Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I don't know about you, but life hasn't always

gone the way that I predicted it would. And because of that, I needed to adjust to life and its changes.

Well, in the day's episode, we're going to look at how to adjust in ways that work for us,

versus often what we do is adjust in ways that don't work well for us. And I want to start with a story about

myself. When I was a kid, I grew up in Iowa, and my family did pretty well for Iowa standards. I mean we weren't wealthy remotely, but my dad was able to take off about a month every year for vacations.

And we did have a decent home and we lived pretty well I would say. He had the same job that

entire time growing up which he began working at while I was in college and he stayed into

it all the way until I was 14 years old. Well in the summer when I was 14 he had a

meeting all the way in Omaha with his home office and I went with them. My father and I had a

really good relationship. We were close, we did a lot of things together,

and we just enjoyed each other's company. Well, when he came back from the office, I could

tell something was wrong, and he told me he'd lost his job. I could tell it

really affected him in a negative way. But at this point I didn't realize how big an impact

it was going to have on him, which I discovered later.

It started pretty quickly.

My happy, fun-loving father became someone who was depressed.

He never really drank much prior to this, but he started drinking more.

And I would say it took him at least eight years to come out of it.

Eight years of trying to figure out what he wanted to do, what his purpose in life was now, because right

now for the next eight years he had kind of given up. And it was both sad and frightening

for me to see, because not only did I feel like I lost my father, I felt

like I lost a dear friend.

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