How to Create Positive Emotions | Resilient by Design

In this episode, we dive into practical tools to access positive emotions and build emotional resilience—your ability to adapt to adversity and stay aligned with the life you want to create. 

Learn how emotions serve as a compass, guiding you toward meaningful actions, and discover actionable strategies to manage negative emotions, elicit positive ones, and break the cycles of self-sabotage.

Drawing from research on the brain's approach and avoidance systems, we unpack how your emotional responses shape your behaviors and beliefs. 

This episode is packed with insights to help you develop a positive emotional toolkit that empowers you to navigate challenges, regulate stress, and move toward thriving.

Key Takeaways:

• Emotions Are a Compass: Emotions guide us toward what matters most in life. Instead of resisting them, use them to identify areas needing action or reflection.
• Dual Role of the Brain: The right hemisphere activates avoidance (fear and fight-or-flight), while the left hemisphere focuses on approach (reward and curiosity). Recognizing these systems helps us navigate emotions more effectively.
• Self-Sabotage Explained: Your brain aligns behaviors with your core beliefs. Limiting beliefs often lead to self-sabotage because they feel "safe" and familiar.
• Emotional Toolkit: Build resilience by incorporating daily practices like humor, savoring positive memories, music, and acts of service.
• Positive Emotions Expand Capacity: Research shows that positive emotions enhance problem-solving, connection, and resilience (Fredrickson, 2001).

Practical Tools:

1. Humor and Laughter: Engage with content or people that make you laugh to release feel-good chemicals.
2. Savoring Memories: Recall joyful experiences and visualize them vividly to access positive emotions.
3. Create a “Happy Button”: Associate a physical touchpoint with positive emotions to activate them in stressful moments.
4. Use Music and Nature: Play uplifting songs or spend time in nature to calm your nervous system and elicit joy.
5. Acts of Kindness: Helping others not only benefits them but also boosts your own well-being.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Emotional Resilience
02:34 Why Emotions Matter in Resilience
07:21 The Dual Role of the Brain in Emotional Responses
12:48 How Self-Sabotage Aligns with Core Beliefs
17:15 Tools for Eliciting Positive Emotions
21:40 The Role of Humor, Smiling,

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

As you do this you're absolutely going to build your overall resilience Your Capacity to come back from adversity or to experience adversity and not have it drag you down into a hole for you know a week a month or however long this is a part of you getting into a place in a rhythm where you're staying on course with the life that you want to build and for most people the first thing that derails them from that is when they experience negative emotions and the story that they build from those negative emotions so getting in this space and getting good at this is really important for you to make progress towards the life that you deserve hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the permission to love podcast I'm your host Jerry Henderson and as always I'm so grateful that you've taken your time to be a part of this episode now today we're continuing our series on resilient by Design we're discussing how can we become more resilient we're looking at what resilience is and all of the factors that can help us be more resilient now today we're doing an episode that connects to the episode that we did last week on emotional resilience and today's topic is going to be specifically about emotional tools that you can use in order to develop your resilience now before we continue with today's episode I do want to take a moment and remind you if you've not yet had a chance to subscribe or to follow please take a moment to do that that would really mean a lot to me because the research shows that 50% of people who who listen to podcasts actually don't subscribe to them and what we're trying to do with this community to help people understand how they can have a healthier relationship with themselves how they can learn to thrive and how they can build the life that they want to live in a way that's happier healthier and more Sustainable Building our subscriber base is a key part of building that movement so thank you for taking a moment and hitting that subscriber follow button now let's start talking about why emotions matter in building resilience the research shows that emotions play somewhat of a dual role in US building resilience I know that emotions can often feel very overwhelming they can be scary especially if we don't have the tools to learn how to manage those emotions but I also do want to take a moment and remind you that even though emotions can feel very overwhelming they can also serve us in a very powerful way they can be guides to us to provide us information about ourselves about what's going on that can help us respond to what matters the most so if you can instead of thinking about emotions as something negative start to think about them as a compass in your life a compass that can direct our attention to the things that we need to take action on that we need to listen to that we need to be aware of that we need to reflect on I do want to take a moment and point out that yes absolutely sometimes emotions are just emotions and we need to allow ourselves to witness them without spiraling into them and giving them more meaning meaning than what's actually going on but if you have an emotion that