What does it truly mean to live a happier life, and how can we create lasting happiness in our everyday routines? Today, we explore this through the journey of inspiring leader, Jo Howarth. We’ll uncover how personal experiences sparked the creation of a unique happiness platform and discuss powerful techniques like mindfulness and hypnotherapy for managing stress and anxiety. From supporting workplaces to uplifting schools, this episode is packed with actionable insights on fostering personal and professional happiness.
More information about Jo here.
More information about the Happiness Club here.
Transcript
*Please note that the transcript has been automatically generated and proofread for mistakes. But remains in spoken English, and some syntax and grammar mistakes might remain.
Elisa Tuijnder: [00:00:00] What does it truly mean to live a happier life? And how can we create lasting happiness in our everyday routines? Today we explore this through the journey of an inspiring leader in the field of mental well being. We’ll uncover how personal experiences sparked the creation of a unique happiness platform and discuss powerful techniques like mindfulness and hypnotherapy for managing stress and anxiety.
From supporting workplaces to uplifting [00:00:30] schools, this episode is packed with actionable insights on how to foster happiness, both personally and professionally.
Before we dive in, you are listening to the Happiness at Work podcast by Management 3point0, where we are getting serious about happiness.
I’m your host, Elisa Tuijnder, happiness enthusiast and [00:01:00] Management 3point0 team In this podcast, we share insights from industry experts, influencers, and thought leaders about what it takes to be happy, motivated, and productive at work, so that loving your job becomes the norm and not the exception. We will be publishing every fortnight on Friday, so be sure to tune in and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.[00:01:30]
Today, we’re delighted to have Joe Atworth, founder of the Happiness Club, with us. Joe is not only a psychologist, advanced hypnotherapist, and mindfulness expert, but also a resilient individual who has turned personal challenges into a commitment to helping others. Today, we will explore her journey, the workings of the Happiness Club, and how she empowers individuals to lead happier lives, as well as businesses.
Right, Jo? So great to have you here. Lovely to be here. Thank you so much [00:02:00] for having me. No, thank you. So I’m excited to learn more about your journey and the impactful work you’re doing through the Happiness Club. But I have to, before we do anything else, I have to ask our signature question, which I’m sure in the Happiness Club you probably have thought a lot about, but what does happiness mean to you?
Jo Howarth: Beautiful question. So I think my definition of happiness differs somewhat to the mainstream. I might be wrong. I might be getting more mainstream, but Most people tend to describe [00:02:30] happiness as a fleeting emotion, a moment. For me, happiness, true happiness, is about being able to embrace and accept and allow all of it.
The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the difficult, the challenging, the easy, the gorgeous. For me, happiness, living a happy life is about coming to a place where you allow all of that to be there. You allow all of those emotions, you allow all of [00:03:00] those situations, you allow everything to be what it is, and that way you embrace happiness truly.
That’s my definition.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was the Buddhist saying, they also say that, right? You can’t actually have happiness if you don’t know what unhappiness is, because that’s Right? Two sides of the coin.
Jo Howarth: No light without dark
Elisa Tuijnder: and all of that. Exactly. Exactly. So, you founded the Happiness Club and I think, as far as I’ve read, that your personal experiences really shaped that [00:03:30] decision.
And I always really want to know what I have in front of me, so why don’t you give us the synopsis, highlights, whatever you want to share with the podcast. I’ll
Jo Howarth: try and keep it Yeah, it’s a long story. Yeah. No, I mean, I grew up, I was a fairly typical kid. In the seventies and eighties, my parents were divorced.
I had stepdads and stepmoms and all manner of things. I grew up in quite a negative environment. There was love there, but it was quite a negative environment. And then when I was [00:04:00] 25, my biological dad passed away very suddenly, had a heart attack and he died. Bless him. And he was 50 and I was 25 and it literally, it was like the biggest smack around the face that the universe has ever delivered to anybody.
Losing a parent is ridiculously difficult, but losing them suddenly and at quite a young age is huge. And it literally turned my world upside down and inside out. And I found myself in therapy, which before that [00:04:30] time, If someone had suggested to me that I look at therapy, I’d have thought they were absolutely bananas.
