Thank you for joining us for episode 514 of Live Happy Now.

We all have birthdays, but are we making the most of them?

We're about to find out.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by Tamar Hurwitz Fleming, author of How to Have a Happy Birthday,

Create Meaning, Fulfillment, and Joy on your special

day. Tamar gives us a new spin on how we approach birthdays, and today she's here to explain

how it's a yearly chance to create our own personal holiday for lasting growth and change.

Let's have a listen. Tomar, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.

Thanks, Paula. It's a pleasure to be here

this is such a great idea this book i was looking at it again last night and i'm like it's

one of these things that you're saying why didn't someone think of this sooner i mean this whole

idea of how to celebrate your birthday how to turn it into a personal improvement

mission is just incredible. So you call yourself a birthday officiado. Tell me what made you a

birthday aficionado and then how that led to this idea. Well, I call myself a birthday

aficionado because I've been paying very close attention to the energy that builds as our birthday comes every year and crests and then sort of fades away.

And I've been paying attention for decades.

And I've been paying attention to it not just for myself, but how the birthday energy impacts other people.

And so by paying close attention and really understanding that we all have different

relationships with our birthdays, I realize that, you know, there's a lot here to unpack, and there's a lot

here to offer in terms of how to help people have happier birthdays. So what made you start paying

attention to that in the first place? Well, the worst birthday of my life was when I

turned 18. It was my freshman year of college. My birthday's in January. So it was just a few

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