What is Killing Your Joy?

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Check out this fantastic article by author and life coach, Jess Kaskov! 

Joy is a currency to pay yourself – mind, body, and soul.

So, it is interesting that we focus so much on financial salary we earn from our jobs instead of the salary we pay ourselves. This reflection helped birth a concept I call: Soul Salary.  It represents the value your soul receives when you invest your time and energy in alignment with your joy and fulfillment.

To understand your joy, you need to first determine what you consider a “paycheck” in Soul Salary, aka what fills you up and feels authentically joyous to your unique self.  To identify what is killing your joy, you need to determine what you consider “bills” in Soul Salary that are draining you and keeping you from feeling joyous.

Joy is brought on by well-being, meeting your desires or being on a path to do so, playing, laughing, etc.  Joy lights you up, and it feels fun.  It is a feeling of great pleasure, happiness and delight.  So let’s start here with using joy as your map in life.

Where is your joy, you may ask?

Consider finding a joy moment from the past (go beyond weddings and births).  Visualize that moment and sit with it for a few minutes, reminiscing and transporting yourself into that feeling of bliss.

• What did you see? What did you hear? Taste? Smell? Feel?

• What about that moment made it joyous?

These are some of the joy “paychecks” your soul desires.  To talk about what is keeping us from feeling more joyous, we need to address joy killers which are the expectations of others and our own inauthentic expectations of ourselves.

To identify a few joy killers, write 3 expectations you have of yourself and 3 expectations others have of you.

• Now read the list and cross out the ones that do not feel authentic to you.

• You will know if it is not authentic because if you can say “I want to” or “I desire to” do this expectation and believe it, then it is aligned with you.

The expectations you crossed out are some of your current joy killers and “bills” to your soul.

To increase joy in your life you need to increase your Soul Salary and as you know, you can increase a take-home salary by increasing your paychecks (like the joy moment you reflected on) or decreasing your bills (like the joy killing expectations you crossed out).

From your reflections so far, ideate and commit to ONE item you can do this week to add more joy or remove some joy killers.

When you prioritize a high Soul Salary and a joyous life, you have a profound impact on yourself and in turn change the world around you. “The creation of a thousand forests lies in one acorn” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a world lacking joy, please be the acorn of joyous change.

Warmly,

Jess Kaskov

To discover your current Soul Salary – take this quick, free quiz!

 

Jess Kaskov is an author, speaker, life coach, and thought leader who inspires the world to profound joy and fulfillment most recently through her book: Soul Salary – 4 profoundly impactful steps to aligning your time and energy with what feels joyous and fulfilling. She left her successful, fifteen-year engineering career at a Fortune 500 company to start her own business (Joyfulness with Jess), trading her hard hats for headbands. Today, she does what she feels called to do—motivating and supporting others. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago with her encouraging husband, two active sons, and two lazy cats.

The post What is Killing Your Joy? appeared first on The Founding Moms.