Change the Way You Respond to Life (How to Be on Your Own Side) | #99

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

Change the Way You Respond

If you’ve heard the phrase, life isn’t what happens to you, it’s the way you respond to it, and thought to yourself, “Yeah, but how do I do that?” This video is for you.

Why do we want to learn this?

Because humaning is hard. We need connection. We need kindness. When we’re overburdened by our own mind, it can affect the choices that we make, including the company that we keep. And everything we experience dictates how we get through the lessons.

This is the Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn, number 99. Videos designed to expand your thinking.

Life is going to life. We’re all told life isn’t what happens to you, it’s how you respond to it that matters. And then when you change the way you respond, your whole life changes.

Well, I didn’t know how to do that. So I just kept repeating the same lessons over and over and over until I built a framework to guide me. And what I was teaching myself was how to be on my own side.

I’ve built a whole channel of evergreen videos designed to help you change the way you’re responding now so that you can be more you.

Welcome back to my Happy Matters Collective. If you’re new here, thanks for joining us. We’re a small but growing collection of people who understand that humaning is not always easy. That Earth is a tough school, and that we could all use a little guidance to get through some of these challenging lessons so we can stop making hard things harder than they have to be.

So how did this come into my awareness?

Well, I knew I wanted my life to be different, but I didn’t know where to begin. So I just started consuming everything at the library—and I continue to daily, although my medium has moved from the library to my phone, which is wow, so much easier.

Brené Brown. Deepak Chopra. Dr. Judith Orloff. Joe Dispenza. Daryl Anka. Abraham Hicks. Mel Robbins. Matthew Hussey. And countless other creators. (I've linked some things below) They’ve figured some things out, and they made it their purpose to share it with the world, like I’m doing.

I took the bits of their wisdom that resonated the most for me and Dawnified it. I put it through the YOU filter and figured out how I could apply their lessons in my own life. And every year, I take on new things that I never even realized were in my way. When you have a lot, you just have to take things on one at a time. And sometimes you clear one thing and it brings up another.

So I continuously use what I call the four stages of learning to help me get through it.

Notice something needs to change.

Identify some strategies you can try to affect change with.

Practice, practice, practice, practice until you become the thing you wanted to become in the first place.

And it’s easy to get stuck between knowing what you need to do and doing it. That’s why I put it on a magnet and stuck it in front of my face. I did that because I know my limitations. Four decades of sleep deprivation—my memory is not great. And if I want to learn something, I need to keep repetition going.

It’s so much easier to respond to what life throws at us when we know ourselves, when we like that self, and when we believe in that self. So I’ll continue to share what I’ve learned during my decade-long transformation journey that helped me get to my version of thriving.

I’ve overcome so much, and it took me 41 years to get on my own side. And you know what? It’s a lot easier to respond to life in a way that benefits you when you know who you are, when you stand for who you are, and when your authentic self shows up at any given moment.

So you start small and you build—which is exactly how I designed my book, How to Be on Your Own Side. The first half gets you more comfortable doing things that benefit you, and the second half dives a lot deeper into you.

The other day, I got a message from Jane. She actually put it on my Facebook wall. Back when my book was still an email challenge, she took it and immediately after ended up spending an entire month in the hospital. And she credited the strategies she used with helping her stay calm and helping her stay on her own side.

She’s visiting with her mom, and her mom watched one of my videos and liked it. So Jane got her the book, and they’re going to go through it again together.

When you respond differently to crisis and you shift your perspective, it helps you hold your own hand through the experience until you get to the other side.

Happy matters. It’s not a tagline, it’s a lifeline. If you lean on it, it’ll help you save the quality of yours.

Want to check out some of the creators that influenced my personal growth? Just click their names:

Brené Brown - Dare To Lead. | Deepak Chopra - Soul of Healing Affirmations. | Dr. Judith Orloff-The Empath's Survival Guide. | Dr. Joe Dispenza. | Daryl Anka. | Abraham Hicks. | Mel Robbins. | Matthew Hussey.

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)

CLICK TO GET YOURS: https://dailydoseofdawn.com

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