you off the brink. And I must tell you, I have listeners who come from across the globe who say to me, You have no idea how that little kernel of an idea transformed my life. It’s interesting because sharing all of these wonderful ideas, particularly coming out of the pandemic, coming through a changing time, and I never want to waste a crisis, it’s important for us to realize that there are new ideas out there that can help us. And why not learn more about them. Who knows how they can help you?

So I have the honor today to bring to you Rebecca, Becky, Morrison, and Becky has a new book out. She’ll tell you all about how to untangle happiness and find it. But I also want to tell you a little bit about her, her own bio, her background, because she didn’t jump off the ship and say, Here I am, I’m going to help you with happiness. She went through a journey that reflects so much of what I’m finding with my coaching, my executive coaching of women reaching a place where they’re successful. And it’s not enough. Men too, they reach a place in their careers and they wonder, Isn’t there anything more?

So we’re going to talk today about finding purpose, finding happiness, finding what’s missing. That little link that doesn’t seem right. A little bit more about Becky. Rebecca Morrison is a mom, a wife, a lawyer, turned happiness coach. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and Georgetown Law. She also received an executive coaching certification from UC Berkeley. She worked in finance and big law for over 20 years. And she reflects, as so many of my clients who have been very successful, and then they said there is more to it. She spends her days helping clients uncover their own happiness recipe. The book is called The Happiness Recipe. And by applying the principles of priority-aligned living, she’s thrilled to share them with you all as part of the book. Becky, thank you for coming along. It’s been so much fun meeting you.

Becky Morrison: Thank you, Andi, I’m really excited to be here and talk about obviously one of my favorite topics with you and your listeners.

Andi Simon: Well, I think the first thing we’re going to do is, who is Becky Morrison? What’s your journey? Your story is a wonderful one but it also reflects an enormous population of folks out there who are following very much the same footsteps and wondering, really, what is this all about? And I can’t tell you how many attorneys I’ve met at gatherings over the last several years, women in particular, who say, Well, I’m pretty successful, but not quite sure this is what I want to do for the rest of my career. How about yourself? What’s your story?

Becky Morrison: So it’s interesting because you describe that moment of like, I’m pretty successful, but what else, right? And I think I’ve gone through that experience at least three times in my career, maybe four. But the first one was, I think I’ve often described it as the kicking off point for this journey, happened back when I was a relatively new litigator. I was about four years into a job at a big law firm on partnership track, married, had a toddler at the time, and found myself one evening on the floor of the bathroom with my toddler in the tub and the cordless phone clipped to the back of my pants and the toilet seat cover closed and the notebook on the toilet seat cover, the papers all around me.

And I was doing two things: I was bathing my toddler, and I was working with an expert on a conference call to get them ready for their upcoming testimony. And I had two thoughts in super quick succession in that moment. The first thought was, who says you can’t have it all? Like, here I am. I’m killing it. And the second thought was, I’m exhausted and this is unsustainable. And more importantly than all of that, I’m not sure this is really enough. This is not really making me happy, that I really want to be an attorney.

Which I mean, when you’ve gone into six figures of debt to get through law school, like me, wait a minute, you don’t want to like that you’re making good money, you’re on the right track, there’s gonna be a payoff. It’ll be okay. So that was the first moment like that that I had in my career. And it led me on this path of incrementally increasing my happiness each time I made a change and then continuing to have that kind of conversation with myself about what else am I missing?

So from that point, I made a shift to law firm administration. That was a really positive shift because it gave me more time and freedom. I still got to use my legal brain and my legal education. It was kind of a hybrid attorney, attorney administrator role. And then again I reached a moment, after about a decade doing that, of like, okay, well, this is fun, but now what? What’s next? Where’s more? And at that point I was faced with the choice of, do I double down on this career and legal technology that I’ve developed and really become a well known expert in that space, which I felt I had the ability to do, or do I do something else entirely.

And what I realized is, I’m not doubling down, again, done this before on something that I’m not sure is for me, and so I took really kind of another left turn and left the legal space entirely and went into more entrepreneurial finance space to be a COO, because people in process have always been at the heart of my work. I had a lot of fun for the first two years because it was a new environment. It was fun to have an impact. It was fun not to be part of a big organization.

