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Divas That Care Network
Discover Your Happy with Happiness Coach Zoe Pink
Join Host Lexi Galbraith as she interviews a variety of committed women weekly, whom are working to make the world a better place! #DivasThatCare
BIO: Life is busy. Sometimes it can seem an unending stream of work bookended with responsibilities, chores, errands, to-dos and, of course, the unexpected. Time has the tendency to disappear faster than a magician’s coin. And even if you have the resources and are motivated, the path to reach your goals can often seem un-wielding and convoluted.
This is why having a coach to provide strategic support and guidance will make all the difference in achieving your happiness. Imagine having a dedicated advisor and advocate who is always on your side to help you. Zoe helps her clients to explore the possibility and potential of true happiness on a journey of self-discovery that is as every bit unique and authentic as they are.
Zoe, a professional happiness coach, shares her journey from a traumatic childhood to finding her purpose helping others discover true happiness through self-awareness and authentic living.
• Happiness coaching framework focuses on knowing who you truly are and living in alignment with that self
• Many clients struggle with not knowing their authentic selves due to trauma, societal expectations, or numbing
• Happiness requires both internal work (removing negatives, amplifying positives) and external boundaries
• Focusing on both present happiness and future self is crucial for making aligned choices
• Reframing negative thoughts is challenging but essential for shifting perspective
• The "deathbed exercise" helps clarify what truly matters by imagining your final reflections
• Ask yourself "Did I earn my good sleep?" each night to maintain alignment with your values
• Self-kindness is foundational to happiness – we're often harsher with ourselves than we would be with others
• Teaching self-compassion to children creates generational healing
• Holistic happiness requires tending to mind, soul and heart – not just physical wellbeing
For more Divas That Care Network Episodes visit www.divasthatcare.com
It's Divas that Care Radio Stories, strategies and ideas to inspire positive change. Welcome to Divas that Care, a network of women committed to making our world a better place for everyone. This is a global movement for women, by women engaged in a collaborative effort to create a better world for future generations. To find out more about the movement, visit divasthatcarecom. After the show. Right now, though, stay tuned for another jolt of inspiration.
Speaker 2:Wonderful friend, zoe, with me and she is a happiness coach, and so Zoe is going to share a bit with us about her passion, her experience and everything about being a happiness coach. And I guess I'll start off with we met we're trying to figure it out so, like all talk Tuesdays, we ended up having like a two hour conversation before we started filming, which was awesome. But I think it's about we figured between four or five years ago that we met a tribe and just had this instant connection with each other and it's, it's been awesome. Even though we haven't seen each other in a long time, it just always feels like like we've never been apart. When we get together and we start chatting again, it feels like we just saw each other the other day. So yeah, zoe, I'll let you kind of introduce yourself and tell us about your passion and what drives you and being a happiness coach.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, thank you, lexi. Thank you for having me on. I yeah, happiness coach is something you may have never heard of and, to be honest, I kind of made it up. Now there's a few out there now but, yeah, I didn't really see like, oh well, I heard of that, that's a happiness coach, I want to be that.
Speaker 3:So for me, happiness I got to twirl backwards, go back back back in time and start with when I was a child. I actually had a really bad upbringing is really actually traumatic, and it started right as a baby. So right from the moment I came home, there was problems and in and out of started right as a baby. So right from the moment I came home, there was problems and in and out of foster care as a baby. And then my parents divorced and I was actually raised by my father and I will say this was a very unhappy man raising me and my brother, and so that set the stage for what was a really negative, really bleak, really terrible childhood. And partway along the way I started thinking to myself I want to be happy. So you know, if there was the first star at night I would wish. I just want to be happy, you know, anytime if there was a candle to blow out, I want to be happy, and this just became something I was really focused on. I didn't really know what happiness was, I just knew I wanted to be it, and so that was my yearning, that was my secret wish every time I could make one. And yeah, so continue tumbling along through teenage years, still really unhappy and still really, you know, not doing well.
Speaker 3:I left home at a young age. I was a high school dropout, I did go back and finish, but I, yeah, I just continued along this path, but still always yearning to be happy. And I started working on it in my early 20s and you know that was painful and hard and overwhelming. There was no internet back then, so I didn't know where to go and how to do this. I was living in Toronto, paying Toronto rents with like no extra money, so there was no therapy, and so I just started feeling into and looking around at what books and just trying to sort of cobble together ways that I could become happy.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, it just continued on being my theme, being my focus, ended up doing lots of different office jobs and different careers, always struggling to go in and out and figure out what am I meant to be? Oh, I'll go to hair school I meant to be a hairstylist. And then chemical allergies, so nope, back into the office world. And then it's like, okay, I really love fitness, I'm going to go be a personal trainer. So how would I go, study for the year, become a personal trainer? And then that business model didn't work.
Speaker 3:Back into the office and so kind of going back and forth and in the office world I never really felt like I belonged or very happy. And so the last time I came out of an office job I said to myself I need to just relax, I need to just heal and I need to start to think about what am I meant to do, what am I meant to be when I grow up? And so I healed, spent some time, you know, enjoying some sun on the deck and started, you know, just trying to like delve into different things. You know, what do I love all those different questions everyone's always asking and I decided that I wanted to be a life coach. So off I went to take some life coach training and yeah, did that.