And I was very much of the, just get on with it, bury whatever you need to bury, don’t think about the stuff you don’t think about, don’t feel those horrible feelings, bury it all, suppress it all, pretend you’re fine, get on with life. That was my, yeah,
Elisa Tuijnder: philosophy.
Jo Howarth: Yeah, philosophy then. But yeah, it landed me in therapy and I literally had never [00:05:00] met anybody that thought the way my therapist thought.
I’d never come across positive thinking. What do you mean you can think good things? You train
Elisa Tuijnder: yourself. Yeah, exactly. It was
Jo Howarth: a complete revelation to me. And then when I, I had a job, I was a corporate event manager for many years. Oh, I had dabbled in that as well.
Elisa Tuijnder: It was not very happiness inducing, I must say.
Jo Howarth: No, exactly that. So I already experienced massive levels of anxiety from all the stuff I’d experienced as a kid. [00:05:30] And then I was landed in this massively stressful role. Everybody always thinks event management is really glamorous, easy. It is the least glamorous of all of them, I think. Exactly right. It’s incredibly stressful.
So, I found myself in my mid 30s, stressed out my head, daily anxiety, I’d just got married, I’d had two children, and I was faced with this choice of going back to event management. Which didn’t mix with having kids in the [00:06:00] slightest, or taking a step back and seeing what I wanted to do with my life. I went for a therapy session because having children in and of itself brought up a lot of stuff from my childhood that I need to deal with.
And so I was seeing my therapist and I just said to him one day, Do you think I could do what you do? And he said, I’ve been waiting 10 years for you to ask me that question. And so I started training with my own therapist one to one and became a [00:06:30] hypnotherapist, then found mindfulness, then became a mindfulness practitioner, then started seeing people myself when I qualified.
And my clients started saying things to me like, Oh God, could I put you in my pocket and take you home with me? Because you sit on my shoulder in between sessions and just whisper in my ear what I’m supposed to do. Uh, not that I told my clients what to do. Yeah, yeah. I don’t know the context. And it really resonated with me because whilst therapy had helped me [00:07:00] massively, hugely and continued to do so, I mean, I’m, I’ve been having therapy, I’m 50 now, I’ve been having therapy since I was 25, right?
Right. Every time something comes up for me, I go for some form of therapy. And it really resonated with me because for me, that’s the bit that was missing. When I first had therapy, I would get this hour and a half with this amazing human being who helped in ways I don’t even think he realized. And then I’d have to go out into the big wide world all by myself and manage for an entire week by [00:07:30]myself, which sometimes was just impossible.
Elisa Tuijnder: And
Jo Howarth: then I was on the other side of it where I was a therapist and I had clients saying that to me. And that’s literally where the idea for the happiness club came from. The happiness club was set up to help my one to one clients to give them something every day between their full on sessions with me.
That’s why I set the club up. That’s where it came from.
Elisa Tuijnder: Sometimes it’s that. Those kinds of things that are the most [00:08:00] impactful. You don’t have to come with the greatest of crazy or in depth things. It’s like, okay, yeah, so you miss me. Maybe let’s get everyone together because I can’t always be there.
Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. And I also love that almost all individuals that I’ve spoken and are really do these things and are really into the positive psychology and happiness side of the business. They always have the same story in the sense that they didn’t start out happy. And I won’t say that everyone that is in anything to do with happiness are the destitute or a very horrible upbringing or something [00:08:30] like that.
But there’s always been some form of a hardship whereby they realized, okay, there is ways out of it. And then it’s so beautiful that they don’t want to keep that to themselves. It’s just, okay, let’s make sure that everyone knows this.
Jo Howarth: Yeah, exactly. I think what I know from my point of view and from people, like you say, I’ve spoken to a lot of rappers who do this work because they’ve had a similar kind of experience.
And I think the driving force is really that you just don’t want anyone else to have to go through what you went through. You want to be able to [00:09:00] help them so that when those difficult things are going to happen, stressful things are going to happen, you can’t stop those happening. Yeah. You absolutely can help yourself through them.
