We’re told that we should be happy and that we deserve to have it all. And we often feel that we’ve failed ourselves if we aren’t happy 24/7—and if we haven’t managed to get everything we’re supposed to need and want. I’ve found that the overly high expectations we set for ourselves (plus those set by family, friends, and society) tend to work against that most lasting and delightful goal of all—the ability to experience deep, sustainable joy. How can we release expectations that don’t serve us to create greater well-being? How can we turn inward to find our north star—the guiding light that allows us to be our best selves and live to the fullest? Join me and Dr. Jennifer Guttman to explore the six secrets of true joy and satisfaction.

 

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend 

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

 

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

 

Book by Dr. Jennifer Guttman:

Beyond Happiness: The 6 Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction

 

Connect with Dr. Jennifer Guttman:

Website: https://www.guttmanpsychology.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guttman_psychology

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JenniferGuttman

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferGuttmanPsychologist

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferguttman

YouTube: http://youtube.com/c/DrJenniferGuttman

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@guttman_psychology

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Discover the Six Secrets of Lasting Joy and Satisfaction with Expert Dr. Jennifer Guttman

Create the Life of Your Dreams by Harnessing the Power of Your Internal Joy!

Introduction

We’re told that we should be happy and deserve to have it all. We often feel that we fail ourselves if we aren’t happy 24/7 and if we haven’t managed to get everything we’re supposed to need and want. I found that the overly high expectations we set for ourselves, plus those set by family, friends, and society, tend to work against that most lasting and delightful goal of all. It’s the ability to experience deep, sustainable joy. How can we release expectations that don’t serve us to create greater well-being? Join me and Dr. Jennifer Guttman to explore the six secrets of true joy and satisfaction.

We’ll focus on this reader’s real-life question. I’m 31 and single. All of my friends are married or in committed relationships. They seem happy in their home and work lives. I feel like I’m on the outside looking in. They’re living the life I want to live. My best friend told me she’s pregnant, and I’m happy for her but secretly sad. Is there a way I can get more happiness to get what my friends have? I feel stuck with that question as the focus of this episode. I’m Dr. Carla Manly, and this is Imperfect Love.

 

 

Dr. Jennifer, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us.

Thank you, Dr. Carla. I’m excited to be here.

Before we launch into the subject matter of this episode, would you share with our readers what makes you you?

Lots of people have watershed moments in their lives. I had some seminal moments that created who I am as a person. It was three events that happened in quick succession with each other. One was that my son had a life-threatening illness that required surgery. I had a life-threatening illness. After that, my father passed away. My kids were back in sleepaway camp. I packed a carry-on bag and a one-way ticket to Europe. I went there with no agenda other than to regain a sense of purpose, optimism, and hope after all of those experiences.

While I was there, I had a hot experience. I wasn’t trying to find happiness again. That seemed incongruous with what I had been through. What I was trying to find was a sense of satisfaction, peace, and contentment. I decided that if that’s what I was going to look for, I needed to deconstruct what satisfaction was because I felt that it was aspects of satisfaction that had kept me going through all of those three events. During that time, an idea of what sustainable life satisfaction would look like was born. That’s what makes me me.

Thank you for sharing all of those pieces with us. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, your son’s illness, your illness, your father’s death, that passing, and yet you took all of those and used them to create a better you and life and a purpose because you are the satisfaction go-to person. Let’s look at the reader’s question.

Happiness, Positivity, Joy, & Satisfaction

It sounds as if she is not satisfied, and that lack of satisfaction is somehow disguised as a lack of happiness because that’s what our society looks at. We always look at happiness and not see that it’s fleeting. Happiness is fleeting and externally oriented, where joy and satisfaction come from the inside. Can you start us off with your paradigm about the difference between happiness, positivity, joy, and satisfaction? Let’s start there. This is such a great way to begin because my first book, Joy From Fear, focuses on dismantling those differences. We all have different takes on it. I’d love to hear yours.

I see a large difference between happiness and satisfaction. I love the name of your first book, Joy From Fear, since satisfaction comes from facing your fears. Everybody looks at language in different ways. I have found that many people feel like they’re supposed to be happy all the time. I saw it in a popcorn bag. If you eat this popcorn, you’ll be happy. I thought to myself, “I’ll be satisfied if I eat the bag of popcorn, but happy. I don’t know.”