continues to come up that is a pattern I don't want you to ignore that I want you to pay attention to it and see it as a compass in your life okay now let's dig into some of the research behind emotions and how they're trying to help us now the research by Dr Davidson shows that our emotional responses are regulated by two primary brain systems and he names these two systems the approach system and the avoidance system system now these approach and avoidance emotions actually live in two separate parts of our brain now the right side of the brain is associated with that fear system and when we experience certain events it gets activated and it's going to trigger the amygdala the limic system it's going to activate that fight ORF flight system and start dumping adrenaline into our system all of that is getting us ready to deal with an acute stress now on the other hand the left hemisphere or the left part of our brain is associated with our reward system which Dr Davidson calls the approach system things that we want to approach because we know there's some type of reward we have curiosity or we want to solve the problem Etc now when that part of our brain gets activated it starts to dump out dopamine and it begins to make an association towards that behavior towards that feeling as something that's good that we want to approach because we want the reward of dopamine this is how addictions get develop this is how Behavior gets wired into us when we see that that behavior or that belief or that response is rewarding to us because of the release of dopamine which then makes us want to approach that again over and over now the challenging part about this is that we know that dopamine doesn't just get released when we experience things that are good for us it gets released when we want to build a reward Association around that behavior or that belief and so if you're getting a reward around a limiting belief or a negative belief and it's reinforcing the way that you see yourself and that behavior that belief is going to actually get wired into your system through the release of dopamine and you're actually going to be carrying belief systems that aren't good for you are going to be approaching situations they going to reinforce your belief system because that's going to release those chemicals give you a reward and what's the reward a lot of times the reward is that it's aligning you with your core belief about how you view yourself and so why do we self-sabotage because we often will think that we're not worthy of whatever it is that we're pursuing or is showing up in our lives so we sabotage it now while it doesn't feel good to us afterwards to realize that we sabotaged something however in the moment our brain is trying to align our Behavior our present our future all of it with what we actually believe about ourselves how we actually see ourselves and so self-sabotaging is activating your reward system by aligning you with what you believe about yourself and when you do that it subconsciously feels good to you because it's getting you back to a place that feels more safe and more aligned with your identity now a few years ago I was working with a client who was dealing with this exact issue they kept sabotaging themselves wondering why they were doing it and they couldn't get out of the loop and they found themselves drawn to things were actually sabotaging their career and their relationships and as we begin to dig into it we got to the source of why that sabotaging behavior was serving them which then began to help them understand why they were drawn to it why they kept approaching those situations that caused them to derail from the path that they wanted for themselves and then we developed a plan for them to be able to look at the part of them that was sabotaging themselves with love with compassion understanding that they had a reward system built in their brain that was aligning them with what they believed about themselves and then that gave us the freedom to start developing a new identity a more true identity about who they believe that they are and so therefore they wouldn't sabotage themselves as they were approaching the things that were aligned with the person that they wanted to become because they begin to get comfortable with seeing themselves in that that future and they begin to get comfortable believing that they were worthy of that future and so the actions that were required to get them to that future begin to feel more and more normal to them because they felt like it was a part of their identity and who they believe that they are I just want to take a moment and talk personally to you if you're struggling to have a healthy relationship with yourself if you're self-sabotaging and you don't believe that you're worthy of the life that you actually want if you find yourself in a repeated pattern of setting goals and a vision for your life and then sabotaging yourself out of it and derailing yourself if you're tired of dealing with that inner critic or you're tired of having the feeling that there's something wrong with you that you're uniquely broken in the problem that needs to be fixed and you're ready to move from all of that to learning how to have a healthy relationship with yourself how to have a healthy relationship with other people how to see yourself as worthy of the things that you want and then begin to build the identity within yourself of the person who's worthy of that to begin to unlock all of that and you're ready to go on a path of self-expansion to discover what you're capable of to discover what a life looks like where you're happy healthy and you're thriving so if that's you