Elisa Tuijnder: And I’ve wondered as well as because a lot of people who go into happiness understand that true happiness also comes from helping others. And they really internalize that somehow and it might not even be a conscious decision, but it’s just almost kind of comes out because of that as well. You know, that makes us happy.
Jo Howarth: Yeah, I agree. When you see your client make a change that [00:09:30] they desperately want to make and they just have to. And you see the relief flood through somebody. There’s just, that’s just awesome.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Did you want to make the Happiness Club a little bit more tangible for us? I’m guessing it also evolved over the years, but how do we see this?
Is that like masterclasses in certain things? Is that a group of people that can do all of them things and they have an all on platform or is it on the ground? Can they, do they come together? Yeah. What’s the lowdown there? These
Jo Howarth: days it started off as a Facebook group, but these days [00:10:00] it’s operated via an app.
Um, and we release what we call a daily strategy every morning, six o’clock in the morning UK time, which is a small piece of writing and a video that is designed to just help people do one thing that day to look after their mental and emotional health. So the point of the daily strategies is that they build up over time.
So the more you read and go with whatever the daily strategy has [00:10:30] suggested you think about or try that day. the more the effect of the daily strategy builds up over time. So that’s the core of the offering. And then we run a live webinar every month, we run a live meditation every month. Yeah. And fully paid up members get 24 7 access to a team of therapists.
So it’s not full blown therapy, but it is ad hoc in the moment. Oh my God, this has just happened and I’m completely stressed, totally anxious, or I feel awful [00:11:00] today and I don’t know why or whatever. I have to do a
Elisa Tuijnder: presentation
Jo Howarth: or
Elisa Tuijnder: whatever and I don’t want to do it.
Jo Howarth: So it’s ad hoc in the moment support, so they can call us, they can message us, they can email us, whatever works best for them.
I was very keen when we put that side of the service together, that it wasn’t just a phone call or just a hotline. Yeah, because it’s hard for a certain people, right? Because I knew, I related it back to myself. I knew that when I was at the height of my stress and anxiety as an event manager, A, I wouldn’t have [00:11:30] told my boss.
It’s not a chance on this earth I would ever have confessed it. But if it had gotten so bad that I had, if he’d given me a number to call someone I didn’t know, no way would I have picked the phone up. And actually, I’ve been utterly validated in that. Messenger is our most popular. That’s how the members get by a messenger.
Elisa Tuijnder: Weirdly, I’m not a big phone talker. People say it’s a generational thing, but I actually don’t. I like to talk face to face. So also this Zoom kind of thing, but when it’s stressful or when anything’s happening or you’re on the train or [00:12:00] whatever, I’m I hate phone, phone calls. And the only time I like phone calls still is when I do like walking or like just I’m on my own or those kinds of things.
So just having in a situation, the ability to text a person or messenger or these kinds of things. There’s so many situations that we are in that we can’t actually pick up the phone or don’t feel comfortable talking. And that is really important. So thank you for that. And I’m sure that you have a lot of people on call as well, that it’s not just you that that has to take all of these up.
Jo Howarth: Wow. And actually that side of the service doesn’t get [00:12:30] used as much as I thought it would get used. And when we went out to the membership and asked, Hello, you do know you can do this, don’t you? The answer that came back to us was there are so many other resources on the app that help us on a daily basis.
Actually, it’s like a safety net. It’s like, if things get really bad, I’ll pick the phone up or I’ll message you. But actually, I don’t need to because there’s all these resources on the app.
Elisa Tuijnder: Knowing myself, that would also for really last resort, like I’m really, really all the other, and also just because you’re like, Oh, [00:13:00] I can’t bother that person or I’ve not made the appointment.
Like there’s some, there’s a, there’s some barriers even that we might not even fully realize that we have them. But just yeah, that reassurance, I think with anxiety, it often is the case, for example, that once you get diagnosed that nothing is wrong, nothing’s wrong in another level or physically wrong.
Your anxiety can sometimes already a little bit, just such a having it, it’s already a very powerful thing, even if you don’t use it. And then that’s really nice. So I talk a lot, well, we talk about happiness in business [00:13:30] and happiness in general and individual strategies and that kind of stuff. And when I came on onto your website and actually already knew this, but it’s also one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you and knew that you were doing this in schools as well, and.
