7 Days Of Joy: Simple Strategies for Happier, Intentional Living

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1 7 Days Of Joy: Simple Strategies for Happier, Special Sneak Peek! by Effortlessly Intentional.com

2 Are you looking for simple practices to find more joy in your day to day life? No time for a full-life makeover or a week long retreat, but need to shift your focus and engage in better self-care? This is the e-book for you and I'm so glad you're here. I'll show you how to take one week and transform your life in small, easy to accomplish steps. Based in research, you'll understand why these behaviors are important, and you'll strategize how to prioritize them daily to establish new habits. Once they are part of your repertoire, they will become effortless, occurring without much mental effort. Each day we'll add a new step to our practice, but don't worry, I promise these steps won't add more than a few minutes to your day. At the end of the week, you'll have seven strategies to use every day, moving your life more in line with your values so you can experience greater joy. Before we jump in to step 1, I'd like to introduce you to myself and the philosophy of Effortlessly Intentional. I'm Kim. At home, I'm a mom of three and a wife who loves to cook healthy foods and develop new recipes, spend time connecting with friends and nature, read, do all sorts of crafty and creative things, and practice yoga. By day, I'm a behavioral health expert with a Ph.D. in psychology who is fascinated by how we humans tick: the interplay of our brain, body, and emotions. I created Effortlessly Intentional to marry two of my most passionate interests: values-driven intentional living, and the science of behavior. Page 1

3 At Effortlessly Intentional, I help people explore values in all different domains of life, then set specific, attainable, values-driven goals while problem solving the barriers to goal attainment. Once new behavioral habits are established, goals can be met and maintaining the goal becomes effortless! I'm also not some totally zenned out guru living a perfectly monastic life... I'm a real flesh and blood working mom trying to carve out serenity amidst what sometimes seems as swirling chaos. I get it and I'm right there in it with you. Page 2

4 While this e-book deals with finding joy, you'll find inspiration and motivation in lots of life areas over on my blog, webpage, and facebook community. I invite you now to take a moment and join our closed facebook community page a great, judgement free place to ask questions, get support, share your inspiration, and connect. I'm often posting challenges that you'll want to be involved in and will help push you towards your goals, and our members share all kinds of helpful tips and practical advice. Effortlessly Intentional is all about helping people through motivation, inspiration, community support, collaboration, and coaching to move lives in a direction congruent with their ideals. Lots of us are great at setting goals: I want to lose weight, I want to save for a dream vacation, I want to be a calmer person, I want to feel more joy. But translating these ideals into behavior can become tricky. Further, if we are setting goals because somebody else tells us they are important goals but they are not goals that really resonate with us, we are doomed to fail before we begin. Sign up and join us, then get ready to start living a more joyful and joy-filled life! Click here to reach the facebook group. Page 3

5 Day 1: Practicing Gratitude Our focus today is on gratitude. "Gratitude" always makes me think about Thanksgiving and cut out, construction paper turkeys my kids made in school, with something they are grateful for written on each feather. What a great practice it is to reflect on gratitude. Rather than save this for late November each year, what would it be like to make gratitude an intentional part of your life every single day? Research tells us that our brain has a natural negative bias. What that means is we pay more attention to, and remember, the negative in our world things that went wrong, things that are broken or not as they should be, things that are unexpected, and things that are upsetting or frightening. And this totally makes sense. For our species to survive, we developed a strong internal system of safe keeping. The core of this system is a very primitive brain structure of the midbrain called the amygdala. The amygdala processes fear and stress and is the seat of our "fight or flight" response. When the amygdala "flips on" and identifies a stressor in the world, our body responds in a way to keep us safe. In order for our brain to do a good job of identifying potential fear triggers, our brains have evolved to be very, very good at noticing things that are different, unusual, wrong, broken, or otherwise not as expected. This is referred to as negative bias. We remember things that went wrong and times we are not treated with kindness much more easily than we remember things that went well or we are treated kindly. And we are hard-wired to do it. The good news is, we don't have to accept our brain's negative bias as fact, and we can work hard to change our frame of reference. Research shows us that the act of thinking about and seeking things to be grateful for leads to more happiness and joy. I find this fascinating: It's not ha ving things to be grateful for or finding things to be grateful for that leads to happiness--it's seeking. Changing our attitude and giving our brain the job of finding things to be grateful for really does make an impact on our outlook and our experience of the world. Page 4

6 Your new practice for today is to find and journal 3 gratitudes. Try to reflect on this throughout the day, mentally noting things to be grateful for. They might be big things, but more often than not they will be lots of little things. Pay attention and start practicing a shift from negative bias to positive expectation and see what happens to your happiness level. Once you've written them down, hop on our facebook group and share your gratitudes with our community! In addition to finding more joy in your own life, you may also inspire someone else! Today's Gratitudes: Page 5

7 Day 2: Setting Intentions This concludes are sneak peek, but don't go yet! We welcome you to join our facebook community. Post your results on one of our Gratitude Challenge threads! Want 6 More Days of Joy? Our beautiful e-book is waiting for you with six more days and strategies for joy. With inspiring photos and backed by the science of stress reduction and behavior change, you'll have a week to try new strategies, journal your results, and ultimately feel a weight off of your soul. Won't you please join us? Yes! Let's Get Started! Page 6