Joy and Excitement — What’s drives you?
Do you remember that feeling of joy and excitement you used to have as a kid when you knew something great was going to happen?
I remember I used to get so excited with my birthday and Christmas eve, or going out to ride on my bicycle, or climb trees and hang out with my friends after school.
As a kid I would get excited with simple things even though they were nothing new to me, climb trees, ride my bicycle, go to the beach, play football were my favorite things and I did that for years and years as a kid and always got excited and loved it..
As an adult I struggle to feel that level of excitement.
Even trying something new like paragliding didn’t “pump my juice” per say. I was excited but I wasn’t over the moon, filled with joy even thought I was going to cross something out of my life’s todo list.
So… what happened? Where did that feeling of joy and excitement go?
You fell blend This lead me to go into a deep retrospective about me and my life trying to figure out the last time I was really this excited about something.
It turns out I developed a “filter” to constrain that feeling. In other words, I prevent myself from going to that level of excitement and joy.
But why?
The answer is always different from person to person and mine is too personal to share here. I can tell you I’ve been conditioning myself to restrain feelings and emotions in general to prevent them from being used to hurt me.
My journey on this, my introspection lead me to believe that the lack of positive reinforcement in my life from basically everybody (friends, family, bosses, coworkers, girlfriends…) and the finger pointing when anything went wrong, particularly the “I told you so” people made me find this way of protecting myself at the expense of my own personal feeling of joy, accomplishment and fulfilling.
Even now that I am aware of this I often find myself “behaving” instead of letting a loud “Woohoo” out or jumping out of pure joy about something.
It’s doing this
when you want to do this
We jump, we scream our lungs out, we hug, we cry and make crazy dance moves when we are “over the moon” filled with joy and excitement.
To fight this self imposed “filter” I force myself to celebrate my wins, regardless of how small they might seem.
I do positive reinforcement on myself and my achievements.
There’s not many people in the world who have friends that are supportive and motivate us to excel in life, so we need to take care of ourselves so good that we reach a position where we are the change we want to see in the world around us.
So ask yourself, when was the last time you felt so happy you couldn’t contain your joy?