And then again, I sort of reached a point where they weren’t growing the way that we anticipated and the CEO and I agreed that it was not right for me to stick around long term. Even though I didn’t get laid off, and I didn’t get fired, the practical impact was the same. I still had to find a new job, right? And so again, I did this exercise. Well, what can I do? And let me think about all the jobs I’m qualified for.

Well, I’m a lawyer who’s managed 100+, 200+ attorneys and staff at various times in my career. I’ve got a strong process background. I’ve got a management background, I still have my Bar license. Let me apply for all the jobs and again, had this thought of wait a minute, wait a minute, what do I want to do? What am I really here for? What is my purpose, not just in life, generally, but more specifically, in this season of my life? What is my purpose? And I hired a coach, and that coach facilitated for me a really wide range exploration of all the possibilities. And then I ended up at UC Berkeley to get my coaching certification.

Andi Simon: That is pretty cool. It’s interesting listening to you. I have a wonderful client and she is a successful partner in an accounting firm, a CPA, MBA, raised three kids alone, single mom, successful. And her shrink fired her. The person said, No, you’ve got to do something. You can’t keep talking about how unhappy you are. And so we went through our process, and I’m anxious for you to share yours.

But usually it’s in the story, you’re managing your mind, your mind does exactly what it thinks you want it to do. I’m thinking about her experience in yours. I could stay in that zone. If you were a guy, my hunch is, you might have actually stayed in that zone because you were moving up the corporate ladder, making more money. It was all in that category of how you will be successful.

But the women I work with have a different mindset. They’re asking some profound questions about what’s the meaning, what’s the purpose? We talked a lot about Gen Z asking that, both men and women, and we’re finding that the pandemic has been a catalytic moment. For a huge population, you can talk about the great resignation, whether it’s the boomers or if it’s youngsters, everybody’s asking, what is it about work? What is work anyhow? What should we be doing? So what happened? You got your coaching. Did you become a coach, and then begin to build your business?

Becky Morrison: So I showed up at UC Berkeley for a 10-day intensive, back when we were still doing 10-day intensives in person. And the first day, one of the first exercises they take you through, they call it the soul portrait and you stand up in front of a room. And at this point, all you’ve done with your cohort peers is exchange first names. That’s it. And so you don’t really know each other, and they ask you some really big coaching questions. And one of the questions they asked me was, What is your purpose? And I answered: to spread joy. And then I looked around, like who the heck said that? Because that was not something that I have ever consciously expressed before.

Andi Simon: I love the line. That is a purpose statement, isn’t it? 

Becky Morrison: And so then I said, Well, that’s interesting. I’m not sure what I’m going do with that. Let me go through this experience. My thought had been with coaching, actually, to take back some executive and leadership coaching work into law firms, because lawyers are not trained in law school to be either leaders or managers, which means that some are and some aren’t. It depends on the firm and it depends on the structure that they’ve given you to develop those skills.

And so I thought, hey, this could be fun because I really like that piece. I’ve seen firsthand how it can actually influence, not just the success of the individual, but the success of the firm or the client engagement to have people who aren’t good leaders and managers there. Actually, I should just say effective. It’s not about good and bad, it’s about whether we have the skills, and that was my intention.

So I left Berkeley and had a bunch of certification hours that I needed to do. And so I engaged in a wide range of exploration of coaching. I saw different people at different places, different careers, different backgrounds, just to see what I might like. And I found a thread. And the thread was the one you’ve described, which is, I’ve done a lot, I’ve checked a lot of boxes, but something is missing. And I was like, this is an interesting thread because I’m familiar with this thread. You’ll recall, I’ve experienced this thread personally, throughout the course of my life, and that led me to really thinking that that’s the space I wanted to be playing in, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to look.

And I had an intention in February of 2020. I got my certification, and thought, okay, cool, so now I’m going to really dial into this niche of trying to help people figure this stuff out. How will I do that? Well, I’m going to go and do a bunch of networking conversations and then I’m going to try and get some people to let me come in and do some lunch-and-learns so that I can kind of develop by experimentation because that’s how I roll my framework, my approach, see what works, what doesn’t, test out what I’m thinking.

Then March happened and there was no in-person anything. And there was no virtual anything for a period of time because people were really in survival mode as they needed to be. And so I decided to join a writer’s retreat, instead thinking that that would give me some structure to play with some content. And thus, my book was born. I did not intend to write a book. I showed up to the first meeting of that writers’ retreat group, in fact, and said, I’m here, I’m here to support you, if you’re writing a book, that’s awesome. I just want some structure for writing and creating content, I will not be writing a book. And out of my small pot of five writing peers, we still meet actually to this day, they’re delightful. But I’m the first person to take a book to market. Famous last words, I’m not writing a book, but here we are.