I’ve had thousands of clients come into my office over the past several years telling me that they feel like they’re failing at being happy. You can’t fail at an emotion. Happiness is an emotion, and like all emotions, it comes and goes. Emotions are meant to be fleeting. That’s what happiness is. It is based on something happening in the external world. If you get a surprise text from a love interest, you might be happy or see a shooting star or the first snowfall. If you’re looking for something, a job, a relationship, or a school to provide a feeling of happiness for you, you’re destined to be disappointed because happiness is a dopamine hit. It comes from outside of ourselves. It’s fleeting.

Satisfaction comes from inside of ourselves. Satisfaction is a feeling of contentment and peace. Satisfaction is how you feel at the end of a productive day. It’s how you feel when you curl up cozy on a couch. Satisfaction with the right tools is something that you can create right within yourself. In that way, it’s attainable and sustainable. That’s why beyond happiness is satisfaction.

I agree on many fronts, and I love how you say, “Happiness is a dopamine hit.” That helps us understand physiologically that it’s not sustainable and pure body mechanics. We cannot sustain happiness. We can’t and don’t want to sustain those dopamine hits 24/7. That’s what is the basis for addiction. It’s after that next dopamine hit.

I love looking at joy. I come from the five-emotion paradigm, where there are five key emotions, anger, joy, sadness, fear, and disgust. I love to see joy. The way I’ve coined it is this candle that’s inside of us, this little votive that’s burning. Life happens. We get disappointed, and people hurt us. We get shamed, which builds up this black coating around that votive. Darkness helps us turn dark inside. It makes us not feel and see that joy. When we have practices that allow us to wipe off that soot that has built up, we pause and start to feel our own inner light more.

It sounds as if that is akin to your idea of internal satisfaction. That glow, if we do the work to polish it and keep that light glowing there, and no matter what’s happening around us, whether that bag of popcorn is awful or we don’t get what we wanted or hoped for, that joy and satisfaction can be in there glowing away. Sometimes, it flickers and gets a little dimmer. Does that sound similar to what you were talking about?

Your definition of joy would be similar to my definition of satisfaction. It is something that is within us all the time. I think of it more like the moods come like clouds. Sometimes, you have multiple of them. I call it stormy skies. It’s a similar concept where I would say that you have the basis of satisfaction within you all the time. You have moods, sadness, anger, anxiety, and all of these things. They’re like passing clouds, but they’re going to come and go. You can have more than one of them at a time, but that within you all the time is the ability to foster a sense of satisfaction.

I appreciate how you wove it in with peace because those two are hand in hand. The internal satisfaction and joy go and bring peace. Peace allows it. That’s why it’s this hand holding thing inside of us. I also appreciate the idea of clouds. I learned that when I was getting into meditation and learning how to do meditation and teach meditation. If we see life itself, all of those internal and external vicissitudes, as clouds that are coming, we don’t try and hang onto the clouds. When they’re passing, we’re like, “The sun is gone. It’s a cloud that’s passing. We don’t try to grab that cloud and keep it away from the sunshine.

We know that sunshine, we might call it our internal joy or satisfaction, is going to appear again. Let those clouds pass by, and work on that internal tolerance for those times of anxiety, anger, and sadness. Those two have a message and work on our ability to tolerate and make a place for it. If we can’t welcome the sadness or the discomfort, we can make a space for it. Is that what you learned when you took your hiatus and went to Europe?

I learned that it’s not something to be afraid of because you have to learn that you have resilience for it. It’s the thing where things are going to happen. They’re going to be painful, challenging, and difficult things. It’s about learning that you have the strain coping mechanisms and the resilience to move through those difficult times and persevere, and you have the ability to do that. If these events that bring on these emotions come, you can say, “Sit next to me because I know that you can sit next to me. After you’re done sitting next to me, you’re going to move on. I’m going to be able to come back to a satisfying place.”

Having changed for having been through that, but I still will be me sitting here. I will have become a stronger person for having lived through it. What I talk about is how that ends up reading more confidence, resilience, self-worth, and self-respect. It ends up building a lot of character traits that are important as much as it seems like you want to push away all of these things. In the end, these events that we don’t and can’t get rescued from end up being beneficial for us.