I want to encourage you to go to my website at Jerry henderson. org or simply see the show notes in this episode and set up a free oneon-one 60 Minute strategy call and in that call we're going to basically be doing a free coaching call to see if working together is the right fit and if it is then we'll determine a path forward to get you to the place that you want to be the research shows that people who work with coaches experience a 70 to 80% Improvement to reaching the outcomes that they want and then sustaining those outcomes so what is coaching even all about coaching is about having a partner in thinking to help you look at things differently who can help you build a plan who can help provide some accountability to help you stay on the path that you want to be on so if you're ready to make change and engage in self-expansion and create the life that you want to live check out the show notes in this episode or go to my website and set up that free strategy call I'm looking forward to connecting with you so let's take a moment and talk about what are the functions of emotions emotions are there to help us prioritize and organize our behavioral responses in a way that allows us to adapt to what we're experiencing so let's real quick talk about the components of an emotion the first thing that happens always the first thing that happens right we have an experience we can refer to this experience as a stimulus or an event that stimulus then evokes an emotion within us now I want to point out that this stimulus can simply be a thought doesn't have to be something external from us and often for many of us it is the internal stimulus or event that happens that triggers this Cascade so I want you to think about it that way because it doesn't just have to be that somebody cuts you off in traffic or somebody's rude to you yes those are stimuli those are events and they're going to evoke emotions but we also inside here constantly having events constantly producing stimuli that are causing emotions right so for example if you're thinking about your past with regret or you're ruminating that is an event an experience that you're having if you're thinking about your future and you're catastrophizing it that is a stimuli you're beginning to get fearful about your future because of the event of you thinking about it thoughts are very power powerful thing and they activate a whole network of experiences inside of us when we have them and a part of getting control of what we're experiencing internally and all of those emotions is understanding how connected they are to the thoughts you know one of the things that I often ask people when I'm coaching them and they're experiencing something negative is to ask themselves about the thought they had before that emotion kicked in or before the whole story started to cascap of what a loser they are a failure they are and they'll never be successful and they'll never be able to overcome the challenges I ask them I challenge them what was the thought that triggered it what did they think just before that and then sometimes I'll ask them to get proactive on this and to keep a thought journal to really get aware of the thoughts that they're thinking and when they get triggered and they find themselves spiraling to do the work to move back towards what was the thought then write it down because eventually they're going to see a pattern that this thought keeps coming up and then it drives me down this rabbit hole that I don't want to be in so emotional awareness is also about thought awareness now we're going to do an episode later on cognitive coping strategies and cognitive awareness and strategies that we can do mentally to help us cope but for right now I just want you to have that Association and realize that for the most part emotions are not happening in isolation they're not happening in a vacuum they're being driven by stimulus events experiences and if we can identify those it'll help us understand why we're experiencing it give meaning to that emotion and begin to look at it in a different way which can then Empower us to cope with that emotion redirect it and use some of these positive emotions to help us stay on track with where we want to be so now let's talk about what happens after we experience that emotion from the event one of the first things that happens is we have an expression this could be be a facial expression right as soon as you experience disgust you have this like look on your face or when you experience Joy your body reacts with a smile or when you experience fear for example you might gasp and so there's three types of Expressions that happen from an emotional response the first as we talked about facial the second is vocal and then the third is a change and posture so if you start to feel some of these emotions that are secondary around shame you might start to pull back you might start to play small okay because you're experiencing things that are uncomfortable and so you're trying to hide yourself another thing that happens is that physical response our physiology kicks in our brain starts to signal to the rest of our body to release chemicals and then our body starts to respond maybe our voice gets shaky our hands get shaky our heart rate increases uh whatever's going on inside of us our body's responding to those emotions now a lot of times we can get caught in a loop of this we have an experience some event that happens we feel an emotion and then that emotion gets this trigger uh to our brain to release these chemicals we start to have these bodily experiences then our brain notices that these things are happening which causes us to feel more