Andi Simon: Did you self-publish that book or find an editor?

Becky Morrison: I sure did. And I did that intentionally because I didn’t want to wait. It was very clear to me that the tools in this book were going to be helpful to people at the time that we’re living in now. Because this experience of living through what we’ve lived through over the past two-ish years, for a lot of people have asked the question, it is called the prioritization question. It’s really a global era of reprioritization, of really looking at what matters to us and how we want to live more in alignment with that.

Andi Simon: Well, I think that is very exciting. If you look at my archetype, I’m an explorer. And I’ve always been on the margins of what was stable and certain, and I’ve always been an executive in organizations that were changing. And, you know, I love change. When I launched my company, it was as a corporate anthropologist to help companies change. And people hated me and loved me. They had to change, they didn’t know how to change, and we needed to figure out how to change.

But you are in your book, and in your beautiful website, and all the things that you’re doing, transforming yourself and others at the same time. And I thought that this was a beautiful story to share. Because the transformation we’re going through means your story’s changing. And as you’re telling it, their story is, and the challenge for people is that we like stability and continuity and certainty. And for the last two and a half years, we haven’t had any of that. And consequently, humans are frail and very fragile when there’s no stability. The ambiguity is as bad as dangerous places we can be in. Happiness? Who knows where that comes from? What will it look like? So you help them reestablish something. Help me, help them. How do you do it? What’s your process?

Becky Morrison: So there’s two tracks that I like to play with. I like to play with them simultaneously, not in the same exact second, but as we’re working together, we’re coming at it from both ends. And the first end is, that is the piece that’s in my book. It’s how do we identify your top priorities for this season of your life, whatever that may be? And how do we start living more in alignment with that? And then how do we equip you to re-identify or re-evaluate or re-calibrate when the season changes? Because it will, we’ve seen it happen recently.

The other end is, how do we at the same time that we’re thinking about this greater architecture problem, how do we live happy or as happily as possible in the day-to-day without changing any circumstances? Because the science on happiness tells us that our circumstances matter to our happiness, but not nearly as much as our daily behaviors and thoughts you must be talking about. I think it’s important to understand that there are two important pieces. That having positive emotional experiences, even in difficult circumstances, has really important neurological brain pathways and neurosystem benefits to us that equip us to do the bigger work of architecting our life.

Andi Simon: Sonja Lyubomirsky has a wonderful book called The How of Happiness. And I’ve also taken the Coursera Yale course on The Science of Well Being, I’m sure you have too. And it’s funny, a lot about the science of this, about half of it could come from the situation we’re in, but the other part is really in our own hands. So I’m curious, how have you developed? You’re two years into this business. I’m 20 years into my business and I love it. Talk about what you’re discovering. So what are the things that matter to find happiness? And how do you actually do it? What are your thoughts?

Becky Morrison: So the first thing, and when we talk about sort of coming at it from how do we improve everyday happiness, it’s not going to happen by accident. It requires intentional action. And in order to take intentional action, to increase your happiness, you have to know what intentional action might bring more happiness. It’s true, which I know sounds sort of obvious, except that a lot of people don’t.

One of the early exercises we’ll do is something that I call finding your joy menu or finding your essential sources of joy. We will literally sit down and figure out what are the basic building blocks of your positive emotional experience as a human being because they’re different for everybody. And when I ask people that, we ask it in a more casual way, like, what I feel happy when fill in the blank, and often people will come up with things like, I feel happy when I’m on vacation. I feel happy when I’m with a loved one. I feel happy when I can wrestle with my dog on the floor, or when I’m with my dog, or my dog makes me happy, whatever. That’s great. But you can’t always drop everything and go on vacation. And you can’t always drop everything and spend a whole day with a loved one doing things you love.

So the question is, how do you make it bite size so that it can drop into a day where it already feels full and overwhelming? So you take those things and you dig a little deeper. What is it about vacation? Or what is it about your dog or what is it about your loved one or time with your loved one, and let’s get it all the way down to something that is literally dropper sized.

