Harnessing Happiness with Sarah J Naylor

Welcome to the Harnessing Happiness Podcast.

Upbeat vibes generated and transferred to you.

And well, hello and welcome to Harnessing Happiness

with myself, Sarah J Naylor.

Hello, hello, hello to you all across the

globe and thank you so much for stopping

by and listening.

Please do subscribe to make sure you never

miss a notification to let you know when

my next episode has dropped.

Anyway, let's get on with it because today

I really want to talk about the time

when you get to a crossroads in life.

I don't know, maybe it's something to do

with the fact that I'm now 60 and

there's a lot of people I'm talking to

of a similar sort of age and demographic.

Although that said, I do know and socialise

with people of all age groups, but it's

been really interesting.

And I think particularly with all that's happening

in the world right now in relation to

AI and people also facing redundancy or people

returning to work after children or taking early

retirement, there are a lot of conversations.

In fact, there appear to be an increased

level of communication, conversations that I'm having with

people right now about and around the subject

of, what do we do?

Where do we go?

What do I need to do?

I don't know, what am I doing?

From people, as I've said, returning to, ladies

returning to work, particularly ladies who've been off

predominantly focusing their working life around their children.

I mean, I didn't, I always went straight

back to work, but there have been a

lot of ladies that do, a lot of

women who have stayed off and then there

are people facing early retirement or redundancy.

And it changes things because we have become

brainwashed into that pattern of going to work,

work hard, get enough money, you can buy

this.

And it's all conditioning.

It's all narrative.

It's all been pumped into us.

I mean, there's so much complexity to this

that I can't even really start to dig

into it in a 10 minute soundbite.

So suffice to suggest, no, suffice to say,

that's the phrase I was looking for.

Good grief, you can tell I'm not being

very well programmed.

And that's because I fight against the norm.

I think my brain goes all over the

place.

And do you know, for many, many years,

all of my life, I've sort of kind

of questioned it because I can't keep on

one subject and I won't adhere to anybody's

algorithms or any ways of working.

I do it my way.

And I don't mean that in a sort

of a demonstrative way.

I am my own person.

And I know myself, even if I spent

many years having been manipulated, if you like,

because I didn't realise what was going on

in my life.

But I have always had the strength of

my own conviction, even if it's not been

necessarily serving me.

I don't know, you know, because everything happens

for a reason.

We learn from everything.

However, what I do know is trusting your

instinct and your gut instinct is vitally important.

And I also know that we have been

consistently on a drip, drip, drip effect.

And I say, the more I learned about

narcissism three years ago, the more I recognised

what's happening globally.

So all the stuff that went before was

a lesson for me to understand and to

learn that what's happening globally through a minute

amount of power, managing and manipulating everybody on

the planet.

It's fascinating stuff.

Once you actually open your mind to it

and you look beyond what this sort of

narrow, narrow funnel that we look between, there

is so much more out there.

And in fact, there is so much more

in the unseen than there is in the

seen, because it's about what we perceive, what

we perceive, we believe and what belief systems

we have in place and how that's been

conditioned through our childhood, our upbringing and so

on and so forth.

Yeah.

Life is an illusion of our own creation.

So how we want it to be is

what we see and what we generate because

of what we, our experiences teach us about

our responses.

So it always does come back to the

And unfortunately, with all of the technological advancements

that have just, it's been insane.

And this is why I've pulled myself away

back from it.

And I think this is why there are

so many people questioning what's going on because

of the chaos that is going on, which

is sent to divide, to conquer, to rule.

But let's take a step back, because this

is the important thing.

If you are of that mindset, are you

questioning things?

Are you wondering what to do next?

Are you going, oh, my gosh, I'm being

made redundant after all these years of the

same employer?

Are you questioning?

All right, well, I need to go back

to work, but I've been off work with

the kids for the last five, 10 years.

I don't know what I do.

Or you are being made redundant, early retirement.

As I've said, what is it?

Whatever it is.

And you're going, I don't know really what

to do.

Where am I going?

Because everything is changing.