emotions we begin to experience more fear and anxiety about having the fear and anxiety and that's when we start to get overwhelmed so there's a lot of research about if we can disrupt some of that initial reaction with breathing exercises with grounding techniques with eliciting positive emotions like gratitude it can help us disrupt that cycle and keep us from getting drugged down into that sense of feeling overwhelmed now another thing that's happening when we experience those emotions is we're having a cognitive appraisal of what's going on we're making meaning we're building stories and all of that is causing it to either get better or to get worse we're either building resilience through the way that we frame it what we believe about it or we're allowing ourselves to spiral one of the things that's key in understanding this is that a lot of your core beliefs and your past experiences are what are causing you to frame that experience that you're having emotionally the way that you're framing it so for example if you're in your annual review with your boss and uh they bring up one item that you need to work on they've said like 10 things that were really good about you but they brought up that one thing uh that you could work on and you feel the emotion all of a sudden of maybe shame or you start to feel some anxiety around that am I going to get fired or whatever the story starts to develop your cognitive appraisal how you start to interpret the emotion that you're feeling from what the person said can either lead you down a path that spirals catastrophizes or can bring you up out of it to say hey I heard 10 good things and one negative thing and you're cognitive appraise of what just happened the event of the feedback then the emotion that you felt and then how you begin to frame that comes from those core beliefs comes from the messages that you carry about yourself and so if you have a sense that you're not enough your appraisal of that review might start to reinforce the sense that you're not enough you might start to wonder when you're getting fired and you might start to build a story that builds a lot of anxiety and a lot of unnecessary worry because your brain praise that whole situation in the light of what your core beliefs are and so that's why it's so important to deal with core beliefs and making these changes and recognizing that just because I feel the emotion of anxiety around what my boss said doesn't mean that it's true it doesn't mean that it's true about me you can get to the place where you have enough awareness where you can say to yourself oh that's just a thinking pattern that's been ingrained in me that's been developed and I'm going to work to choose a different belief about what just happened and you know what's going to happen then is you'll start to experience different emotions about what you just experienced now here's the thing about emotions we talked about earlier that they drive behaviors right they allow us to you know prioritize and categorize the behaviors that we're going to take for example do I need to get safe do I need to stand up for myself do I need to walk away do I need to celebrate do I need to lean into What's happen happening in this conversation on this date Etc so it's both good and bad and they're helping us understand what's the behavior that I then need to take so for example if you're in a situation where you're feeling threatened you feel those emotions you feel the fear your behavior is going to either be to run away or to stand up for yourself and to fight so another example is if you're on that date and you start to feel anxiety and all of a sudden you start to read the person's facial expression as they're not interested that can cause you to display Behavior it sabotages the date causes you to pull away and the whole time the person might be really enjoying themselves with you and on the other hand if they start to send you signals that they're engaged in the conversation that they have interest in you then your behavior is going to be to lean in to get you to begin to pursue or to get you to approach the person with more confidence so now let's just take a moment and talk about what are these emotional tools for and what are these emotional regulation skills for well number one it's so we can manage our stress and those negative emotions that we're experiencing that we don't want to experience now once again we're not talking about shoving them aside or pushing them down we're just talking about how do we make sure that those negative emotions aren't overwhelming us they're not hijacking our life I do want to take a moment and talk about something that we're going to talk about in future episodes which is our stress system and what we're built to handle you know our systems are built to handle acute stress what is that that's in the moment stress that's when the fight and flight kicks in or the freeze Fawn all that system kicks in for example when you experience a bear or you experience a noise in your house right all of those emotions everything starts to kick in to prepare you for survival that's the acute stress system now the other type of stress is what we call chronic stress which is what most of us live live with today and the truth is we are not built for living in chronic stress our entire systems are not wired for it and we're going to talk about that in the future but I wanted to make a note of it right now because it relates to what we're talking about on this approach versus avoidance system and when we get into avoidance it can actually trap us in a constant Loop of chronic stress but when we get into more of an approach Behavior