Sometimes, events that we don't get rescued from end up being super beneficial for us. Share on X

I’m wowed by that image of inviting the emotion and uncomfortable emotion to sit next to you because I often think of inviting the uncomfortable emotion to pass through me, to be with me, to walk next to me, but to sit next to one, I don’t know how it’s feeling to you, but I don’t know why it feels more challenging because to let an emotion sit next to us is like that if we think of sadness as this dark gray mass. It’s one thing to say, “Go ahead and walk next. I’ll be with it. I’ll stay with it.” To others, you say, “Gray mask, go ahead and sit right here next to me. I’ll put my arm around you. We’ll hang out together.”

That is a wonderful way to look at it, even that idea of thinking of putting your arm around that uncomfortable emotion. I’m a big believer that our anger, sadness, and joy as a messenger are disgust. They’re all messengers. Our anxiety is a messenger. It’s hard to put our arms around anxiety. If we can learn to be with it or sit with it, it is, too. I like it when anxiety moves on, and ready to trot off in the other direction.

It’s okay for it to sit there because we have faith that we can tolerate it. If it’s going to go, the less scary the whole experience is. That’s why it’s like being able to tolerate and hold space for that image helps because the whole thing becomes less daunting.

For the many readers who are digressing from the question, many of the people I work with, and I imagine it’s the same for you, suffer from huge anxiety. People often take psychopharmaceuticals to handle it. They self-soothe with food or alcohol. We can invite our readers to maybe experiment with when their anxiety comes up because it’s a difficult emotion, especially if it’s getting toward panic. It can be awful.

Invite the reader to imagine I love going into that imaginal world and creating a creature, whether it’s a porcupine or a non-poisonous puffer fish. That’s what this is right here. It’s a giant hairbrush with lots of spikes poking at me, but I can hang here and breathe. This is an uncomfortable porcupine or even a cactus next to me. It doesn’t feel good, but I can breathe, practice letting, breathing, and working through it. I’m noticing that joy and peace are inside. They’re working with that, even noticing if perhaps that allows peace or something to come up inside.

A lot of what I talk about in the six secrets in my book are things that would make people anxious. Part of it is you have to tolerate anxiety and not be afraid of that anxiety. Being able to tolerate anxiety is empowering in and of itself. As you are able to tolerate that and cope with that, that brings about a feeling of self-confidence, and holding space for that.

It makes you feel encouraged to hold onto other types of anxiety or distress. That makes you feel like you can cope with resilience with other daunting challenges that may come your way because you have started in small ways to deal with more difficult challenges as opposed to trying to be rescued from them or avoid them.

I liked the second time you brought up the piece about being rescued. It’s wonderful that you’re highlighting that because I believe it’s human nature from childhood forward. We want someone to rescue us. We want Mom and Dad to take the owls away. We want our friends to help us. We want our romantic partners to help us. We want shopping and medications to help us.

The truth is all of those have a place, yet when we learn to know that this person that you are now has so much wisdom in this body and psyche. I hear you saying, and I love that we’ve paused on the topic of anxiety because when people build their awareness of anxiety, they realize that anxiety is not all the same.

We all have anxiety every day. There’s optimal anxiety. That smidgen of anxiety helps us wake up in the morning and say, “If I don’t get dressed now and get to work, I’m not going to have money to pay my bills. If I don’t take the dog out now, I can have a mess on the floor to clean up.” All of those bits are anxiety at work. It’s telling us if you don’t do something. When you realize it, you already have quite a lot more capacity to do with anxiety than you realize.

That’s what you are saying, which can be found in your book. We’ll talk more about your book. Her book will be in the show notes. You’ll be able to find it there. We can see that building that tolerance for all of our emotions, especially anxiety helps us build more of that resilience and confidence in the self. We’re going to be building more self-esteem, flexibility, self-awareness, and all of these yummy things that take us back to building that core of joyful satisfaction that helps. No matter what’s happening in life, there is still that internal core that you can go to and say, “I’m strong. I’m good. I’m feeling all these other things, but I’m going to be okay.”