I really love that because I have a friend, for example, who tries to do this with yoga and mindfulness in schools. And I was just thinking, the amount of stress that kids are under nowadays, if they have the coping strategies, and I mean, sometimes things can still go wrong, but if they are given the coping strategies and the understanding of their feelings and emotions, and I know they go through puberty, so there’s an [00:14:00] extra level of complication, but how impactful would that be also afterwards in businesses to just say, these are my lines, these I can’t take.
It’s a snowball effect. Exactly.
Jo Howarth: I always say to people with the different strands of the business that we do, I’m always rather selfishly trying to help a past version of myself, right? I wish someone had come into my school when I was five or eight or ten. And taught me some ways to, and taught me that how I was feeling, I kept it very [00:14:30] secret.
I was very embarrassed about how I felt at home. It was just awful. And I was like, I was that child. Smile and was polite and was no trouble. And no teacher on this earth would have ever thought there was anything up with me. Because I masked it like no tomorrow. And so those are the kids I’m trying to help with our schools, particularly, because the ones that are obviously struggling will get, the [00:15:00] ones that I want to help are the, in the workplace and in the schools, are the people that sit there that everybody thinks is okay, they’re okay.
Elisa Tuijnder: And they take on so much and they take on more because they’re stronger and or they want to they come across as strong. I recognize myself a little bit into it and then you get your first panic attack and it’s all of a sudden like, whoa, okay, I really have to not do this anymore. Yeah. Or not even, then you go, nah, maybe that was one time.
Jo Howarth: I think it’s ridiculously powerful for children to understand That all of their emotions are [00:15:30] valid, and that it’s okay. And they’re not alone, yeah. And the other people, you know, one of the first things we do in our schools program is ask them if they’ve ever felt angry, sad, frustrated, and we ask them to put their hands up.
And the most powerful thing we do when we ask them is we put our hands up too. I think adults have got it sorted, right? They think we’re all fine and we must be right because we’re grown ups. So they must be wrong because they’re children. And actually, that’s one of the most powerful messages that we get across is [00:16:00] everybody feels all of these and it’s OK.
It’s OK
Elisa Tuijnder: to feel them. I think one of the most powerful things for me when I was growing up, that was when I I didn’t do this with my high school friends and that kind of stuff because in high school, you’re doing all of these, okay, this is me and I’m doing some kind of show actually at school. And then I got some friends later in my twenties or mid twenties that I could really talk to and ask them like, how are you going through these things?
And I didn’t get the massive realization that everyone was struggling with the same feelings as kids and that none of us were able just to [00:16:30] talk to each other about it because I have now gone back to some of my high school friends. What were we doing there? And why were we not supporting each other?
And it seems so obvious, and especially with the times, we’re also very different in the sense towards mental health, and yeah, but how powerful is it indeed if you tell kids that? way earlier, and then obviously give them practices around it as well.
Jo Howarth: Yeah, exactly that. Give them things that empower them to look after themselves.
And like you said before, that then continues through the rest of their lives, right? It’s [00:17:00] at their fingertips when they are. When they do come to work in the workplace ready, they’re already equipped. If that makes sense.
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Can I ask you to that? It’s like, um, is there like any practical guidance or what, what aids that you guys start doing this? Or do you feel like, okay, we should actually do this really early? Or is there a sort of time where they really start developing? Kids are really start developing this kind of more anxiety and then thinking about things or.
Jo Howarth: Now, I mean, honestly, I find some of the stats around anxiety and stress in children scary. Yeah, that’s,
Elisa Tuijnder: yeah.
Jo Howarth: Yeah. It scares the pants off me. But we start as young as possible. So we work with reception age [00:18:30] up, so four, five year olds, all the way up to 18. And the teachers that teach them, too, because that’s quite.
