Thank you for joining us for episode 552 of Live Happy Now.

2026 is here, and this week's guest is going to tell us how to live this year like we mean it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm welcoming back Jodie Wellman, author of You Only Die Once,

How to Make It to the End with No Regret.

As an expert on how to stop squandering your life and live it to its fullest, Jody's here to talk about

how we can enter this year with a new mindset that will help us rediscover what we love, who we are,

and how we live. Let's have a listen. Jody, thank you for coming back on the show with me. Oh, I'm really excited to be back. Thank you. You are the perfect person to kick off the new year. And I know, as we enter this year, a lot of people might think it's weird for us to talk about death instead of a new beginning. Because historically, it's like, people, oh, what I'm going to do this year? And dying is not what we want them to do. But why is it important for us to remember that we are all going to die at some point? Oh, first of all you got me all excited. Here we are, New Year, 52 Mondays, like to really jazz up our lives. Here's the thing. Our lives don't really have a whole heck of a lot of meaning unless we know that there's

an expiration date, right?

We get everything done through work or our task because we know there's a deadline.

Life is the ultimate deadline.

Of course, the word deadline couldn't be a clearer dead line.

And we need that in order to put in perspective that this life is precious and worth doing

something juicy with if we are so inspired. And this is, I think, our conversation is to get

inspired because there's an end, not this year. I mean, that's odds are slim. But it's coming.

So let's make this year when it counts. Yes, and I love that because,

you know, we've just wrapped up quite a year. I heard one person described 2025 as being

awake during surgery and I don't think they're wrong. But that has left a lot of people just

kind of feeling numb and dead and hopeless in inside, but you wrote this fantastic blog post

addressing this very topic, which is why we're talking. We wanted to dig into that.

So tell me, first of all, what are some signs that we might be getting a little bit dead

on the inside? Oh, dead on the inside. Well, I look at it in two different categories, right?

So one is we can be conscious to it or unconscious to it. And when we're conscious to it, that's when maybe we're just a tad more self-aware or we're a little bit like, ah, you know, life isn't what it used to be. I want to pick it up again and do a little bit more. And that's our choice is to decide, are we going to make this our time? It's to stop delaying our life, postponing our existence, all the things that we normally do because that's what we do really well, because we're human. So there's the conscious, wow, I really want to spruce things up around here. And then there's the unconscious stuff, which can be more insidious. And this is where I think it's actually more exciting, is the stuff where when,

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