What you said is important that people don’t get together necessarily and talk about the fact that they’re anxious. Almost everybody is anxious over many things. They don’t talk about it. Talking about it helps because it makes you feel not alone. Lots of things make many people anxious. We make assumptions that other people aren’t anxious. That’s not true.

One of my clients said to me that she was hanging out with a bunch of her friends. It came up that all of them had social anxiety. She would’ve made the assumption that she was the only one who had social anxiety, and yet all of them had social anxiety. They were able to have a sense of belonging around the fact that all of them had social anxiety.

What was nice to me about hearing it was that they were able to reduce the stigma around social anxiety by talking about it and talking about some strategies that each one of them used to combat social anxiety. If people talked about it by reducing the shame of it, that might also help people feel like it’s not such a scary thing to have. It’s uncomfortable to have it, but it’s not bad.

Talking about social anxiety by reducing the shame of it might also help people feel like it's not such a scary thing to have. It's very uncomfortable to have it but it's not bad. Share on X

I look at social anxiety as an opportunity because I have many clients with social anxiety. I often say, “Are you an introvert? Are you an extrovert?” It’s the introverted clients. We figure out, “Where do you get your recharged? Are you getting recharged by solo time or time with one friend?” Do you get recharged out in a crowd with groups of friends?”

Comparison and Self-Reflection

It is the individuals who are on the more introverted end of the spectrum who feel like they need to be out. They’re more anxious because it’s not their happy, peaceful, and satisfaction place. Once we start talking, we can say, “It’s okay for me to dial back.” If you’re someone who’s extroverted and you have social anxiety, why are you with a crowd? Start getting curious about where the anxiety comes from. We can take this and pivot back to our reader’s question.

I couldn’t help but see in big, bold word comparison as I was looking at that question. This individual is stuck in that hard, uncomfortable place of comparing themselves to other people. I’m a big believer that comparison is destructive for us because we start looking at what other people have and using that as the litmus test for success or happiness rather than turning inward and saying, “What do I want and if I want what these other people have? If that’s what I want after I engage in self-reflection, how can I go about getting that or the baby steps I can take to get myself toward that place?”

 

 

The other thing that I thought of when you were talking is the idea of your client and her group of friends. They once started talking. Everybody is talking about social anxiety and what we perceive in others’ lives. I don’t know if this is the case for the person who wrote in, but often, that happy life that we’re seeing through binoculars or a telescope, depending upon how close we are to the person, we still aren’t seeing it all.

We don’t know about crying babies, people’s difficult conversations, or finances. They may appear happy and they may truly be happy behind closed doors. They may be regular people having difficult lives who do what most people do and show only the sunny side on social media or when they’re talking to friends. What do you think about that comparison piece?

I agree with what you said. I also saw the comparison and the risk of believing that everything is romanticized because somebody is following what appears to be a socio-normative path at a certain age. There’s a risk in that. Romanticizing anybody’s life is a risk because you don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors.

If you’re assessing somebody’s life based on social media, that would be a mistake because we tend to make mental movies out of social media. All we see is a snapshot. We make a movie based on the before and after, even though we have no idea what happened before or after the snapshot. If we go back to the comparisons, the people that we’re making comparisons about are also making comparisons of themselves to us.

It’s important that we don’t forget that there are few people exempt from making comparisons. It may feel to us like we make comparisons and find ourselves lacking, but many other people are looking at us and finding themselves lacking. The grass is always greener. I have clients in similar situations to this woman who’s talking about this. They will talk about how sometimes they will have a transparent conversation with a friend who is married and is pregnant. They are not in that situation. The friend will say, “You have that I wish I had.” The comparisons are happening on the other side.

What’s important is that there are only many things in life that you can control. I hear you when you say that those are things that she wants. There are steps that she can take to attempt to execute that. She should do that. Some of what I try to emphasize in my book is that there’s only so much in life that you can control. You should do your best to put yourself out there to the best of your ability and the things that you want to make happen. Satisfaction doesn’t come from things that you can’t control. It comes from things that you can control. Dissatisfaction comes from folks over-focusing on things they can’t control.

