55 | Joy as Leverage and Resistence

How can joy become your leverage when life feels like it’s falling apart?

In this solo episode of The Art of Badassery, Jenn invites you to rethink joy, not as something frivolous or optional, but as a powerful form of leverage and an act of resistance in the face of chaos. As we step into a new year, Jenn explores how intentionally cultivating joy can help you feel stronger, safer, and more grounded, even when the world (or your personal life) feels heavy.

Jenn shares a deeply personal story about getting married shortly after the unexpected death of her father, and how choosing joy in that moment became emotional leverage—proof that joy and grief can coexist, and that joy can help carry us through our hardest seasons.

You’ll hear practical ways to create and protect pockets of joy through daily rituals, creativity, and artistic expression, along with a reminder that safeguarding your inner light is not selfish; it’s necessary. This episode is an invitation to use joy as fuel, as resistance, and as a strategy for continuing to move toward your dream life, no matter what you’re navigating.

Let’s create joy on purpose—and use it to move forward, together.

Sign up for Jenn Cassetta's newsletter for a boost of badassery to your inbox and never miss an episode: pages.jennifercassetta.com/newsletter

Transcript

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We have things like leaning into our community. We have money and resources that I talked about in another episode. We have our voice that's very powerful. But again, in today's society, a lot of people are afraid to use their voice because of backlash, maybe because where they work or their community, etc. They don't want to speak out against what they're seeing as wrong or immoral for whatever reason. Okay, we still have leverage. And that's the point of this episode is I want you to remember that there is always more leverage. You always have more leverage. And we as a community have more leverage than we think. Hi there, I'm Jen Cassetta, your chief badass three officer. If you're feeling drained, hesitant, stuck in self-doubt, or you just have a case of the vlogs, the Art of Badass 3 podcast is here to help you unleash your mojo once and for all. We'll provide you with tips, techniques, and real-life examples of how you can pick heads in all areas of your life. You'll learn how to flex your mental muscles, rise above fears, and turn setbacks into superpowers. So let's enter the dojo and let's get to work. Welcome to the Art of Badasserie podcast. I'm Jen Cassetta, your chief badassery officer. Happy New Year, my friends. It's just you and I, a solo podcast today where we're going to talk about leverage. Leverage. That means being able to feel more strong, more safe, more powerful regardless of what's happening in the world, regardless if it feels like the world is on fire right now. And to be honest, I know how easy that is because I feel it too. But before we get into this concept for today and this episode, I have a quick favor to ask. It is the new year. If you have been listening to this podcast, I don't know, for months, for the past year and a half or so that it started. Or if you are a brand new listener, welcome. And please do me a favor and hit the subscribe button to follow along so you know and you get alerts exactly when each episode is launched. So if you're watching on YouTube, amazing, hit that subscribe button. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere that you get your podcasts, I am asking from the bottom of my heart to please follow along. Hey, and you want to go the extra mile to support me and this work, then leave us a review. Rate the podcast. That would be so helpful. It helps me get the word out. And I'm planning on ramping this up in the new year. So it would definitely help to get more eyeballs, more ears, and most importantly, more hearts in tune with this work. Again, if you're my people, I can tell that it's been a heavy year. 2025 was wild and weird and crazy and heavy and sad and scary and all those things. And yet, I am sure you can look back and find highs, some high points that happened for you during the year. I know I can. I had lots of amazing things happen last year in the midst of all the chaos. I landed a book deal with Penguin Random House, a top five publisher, which brought me so much joy. It was on my vision board for years. It was on my goal list for years. I ran my Destiny Dojo workshop the January 6th, but truly, I was launching it in the end of 2025. We had an amazing turnout. We had a great group who all I took them through the three-year vision workshop. We created beautiful representations of their visions in Canva, and they've been sending me their final vision boards. So if you haven't done that, you can still reach out to me and I can send you the recording if you'd like. So do that if you haven't yet. And honestly, January is a great time to do it, but it's not the only time. You can create your future any single day of the year. Okay, because you're looking three years out into the future. That's my process anyway. So it doesn't matter if it's January, February, or June, July, or even December. You're looking out into your future, creating it in real time. Okay. Again, look back at 2025. Look at for some pockets of joy, seasons of joy, highs, accomplishments of yours, and feel that, right? Feel that. And now think of that as leverage. I've been seeing a lot lately of this phrase, joy as resistance. And I love that. I truly love thinking of being a joyful people, right? Joyful humans are going to be a heck of a lot harder to take down in general than sad, miserable, divisive