Hello and welcome to the Mindful Kind podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Cable, author of the

Mindfulkind book, Mindfulness Teacher and blogger at Rachelcable.com. Each week this podcast will bring

meaningful tips, tools and strategies so you can manage stress and live more mindfully in the modern world.

Hello and welcome to episode 285 of the Mindful Kind podcast. Well, it is definitely winter

in my little part of the world. There's snow on the mountains. I work at my desk with a heat pack on my lap, I've got chill

planes on a few toes and it's been raining quite a bit lately.

It's also my birthday in a couple of days, the day before the winter solstice, which means

it's one of the shortest days of the year, but that's okay because I'm planning to sleep in,

read a book, cut all the dogs, maybe go out

for lunch with my partner deck and enjoy some tasty food, nice, simple activities that

help me feel happy and content, which actually brings me to the topic of this podcast episode.

I'll be talking about enjoyable activities and some interesting

studies on this topic, plus some key things you need to know about how to engage in enjoyable

activities. I think it's all really interesting and I can't wait to share it with you. But first,

I thought I'd explain what inspired me to create this particular episode.

You see, I've been reading a great book, which I highly recommend, by the way, called Be Who You Want by Christian Jarrett.

In the book, you'll learn about different personality traits, and one of those traits is agreeableness.

Basically, someone who has a high level of agreeableness is generally warm,

friendly, optimistic, trusting and tends to get along well with others. Being too agreeable and

pleasing others might mean you compromise your own happiness sometimes, but generally,

higher levels of agreeableness have been associated

with higher levels of positive feelings, like happiness. But here's the really interesting part.

...