an approach mindset we'll talk about what that means here in just a second it can actually allow our nervous system to calm down it engages parts of us that get into more of a problemsolving approach to what we're facing rather than an avoidance and we're going to get into that some more today and in later episodes but I just wanted to make that note for you to understand that while our systems yes are built for acute stress and these things like anxiety fear and anger can service in the short term were not designed biologically physically emotionally mentally to be able to sustain chronic stress and if these things stay stuck in our system like fear anxiety and anger we're going to start experiencing things like panic attacks unhealthy coping mechanisms depression all of those things will start to manifest in our life if we don't figure out how to regulate those emotions allow ourselves to have the acute responses but get ourselves out of living in chronic stress now the second thing that having emotional skills or a toolbox is going to do for us is it's going to help us build coping strategies in order to deal with those emotions but also to deal with what's in front of us it's going to give us the capacity to face things to not get shut down and not allow all those emotions to overwhelm us and then finally what it's going to do it's going to give us the ability to evoke positive emotions and put positive emotions to use for us to help us so that we can increase our overall well-being begin to change our relationship with ourselves we see ourselves and begin to change the relationships in our life and to begin to build and sustain the life that we actually want to live now let's start talking about the role of positive emotions and tools uh for developing positive emotions in our ability to develop resilience and to bring down the waterline of chronic stress in our life I want you to think about emotions once again as a compass but also as a tool and if you can see emotions as a tool it might help you disconnect from that that story that you're using toxic positivity or you're faking it until you're making it or whatever story think about it as a tool that you have a toolbox inside of you of positive emotions that you can activate for your benefit so let's dive into this because the research shows us that positive emotions they do more than just make us feel good positive emotions actually expand our capacity they expand our capacity to think to connect and to grow positive emotions are very important for us and our overall well-being and the development of our resilience because when we're experiencing positive emotions it's signaling our system our brain our bodies that things are okay that we can relax that we can enjoy things as they are that allows us to lean in so that we can feel a sense of Peace so that we can relax that can then help us build an overall sense of resilience and I want you to think about resilience as you're on a path you have an experience and that experience dips you down right and it's supposed to dip you down it's supposed to cause some challenges for you because without challenges we don't have resilience but eliciting positive emotions what it does for us is it helps us begin to climb up out of that downward path okay because if we stay in the downward path we're going to get trapped there we're going to start to experience the panic attacks the depression uh wanting to give up and a lack of resilience and derailing ourselves self-sabotaging Etc and so those positive emotions when we elicit them and connect with them they're actually helping us pull out of that response appropriate response negative event we go down we we feel some negative emotions we're struggling then tapping into those positive emotions is what helps us pull back up as a part of that recovery and developing resilience will come back up out of it stronger at a higher level than when we went into it and you see that's what resilience is the ability to go into something to connect with hope positivity to see a brighter future begin to pull back up and as a result of that whole experience we become stronger and stronger and stronger and that's why it's so important to understand how can I access those positive emotions as a tool to help me develop My overall resilience so now let's talk about some strategies to access your positive emotions they're in there you have them research shows that we're all born with these things they're common to humanity to have these emotions living inside of us so you have the capacity and ability to connect with them even if they're down there pretty deep and even if painful life events have covered them up you've got the capacity to connect with them okay I want you to tell yourself that right now take a moment and tell yourself I have the ability to connect with the Positive emotions that are inside of me even though you haven't been able to connect with them in a while you haven't felt them they feel like a distant memory you haven't lost them they're just buried underneath there and so be patient with yourself as you start to peel off the layers as a part of your journey so that you can get to some of those things and begin to see them grow Blossom and serve you as a tool tool to build the life that you want to live now the first thing you can do is engage in humor so if you're experiencing something that's tough the ability to engage in humor uh is a key part of beginning to open yourself up to experience those positive emotions so for example if you've been to a funeral and then after the funeral what often happens yes there's a lot of grieving but then people start to tell