Let's talk about this exercise. Now, I had been doing this little exercise for as long as I can remember. It was like my own little secret magic trick, right? A fail proof way to tap into happiness whenever I felt lost. I had never shared this exercise with anyone else. Well, that all changed one day in 2020. Here's what happened. My husband and I were standing in the kitchen. It was in the summer, and our daughter Sawyer, she was in her mid-20s, she walked into the kitchen. We were cooking dinner, and we turned to look at her, and her eyes were swollen. They were so red. You know that look on somebody's face where they just look puffy? It is so clear that they have been crying for Lord knows how long. I mean, honestly, it looked like she had probably been sobbing all day long. She had been having a really tough time. Let me explain a little bit about what was going on. She had graduated from college in the middle of COVID. Maybe you had that experience, too. Maybe somebody that you love had that experience. The life that she had been looking forward to had literally imploded.

I mean, absolutely nothing was going according to plan. She had been working for four years while she was in college to save enough money to take a service trip to Cambodia after she graduated. It was canceled. Instead of living with her friends in the city, she was stuck living at home with us. You want to know how she dealt with the sadness and the depression and the disappointment and the grief? By drinking herself into the ground. She had put on extra weight. She had become really sedentary. She hated how she looked. She hated how she felt. She hated her life. She had nothing to look forward to. She had hit this point where she could no longer contain or hide the massive breakdown and downward spiral that she was in. She walks into the kitchen after clearly crying all day and said to us, I am so stuck. I'm lost. I'm miserable. I don't know what to do. I turned and I looked at her and I said, Actually, I think you do. You're just scared. She looked back at me and I said, No, I think you know what to do, and I'm going to prove it to you.

Take out a piece of paper. And she did. Draw a line down the center. And on the left-hand side of that piece of paper, I want you to write two words: happy me. Now, close your eyes and imagine a world where you remember being happy or more confident or feeling more alive. It could be a great memory from the recent past, or you might have to go all the way back to childhood, and there was this long silence. As we stood there, I could tell that she was traveling back in her mind to this other world. But all of a sudden, she exhaled and she opened her eyes and she said, The last time I remember being happy was my senior year of high school. And I said, Okay, great. I want you to write down all of the things that you see that you were doing in that world. Describe a week of your life when you were a senior senior in high school. She said, Oh, well, I got up at 6:30. I left the house by 7:00. I was with my friends all day and going to classes. I was so looking forward to going to college.

I was playing varsity lacrosse. I was exercising six days a week. I was only drinking two days a week on the weekends with my friends. I had a great relationship with the guy I was dating. I was home probably for dinner with you guys four nights a week. And as she described it, I could see that world, too. I said, Great. Now, look back to the piece of paper. And on the right-hand side, I want you to describe the world that you live in right now. She sighed. She said, Well, I sleep until noon. When I wake up, I don't know what to do every day. I drink every night because I'm so depressed. I don't ever see my friends because everybody's scattered after we graduated and plus COVID. I don't have anything to look forward to. I mean, this trip to Cambodia was canceled. My job doesn't start for another six months. I'm not exercising. I'm eating like crap. I sit in my bed most days, and I'm spending so much time on social media. And I said, Great. Compare those two worlds. And she got it right away. And I bet you're getting it, aren't you?

Because there are two worlds, aren't there? There's the world that you're in right now and another world that you can access When you close your eyes and you ask yourself, When do I remember being happier? See, our daughter immediately made the connection between these two worlds. And that's how easy it is to pass between them. She understood that the happier version of herself was right there for her to see. Everything that she described in the world that she lived in as a senior in high school offered the clues that she needed to bring back into her world today so that she could become happier, more confident, and feel alive again. Because here's the truth. You do know how to be happy. That's why you miss feeling it. You can only miss feeling something that you know. And your own life experience offers a map to a world where you do feel happier today. And here's the mistake we all make. You think you need to permanently escape your life in order to be happier, to go on vacation, to blow up your relationships, to move, and change your jobs. No, you don't. All you need to do is learn how to open the door to that other world while you're still living day to day in this one.

Because you're already starting to think back and travel through time and tap into that world where you felt a little happier, I want to give you a very important tip that will make this exercise even easier, and it's based on research. Here it is. All you have to do as you pass through the portal in your mind and you step into this other world is find one clue. You just need one thing. One thing that you can bring back with you to this moment, this morning morning, we were having a team meeting, and we were talking all about this episode. The team started to just naturally pass through the portal into other worlds in their own minds, back in time when they felt happier. And so I thought, before I turned to you, I wanted to share some of the reflections that our team members had, because I think as you listen to other people describe what they discovered, when they thought about, Well, when was I happier? And what did that world look like? I have a feeling it's going to shake loose some memories for you. So let me share some of these with you.

Janaya, who is one of our amazing video editors, she said, Oh, yeah, I know exactly what that world was like. I felt so much happier when I was younger. And she used the word freedom. She said, When I was younger, I just felt free. I would get up every morning, and I was with my family, and then I would go to school, and I got out of school at two o'clock. And then every day after school, I would go to dance practice, and I loved dance practice. Dance was like this creative expression of who I was, and it was so amazing. And then I would come home, and I'd have dinner with my family, and I'd go to bed, and then I'd wake up and do the whole thing all over again. And can you guess what the clue is that she needs to bring back into her world right now? If you're thinking dance or some form of creative expression, you're exactly right. And it doesn't have to be dance every evening. It could be take one class a month from now. It could be sign up for some series. But when you bring something from that other world into your life now, you can see how just adding that one thing suddenly energizes you, suddenly reminds you of who you are, suddenly brings something alive inside of you, and it helps you to start feeling free again.

Isn't this so cool? So let me share another one with you. So Maddie, who is one of our amazing video editors on the team, shared about a time in her life when she was super happy, and she was getting her MFA in Documentary Filmmaking. As she described her life, she would get up every single day at 6:30. She would go exercise, then she would go to class, and she felt so creatively energized. After class, she went to the same coffee shop every single day, the Thinking Cup on Newbury Street. That was her spot in Boston. She would sit there like the filmmaker that she is, and she She would sit with her journal, and everybody in the coffee shop knew her and greeted her when she came in, and she felt the sense of community. Then at night, she'd be helping some of her fellow classmates shooting their films, and she'd collapse in bed at 11:00, and then the next morning, get up and do it again. The reason why I'm telling you the details of what Maddie shared is because she had this huge epiphany on the call this morning with the team, where she realized As she allowed herself to pass through that portal and step back into this world where she was a happier person, and then come back into the present moment and examine her life right now, she realized something amazing.

She's really happy right now because her current life contains all the clues that were in the other world. She wakes up at 6:00 in the morning in exercises, and she arrives close to to the office by around 7:30 in the morning. You know what she does for 45 minutes? She sits in a coffee shop with her journal. Everybody at the coffee shop now knows who she is and greets her when she walks in, and then she goes into work and she's working on creative projects, and then she gets home and she's with somebody that she cares about, and then she wakes up and she does it all over again. Those little things, those little clues that built a happy life She has brought them to her life now. And this is so important for you to hear, because you think it's the big things, and it's actually no, just one little thing. What if there was a whole other world that you could tap into? Only in this world, you would be happy. There's the world that you're in right now and another world that you can access when you close your eyes and you ask yourself, When do I remember being happier?