Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Let's try something together today.

I want us to go back to the past and think about what was happening, say, 5, 10, 15 15 20 years ago or longer of course it depends upon our

age maybe we were just finishing high school maybe we were just getting married

maybe we were starting our first job. But what I want us to do

is think of an important time on our lives where things began to change or things were going

on and think about,

hmm, what did I at that point think was going to happen in the future?

What were my goals? What were my plans? How did I think life would turn out?

And if we need to pause this plan, How did I think life would turn out?

And if we need to pause this podcast right now, that's great. Let's go ahead and do that.

Okay. Now the question I want is to all ask is, did life turn out the way we expected it to? Did the goals that we had for our future turn out the way we hoped it would?

Is it the same or is it very different?

And in some cases of course, things turned out exactly as we expected.

We expected to have two kids and we have two kids.

We expected to finish college and get a job in this field and we did. But for many of us, probably

all of us, some of the things we planned didn't turn out the way we expected. Life had a lot of twists

and turns along the way. And even if we're young and

we're new to life, we still can go back a few years and think, what did I expect this time

of my life to be like? What did I hope for?

And did it turn out that way? There's one really good lesson that this exercise can

teach us, is that life changes, life doesn't stay the same. It's in constant flux, it's in

constant movement. Things just don't turn out the way we always planned and we have to

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