these silly stories uh these humorous stories about the person and that begins to open up people to really begin to experience some positive emotion we're not talking about denial we're not talking about shoving them away I keep repeating that because I think it's important but you're allowing yourself to use humor to open yourself up to access some positive emotions to help you cope to help you move forward so I want to encourage you find ways to engage with humor the second thing is research shows that smiling and laughing physically biologically actually start to elicit positive emotions in us there's some really cool videos that are out there that have shown that people get on a bus and then they start to laugh and then everybody around them in the beginning is looking at them really strange like what are you laughing about but they keep at it and then all of a sudden somebody else starts to jump in and starts to laugh as well and before you know it the whole bus is laughing well what's happening the sound of laughter and then even seeing somebody else smile causes that positive emotion to start happening inside of us and the evidence is really clear also that the action of smiling those nerves the muscles are connected to certain Pathways that activate our brain it starts to release positive Feelgood chemicals because our brain's getting the signal wait I should be happy right now my face is telling me that things are okay and then the brain will actually start to respond in like you know research also shows that one of the first things as we talked about earlier that happens when we experience an emotion is the facial response so we want to use that to our advantage to disrupt that cycle when we start to feel like we're spiraling or we just feel like we're in a really Funk and we can't get out of it because your brain uses your face as a first signal of what you're feeling it actually can work in reverse you starting to smile as I said is going to send the signal to your brain and it'll start disrupting those negative experiences and allow you to start eliciting positive emotions now laughing has also been showed to be very healing physically there's all kinds of stories about people who are very sick whether it was cancer or other physical ailments they start watching these comedy shows and belly laughing for hours and what this was doing is releasing all of these ch chemicals these healing chemicals in their body and it begin to bring healing to their life you know the other day I was reading some research on somebody who couldn't fall asleep at night and they were really struggling with insomnia and so what they started to do was watch Comedy before they went to bed and really get a good laugh in and you know what started to happen for this individual they actually started to sleep like a baby the chemicals that got released as a result of laughing were releasing all of these feel-good chemicals with was putting their brain in a state that said it's okay to sleep we feel good and it actually diverted their attention away from all the ruminating and the worry that they would do when they'd lay their head down at night and so they were going to bed on a high note instead of getting into that bed with all that stress so if you're struggling to access positive emotions start smiling even when you don't feel like it and allow yourself a good laugh that laughter that smiling is absolutely releasing all of of those things to your system that let you know it's okay to feel good and allowing yourself to make progress to becoming a more resilient person now another thing that you can do to access positive emotions is savoring or recalling really positive memories now the research on this is really fascinating because our brains when we relive a moment we visualize it we connect with the details of it and we Savor a previous experience where we were really happy what that's going to do is it's going to release the same chemicals that you had when you were in that moment and your brain often doesn't know right is this happening now is it happening back then right subconsciously there's a connection your brain's making that we're experiencing this in this moment and we're safe so let's go ahead and release those Feelgood chemicals uh those emotions that go with it that's one way that you can really connect with those positive emotions now here's a tip for you i' encourage you to take some time to sit down and write out several positive memories that you have and start to make a list of them so that when you are experiencing a tough time or you really want to access some positive emotions you have a list to go to so use that list to somewhat of a database that you can go to and say I want to pull up this file I want to think about this and I want to experience the emotions that are connected with that experience and the research shows this is a really powerful way for you to begin to access those positive emotions inside of you now here's another tip I would give you when you're in that state of accessing those memories you're really savoring it create for yourself what I call a happy button so what is a happy button well a happy button is something that you can use that you can wire into your system to begin to elicit positive emotions well how do you do that what you're going to do is when you're in that space of savoring and really connecting to those really good feelings you're going to find a spot on your body that you can touch for me it's my middle finger and I take my thumb and I press it into the middle knuckle of my middle finger when I'm feeling really good emotions and what I'm doing is I'm anchoring that