Besides putting her energy into things that she can’t control, it would be important to put energy into things that she can control. What other things about her life that she like and can focus on where she has more control than her dating life, which is only 50% in her control? There are other aspects of her life where she has more control over that, or she can be more of a captain of her ship than she can be a captain of her ship in that area. You’re going to find more satisfaction when you can look internally at your compass as opposed to when another person has to also participate in being your compass.

That is such fabulous wisdom. I love the piece about dissatisfaction, coming from trying to control things that you can’t control. In life, all we have is our ship and one human being. We can control our feelings to a certain extent. Our thoughts, mindsets, energy, and actions are what we can control. That’s the paradigm I use in my fourth book, The Joy of Imperfect Love, where I talk about the interplay of feelings, thoughts, mindset, energy, and action.

If we take that to our reader’s question and weave it in with what you are saying, we can see that maybe she can do a gentle reset in a couple of ways. Take her bestie and let her bestie know how she’s feeling a bit stuck. If she doesn’t feel safe talking to her bestie, find a therapist or a mentor where she can start talking about this because she’s not alone. Her issue is one that I see in a variety of forms every day. She feels validated. She won’t feel broken. She’ll feel like, “There are lots of people like me out there.”

Given the forces that occurred during the pandemic, many people experienced an interruption in their growth cycle and developmental steps forward. Some people who ended up being partnered and now married happened to get in under the radar before the pandemic and had things in the works. For her, depending upon what her situation was, she might be “behind” where she wants to be, but not through any fault of her own because there was a huge interruption that we are still experiencing.

I appreciate what you were saying about recalibrating and looking at what she can control, which might be reevaluating her work life, how much joy, how much satisfaction she is getting there, and looking at her friends. Does she want to have some single friends? Does she want to do some different activities? Looking again, not at getting dopamine fixes, these little happy jolts from this and that, but bringing more sustainable. I love that you used that word in your work, sustainable satisfaction because that’s what satisfaction is. It’s much more sustainable.

As you’re talking about the dating world, I’m a firm believer that there’s always a better opportunity to attract a healthy and a good-fit partner when you are in a good place yourself. If you’re in a one-down place or you feel needy, desperate, unlovable, or broken, you may have people coming to you who sense that because there are predators out there and manipulators who will sense that.

 If you’re coming from a place where you are growing, your development is moving forward, and you’re feeling good about yourself, you radiate not perfection because it’s not about perfection. You radiate that sense of confidence and self-esteem. You’re like, “I know where I’m going. That’s good enough for me.” There’s something beautiful about that because it’s more open energy, whereas the energy in her question feels shut down, sad, and gloomy, understandably. What do you think?

It is true that it is important to love yourself. A lot of people, if you ask them if they feel like they are lovable, they struggle with the question of whether they are lovable. That has to do with how much they existentially believe in their own worth. The more people existentially believe in their own worth, the more lovable they will feel that they are, as opposed to having to prove themselves and live in the service of other people.

The more people existentially believe in their worth, the more lovable they will feel that they are. Share on X

The more they believe how lovable they are, the easier it will be for them to attract not just partners but friends also because they will exude a feeling that they believe that they are somebody that other people would want to be around regardless of whether they’re acting in the service of others. One of my taglines is, “You don’t need to love others perfectly to love yourself well.” You don’t need to love yourself perfectly to love others well. It works both ways.

Going back to the reader, if she’s loving herself more fully, if imperfectly, that also helps the comparison fade because she’s more focused not on what these other people are doing, but on what is important to her and where she wants to be in life. It sounds like this is a great opportunity for her to recalibrate and do some internal work to figure out, “Where do I want to be? Do I want to get married? Do I want a long-term partner? Do I want to be single? Do I want to stay in this job?”

It sounds like it’s a wonderful opportunity to turn inward and do some self-evaluation that she’s not living for expectations that she has had in the past for herself or societal expectations or expectations from her friend group. She’s turning to find, “What’s my North Star now?” It might be different from her friends or goals she had several ago. It sounds much like all of those losses that you experienced and the changes you experienced. You used it as an opportunity to go, “I want to recalibrate.” It sounds much as if it’s a similar opportunity for her.

