This is a really important topic to me because I spent so many years of my life being miserable, absolutely miserable. And you know, when you’re miserable, you don’t really realize how miserable you are until you move into a place of joy.

This happened for me when I was about 51 years old. At 51, I ended up hiring a life coach and my life coach helped me to unlock a bunch of different things about myself in discovering that I wasn’t happy. I was actually absolutely miserable and that I didn’t even know what joy was. Sometimes you hear these words, joy. I’ve got joy. I’ve got, I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart. I got the joy, joy, joy, joy. That’s a song we used to sing when I was young. Um, I don’t remember if it was going to church or not. ’Cause I hardly ever went to church. Our family just wasn’t into church, but I do remember that song and I remember singing it and it was always a fun song to sing, but did I really know what that meant? I got the joy in my heart. I don’t think I had any clue what that really meant.

And do you? If you don’t know what it means, please go back and listen to the previous episode with Anne Scottlin, because she talks about joy. Talks about living a joyful life and moving into that place of joy. So go back and listen to her episode. She’s going to talk to you about joy.

But what I wanted to talk about is my journey of discovering joy and what that means for me. So joy to me is a feeling that when something happens in your life, you can feel it resonating inside of your body. Something that really makes you like squeal. There’s a saying, Oh, my God. You squealed with joy. That’s because it’s so filled with excitement that, it brings a tremendous amount of joy to you. And that for me is what joy is all about.

And I really couldn’t experience joy until I learned to love myself.

I couldn’t really experience joy until I learned to love myself. And this is one thing that my life coach helped me with. And I talk about my life coach a lot. Why? Because she literally opened my mind, my heart, my eyes, my soul. She opened everything for me to see what was truly there for me. To see who I really am. What I’m all about.

You know, before I met her, I literally thought I had no value, zero value on this planet. I was 51 years old when I met her. I lived 51 years thinking I didn’t have any value. Now I was just living my life on a daily basis. You’re going here and there and doing this and that. I did some fun things and did some exciting things, but I never really felt like I had an amount of value. And what’s crazy about that is my husband, who I’ve been with for 32 years, he’s always telling me how amazing I am, how incredible I am, what a wonderful person I am, but I didn’t believe him.

And I think this is where the distinction comes in for loving yourself and loving others. Because until I loved myself, I wasn’t able to hear what my husband was saying about me. And all of this started, all of this started, this pain and misery started when I was a child.

At five years old, I ran away, I was gone for an entire week. I only went to the neighbor’s house, but for all intents and purposes, at five years old, my plan was to be gone forever. I never wanted to go back, but after a week my mom brought me back home. She knew where I was and she brought me back home. But what happened was while I was gone for that one week, something got locked in my mind that my family doesn’t love me, they don’t want me around. I have no value. And I carried that around with me for decades to come, 46 more years to come, until I was 51 years old.