Yeah, I
Elisa Tuijnder: love
Jo Howarth: that as well.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. And also, this is a very stressful job, but then they also learn how to deal with kids who are in emotional distress better. And if there’s anything we need, teachers are so important. Certain teachers have influenced me up until today. And I know that they can’t continuously live every day thinking, Oh my God, I might have ruined the kid, or I might’ve done this, or then you don’t do your job anymore, then it’s too much.
But yeah, just giving them the right tools. And I’m [00:19:00] sure universities and, and. Colleges do tend to give them tools, but like continuous training around this and evolving is really handy. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Is that like a long, is it like a one day thing or does it come out in like, you know, a whole year that they sort of do these like tricks and, and, and, and, and yeah, how does it, how does it, I’m so sorry, I’m so intrigued with this.
I love it.
Jo Howarth: The schools program is a four week. So we go into the school a week for four weeks. So the idea is we [00:19:30] teach them, we talk to them about their emotions and we teach them a range of tools and techniques each week, but we go back and recap the ones that we’ve already taught them every week. So by the end of the program, they have 12 largely mindfulness based tools at their And they’ve got so used to using them because we come back and recap and check in how they’re using them and interact with them.
The first time I ran the program, when I devised it, the first school I ran it in, I went [00:20:00] back for the second week and I was like, Oh, there’s no way all these kids are going to have remembered what I taught them. And the amount that they remembered, the amount that they retained, I was absolutely gobsmacked.
Because I really wasn’t expecting them. It’s partly because of the way that we deliver it, because we do it playfully as a game. So it involves them. And maybe
Elisa Tuijnder: also because they need it, you know, if they can already link it to, or might be able to use it. There’s probably really hard to say, okay, [00:20:30] five apples and this, you know, the maths problems that you don’t relate to as much.
So it’s actually. Yeah, it’s giving you a tool to something that you already might have encountered. So then they link one and two together, I’m guessing. Exactly
Jo Howarth: that, right? And then, obviously, then we train the teachers at the end of the four weeks, and we offer a workshop for parents as well. So then those children are, literally surrounded all the grownups that are with them day in, day out, and then know what they’ve been taught and hopefully using the
Elisa Tuijnder: [00:21:00] tools as well.
I mean, the kids go, I think, I’m not sure whether it increases, I’m always going back and forth with that, whether pressure increases and, but at least they, especially the kids now, they went through a pandemic, they have had so many disruptions, and they’re, all the standardized testing is becoming more ridiculous anyways in the UK A levels and GCSEs, and there’s such stressful moments in their very young.
young lives, that giving them sort of some tools and framework around it should actually just be standard [00:21:30] practice.
Jo Howarth: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I absolutely agree. When I first put the schools program together, I actually wrote like a mission statement thing for it, for the business and everything. And it came from there.
There’s a quote. Oh God, I’m going to completely misquote him now, but there’s a quote I love. Where he said, if you, if we taught every eight year old in the world to meditate, we would eradicate war within a generation.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah.
Jo Howarth: That was the quote that I read that inspired me to put the [00:22:00] schools program together because if you could have a generation of children that grew up knowing how to look after their mental and emotional health themselves, that would just be amazing.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s going to take some time for the current government or any government I’m guessing to really implement that. Because What they just say, go back to work, it’s okay, or go back to school, pull up your pants, like, you know. And that’s what becomes the attitude
Jo Howarth: in the [00:22:30] workplace then, you know, exactly.
And then it just keeps going. Yeah. I did a poll on LinkedIn not so long ago and I put, you know, if you were feeling, I can’t remember exactly what the options were, but if you were feeling. stressed, if you had a lot on that day and you had loads, you didn’t have enough time, had so much to do and you’re feeling stressed and anxious, would you A.
take a break, B. soldier on? And the biggest answer was
Elisa Tuijnder: soldier
Jo Howarth: on.
Elisa Tuijnder: We’ve cultivated that in the culture, right? And I think that’s almost I think that certain government structures [00:23:00] and some certain ways of working, and it’s more so in other countries than in others, it gets cultivated and it gets, and every generation gets almost worse.
And it’s just like, so we need to, we need to stop the pattern. And like, I think a lot of people are working on that, but then there’s a lot of other things that happen and then the focus on it shifts again. You are also like, I mean, I’d love reading about your background as well. And you do mindfulness and hypnotherapy a lot in the, in, in your programs and you try to incorporate them.
