Your Roadmap to Joy
Discovering what you love is one of the greatest joys, and though you might not have known it, you’ve been doing it all your life.
Lying in a field as a child and noticing tiny bright buds drawing themselves forward and backward with the wind.
I love buttercup yellow.
Exploring the world of love in your adolescence.
I love boys who make me laugh.
Choosing a career path with integrity—true to your desires.
I love helping people.
Trying your hand at weeding and planting on your friend’s farm.
I love whole days spent kneeling in the soil.
No one else can define your joy. You can and must discover your joys for yourself if you want to know what you were made for.
Not sure what your joys are? Here’s an action plan, a simple one.
The Daily Examen
It’s rooted in a centuries-old contemplative practice, and one of the reasons I know it’s such an effective tool for well-being is that it’s been renamed, repackaged, and repeated with its essential function left intact countless times.
It originated more than four hundred years ago as the Examen of Consciousness by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and has been called “moving toward and away” by motivational psychologists, “energizing and de-energizing habits” by even more motivational psychologists, “life-giving and life-taking practices” by spiritually centred leadership and relationship experts… and I call it pursuing joy versus despair.
Whatever you call it, whatever philosophical tradition you’re rooting it in, my action plan is an essential resource you can carry with you daily, helping you choose what to do next and discern the right way to go—toward joy.
Here it is.
Tonight, and every night, before you go to sleep, ask yourself these two questions:
What was the most life-giving experience of my day?
What was the most life-taking experience of my day?
Not yesterday, not when you were a kid, not what you’re worried about tomorrow, but today. You can use whatever language you wish to describe this: I use life-giving and life-taking, but you can say joyful vs. despairing, energizing vs. de-energizing.
However you name it, you are actively separating your experiences into things that, if repeated and pursued, will move you toward joy and those actions that will move you away from it. And so the most challenging part of moving forward, deciding the right thing to do, has already been done.
“Postpone joy, it will diminish. Postpone a problem, it will grow.”
What do you want? You want joy.
In my book, Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age, you discover what your joys and good burdens are: the unique experiences, relationships, and things you want more of in your life.
If you asked yourself these questions tonight, what might your answers be? Maybe your most life-giving experience today was holding your partner’s hand as you walked down the street, and your most life-taking was agreeing to a voluntary activity that you really didn’t want to do.
These realizations are valuable. They are how you honestly, actively, and with greater self-awareness admit fundamental truths to yourself about what will lead you toward a more joyful
life.
In this case, maybe those truths are these:
I want more simple intimacy with my partner.
I want to learn how to say no.
What happens then? You move toward the joy you seek. In this case, you might move toward seeking and requesting mutual intimacy and away from people-pleasing and the tyranny of “should.” You miss out on something: the relative ease of going along with something and not speaking up. And gain something in its place: comfort with expressing what you need and building the intimacy you want.
You give up the things that don’t truly serve your success and well-being.
You make the sometimes tough decisions to leave them behind. But they don’t leave an empty space—life moves too fast for that. The things you give up are replaced immediately by the things you’re moving toward, the things you’ve chosen.
You are experiencing the joy of missing out — on the right things to make space for what matters most.
Get at those joys. Find out who you are and where you want to go.
And go there.