people. I also know that not everybody relates that to that right now. Not everybody can relate to this idea of resistance. Some people might be saying resisting against what? Totally understood. Okay. If you're there, I get it. But everyone can use joy as leverage, leverage to get through the hard times in your life. So if you're in the middle of a takedown right now, and that could be anything from a health scare or going through some type of disease, chronic pain, it could be taking care of a sick loved one or an aging parent. It could be going through a divorce or a hard time in your relationship or financial hardship or fear of losing your job to a robot. It could be anything these days. I promise you, no matter what's happening in the world, you can still move forward in the direction of your dreams. Gotta know what those dreams are first, though. So make sure that you do the destiny dojo or some version of it, even on your own, right? Knowing what your goals are, your dream life, a vision for your future. Because when it's heavy out there, when the storms come, when the noise is so loud that it shakes you to your core, you need that vision and joyful moments in your day to help pull you forward. Another reason I love using this concept of leverage is obviously because of my martial arts background. And when I think of leverage in martial arts, it's all the self-defense techniques that I learned from joint locks and arm locks and finger locks and all these things. They're all about leverage. But even more so is judo moves, right? Judo throws. And when back in the day when I was on the mat training all the time, I was lucky enough to train under this judo sensei, sensei Andy. Hi Andy, who taught me these awesome judo throws. The whole concept of judo is about getting underneath, using your body, using your hip in this instant, this particular judo throw I'm thinking of, as a fulcrone, right? So getting underneath your opponent, getting underneath their center of gravity, twisting and basically throwing your opponent, someone who could be twice your size, over your hip, over your shoulder, over your body, and literally flip them onto their back. It's the coolest thing, and I'm sure you've seen it if you've watched any movie with a fight scene. But that is what I think of as a representation, a visual representation of this energetic idea of using leverage as resistance. And then what do we use for leverage? We have things like leaning into our community. We have money and resources that I talked about in another episode. We have our voice that's very powerful. But again, in today's society, a lot of people are afraid to use their voice because of backlash, maybe because where they work or their community, etc. They don't want to speak out against what they're seeing as wrong or immoral for whatever reason. Okay, we still have leverage. And that's the point of this episode is I want you to remember that there is always more leverage. You always have more leverage, and we as a community have more leverage than we think. We're going to talk about using joy as leverage. This reminds me of a story, and I share it in the book as well. This is 10 years ago now. So in 2016, I'll just never forget this moment where we were at my mom's house, my parents' house, in Westchester, Putnam, New York. And we were in a limousine, the doors close, and my mother turns to me and says, Your brother walked you down the aisle. It was like a moment where you just go, what? Aisle? Wedding? I'm getting married. We're sitting here in this limo heading to my father's funeral. He had died just a few days before that, and it really came out of nowhere. My dad was only diagnosed with this cancer for about seven days before he passed away from complications from a surgery. So it really shook me. It shook my family, it shook everyone that knew him. Because if you knew him, you knew that he preached health, nutrition, well-being, exercise, and he walked the talk. I'm talking like he was a martial artist, he started in his 50s. At this point in 2016, he was 78 years old. We all thought he would live to 100 because he declared that. And we all believed him. And it was easy to believe because he was that fit. He was muscular, he was doing pull-ups, he was hiking mountains, all of this while he had this tumor growing up his spine. So that nobody knew about, including him, until it was too late. But a month before this, my husband proposed. My now husband, boyfriend at the time, Lindsay, he proposed. And it was something that my dad was definitely looking forward to because Lindsay and I had been dating quite a while, lots of years, in fact. So he asked me to marry him and we set a date for sometime in October of that same year. So it was only six months away at this point when my father had passed away. And in those, in that week in the hospital, it was the last thing on my mind, especially after my dad passed. It was, I couldn't even think about it. It was the first time I even thought about it was when I heard my mom say those words in those in the limo. And I was just stunned. I had nothing to say. I couldn't say anything. I just, in my mind, I just kept thinking, what? You really think I'm gonna get married right now? My world just exploded. Our world just exploded. How could that be possible? And time went on. Obviously, we had the funeral and I grieved and grieved, and yet something also was nudging me inside that, yeah, we should probably keep this wedding going for ourselves, yes, of course. And to bring some joy in a very in a time that felt really dark. So luckily, I have amazing friends and family who rallied around me. I have a friend, Nicole, who called