Live Happy Now

Many of us would do just about anything for our pets. But have you thought about how much your pet is doing for you? This week’s guest is here to tell us! Dr. Margit Gabriele Muller is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and executive director at Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. But she’s also a speaker, life coach and author of multiple books on animals, including her latest — Your Pet, Your Pill: 101 Inspirational Stories About How Pets Lead You to a Happy, Healthy and Successful Life. She’s here to explain what our furry, feathered and finned friends are doing for our health and overall well-being.  In this episode, you’ll learn: How pets are beneficial for our daily lives and our health. How pets have been so important during the COVID-19 pandemic. How to learn to “listen” to your pet.

This has been the most unusual and, for many, the most difficult year in recent memory. So what’s gratitude got to do with it? As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, it’s the perfect time to talk about how important gratitude is – not only at Thanksgiving, but as a daily practice. Live Happy CEO and co-founder Deborah K. Heisz joins us to talk about gratitude and other practices to make this unusual Thanksgiving more meaningful. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why gratitude is more important than ever right now. Simple ways to increase gratitude in your own life. How to share your gratitude with others.

As we get older, it’s common to start thinking about what kind of legacy we’re leaving behind. But what if we started thinking about living our legacy instead of leaving it? This week’s guest is Codi Shewan, author of Everyday Legacy: Living Your Life with Purpose, Right Now. Codi’s career in the funeral industry gave him unique insight into death and the realization that every day matters. Now, he explains how each of us can discover our own legacy and live it to the fullest. In this episode, you’ll learn: What it means to live a legacy. How to use the time of COVID as a chance to re-evaluate your life and legacy. How to help others discover their legacy.

Intuition is something we’re all born with, but somewhere along the way, the noise of the outside world can drown out our inner voice. Or we forget to stop “listening to our gut.” But learning to listen to our intuition can improve virtually every aspect of our lives and help take mindfulness to the next level. This week’s guest, Kim Chestney, is an expert on intuition and author of the new book, Radical Intuition: A Revolutionary Guide to Using Your Inner Power. She explains how tapping into our intuition can change our lives — and what we can do to start.  In this episode, you’ll learn: Why it’s important to learn to listen to your intuition. How to tune into and develop your intuition. Why insightfulness is the next step beyond mindfulness.

Grief is a difficult subject, and it can be even more difficult when trying to manage it with children. After the sudden death of her husband, Ashley Bugge found herself not only raising two children and planning for the birth of her third child, but also trying to help them live in a world suddenly consumed by grief. Unable to find books that spoke to children about grief in real terms, together she and her children wrote a remarkable book titled, A Hui Hou: Until We Meet Again. This week, Ashley discusses how to talk to children about grief and loss to help them understand their feelings and live a happier life.  In this episode, you’ll learn: Why it’s important to have honest conversations about grief with children. How to make new memories as a family while grieving loss. Signs a child may be struggling with grief.

If you’ve been feeling a bit more stressed or anxious lately, you aren’t alone. A new study by the American Psychological Association finds that this election is a “significant source of stress” for some 70% of Americans. The term Election Stress Disorder was coined in 2016 by psychologist and author Steven Stosny to describe the anxiety and distress people were feeling. Now, the intensity of the current election has led to even greater levels of stress, which are amplified by social media and concerns about the pandemic. This week’s guest is Erin Wiley, a clinical psychotherapist and executive director of The Willow Center in Toledo, Ohio. Erin’s here to explain how Election Stress Disorder affects us and how we can avoid it. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why regulating exposure to the news and social media is so important. How mindfulness can help during this time. Tips for preparing your mind for Election Day — and the days that follow.

In today’s busy world, it is often easy to overlook the value of those friendships. After a cancer diagnosis, lawyer-turned-life coach Shari Leid realized that she wanted her friends to know how much they meant to her. So she made a list of 50 women and sat down with each one, face to face, to tell them what they had done for her. Not only did it change her life and the lives of her friends, but it led to the book The 50/50 Friendship Flow: Life Lessons From and For My Girlfriends. This week, Shari joins us to talk about how this mission changed her life and how you can use the same process to deepen your own friendships and discover greater gratitude in your life. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why everyone in your life is either a student or a teacher. How deepening your friendships improves your happiness. Why creating your own Friendship Challenge is even more important during a time of COVID-19.

We make decisions every day, but how often do you really think about the process that goes into making those choices? This episode’s guest has built her life on making the right decisions: As a former professional poker player, Annie Duke who won more than $4 million in tournament poker before retiring in 2012. But she also studied cognitive psychology, is a bestselling author and a consultant on decision-making. Her new book, How to Decide, picks up where her last book, Thinking in Bets, left off. This week, Annie’s here to talk about how to find better outcomes by changing the way we make our decisions. In this episode, you’ll learn: What the Happiness Test is and how it can change the way you make decisions. How embracing uncertainty can make us more decisive. When to decide fast, when to decide slow and when to decide in advance.

We’ve all told little white lies, but have you thought about how honest you really are in your day to day life? When Judi Ketteler started thinking about it, she realized that maybe she wasn’t as honest as she thought. So she delved into the research on honesty and began looking at her own habits. The result of that work is her new book, Would I Lie to You? The Amazing Power of Being Honest in a World That Lies. This week, Judi’s here to talk about why we lie, how it affects our happiness and how we can all live our lives with more honesty. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why honesty affects our happiness. How consciously becoming more honest changes our lives. The importance of being honest in a dishonest world.