And I think mindfulness has become a little bit more, let’s [00:23:30] say mainstream or at least known, um, over the, over the last decade, at least. And I just wanted to know what common misconceptions were for these for, for people as well as, you know, how do you, how do you drop these things in, especially I think around hypnotherapy as well.
’cause I think there’s a lot of people don’t really know what it is, I guess.
Jo Howarth: No, there’s a lot of, um, myths around hypnotherapy. Yeah. There’s lots of people think it’s mind control or something. Yeah. Victorian, sort of the pendulum swinging and, yeah. And that’s it. Actually, a lot of people practice hypnotherapy without [00:24:00] realizing that’s what they’re practicing.
Mm-hmm . Uh, any of those. guided meditations, visualizations, any of that kind of thing that you download from YouTube, that’s actually hypnotherapy. They’re not meditating, they’re actually hypnotic tracks because that’s all hypno is. Hypnosis is basically a daydream like state. We spend most of our day every day in hypnosis naturally.
So what we do in hypnotherapy is encourage people into that state, guide them into a relaxed daydreamy like state, and then get [00:24:30] them to visualize. To make suggestions to their subconscious mind, to make changes, to make shifts, to help them relax, whatever the thing is. So a lot of people are actually already using hypnotherapy, that’s what they’re using.
Mindfulness for me, I think the most common myth about mindfulness that I’ve come across is that mindfulness is meditation. Yeah. And it is, meditation can be part of a mindfulness practice. Mm-hmm . But lot of people think [00:25:00] that’s all that mindfulness is. Yeah. And it really does have to become part of your lifestyle.
And I think that’s, when I run a workshop, one of the questions I will say, well, I will ask is, uh, who in here already a mindfulness? And the most common answer that I get is People going a bit. Yeah. Because they’ve started down the road of practicing it and realized. With standard mindfulness practice actually is quite time consuming.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, and I was just about to say, [00:25:30] I went, I once got the book started it when in, in a particular year of time, and I think at page five it felt already too daunting. It was like, oh my God, I have to change my whole life.
Jo Howarth: Exactly. You know, when I was doing my mindfulness training, my kids were four and two at the time.
I’d just started my business. I’d just qualified as a hypnotherapist. I had two small kids that weren’t at school. And my mindfulness teacher was asking me to do 45 minutes of this meditation every day. My stepmom just went through the same one and it was like, yeah, [00:26:00] a lot. A lot. It was like two hours of practice every day and there was just no way.
I mean, I knew I was going to use it professionally as well as personally, so I did the best I could. The minute I qualified, I was like, okay, we need to find a way to make this simple and practical and short and easy, because otherwise people are never, ever going to use it and they’ll never feel the benefits of it.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. There’ll be a few bits and pieces certain people will do, but like the grand majority of people will not, especially because this is [00:26:30] tools for people who are in high stress times. If there’s anything that people don’t like doing when they’re in high stress time, it’s spend a lot of time consuming things on other things that might be beneficial in two years.
Exactly that.
Jo Howarth: Everything that we teach in our workshops. is, you know, we teach people to meditate in one minute and the difference it makes, you know, I say to people, instead of sitting down to meditate for half an hour, use the, I don’t tell them it’s meditation before I teach it to them because again, a lot of people have got preconceived [00:27:00] ideas about what meditation is and they try that.
Thanks very much. So we just, it’s one minute exercise. And afterwards I tell them you just meditated. And honestly, you can do that in 10 seconds. You can do it in one minute instead of sitting down and finding half an hour, which is impossible. Also
Elisa Tuijnder: in a half an hour of meditation is really hard. Most people have never, they don’t realize that, have not meditated how hard it is to sit still and try and think of nothing for even 10 minutes.
Exactly. So just
Jo Howarth: do it for one [00:27:30] minute, 20 times a day. One of my favorite clients ever, one to one clients was a nurse in a cardiac unit in a hospital. And she literally still messages me now. She’s a member of the happiness club as well, but she uses that one minute to punctuate. So in between each patient, in between each clinic, in between each meeting, she just sits and does the one minute.
