What do you love?

The key to creating Joy is finding something to love in the small moments that make up each day. I invite you to join me in an uplifting exercise:

In your journal, start a list of Things I Love – allow this list to be generated stream-of-consciousness without any edits – you can set the timer for 5 or 10 minutes if you like and don’t worry if you can’t think of much, this is just the beginning, so leave a few pages blank to fill in later.

Some big things might bubble up, but it’s also important to concentrate on the little, itty-bitty details that make up your day. It might help to think of your list as ‘Things I Love right now’ or ‘Things I love today’.

Need some inspiration? here are some ideas:

• I’ve been sharing ‘Things I Love’ for many years on social media and some are included on a page in my website HERE. Perhaps you see things on my lists that you also love, or maybe you love them in different ways than I do, or maybe you don’t like them at all but something there reminds you of things that you do love. Feel free to use my lists for inspiration when creating your own lists.

• Think about your morning or evening routines — what bits do you love?

• Look around you at your home, your belongings, outside the window, along your walk /drive to work

• Think about your favorite foods, beverages

• Remember places that you’ve been, people that you’ve been with

• What music you like

• What nature sounds calm you

• Go for a walk, and look through the eye of your camera

• Look for teeny details — even decaying seed pods can have beauty if you look at them in the right way

Now it’s time to look more closely at WHY you love these things

Choose three items from your list and write in as many adjectives as you can think of to describe why you love them. Think about each item from a perspective of one of your five physical senses as well as your emotions, feelings, memories.

Try to focus on one of your senses for each item at a time then choose another of your senses.

Let’s dive even deeper and look at the same items from above in an entirely different way, using different senses than the ones you used above. With the same three items, write down as many different ways you love them.

Not sure where to start?

For an idea of how to tackle this, take a peek at my example below (under the chocolate):

My Example

Things I Love:

• Chocolate

• The Color Green

• My Cat

Why I love them:

• The way chocolate melts on my tongue, smooth, silky (touch)

• Looking out the window at my lush green garden (sight)

• My cat talking to me, echoing my words (sound)

Another perspective:

I could easily reframe each of the items I love using different senses. Above I thought about the feel of chocolate, the sight of green, the sound of my cat.

Now, I’ll think of it in terms of the smell of chocolate, the memory of green, the feel of my cat.

Things I Love (from another perspective):

• Rich, earthy smell of dark chocolate (smell)

• Running on the green moss in my parent’s orchard (memory)

• My cat’s warm body pressed up against my back like a heating pad on a cold night (touch)

Funny right – that I wrote about the feel and smell of chocolate when our immediate tendency is to love it in terms of taste! Just goes to show that there are oh-so-many ways to love chocolate!

Make it a habit

Writing out three Things I Love is like a light switch helping to shed light and train your brain to seek out the beauty and positivity in the world around you.

Challenge yourself to write out three Things I Love each day through the rest of our time together. You can write it in your journal, on a post-it note, on your calendar or on a torn up paper bag – doesn’t matter where you write it, just that you do (I like to write on a post-it and tack up on my bathroom mirror). Remember not to edit yourself on this, it can be big, or little, or the same thing every day!

Now it’s your turn to share!

What are three Things You Love and the different ways you love them?