Discovering Peace in Your Present Path, with Dr. Joy

(gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday. If you listened yesterday, you know that this week I'll be sharing some tips to help you take better care of your mental health. In Western culture, we often praise high achievers and go-getters, we're encouraged to dream big, but nobody really prepares us for when those dreams don't come to fruition which, by the way, happens to all of us. So today, we're going to talk about what to do when we find ourselves somewhere in life we didn't expect or want because, it turns out, that's probably exactly where you're supposed to be. I think that many of us set unrealistic expectations for our lives based on what other people have told us our lives should look like. So from parents, and coaches, and teachers, they often have dreams and expectations that they think we should live up to. And those things may be great, but they may not be the things that are actually true for us and things that actually speak to our heart and our own calling. And so I think it is a process oftentimes, of getting rid of the voice of other people, and other people's wishes and dreams for you to really tap into the things that really will set your heart on fire. If I think back on my own life, and like 10 years ago where I thought my life would be, I thought that I would have a cozy little private practice, be married with kids, which I am now. But I thought that my professional life would look very different than it does now. And I think, to me, is a lesson in sometimes our dreams for ourselves are not even big enough. And so sometimes we are not even making space for all of the ways that our lives could change and grow that would completely top anything that we may have currently imagined for ourselves. If I think back over my own life, when I was planning to just be a private practice psychologist, it was what I knew, it was kind of how I had been socialized and like the colleagues that I was spending time with. And it was only when I had an opportunity to do a training with some therapists in San Francisco that was really designed to help you think about like what's next in your practice. So it was actually called Next. And only then, did I really have an opportunity to think about all of the different ways that my practice could transform into what it has become. So I was already doing the podcast but didn't necessarily have plans for it to be like a huge podcast. And so all of these things were kind of percolating and kind of simmering underground, but it was only through conversations with other colleagues and...