And it just sets her. She worked incredibly long hours in an incredibly stressful environment. She gets through it a [00:28:00] thousand times better now because she literally just sits and does that, one, or stands in the corridor and does the one and then carries on with her day. It’s powerful stuff.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. And it’s also kind of fitting it into your one, the way, the one that you, the way that you work, your individual person, as well as the environment around you.
Like for me, for example, I know how powerful journaling is and gratitude and all of these kinds of things. I always bought a beautiful new diary and, and a new journal and a new this, and I, and I, I really wish I could just actually every night [00:28:30] sit here and do that. But my, I I, I have a life that is quite chaotic in the sense that I’m not very, I, I, I don’t like structure that much anyways.
So some days I’ll work out from 7:00 AM till 10:00 PM at night or the other way around, or I won’t work much and I’ll be at somewhere else. But if I don’t have that structure, also then that journal then came in, in a weird time, always. And if it comes in on a weird time, then you kind of go, okay, I’ll do it later.
And then you don’t do it. And it was very hard for me to become a habit. So I figured out that I’ve put it into [00:29:00] something else. It’s in an app and it’s with a photo and like, you know, it’s sort of my own kind of way of doing it and it’s only once a week and I gave myself permission to do it from Saturday till Tuesday whenever I have a second.
And I know other people will be like, yeah, but you just have to practice it. You just have to have the habit, but then actually you’re hurting yourself and then the practice is not helping.
Jo Howarth: That’s it, exactly that, right? If the practice is stressing you out, making you angry because you’re not keeping up with it, then there’s no point doing the practice, right?
It is about fitting it into your own lifestyle and [00:29:30] how, and what works for you, absolutely.
Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Talking about your own lifestyle. So you’re a mom, a wife, an author, a speaker, an entrepreneur. That’s a lot of things in one go. And how do you do all these different roles or is, are you one of those people that feels actually all of these roles encompass is one?
Yeah. I just wanted to ask about.
Jo Howarth: Ah, sometimes with absolute difficulty, it is a bit of a juggling act. A lot of time, I’m lucky now that my, my children are teenagers. So they. [00:30:00] Self sufficient, almost. They take care of themselves and they care much less whether I’m in the same room as them or not now. But when they were little I mean, again, this is where some of the practices that we teach in the workshops come from because literally I had a four year old and a two year old following me every way, minute’s piece.
So to try and sit down and meditate for 20 minutes was impossible, literally impossible. So I had to find ways to build it into my routine, my practice [00:30:30] to make it work for me, like you’ve just said, right? So the biggest thing that I’ve learned over the however many years it is now. is really just to get really good at cutting myself some slack.
It’s priceless, right? If I don’t get those emails finished today, actually, what’s more important that I spend an hour stressing myself out, trying to get that bit of work finished, or that I look after myself, which is what I would advise my client to do. I look after myself and rest, and then come back to it rejuvenated [00:31:00] tomorrow.
That’s way more powerful for me than trying to force it in and stress and worry and oh my god and get all wound up about it.
Elisa Tuijnder: And it actually makes it worse, right? Because then you’re in a perpetual loop of being angry at yourself and then you stress more because of that and that’s just the most anti productive thing in the world, right?
Jo Howarth: Exactly. One of the most powerful mantras that I have learnt and I cannot for the life of me remember where I got it from. I didn’t devise it. But it helps me enormously is [00:31:30] I am where I am and that’s okay. Yeah,
Elisa Tuijnder: just being. I’ve read a sentence once where it said the tortoise also doesn’t think, what am I doing today?
I’m being a tortoise. And some days that is also really cool. And I don’t know why, but some of these sentences sometimes they stick. And I don’t remember whether it was a tortoise or something else. I don’t even know where I get it from anymore. But yeah, it’s so key to just be human. That’s enough.
Exactly.
Jo Howarth: It’s unbelievably important to just be. And sometimes when I [00:32:00] teach my clients that mantra, I am where I am and that’s okay. And they say to me, but what if it’s not okay? Yeah, who made that decision then? But it is okay because it is what you are, right? So it has to be okay because if it’s not okay, then all you’re doing is beating yourself up and causing untold damage that you don’t need to cause.
