How to Love the Life You’re Living (Even When It’s Not What You Planned) | #98

Learning how to love the life you’re living can feel impossible when your life doesn’t look the way you planned. In this Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn, Episode 98, Dawn Super shares how she learned to love the life she was already living instead of waiting for an “if / then” future. This video is for anyone living a challenging life, navigating chronic illness, a heavy past, or feeling stuck believing that happiness comes later. Through lived experience, practical mindset shifts, and her signature Happy Matters framework, Dawn explains how perspective, gratitude, and self-permission can change everything—without pretending hard things aren’t hard.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

Learn how to love the life you're actually living.

Who’s this video for?

Anyone living a challenging life. Anyone living an if / then life. If this happens, then I can love my life.

Why do we want to learn this?

Because you only have one life to live, and you can find yourself spending an entire lifetime wishing you were living a different one.

This is the Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn. Number 98. Videos designed to expand your thinking.

For 41 years, I let myself believe I didn’t have the right to be happy because I had health issues, because I had a heavy past, because I continued to attract people who took advantage of me, mistreated me, or otherwise just did not add to this experience of life.

Welcome back to my Happy Matters Collective. If you’re new here, thanks for joining us. The purpose of these videos is so we can stop making hard things harder than they need to be.

Before I got there, I was happy in spurts, but my default was miserable. The thing that helped me the most was that I decided to do a gratitude challenge. The advice was to write down ten things a day for ten days that you were grateful for. And I decided to go hardcore. I wrote down one hundred things a day that I was grateful for, for thirty days.

I walked around with my notebook looking for things I could add to the list. And at the end, I had three thousand things from my everyday life that I was grateful for.

The salt on a hot French fry.

The tang of yellow mustard.

The effectiveness of baby wipes.

Toddler lunch.

After that, I taught myself how to live Happy Matters. Super simple. Not always easy, but super simple.

Number one: remember happy matters. Write it down. Keep it in front of your face all the time. Remember why it matters.

The second thing is to notice the happy things that are around you all the time. That first sip of coffee in the morning. The way the sun shines through your window and lights up something in your house. There’s always something to notice that can bring you a moment of relief, or at the very least, a small smile.

And the third step — super important — is to give yourself permission to let the happy thing in. So many times we’re bogged down by hard feelings. We don’t feel like it’s okay to be happy, but it is. And if happy feels inappropriate, you can be grateful or compassionate.

Back in 2019, I made a list of my very legitimate complaints. I have a lot of health issues, and I was not in a great relationship at the time. And you know — all the burdens that normal people have. Everyone has normal burdens.

I wrote down all of my very legitimate complaints, and there were two hundred and seven things on that list. Some of those things are never going to change. Some of them will change in one way or another. So I had to change the way I looked at them. The way that I interacted with them.

I decided I wasn’t going to talk about my complaints anymore. They were not going to be part of my story going forward. And I’m not talking about venting to an advisor or journaling. I’m talking about my everyday conversation.

I started speaking more in balance. "This sucks, but this is good." Both are here. Both can get a nod. There’s no need for toxic positivity. Just be on your own side.

People who were on my list worked their way out of my life. I attracted more people who believe that happy matters. And the very same life that I was living got happier.

Perspective is everything.

I can’t even tell you how many times I get on the phone with a coaching client who’s feeling completely defeated about their life — feeling like they’ll never get it, that everything sucks — and within the hour they realize just how strong they’ve always been.

They see how they managed to accomplish hard things despite living a challenging life. They realize they’re further along than they thought they were. And they start to rebuild their hope from the inside. By the end of the call, they’re ready to take life on again.

Nothing is good or bad. It is our thinking that makes it so. Does it suck to have narcolepsy? Absolutely. No question. Has living this challenging life taught me an abundance of things that I can now share with the world? Without a doubt.

Balance. Seek it out.

ANNOUNCEMENT GIVEAWAY!!

This week is the one hundredth episode of the Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn—yay. I’m doing a special giveaway to celebrate episode 100.

Make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube or signed up for delivery so you don’t miss the announcement and can be one of the first hundred to receive the gift.

Wanna go deeper? Check this one out:

Sign up for Dose delivery and get my handmade-with-love How to Live Happy Matters magnet in the mail. A foundational tool for emotional mastery to help you live ‘happy matters’ (USA addresses only)

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