Speaker 3:And then everyone's talking about you need to have a niche, like what kind of niche. What kind of niche? I mean? Yeah, I know I've studied to be a personal trainer, but I didn't feel that that was the right answer for me. I didn't want to be a wellness coach, you know, just working, or like back into the personal training again. So I thinking, thinking, thinking, and then I realized, finally, I was like what is the one thing that has always driven me, always been my North Star, my guiding light, and and it's it's been happiness, my search for the attainment, the keeping of the desire for happiness. So there it began. I'm decided, I'm going to be, I am a happiness coach. That's how I ended up deciding to be a happiness coach.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And so when people, when you're working with people, what kind of things do you? Can you take us through, kind of what a session would look like with you?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess first of all, even before a session, the idea of like a framework, is that happiness for me is about knowing who you are and then living in alignment with that. And so first thing is, some people don't know who they are. You know, they've had a lot of sadness or traumas or different disappointing events happen and they've numbed a lot, and or they've decided to do what their parents told them to do or what society expects from them, and, and yet again, they've decided to do what their parents told them to do or what society expects from them, and yet again they've filtered down and lost their sense of self and their own essence. And so it might sound simple to say you know, live in alignment with who you really are, but if you don't know who you are, then that's the first thing that needs to be explored and looked into. So that would be just sort of like an overarching first step. Now I'll just maybe tell you quickly with steps and then I can chat about sessions.
Speaker 3:But a lot of the framework around happiness, the way I'm coaching it, is that we're going to take a look at internally what we have. So we want to look at things that are making us unhappy that we already have or we are and we want to remove or mitigate them. And then we're looking at what's working and we want to acknowledge and we want to inflate it, we want to make it bigger. Then we look external. We want to be able to block things that are going to come in and be negative or make us unhappy and we also want to bring in more of the good. And again, you can see, lexi, why at this point it's important to understand who you are, because those four parts are all different for each person, same and so. And then, of course, there's a sort of extra time spent on what I'll call living in the shit when things get really, when they go really sideways about how to, you know, deal with that, and then, I guess, when you're in a really great spot, just like evolving it even further, and so those are kind of like the roadmap on how we sort of move through happiness coaching. It's not always linear like that, but those are sort of the main ideas and themes and focuses that are going on in a coaching session.
Speaker 3:A coaching session is actually different depending on who I'm coaching. I always will start with how are you doing, because it's super important to know if something big has come up. I coach a lot of people once a week or the bulk of them are every other week, so a lot can happen in two weeks. So it's just really important to know is there a pressing issue or problem that just you want to talk about, get some feedback on, get some support on, so that you're you know, utilizing any tool that you need to in order to again block, bring in, enhance, you know, just while dealing with that particular issue? So I always will take that opportunity just to check in and see about that, because sometimes that alone drives the entire session and maybe even multiple sessions. And so that's, I guess, the one thing.
Speaker 3:And then the next thing is coaching always involves homework.
Speaker 3:So once you know someone's doing okay, it's time to start going through the homework and checking in, and, and that can go pretty quickly with some people, but with some people that can take quite a while, because while doing the homework there's been awesome opportunities to reflect, to learn, or, even better, when they have trouble doing the homework, and then they have to come back and ask for clarification or examples or they need to tweak it a bit, because really it's about what works best for you in your life, and so it's this almost dance right where we both are involved in coming up with not only the homework but making sure the homework fits right and is going to serve and is going to bring you closer to not only your happiness in the moment, which is something I'm very focused on, but also the other component, the final component of happiness is the sense of your future self.
Speaker 3:So I'm always being paying attention to these two separate selves, so it would be like Lexi right now and Lexi in the future, because what we're doing in the moment becomes who we become in the future, and so paying attention to that and honoring that and making those smart decisions, enhancing, getting rid of bringing in, blocking, paying attention to the version of yourself that you want to be in the future, is super important.
Speaker 3:Because here's the honest truth as we sit here right now Right now, I and you, lexi, we are the accumulation of many different steps and actions and decisions and thoughts and feelings that we felt to get us right here in this exact moment, and so we can all say it's true that there's certain states we can be in that make it easier to be happier and certain states that make it harder to be happier, and so we can just make more of those decisions that are going to line us up in our future selves. To make it easier, I say, why not? And so I really like to coach based on those two sort of moments in time.
Speaker 2:Awesome. And so when you're seeing people, do you? Is it men and women? What are the different?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I coach adults. I coach adults only and I actually coach quite a few men. I enjoy coaching men and women. I find I connect really well with men. I just more because I think men are not necessarily given a lot of attention, they're not given a safe space in order to talk about their hopes, their fears, their struggles, their happiness, and so I think maybe when I've connected and found male clients, they I think they're just really ready for that type of support and that type of help. And whereas I mean I love coaching women, because often the women that come to me they're so open and ready to just be diving in and just so hopeful that there's going to be a wonderful change after we work together.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, and so do you in in the people that you've worked with. Is there, does there seem to be, a central theme in terms of, or what are the main things that people tend to struggle with when it comes to happiness? I mean, I know it's different per person, but are there some overarching things that you've noticed?