me one day and said, Do you have a dress yet? I'm gonna fly down from San Francisco and I'm gonna take you dress shopping. And sure enough, she did, or else I probably would have waited until like weeks before. And we found a dress in that day. And I had another friend, Michelle, who said, Do you want me to make your wedding cake for you? And I was like, Sure, that's amazing. One less thing I have to do. And it's so funny because people thought when I told them, like, oh yeah, my friend's making the cake, people thought it was going to be some kind of sheet cake, box cake, or whatever. This cake, still 10 years later, people are talking about how amazing this cake was. It was like a professional, beautiful cake covered with succulents, and the taste was out of this world. I can still taste it. I can still think about it. Thank you, Michelle. Point being, people rallied around my husband and I. He was my rock during that time. And we did it. We pulled off this really fun party. We pulled it off. We had this really beautiful wedding ceremony followed by a great party. I danced my ass off and drank probably a little too much rose, but had lots of fun. And of course, that spills over into the days and weeks afterwards as well, as you're reliving the moments and looking at the photos and getting texts from everyone who had such a lovely time at your wedding. So the whole point of that is was there moments of this like desperate sadness and aching, and it was so obvious that he was missing, right? My dad was just like so important to me, and he was not there on that day. And yet, I know he was because there was these amazing moments like my sister giving a speech, and all of a sudden this foghorn came in like as soon as she was talking about it. And we all just stopped in amazement because we knew that was like him chiming in from the other side. We had photos of him around. We did our best to bring that joy in. And just as a sidebar, even, it was it was even more sad when my dad died because three days later I found out that we my husband and I also had to put our cat down. And she was nine years old and we had her the whole time. And I was just like, oh my god, can this get any worse? You know, those times in your life when it's like dark, oh, another takedown, oh, another takedown. Yeah, it was one of those. So anyway, moving forward with the wedding was actually, in hindsight, a really great idea, even though there were moments that were incredibly hard, even though there were probably people thinking, like, what are you doing? You sure you want to do that? But it was an energetic judo throw. It was leverage, it was leverage to get me through that hard time. And I honestly think that we need to do that. And I'll I'm not talking about getting married every year, but we need to create more pockets of joy in our life. Not on, not necessarily on those grand scales, but small ones. Each day is there something that you can do that can fill your cup and feel more joyful. I found this quote to sum that up by Sojourner Truth. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around. Okay, we gotta keep our lights lit, though, because it's easy for them to be dimmed by the things happening outside of us, by the things happening in the world. But our light is within, and as corny as it sounds, we have to turn up that light. Sometimes I like to picture E.T. Little like heart glowing. We need to do that for ourselves, right? Go within. It all starts with within. So, where in your life right now can you create more joy? What are certain things that you would like to do? Maybe three years out, three to five years out in your future, that maybe you can move that timeline forward a little bit. So, for example, are there places that you'd like to travel that you think might be further away? Can you move that timeline up? Are there little things that you can do in the meantime? Is there an art class that you've been putting off? Sign up. Is there a language you want to learn? There's tons of free apps that you can start doing that today. Art is another form of leverage, actually. And in fact, it's another thing that I write about in the book that I wasn't really planning on talking about right now. But for a lot of people, art is joy, right? So they're connected. And the another quote that I love the book has a lot of quotes this time around. So I'm hoping that they all get passed by the editor and get included in the book. But this is precisely the time where artists go to work. Tony Morrison said that. And that's how I feel right now. It's like artists are do you like to sing? Do you like to dance? Do you like to create? Are you creating art right now? Make sure you carve out time for that. I have a friend who goes to pottery classes on a regular basis here in LA. I think that's so cool. My art is creating content. So I feel a lot of joy when I start to create my content for folks because I know, or I at least I hope, that it's going to touch, move, or inspire someone out there, which creates a ripple effect. And that's the point of joy and art as leverage, because it creates a ripple effect out into the world, elevating the frequency and the vibration of the planet. Yes, your small acts of joy, your small movements, your small energetic judo throws are that important. Think about it. Think about a small example, something that you can take five minutes to do right now. Put on your favorite song, dance around if that makes you feel goofy and silly and joyful. Then all of a sudden, you get on a Zoom call and a meeting or something, and you're like vibrating at this higher energy. You're smiling more, so it makes you connect with someone else. You may give