Microsoft Because you are where you are and
Elisa Tuijnder: that’s okay. It really is. And it’s such a powerful thing that it’s okay that you do not have to have a five year plan. It’s literally, you were put on earth to be [00:32:30] human or put on earth is even, we don’t know, but it’s okay to just be. And I love that so much.
And it’s such a simple thing to say, but it’s, it comes with so much, especially within society. Ah Jo, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation so much and before we really wrap up, we always really want to leave our listeners with a tangible practice, something that they can practice tomorrow. Do you want to leave one or two or one key action or one key practice that they can start doing?
Absolutely. So
Jo Howarth: for me, I’ve already mentioned the [00:33:00] one minute, I mean literally just sitting. Somewhere quiet with your eyes closed, set a timer on your phone, your watch, whatever for one minute and close your eyes and literally just focus on your breath for that one minute. Then get up and do what you were doing again.
That is priceless. You will feel the benefits. Do it as many times a day as you can. On top of that, you’ve already mentioned gratitude practice. So we in the happiness club, we teach something called the glad exercise, which is my take on a gratitude [00:33:30] exercise. Because, and I call it the glads because I’ve worked with so many people who have been dealt such a hard deck of cards that gratitude, like feeling grateful for something, is really hard.
Right? It feels really difficult to reach for gratitude, but there are things in their day that they can be glad about. We teach people to sit down at the end of the day. So I do this publicly on my social media at the end of every day. Last thing I [00:34:00] do before I go to sleep, which again, helps with making sure it’s in your routine.
Cause it doesn’t matter what time you go to sleep. You just do it before you go to sleep and just to sit and either say out loud or make a list of all the things from that day. So most gratitude exercises are very general about life, things you’re grateful for in your life. The GLADs are specifically about that day, so it makes you go back to the beginning of the day and reflect back over the whole day and find all those beautiful little [00:34:30] moments, even in the day from hell, all those beautiful little moments, like that cup of tea that you had or that hug with Cassie or like, you know, that was really tasty that day.
Exactly. All those little glimmers of gorgeousness that actually are through your day, but when it’s been a hard day and really hard to see. But actually purposely going back and finding them all through your day, saying them out loud or writing them in a journal, whichever way works best for you. I get messages from the Happiness Club members on the regular saying, [00:35:00] had the day from hell, I thought there’s no point doing my GLADS today.
And then I got the nudge from the app and I thought, okay, Joe, I’ll do my GLADS. I’ve done them and it’s turned my whole day around. Yeah.
Elisa Tuijnder: And just
Jo Howarth: the most, yeah.
Elisa Tuijnder: And the next day you get up and feel a little better as well. Exactly. Because you’ve left that in that day and you don’t sort of drag it with you.
Yeah. Um, Joe, it’s like if people wanna join the Happiness Club, if schools are, or pe any, any people that are listening that are involved in [00:35:30] education, you know, wanna wanna talk to you about this, where, where can they do that? And maybe also what do you guys work just in the UK. Because we have a very international audience or, you know, outside of that, or our partners or anything like that.
Jo Howarth: So we have, we have a team of happiness club trainers, um, that deliver our stuff mostly in the UK, but we do have, um, a trainer in Canada and we have trainers in New Zealand. So we do, we are vaguely It’s very far away from, from each other. It’s very, very far away. I know the wonders of how these things work and, [00:36:00] um, um, so no, we’re always open to global audiences.
Um, and if anyone wants to find out about what we do, the best place is the website really, which is the happinessclub. co. uk.
Elisa Tuijnder: Amazing. I, uh, yeah, sounds, sounds like a wonderful resource that you’ve created there for all levels of, uh, of society. So thank you. And thank you for coming on the podcast as well.
for having me on. All right. for listening to the Happiness at Work podcast [00:36:30] by Management 3point0. Oh, where we are getting serious about happiness. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy our shows, don’t be shy. Write us a review. Share the happiness with your colleagues, family, or friends.
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