I’ve seen over the years that people shake things up in moments like this in different ways. I’ve seen people in careers realize they’re dissatisfied and go from finance to social work. I’ve seen people realize that they hadn’t found somebody that they, at a time in their lives where they felt like they should be matched and decide to switch cities. I’ve seen people feel like they should be matched and decide that they were going to take a job in a different country for a while. I’ve seen people do lots of things to shake it up and see what that means to them.

There are opportunities sometimes where you don’t see it because you’re moving along thinking that you have to try the same thing over and over again, as opposed to if I shake the bottle a little and seeing what happens. I was going to go back to what I might have thought about doing several years ago, what a dream might have been? What would the dream have been then? Why not execute it now and see what happens?

 

 

I’ve seen some people do that with interesting outcomes in the same way that when I tried to get back in touch with my purpose, one of the things that I was meditating on was what I wanted to do. Some of it was I want to spread information about if I’ve been through all this, and I want to be satisfied, I want to be able to tell people what my experience was. If I can at all guide them on how to feel satisfied and resilient in the face of them having similar challenges, that’s what I want to do.

I’ve grabbed onto one of the images that you shared, the image of the bottle. I almost see it as if similar to the bottle that’s behind you readers, you can’t see it. There’s this clear bottle. If we imagine that the person who wrote it has the clear bottle of her own life, and instead of working on the clear bottle and what she wants in that bottle of her life, she’s seeing all of these slightly obscure bottles of other people’s lives. She’s spending her time looking at all these blue, yellow, and green bottles of other people’s lives. That’s only making her feel worse. It’s not getting her anywhere. She’s looking at these obscure bottles and not sure what to do with them. She knows she’s different.

If she turns her energy to her bottle, breathe into it, put whatever she wants in that bottle, and turn from being focused to another focus to being more focused on her bottle. Shake it up and put some things in there. If you don’t like something, take it, dump it out, and use it. I’m almost feeling a playful energy here.

Everybody is always focused on moving forward, but sometimes, you can look backward and move forwards at the same time because there’s a lot of information if you look back on what excited you in the past. When people get admired for what they need to do to push their lives forward, they forget what excited them in the past. There’s a lot of good information about what excited us in the past. Within that good information, we’re losing the thing that could be what gives us the jumpstart we need for the future.

Everybody's always focused on moving forward, but sometimes, you can look back while moving forward. There’s a lot of information if you look back on what excited you in the past. Share on X

There is a great book by James Hillman where he talks about the little acorn. It’s that little acorn from childhood that we forgot about that love for writing, creating, ships, and being a fireman. We forget about it because it was often socialized out of us. Our parents said, “No, you don’t want to do that. Teachers get paid little. Doctors have a hard job. You don’t want to be a garbage man. Maybe you do want to be a garbage person.”

Beyond Happiness

Going back and looking at what excited us is still there. What the world needs is more people going into their passion. The world doesn’t need more people doing jobs and being in situations where they’re not happy and don’t have that satisfaction and joy. Let’s pivot to your book for a minute and the six secrets. We don’t want to give away the entire book, but could you talk about your book and give some tips through the lens of the book that we haven’t already discussed that pertain to the reader’s question?

One of the tips in my book is about avoiding assumptions. When she’s talking about the comparison she’s making, there are some assumptions in the comparisons she’s making about what this other woman’s life must be like based on the fact that she’s hit some milestones. The reader feels like she hasn’t met.

One of the chapters in my book talks about being leery of making assumptions. One of the chapters in my book talks about facing fears, and I don’t mean running into traffic. Shaking up your homeostasis, getting out of your comfort zone, and doing something you wouldn’t normally do. If she’d been trying the same things over and over again, we were talking about shaking up the bottle. That chapter would be part of the experience of maybe trying something new or different than things that she’s tried before that might bring more satisfaction. She’s delegating a lot of control to the external world as opposed to taking back control of herself.

One of the chapters is on active self-reinforcement and how you get reinforcement within yourself as opposed to looking for reinforcement and reassurance from other people of your worth. That applies because she’s looking for some reassurance of her worth from being matched. Instead, she looks toward herself, or how she would reinforce herself or clothing things that make her feel satisfied within herself. That would be a good way for her to start on a journey to feel more self-confident within herself.

