#3 - How To Access A Happy State Of Mind

Style With Intention Podcast

Your environment has a huge impact on your emotions - and you can use it to feel happier. We can aggressively use style and design to maintain an elevated feeling state and get back to feeling happier more quickly when we're not feeling so great.

Here are the biggest takeaways from this episode:

• The relationship between our environments and how we feel can feel happier (this is about so much more than making spaces “look good”).
• A totally new way to think about design (hint: you matter).
• How to aggressively use style & design to create and maintain a happier feeling state.
• How being happier lends itself to better thinking (i.e. feeling good is TOTALLY worth making some small changes).

Hey there! Thank you for tuning in! Today we’re talking about a how you can get yourself into a happier state of mind more often! This is a topic that can affect every aspect of your life. Your environment has a huge impact on your emotions - - and the good news is - - design is something we have control over. It’s one of the best tools around to help you create a happier state of mind. It can be as simple as the colors and textures and sizes of furniture in your home. Or maybe you need to set up a space in your home that’s just for you to relax and wind down? (My dad always had “his chair” and I think each of us deserves our own special place in our homes!) The key is to know where you are and what you want to feel - so you can always be reaching for the next better feeling! As always, my goal is to make it quicker and easier for you to access more ease, joy, and intention in your life...because happy looks really, really good! Enjoy the show!

BONUS CONTENT

To help you get started, we've got really great bonus content for today’s show. We're sharing our "How To Access a Happy State Of Mind" guide so can you identify where you are right now and the next higher feeling you can reach for in your quest for a happy state of mind. (I think some of these will surprise you!) You can use this one-page guide to check in with yourself, identify the happier feeling you want to feel, and set up your environment with whatever supports you need to get there. I recommend you download it - right now - so you’ll have it anytime you need a little help -all you have to do is identify where you are now and reach for the next best emotion. It's so much easier to take small steps toward a happier state of mind, than to attempt a big leap. Give it a shot this week - now’s the best time to start taking control of how you feel.

Click HERE to get the bonus content

and we’ll send it out right away!

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In case you'd rather read than listen...

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE #3

HOW TO ACCESS A HAPPY STATE OF MIND

Welcome to the Style With Intention podcast, where we talk about how to use your personal style as a tool to create the life you want to live. We believe choice is empowering, complacency is boring, and happy looks really, really, good! Hi there and welcome to the show. I’m your host, Annie Kip and today we’re talking about how you can get yourself into a happier state of mind more often. As an interior decorator, you would think that I’m all about making things look nice. And I do love pretty spaces and all the pictures I see in glossy magazines. Perfectly styled rooms are great, but they aren’t all there is to my kind of interior design. For me, there is an important element of psychology in interior design that often gets overlooked. If we were to sit together over a cup of tea, and I were to tell you what I really think about when I am helping a client work on their space, you would hear me talk more about being happy than about fabrics, or lighting, or furniture layouts.

Sure those are the tools I use, but creating more experiences of “happy” is what I do.

It’s intentional work. I believe that your environments can have a huge impact on your emotions. I think we can aggressively use style and design to maintain an elevated feeling state and use our environments to get back on track more quickly when we are not feeling so great. Because we will always get off track. Life is a continuous process of experiencing what we like, then experiencing what we don’t like, and trying to get back to experiencing what we do like. After a long day of work. While the kids are driving you crazy. When you hear news that makes it feel like your world is out of control. We're always trying to get back to a state of happy. I believe that “happy” is your home state. I believe it’s your resting state. Your normal state of equilibrium. It has to be - because the world works so much better when people are happy. So much more gets done when you’re happy. Things just seem to flow - Both at work and at home and even when you’re relaxing. A happy mind can think of new ideas. You have easy access to a sense of expansiveness which opens and relaxes you even more. Brainstorming doesn’t feel quite as difficult or vulnerable - it feels more like a game of possibility.

A happy state lends itself to exploration, new solutions, and compromises you didn’t see before.

Sometimes, the problem doesn’t even seem like a problem from the solid, grounded perspective of a mind in a happy state. You might think “Oh, I guess it doesn’t matter that much to me after all” or “It’s fine with me, either way.” It’s easier to say “Hey, why don’t we try this?” or “This is what I really want” when you are in a happy state of mind. It’s contagious too. When you’re genuinely, unconsciously just happy - people want to be around you. They want to be on your team. They pick you for their team. They want to do your bidding.

It’s an invisible, powerful force of goodness that replicates itself every time it is shared.

I’ve said in other other episodes: that I believe your feelings are powerful, but they aren’t facts. You have a lot of influence here. If you don’t agree with this, you are essentially giving in to the mercy of your reactions and feelings. Which may or may not be based in reality - remember the example I gave of a person who is safe but believes they are in grave danger and another person who might be in a lot of danger, but have no idea of it, so they feel completely safe? Feelings are where our thoughts come from - and thoughts control what we do. I’m not suggesting that you can fool yourself into believing you are a rock star, king of the world or anything else you don’t really believe is true - actually, only a little bit.

I’m suggesting that you can choose what you focus on - and you can focus on things that will get you into a better feeling state. Small steps will help you be more successful with this - it’s super hard to go from depressed to elated - but you might be able to go from sad, to grateful. Or from angry, to compassionate. Or from hopeful, to excited.

It takes effort. You have to really try to concentrate and intentionally feel the feeling you want to experience in your bones for it to stick with you and become real. Start small. And before you know it, you will find that “happy” really does feel like your natural state of mind.

If you do choose to try this, you are taking control of the one thing that sets the tone of the rest of your life. Your feelings are the root of how you interact with people, how you see your life, and the thoughts that result in your behaviors.

My expertise is in creating the home systems and environments that make you feel the way you want to feel. My weapon of choice is interior design. My goal is to first understand what people need to feel good - because “good” means different things to different people - “good” might mean peaceful to one person, energizing to another, and cozy and intimate to yet another person. We use color, textures, layouts, and everything we can to create spaces that make people feel the way they want to feel. There are no prescriptions or rules for this - it’s a new way of thinking about interior design and it’s completely personal and unique to you. I help people figure it out, but I also believe that people have within them all the info they need to create happy spaces for themselves. It just takes focused intention to do it.

In my opinion, setting up your life to help you feel better, hopeful, and happier more more of the time is well worth the effort it takes. Just taking control feels good, but getting to a happier state will show you that this is really where you are meant to spend most of your time. And practicing only makes it easier to get back here, when you experience the less happy parts of life.

You can try it out this week, by imagining how you want to feel at home. Take the time to think about what you can do to give yourself that feeling ahead of time. Do you need a space that is all your own? Do the colors around you lift you up or bring you down. When you look around, what catches your eye? Does it make you happy? You can make the style choices which will give you more access to the feelings you want to have - which will give you those experiences which make you feel good more of the time. Because happy really is supposed to be your natural state, the way you feel most of the time. If you think this episode would be helpful for a friend, you can share it very easily - on your iPhone, I’d love to hear from you about how this is working for you, so feel free to drop me a note and let me know! Thanks for listening today. Until next week, keep making your life look the way you want to feel! Bye, bye for now! Be sure to download the free bonus content for this episode! We are sharing our "How To Access a Happy State Of Mind" guide so can you identify where you are right now and reach for the next higher feeling in your quest for a happy state of mind.

Click HERE to get the bonus content

and we'll send it out right away!

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