spot of my body as an association to send my brain a signal it's okay to feel good right now that you can connect with that emotion and so we're biologically physically emotionally creating a spot on our body that is connected with permission to feel good that's going to call those things up so I encourage you when you're in a positive state do that get into a routine of doing that so that you can then use that when you're in the boardroom when you're in a meeting when you're in a tense moment or you're experiencing anxiety you'll have that to go to and it'll automatically notify your system that it's okay to feel good in this moment now as you develop your own personal happy button I do want to encourage you to make it something that you can do anywhere that's discreet that people aren't going to see so that you can feel comfortable doing it anytime anywhere another way to elicit positive emotions is music find some music to get you in a state of feeling good play that music connect with those emotions and then once again use your happy button to reinforce and imprint that into your system some of the other things that can help you elicit positive emotions are helping other people research is clear that as we do good things for other people we feel good so finding ways to do acts of service is going to bring up those positive emotions for us another thing is scenes of natural beauty that can be out in the environment getting out in nature but it can also be a screen saver that has nature scenes on it that you can see and the research shows as you see that as you look at it it does start to bring up positive emotions for you now the final two that I'll talk about and of course there are more than what I'm just listing here is a connection with your pet or animals that absolutely triggers Feelgood emotions within individuals who have a positive relationship with animals and finally the last thing is getting involved in Creative work do something that's creative that accesses that creative part of your brain that's going to release Feelgood chemicals inside of you because that's calling on that left side of the brain that's associated with approach and when you're in that state positive emotions have the permission to come up to be felt and to be savored so get yourself in that state as often as possible and here's a tip I want to give you don't just wait until you're in a negative state to try these things build these things as a muscle use these things on a regular basis because what we want to do is get into a rhythm of having positive emotions more often right and beginning to feel them and flood our system with them because what that's going to do is it's going to pull us towards being an overall state of subjective well-being of feeling good and when we have more of those emotions and those chemicals being a part of our daily life we get more wired to experience that and our happiness levels go up don't just wait until you feel bad develop this as a lifestyle doing some of the things that I just talked about some of the things that you really want engage in on a daily basis are going to help set a tone for your life you're going to begin to believe that you can be in a state of positive emotions you're going to have a positive emotional toolkit so look at the things that I listed as a toolkit for you go to them listen to that song practice gratitude take a moment and just smile for no reason at all allow yourself to recall those happy memories or whatever works for you to put you in a positive state do it on a daily basis because what you're doing is you're rewiring your system and you're allowing yourself to get more associated with positive emotions versus always feeling like you're in these negative emotions and what that's going to do is it's going to build your overall emotional resilience as we talked about in the previous episode I want to encourage you that building emotional resilience by having an emotional toolkit is work it takes patience it is a journey be kind to yourself take baby steps if you have setbacks don't shame yourself out of the process keep moving forward with it give yourself permission to have some mess ups okay that's a key part of building resilience is to know that you're going to have some mess ups but allow yourself to have them give yourself Grace and then begin to move forward from that place and as you do this you're absolutely going to build your overall resilience your capacity to come back from adversity or to experience adversity and not have it drag you down into a hole for you know a week a month or however long this is a part of you getting into a place in a rhythm where you're staying on course with the life that you want to build and for most people the first thing that derails them from that is when they experience negative emotions and the story that they build from those negative emotions so getting in this space and getting good at this is really really important for you to make progress towards the life that you deserve now if you need help on that journey I want to encourage you go to my website at Jerry henderson. org or simply see the show notes in this episode got a number of resources there and I've also got some resources that I'm in the middle of developing that I'm really excited about so go there check that out and you'll also be able to learn more about my one-on-one coaching program where we can work together to help you build the resilience that you need so you can have a healthier relationship with yourself and start to make progress towards the life that you want and finally I want to remind you as always that you are worthy of your own love