I’ll recap the assumptions. The first one is to be careful about the assumptions that you’re making because that’s the difficult part about assumptions. We’re often not aware that we are in a place of assuming. One of the ways we can work with that is to notice when you’re doing comparisons. We all do comparisons because it’s how our brains figure out what’s safe and not safe. If I’m comparing myself to others, is it making me feel better or worse? Is it motivating me or not? If it’s not motivating you to create a real change in your life towards something you truly deeply want, let it go.

The second one is facing your fears. It’s one of my favorite things. We’re not talking about running into traffic or seeing a bear and running into its arms. No, it’s not that. It’s about looking at the unrealistic fears that often are anxiety on steroids. It’s limiting beliefs and ways of being that tell us we shouldn’t do something or we conversely should be doing something that doesn’t serve us. Spending some time to look at when fear or limiting beliefs are at work.

The third one is to take back control to foster self-worth. I love that because self-worth, self-esteem, and interior are different from confidence. That’s all about how you look or your abilities. Self-esteem is something that, as we work on and grow it, no one can take it from us. It is that powerhouse inside. All of that self-esteem doesn’t grow by chance. It grows by checking in with the self, knowing your North Star, following your North Star, and treating yourself and others with courage, dignity, and respect. These are all of these pieces that will help this individual start showing up more as the true gem and light that she is.

What could be more attractive to herself than that? Forget about all the people who are going to be attracted to that beautiful light. She’ll be like, “I rock.” It isn’t about being egotistical. It’s about knowing I’m a good, valuable human being and worthy. Not that it doesn’t fluctuate. There are days when you wake up, and you go, “I don’t feel great.”

It is more using your word sustainable. When we start growing these pieces that you’re talking about, it creates that sustainable internal world that allows joy, satisfaction, and peace to be much bigger than all of the other pieces. Dr. Jennifer, you are amazing. I appreciate the work you do. Can you tell our readers where they can find you and your book?

You can find me on my website at GuttmanPsychology.com or on Instagram, @Guttman_Psychology. You can find my book on Amazon. It’s called Beyond Happiness: The Six Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction.

Thank you so much, Dr. Jennifer, for being with us. It’s been such a joy.

Thank you so much, Dr. Carla, for having me. It was so much fun.

Thank you to our wonderful readers. Thank you for joining us. This is Imperfect Love.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Jennifer Guttman – LinkedIn
• Joy From Fear
• The Joy of Imperfect Love
• GuttmanPsychology.com
• @Guttman_Psychology – Instagram
• Beyond Happiness – Barnes and Noble
• Beyond Happiness: The Six Secrets of Lifetime Satisfaction
• Website: https://www.DrCarlaManly.com
• Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/drcarlamanly
• Twitter: https://www.Twitter.com/drcarlamanly
• Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/drcarlamanly
• LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b
• Youtube: https://www.YouTube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543
• TikTok: https://www.TikTok.com/@dr_carla_manly

 

About Dr. Jennifer Guttman

Dr. Jennifer Guttman has a doctorate in clinical psychology. She launched a motivational brand called Sustainable Life Satisfaction®. She produced a YouTube series, course and workbook based on this method. This year Beyond Happiness, The 6 Secrets of Life Satisfaction was published by Post Hill Press. Dr. Guttman is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

She has written for national news outlets such as The Washington Post and Newsweek, has been a guest on several network television programs including ABC News and has been featured on dozens of podcasts. Dr. Guttman has an active and robust Cognitive Behavioral practice.

A believer in the power of personal choice, Dr. Guttman offers her uplifting purpose statement: My mission is to use my experience, expertise, voice, and pen to help motivate and empower people to realize there is “a path to achieve sustainable life satisfaction and inherent loveability.” I have been researching and specializing in cognitive-behavior therapy and positive psychology for 30 years. I formulated the Sustainable Life Satisfaction® brand based on my therapeutic success with my clients.

SLS® utilizes six techniques; avoiding assumptions, reducing people-pleasing behaviors, facing fears, making decisions, closing out tasks, and active self-reinforcement. When coalesced these techniques assist individuals in believing in their personal effectiveness in the world, as well as giving them a sense of personal control of outcomes to the best of their ability. Therapy isn’t for everybody. However, if you’re motivated, you are the only tool necessary because you are the change agent.