Everything is changing so fast.

We have to keep pivoting.

And it's been full on really for the

last six years since we had COVID.

And for me, I've had 21 years of

change since I got divorced in 20, not

20, 2005.

I've been with my ex-husband for 20

years.

So I've embraced change consistently.

And even I've found it really, really giddying,

particularly in the last three years when I

had to see my business go into, well,

I had to make the difficult decision to

put my business, my recruitment business into voluntary

liquidation because it didn't simply cope with Brexit

in the UK, followed by COVID, followed by

Liz Truss doing what she did to the

economy here.

But when change happens, it's because it no

longer serves you.

And trying to fight to hang on to

it doesn't serve you either.

So that then brings you back to, well,

where am I?

Because obviously you've got to shed all of

this stuff, all this pattern of behaviour, all

of this consistency that you have been programmed

into.

Because actually, the unprogramming is the exciting thing.

There is so much more to us than

what we have been perceived or have been

controlled and conditioned to believe is so.

And when you can let go of that

and trust your instinct, because we've had so

much of it ironed out of us.

I've stopped wearing, for those of you watching

on video, I'd rarely wear my Garmin watch

now because I don't want to be feeding

into the data centres because this is what

is going on.

All of this tech, it's tracking us, it's

following us.

And I think there's such things now as

plugging you in.

And I don't want to be a computer.

Thank you very much.

And I was always very resistant to AI.

I mean, I do use it, but I've

realised now that I've started to rely on

it.

And that's the brainwashing going on.

I digress.

It's about using your mind.

It's hold on to that.

Don't rely upon AI to give you all

the answers.

You have the answers within.

And that's where I come in when I

work as a coach, because I can help

you find those answers.

Now, this isn't a sales pitch, but that

is what a good coach will do.

We have all the answers within.

And I think back, in fact, I was

doing that very reflecting this morning about, right,

you know, we use our phones, don't we,

all the time for sort of Google Maps

or we're in the car and you've got

the Google, whatever it is in the car,

sat nav to tell you where you want

to go.

And I was thinking, I really must get

an up to date atlas, not an atlas,

you know, a roadmap book.

That's not the right word.

You know what I mean?

And I thought, well, that's interesting, isn't it?

Because actually, we didn't used to have to

road signs or maps or anything like that,

because we used to be able to navigate

our way around the country and we used

to migrate.

We were migratory, you know, people used to

walk and travel and we've been pitted against

each other so much so that there are

all these boundaries and rules and regulations.

And I don't know about anywhere else in

the world, but sometimes you can go out

in the UK and there are so much,

there is so much signage.

You can't read the signs because there are

so many signs.

Mustn't do this.

Don't go here.

Oh my gosh.

What we've been is programmed not to trust

ourselves, not to trust everything.

So it's about regaining that.

So coming back to you are at this

crossroads, believe in yourself, trust in yourself.

Think about what you enjoyed doing as a

child before you became programmed by everything that's

going on, the narrative and societal pressures around

you.

What do you enjoy doing?

I'm going back to sort of hands on

stuff.

I mean, I've always loved making things, but

I've sort of taken a step back and

I've spent far too much time in front

of a computer currently refurbishing handbags and I'm

really enjoying it.

Okay.

It's not going to make me a huge

amount of money or a millionaires, but you

know, money we have been told is what

makes us successful.

It's not.

Happiness and contentment and rediscovering and being true

to yourself away from all this narrative and

all this pressure.

That's where happiness is found.

I'll leave you with one thing for now.

Take time, some time out to stop to

think and to tap into what lights you

up, what fires you up, what ignites that

spark within you.

Take time to work on that and then

just really follow your flow.

And until next time, this is me, Sarah

Naylor, Harnessing Happiness.

Have a wonderful time and enjoy being yourself.

Thanks for listening to the Harnessing Happiness podcast

with Sarah J Naylor.

If you took value from the content, please

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And to find out more about Sarah's ape

mindset, visit sarahjnaylor.com.

That's sarahjnaylor.com.