The Happiness Doctor with Dr. Sophia Godkin

Finding true happiness — the genuine, juicy, and authentic kind — is within your reach at this very moment. We all have the capabilities, tools, and everything we need to create happiness for ourselves, regardless of what’s going on around us.

In this episode, The Happiness Doctor, Dr Sophie Godkin, joins Matt O’Neill to talk about creating happiness from the inside out. They talk about finding joy within ourselves and even unpack some tools to jump start our journey to becoming genuinely happy.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

• Take time to know yourself.
• Heal from places where you hold a lot of emotions.
• Orient your mind to find things to be grateful for.
• Practice mindful meditation.
• Befriend your inner critic.
• Be compassionate with yourself.

[6:57] Reacquaint With Your Soul:

The first and hardest step to getting in touch with your soul is to heal from places where you hold a lot of emotions. Your wounds, pains, and hurts should not be buried; instead, acknowledge, process, and learn from them.

[14:28] Gratitude - Your Biggest Tool:

Gratitude can be your biggest tool for happiness. Learn to be joyful despite life’s stress. The mind has a natural affinity to focus on the negative. It is drawn towards everything that’s not going right in our lives.

[17:53] Do Mindful Meditation:

Maintaining a Gratitude Journal also helps keep the mind’s negativity bias away. It retrains our mind to start counting things to celebrate. Some prompt to get you started is to write down what went right that day or take note of opportunities you have now that you didn’t have before.

[24:47] Deal With Your Inner Critic:

Perfection gets in the way of your happiness. It prevents you from living authentically. The voice that tells you to be perfect is the voice of your inner critic. The only way to shut it out is to start working on your thoughts and feelings.

Notable quotes:

[04:50] “Who you truly are is, you know, infinitely capable. Who you truly are has the skill set that you need to achieve. You have the love to succeed.” [05:02]

[16:47] “It's really up to us to take it upon ourselves to orient our mind towards the kinds of things that we do want to focus on -- the kinds of things that we want to pay attention to in life. And gratitude is just such a simple, easy process that allows us to do that.” [17:02]

[27:50] "When we realize that every single thought, every single feeling is actually here to help us, right? We can befriend it. [27:55]

Resources Mentioned:

• The 5-Minute Gratitude Journal: Give Thanks, Practice Positivity, Find Joy by Sophia Godkin
• Mark Nepo
• TheHappinessDoctor.com
• Sophia’s LinkedIn and Twitter
• Download the Good Mood Toolkit here!
• THE GOOD MOOD SHOW Podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, Anchor, and more…

About the Guest:

Dr Sophia Godkin is an internationally recognized expert on happiness. Better known as “The Happiness Doctor,” Sophia’s mission is to use holistic education and coaching to help people become healthier, happier adults.