I'm Jodie Moore from Bold New Mom and you are listening to Nape Clips episode number 25.

Hello podcast listeners, friends, family. Hello to my mom in Nairobi Kenya who I know listens to this.

Mom, I have to tell you something and everyone else too. All of her my two and a half year old is just at such a sweet age and he's talking a lot but he doesn't pronounce things quite right which is so cute I think.

And his grandma is trying to teach him to say that Papa and Mimi are in Nairobi so she'll ask him where are Papa and Mimi and she's taught him the word Nairobi over and over again but he still says Papa and Mimi are in Obi-Wan Kenobi which I think is pretty close.

So anyway it's pretty cute mom will have to record her for you and hi dad too. Tell dad I said hi.

Okay thanks for indulging me there for a moment. Let's get into the podcast. This is number 25. We are talking about happiness today and as always thank you for listening.

So the last couple of months I took a little bit of a break from what I normally do in my business so I just kind of scaled things down a little bit because I had a baby and wanted to recover a little and spend time with her.

And so during that time I did a lot of reading and a lot of studying and one of the subjects I really poured myself into was happiness.

I want to understand it better I want to help all of you and myself experience even more of it in life.

And one of the things that I've been thinking about and that I wanted to share with you today is this idea of what is even what is happiness right what are the most happy people look like or feel like on a regular basis.

What's a normal amount of time that we should feel good because I think all of us know that we're meant to experience negative emotion we're meant to experience pain and hurt and sadness and frustration.

And I don't pretend that that's not an important part of life in my client stone as well they recognize that so how do we know if we're quote unquote happy or if we've reached our maximum amount of happiness what's our happiness potential right knowing that those negative emotions are part of the human experience.

The experiencing those negative things actually makes the good times better also right we need opposition and all things we need to experience the opposite to appreciate the positive and we know that they're part of our growth so how do I know maybe I'm as happy as I'm ever going to be what is happy enough.

I think that most of us are also aware that some of it is hereditary right some of it comes in our wiring in our DNA and there's all kinds of studies on this available but I will say that based on what I've studied anywhere from a third to one half of our level of happiness is based on our genetic wiring in our DNA and therefore outside of our control.

But a half to two thirds is still quite a bit that we can influence right and that that is also based on things that happen to us as we're growing up in our our belief systems and things that were taught and and all of those things but any of those as adults we have control over and can choose whether we want to change them or not so.

Here's what I think the happiest most positive people that I know in my experience and from what I've studied have happy thoughts or happy peaceful joyful what we would call positive emotions to thirds of the time.

Okay now those are the happiest people that we've found so that means one third of the time they're uncomfortable or unhappy or experiencing something that doesn't feel good.

Now the ones who say that they experience it more than two thirds of the time in my experience are either lying or more often they're in denial or they're repressing negative emotion because they don't know what to do with it.

Or they have this unrealistic expectation of themselves regarding the idea that happiness is a choice right so they force themselves out of negative emotion when at times it might be more healthy and useful for them to allow it and process it and there's a lot of reasons why people do that but what I see most commonly in my clients and in you know because I work majority of my clients are women is that they don't want to be happy and happy.

Is that they don't want to be a burden to others right or they want to set a good example for their children or they want to be pleasant to be around they want to be fun to be around.

Now what's interesting to remember is that human beings are not necessarily attracted to perfection we are attracted to authenticity.

Okay that's something that I talk about a lot when I'm working with clients and when I speak but in the area of happiness if we think people want to be around happy people and we're striving for perfection then we're trying to always be happy and as human beings we're very good at reading one another so we recognize when it's not authentic when the person's just faking it and trying to stay positive and pretending and powering through.

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