So I’ll give you an example. For me, one of the things that I love about vacation, we often go to warm climates for vacation, and I love the sun on my face. Well, I don’t have to leave Virginia. It’s not very sunny right now. It’s in the evening, but the sun was out today. I can go outside and put the sun on my face multiple times a day anytime I want. And the key is, when I do it with the intention to absorb the sun, to enjoy the experience, to savor the warmth, then I’ve created a positive emotional experience for myself. And the more we do that, the more we broaden our abilities or capabilities in the moment and the more we build our stores of resilience, and both of those things are critically important to weather the tough stuff.

Andi Simon: But I bet the onesies need twoseies and threesies. And I’m sure you add, besides going out to get sun on your face, which I agree with and it’s 20 degrees here. So it’s pretty cold. It’s hard to get that warm feeling. Yeah, it’s an illusion more than anything. And do you find that as you work with your folks, are there some patterns? Everyone is unique, but they’re always a pattern.

Becky Morrison: There are definitely patterns of a couple of things. There’s patterns of joy. Each individual can identify the patterns that they have. But, then there’s also patterns of the ways we block our joy. There’s patterns of the ways we sabotage that. I have a client who we were doing this exercise with. And look, I don’t mean to imply that in coaching, you come to me and you just get a joy menu. That’s just the starting point. And it’s a starting point so that you can start intentionally injecting positive emotions into your day so that you have the skill set we need to do the hard stuff, the deep work.

But we were talking about this exercise because she was really at a point of feeling pretty burnt out. She’s the dog parent with primary responsibility. And I was like, Well, how often are you outside with your dog? She’s like, four or five times a day. Well, okay, are you enjoying that time? No, I’m not. I am on the phone every single time. So it’s like, we have these things, but we block our access to them because we’re so overwhelmed.

The last pattern that I think is important is also the pattern of our nervous system. You said something really important earlier and it’s that we are in a place where nothing is certain and uncertainty does not feel good. And it particularly doesn’t feel good for the nervous system which has as one of its primary job descriptions to keep us safe. And certainly, if you think of it in very primal terms, is one of the hardest jobs out there. And so our nervous system is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not okay, right? And so also, another pattern that can be really important is being able to realize when your nervous system is being triggered, or dysregulated. So you can take steps to work with that nervous system to put it back into a more regulated state so that you have more brain power, more executive function, to then do all of this other work to do the untangling, to do the unwinding.

Andi Simon: I want to get to the untangling and the unwinding. There’s wonderful work, I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive again, and I’m using it for a leadership program. But he builds from intrinsic, and that tension between the intrinsic in the extrinsic and what motivates you to the wonderful research that gets to purpose. And I love his three summits there: you need autonomy, then you need mastery, and then you need purpose. And if that’s what you need to be motivated to do well, it also is the same kind of thing to feel happy. And I saw the daily side and the bigger purpose side. Talk to me about the bigger purpose side, because that’s not inconsequential. That’s actually what it’s all about.

Becky Morrison: That is what it’s all about. And all this daily stuff that I do is actually, like I said, to equip you to do the purpose work, because that can be really big, deep, and a little bit jarring work if you haven’t done it before. The one thing I will say is that I think about purpose a little bit differently than other people, in that I don’t think about purpose as like a single north star to guide your life, or a single sort of, I’m put on this earth to do only this. I told you, when I went to Berkeley, they asked me what my purpose was and I said to spread joy. Yeah, I believe my purpose in this season of my life is to spread joy. And I believe that could change. And I’m open to it changing. And I now know, and I have the tools to recognize when the change might come.

So all of that said, the purpose of my work that I do is really about identifying what is most important to you in this season of your life so that you can do more of that and less of the rest. But it starts with getting to a place where you can even take stock of what’s on your plate, which if people are coming to me in the throes of overwhelm and burnout, is very difficult to do initially without first doing this coming down on the other side. That said, once we’ve got that under control, we can begin to dive in and say, Okay, what’s really taking your time, energy and resources? What do we need to get rid of? What do you need more of and if I could somehow rewrite the recipe for happiness that I wrote myself, it would highlight the last of the rest as the most important.