There’s no question that our world needs more kindness right now, which is why this week, we are talking to Houston Kraft, author of the new book Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness. He’s here to talk about the gap between our belief in kindness and our ability to practice it. He’ll also tell us what new skills we need to acquire to better practice kindness and what we can do to turn our intentions into actions. In this episode, you’ll learn: What it means to practice “deep kindness”. 3 things that prevent us from practicing kindness. How to implement kindness as a daily practice.

Whether you’re an educator or a parent, the concept of positive education is something that can change your life … as well as the life of your student or child. In these times, it’s more important than ever to understand the role that well-being plays in the lives of students, teachers, administrators and parents. This week, Live Happy CEO and co-founder Deborah K. Heisz joins us to talk about the upcoming International Positive Education Network’s 2020 Well-being in Education Virtual Conference. This event is being offered entirely online for the first time and it’s also free for anyone who wants to attend. Tune in to learn more! In this episode, you’ll learn: What positive education is and why it matters. How to attend this free virtual event. What you can expect to learn.

Mindfulness is something that pretty much all of us have heard of and many of us want to practice it. But sometimes just the idea of learning how to be more mindful seems daunting. This episode’s guests are experts in mindfulness and they’re also good friends. That friendship and shared passion for mindfulness has resulted in the book, A Mindful Year: 365 Ways to Find Connection and the Sacred in Everyday Life. Join us as Dr. Aria Campbell-Danesh and Dr. Seth Gillihan tell how this book came about – and how you can use it daily to start or reinforce your mindfulness practice. In this episode, you’ll learn: What practicing mindfulness can do for you. How to implement mindfulness every day. Why mindfulness is more important right now than ever.

All of us feel guilty from time to time, but if you’re having trouble letting go of guilt – well, you’re not alone. Guilt is a difficult emotion which is why Valorie Burton, founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute, is tackling it in her latest book, Let Go of the Guilt. This week, she  talks about why it’s so tough to manage and gives us new tools for getting rid of that pesky thing called guilt. In this episode, you’ll learn: How to identify real guilt vs. false guilt. How to let go of guilt and live a more fulfilling life. Why guilt seemingly affects more women than men and what to do about it.

A lot of us would like to learn how to calm the chaos around us right now, and it just so happens that this week’s guest literally wrote the book on that. Nicola Ries Taggart is a life strategist, author and speaker who helps people discover a more centered, conscious approach to everyday life. Two years ago, she wrote the book Calm the Chaos, a journal designed to help users align their outer presence with inner peace. She talks about how you can learn to calm the chaos … even in these rather chaotic times. In this episode, you’ll learn: What practices you can use to calm the chaos. How she discovered these practices and why they have been so important in the past year. Why journaling every day — even for just a few minutes — can change your life.

Are you living in your heart, or living in your head? If you’re spending more time in your head than in your heart, this week’s episode is perfect for you. Sarah Blondin is an author and podcast host whose work has been translated into several languages and is in use in prison, recovery, and wellness programs. Her new book, HEART MINDED: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love, tells us how we can get out of our heads and into our hearts to find our true selves and learn how to discover – and attain — what we truly need.  In this episode, you’ll learn: What it means to become heart-minded. How practicing “soul-itude” can help you find your heart center. Why solitude can be challenging and how to practice it anyway.

Accepting the difficult events in our lives is a key part of our well-being. Acceptance allows us to cultivate a sense of calm that allows us to better deal with stress. As we deal with an increasingly uncertain world, how can learning more about acceptance help increase our happiness? This week, psychologist Scott Hass, author of Why Be Happy? The Japanese Way of Acceptance talks about how ukeireru, the Japanese principle of acceptance, can help each of us during troubled times. In this episode, you’ll learn: How learning acceptance changes your response to situations. Ways to increase your practice of acceptance. How to practice acceptance as a family.

In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about the profound transformative effect that empathy can have on us. For more than a decade, this week’s guest has been on a mission to help bring those powerful lessons to children. Lysa Heslov is founder of Children Mending Hearts, an organization that combats bullying and intolerance by inspiring empathy in children using art and other programs. Her Los Angeles based program has now grown into a national movement, and tell us how it works, why it matters and what all of us can do to get more empathy in our lives. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why empathy is so important during these uncertain times. How empathy can help reduce bullying. The long-term effects of teaching children about empathy.

It’s a brand new month and it’s also a brand new season of Live Happy Now. As we start this new season Live Happy CEO Deborah Heisz and Paula Felps talk about how things changed for all of us last season, and what we can expect to see in the coming weeks and months. In this episode, you’ll learn: What we’ll be talking about this season Where you can get the Live Happy Daily Happiness How to tell us what you'd like to hear on the show.

Anxiety is something that many of us are familiar with—particularly now. But have you considered embracing it? This week’s guest, Karla McLaren, makes the case for delving into this emotion and using it as a force of energy. Her book, Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion, takes a completely new look at how anxiety can benefit us. This week, she talks about how important it is to recognize what anxiety can do for us and learn how to use it for positive effect. In this episode, you’ll learn: How anxiety can help us prepare for the future. Why procrastination is actually considered a form of anxiety. The difference between panic and anxiety.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Lise Van Susteren was noticing a new phenomenon: patients were often plagued by worry, disturbing and intrusive thoughts, sleep disruptions, grief and more. She identified this trend as a condition she calls emotional inflammation, and along with health writer Stacey Colino wrote a book by the same name. As it turns out, Emotional Inflammation: Discover Your Triggers and Reclaim Your Equilibrium During Anxious Times is exactly the book we need for our current situation. This week, she talks about how the pandemic has only heightened our emotional inflammation — and what we can do about it.   In this episode, you’ll learn: What is emotional inflammation and what does it do to us? How does controlling the flow of information in your life help cool emotional inflammation — and how do you do that? What is the difference between being a bystander and an upstander?