them a compliment that you wouldn't have because you're just feeling in such a good mood. Now that person has that energy, right? You just transferred some of that energy to someone else. And they went, wow, she just recognized my shirt and how it matches my eyes, or she recognized and acknowledged me for the work I did on this project, and it really lifted my spirits. And then that person goes and spreads their energy into somebody else and transfers it. So think about the ripple effect, even from doing something as silly, like I just said, an example, just getting out there and doing a silly little dance for yourself. Okay. Maybe for you it's creating a beautiful meal tonight for you, your family, or just yourself, even, right? Just taking a little extra time with the ingredients, following a recipe you've been putting off, something that brings you joy. And it's gonna be different for everybody. So figure out what those things are. In fact, can you write a list right now of the things that bring you joy? Hang on, I'm gonna do it too. My podcast producer will edit out all of the pause right now, and then I'll say what my list is. Okay, I'm back with my list. Do you have yours? My list is my cats. I love, I mean, the I could just watch them play and I laugh. I joy, it literally lights me up inside. Sunsets with my husband, sunsets in general, walking down to the beach, which I'm so blessed to be able to do, and just watching the sun go down and and watch nature put on this magnificent show for us. It's it blows my mind every single time. Walks in my neighborhood. I love to just look at all the diverse flora from the trees to the succulents and the cactus and the wildflowers. Again, I stop, I pause, I breathe them in. Sometimes I touch the leaves or touch a tree, some tree bark, right? Just to feel grounded in nature. And that makes me so happy. Happy hours with my friends. I really do enjoy time with girlfriends and. And they know it. I love it. I'm always scheduling them, or luckily someone else is, and I'm following along. But I love deep connections. I love conversations with friends and family, hiking. And I realized when I wrote that that I haven't done it in a long time. So I need to get back out there. Meditation. I know I talk about it incessantly, but truly meditation brings me joy. By the end of my Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation in 30 minutes, I come out with I'm beaming sometimes. Like I feel pure joy, enlightenment. It feels ecstasy sometimes. It feels like pure love. Like I'm just touching source for those moments. Like it's absolutely incredible. So that's a daily practice, obviously. And when I do it twice a day, I get double the effect. Imagine that. And then music. And that's another thing. I recognize that I can have music in the background playing a lot more often just to help keep my energy higher and my spirits higher as well. When I am filling my cup up, like with all those things, I mean not all those things every single day, but a lot of them can be daily, like the cats or the meditation and things like that. But if I look at the course of the week and say, look at that list and say, how many of these things that I did I do? Okay, great. Calibrate my energy levels and feel a whole lot better, even when the world is on fire. So, my friends, I hope you have a list of things that bring you joy. And my challenge for you is for this next week, even just the next seven days, try to add more things in during the week from that list into your week. Schedule them, put them on your calendar. If you write your calendars down, like you're old school, write them, circle them, highlight them. If they're in a more of your phone or laptop calendar, then make sure you put them in there and nobody can mess with them. Okay. So you want to put like an energetic circle around those things to make sure that they stay on your calendar. You're dedicated to them. You make them happen. What's going to be stealing your joy? Anything that you let. That is the bottom line. And I'm going to say that with all the love in my heart because I know I can walk around sometimes brooding, angry, upset when I read the news and I open my social media feed and see these horrible things happening to people. It truly wears on my heart. And then people justifying that as well. It can really make me angry. But I have to remind myself, and you can remind yourself too, that you cannot let this stuff steal your joy from you and dim your light. You need to turn up your light. You need to be your own little ET phone home, right? And turn up that little glow in your heart, visualize it, act it out, whatever you need to do. Remember that it's there and you are in control of it. Only you, and no one can steal that from you. So remember that you have your energetic throws, your energetic judo throws, right? To get underneath whoever's trying to take you down and twist and pull and turn and throw them right over you. Flip them over onto their back. You stay grounded, you stand up powerfully, energetically, and move through this world, move through the next year and the future, feeling grounded, steady, just like a sensei does. All right, my friends, that's it for today. I will see you in two weeks with a new episode with a woman named Julie Brown. She's gonna talk to us about networking and the power of your network. So get ready for that. Again, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Thank you so much for tuning in and share this with someone right now who can use a little more joy in their lives. Remind them they gotta make it happen themselves. Love you and talk to you soon. See you next time on the Art of Badass 3 podcast.