Andi Simon: We use similar approaches. I have a bunch of tools that I adopted from what I did with organizations who are full of people, to individualize, are they that different? Maybe, maybe not? But at the end of my book, Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business, I have a how-to, my seven steps. And I turned that into an online course called Rethink your journey with Andi Simon. And what’s most interesting to me, though, is that you need to take a look. One of the things we do is take a look at the last 12 months and write down 10 things that really gave you joy. It’s hard for people. I said, it’s okay, dig deeper, you know, talk about it. And then 10 things that really gave you pain, that’s often easier, but not pretty. And then we squeeze it down until we come to three or two or one of the most important values there.

And then we go into a process much like yours: what are we going to do more of to emphasize the ones that give us pleasure, and less of, the get away from the ones that go through pain, but don’t get a start, stop and are sacred. It’s not hard. And when I do it with a group of people, I’m always fascinated because they really know how to change the organization. They work really hard doing it.

First we have to figure out what it is we’re going to do and then do it for an individual. It’s very interesting watching the eyes as they’re thinking about the things that they don’t want to do anymore. It’s okay to say no to the things that you don’t want to do. How are you going to do that? Nobody’s stopping you. But until you have a plan, a personal plan for happiness, you can’t take steps in any direction.

And I find that sometimes it symbolizes why Sonja’s book was so fascinating because it wasn’t that complicated. And I love the wonderful detailed course on the science of well-being. What makes you happy is kindness, gratitude, acts of giving, talking to people, exercise, and a good night’s sleep. People said to me, yes, look at the research. And that tells you that there’s science behind this, not just Andi Simon saying so. And it’s a good time. So in your book, what’s in your book, because I really want to go find your book. I just discovered your book, tell me what is in the book.

Becky Morrison: So the book is based on exactly what I’ve already said. My premise for the recipe for happiness, which is: do more of what matters and less of the rest. I’ve identified three things. And you alluded to them that get in our way of execution. The first is, I call it the authenticity gap, but it’s the knowing gap. Do you actually know? Do you have an awareness of what matters most to what you need to let go of? Are you willing to claim it right now? And then, we live in a doing world. So we go right from do you know, to how do we? And so that’s actually my third gap. And I’m going to come back to the middle gap in a minute.

But the third gap is what I call the physical energy gap. It’s the doing gap. Are you actually living in alignment with that formula? And if not, how do you get there? How do you shift your behavior? How do you shift your habits? Habits, all of that, the middle gap is the believing gap. And it’s the mindset gap. It’s the things that stop us from taking the knowing into the doing. And we often forget to spend a little time there to say, What beliefs or feelings do I have today that might sabotage my ability to execute? Let’s address those proactively. Let’s figure out how to get over guilt, how to say no. How to stop what iffing, all the things, how to work with our nervous system, all of that lives in there.

And one of my challenges is always theories. Theories are great but how do I execute them? I want to do, what’s the doing. So I wanted to leave people with a set of tools. And so every single chapter has at least one exercise that you can deploy, to sort of move the needle on that topic. Whether it’s saying no, or shutting down guilt or incorporating celebration, which is one of the things I put in the activity in the physical energy gap. But it’s all there. 

Andi Simon: I’m enjoying listening to you. It’s hard to find people who know what we do, who do it with joy. But I also always tell my folks to listen. Your mind does exactly what it thinks you want it to do. I like Marissa Pier’s work. And I like Martin Seligman, stuff on positivity. But it is, I like the little bit of science in the story so that they can begin to understand that you have a story in your mind. Your mind said you can call it, but there’s a story there. And that’s your illusion of reality. And it’s an illusion. And so nobody’s making you feel sad, you are allowing your mind to feel sad. And there are things you can do, like gratitude. Diaries are gratitude and things that can change the chemistry in your brain make the oxytocin soar. And next thing you know, you’re smiling.

The second thing is that you live your habits. And those habits are very efficient. Your brain uses 25% of your body’s energy. You wanted to do the habits, go for it. Learning something new takes energy. And the mind undermines it, that amygdala hijacks it. So as you’re going from your two points, and that mindset in the middle, you’ve got to work on changing the story. And telling it often until your mind begins to see, feeling, thinking, believing it to be the new story.

I’m glad you’re shaking your head, yes instead of no because at the end of the day, you are what you are. And the last thing is, the mind goes to pleasure. Even if it’s painful. It’s what’s familiar. And if you’re going to make new things familiar, that means you need practice. I’ll put a plug in here. We have these wonderful 30 day challenges designed to help people practice self care. And it’s fascinating to watch because without practice, nothing changes. It takes about 30 days for a new habit to develop. So some of the things you do to help them because I think what you’ve got here is magical. It can really be transformative.

Becky Morrison: Yeah. I think you’ve nailed it, right. And it’s like this: if I’m a right handed person and I was told to start writing with my left hand. I could do it, but it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be uncomfortable. I’m not going to like the way it looks. I’m not going to like the way it feels. And unless my right hand is inaccessible, because it’s hurt or in a cast, I’m just going to put the pen back in the right hand because it feels better. Even if you told me that key, if you learn to write with your left hand all these rewards await, you know it’s just uncomfortable, right? And so you’re absolutely right that there is an element of training that has to exist.

The very first exercise in my book, I call it, Expect Discomfort. That has been the quickest way to defuse the power of discomfort is to anticipate it. When you are trying to resist that discomfort, when you are focused on the discomfort, when you’re thinking ahead for more discomfort, it becomes all that much more uncomfortable. When you just expect this is going to feel funny, but I’m going to do it anyway, that can be a powerful tool.

And so I think it is just practice, acknowledging the discomfort and taking a different action, whether that’s a thought pattern or an actual habit that you’re developing. Habits are an interesting one because they play a real role, as you highlighted, a really important role. And for many people who are very achievement driven, they can be an absolute mind game because we have this goal. Or I’ll speak for myself, and I’ve experienced with many of my clients, checking the boxes of our habits. And it’s like, if I can do it quicker, I’ll get to the end quicker. But here’s the spoiler: habit never ends. It only ends when you die. So where’s the rush, my friend, to build a sustainable pattern of behavior when you’re building a habit. So how do you do that in a way that you can start and build to where you want to go?

Andi Simon: You know, as I think about what we’re discussing, I think about my grandkids. They are happy kids, and I give my kids, my daughters, and their husbands a lot of credit for it. But it’s also the surrounding world that they are in. The athletic games that they have. Horseback riding is pretty good for happiness. And, it’s interesting to watch them grow with smiles on their faces. But I also know that you nourish it, and you nurture it, and you teach them how to think happy. And don’t think it just happens. You need, all during their early years, to form that mindset that says, I’m a happy person, my cup is half full or overflowing. And it’s okay to be like that.

And so you know, parents, think carefully about the impact your own stories have on your children, because you want them to have a story about their happy person. However we define that this is such fun. Becky, we’re about ready to wrap up. You and I can talk a lot. We may try it again, in six months, you can tell us how you’re doing because this is a new venture that I hope does well. And I hope that our listeners think, What can Becky do to help me? And how can her book help me as well? Where can they find the book? And how can they get to know you?

Becky Morrison: Let me go in reverse order. The best place to find me online is on my website, which is untanglehappiness.com. And you can get links to buy the book there. You can find me on social media there. And you can learn more about the work that I do there. So I’ll make it one stop shopping.

Andi Simon: Good. It’s also a beautiful website done beautifully. And she looks beautiful there too. You want to say you’re a happy woman? Well, I think this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much. So to all of our listeners across the globe, thank you for coming. It’s always a pleasure to share great people with you, like Becky Morrison. And part of my job is to help you get off the brink. And so today’s On the Brink with Andi Simon has been all designed to help you to find that happiness. It’s right there in front of you, if only you can see it. And that’s a really interesting opportunity because there’s a little bit of science that can help you understand that the way forward is all around you, if only you can see it, open your eyes, get a fresh lens and begin to think about what makes you happy and do more of that and less of what doesn’t. It’s not as sophisticated as you might think.

But it does help sometimes to have a coach. We’re both coaches, and we both want you to turn lemons into lemonade or someone said, limes into margaritas. Whatever makes you happy. It’s okay. Our books are all on Amazon. The Happiness Recipe is certainly on Amazon. Both of my books, On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, and Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business, just a year old and it’s been doing gangbusters stuff and turning lots of women to see what’s possible.

One of my favorite reviews when it first came out was a gentleman who said, I have a 13-year-old daughter, she’s a minority and I finally have a book I can give her to show her what she can be. That’s the whole point of sharing our stories. So, thanks for coming. Keep sharing stories and bring me lots of good guests. I love sharing their stories. And when you bring them along, it’s pretty fun. Goodbye, Becky. Have a great day. All of you, stay safe, stay healthy. Bye bye now.