Speaker 3:I think, like you said, people are quite different. But I think that, besides this, living in alignment is like I found that a lot of people are struggling to even know who they are, and that breaks my heart in a lot of ways Because that's just, someone's self has gotten lost along the way. But I have found that that is a very big common theme pretty much with all my clients, and so that's that's sad, but I mean it's great that they're wanting to explore and and take the time and and work on discovering who they really are so that they can honor that person and be happy in that moment. I would say. Also, a lot of clients struggle with reframing, you know, with that. So for those that don't know, reframing is taking an idea, thought happening and if it's negative, trying to find a way to shift it.
Speaker 3:It's that proverbial is your glass half full or half empty? And that's easy just to say and roll that saying off the tongue. But when you get out into the real world it can be really challenging to even one notice it's happening and then to have the willingness to, you know, surmount the negativity bias we all have and then actually move into saying something like being creative enough to come up with a reframe, that's, even if it's just a bit more positive. A lot more positive might feel like a bit of a reach, depending on where you're at, but a little bit, you know, or a lot more positive. So that's uh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's another thing I find a lot of people really struggle with, as well, and so do you have any tips or tricks, like for someone who might be feeling like feeling a little bit lost? Do you have any, any homework or something that you find has been very useful in helping people Like, is there one in particular that you think seems to be? Again, even though everybody's different, that seems to kind of be helpful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I know what you're saying. I I love the deathbed exercise, to be honest. Okay, and that is okay, you can just say it. But it's like I love for people to sit quietly and just really calm their breathing down and just close their eyes and go into that state of imagining which I know is hard for some people, so doing the best they can, just imagining that you're laying there on your deathbed but you're not dead yet, but you're about to die, you're dying shortly and just thinking about what really mattered.
Speaker 3:So the hope is to find what did you miss doing, what did you miss saying, what did you miss experiencing? You know just who did you miss talking to. What about yourself? You know what legacy did you leave? That's a big one, especially, a lot of my clients have kids. So what legacy are you leaving? And just like, what kind of man or woman were you?
Speaker 3:So you can also look at it like what would you like people to say about you at your funeral? That's sort of another. But like you're laying there, but it's like again, if you just get out of your head and try to lay there and just like really feel into, like having no energy, being really like, oh, you know, and just being like this is my last moment, what? What would you have hoped had happened? Where would you like to have gone? Who would you like to have kissed?
Speaker 3:You know, like, like any of these things, like, did you want a wall that was red, you know, and you always had beige. I mean, it's a silly thing, so that's probably not on your deathbed, but it's any of those things, big and little. And then what I like to do is to bring this back into the day today, by when you're at the end of your day, brushing your teeth or flossing, washing your face, whatever it is you do asking yourself did I earn my good sleep? So there's the did I earn my good death at the end of our days. But we have to drive that back into our day to day again, informing who we're going to be in the future. So it's this asking yourself, did I earn my good sleep? And the idea of that is that there's some parallels with what was going to earn you your good death. Way to stay like a touchstones, just to keep, you know, your finger on the pulse, and asking yourself that one quick question at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:I like that and it actually makes me think too of like obviously your personal trainer as well is when you're meeting with clients and you're asking them okay, so what kind of habits this is your goal. If you've achieved your goal, what kind of habits and how are you living your life? What are you thinking? What are you feeding? What feeding yourself? What are you reading? What activities are you involved in? What things are you saying yes to and what things are you saying no to and and releasing so that you can be and achieve what it is you want to? So it's interesting. I kind of see, as you're explaining the deathbed exercise. It makes me think of that too. It's, it's yeah, and I think that's it. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:I know people have said to me don't you have any regrets? I mean, certainly in life there are things in the 51 years I would have maybe done differently or I wish hadn't happened. Not necessarily wish, because everything that's happened has made me who I am today. But really I don't have any regrets. I really don't, because it's always been a case of in my mind and I don't know if this is part of that why I tend to generally be. I am a very happy person. It just feels like it's my, it's me to my core.
Speaker 2:But I think part of it too is that I always think of you know, when I made the move out to Calgary, for example, 11 years ago, it in my head, before I even looked at taking my transfer and leaving, and you know, 17 years of my life back home behind it, was thinking you know what, if I don't take this chance, am I going to be 80 rocking on the porch with my bestie thinking, oh, I wish I would have. And so for me that was kind of a telltale moment. And again it sat in my heart and it resonated Like you talked about your, your true self, right it. It was one of those things where it's like no better to take the chance. This is an adventure and I think that that reframing and that that attitude and asking yourself those questions are so important. So, yeah, that's, that's really interesting and I like that exercise, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think. I think I love that idea, the idea of just asking yourself what would a fit person do, what would a happy person do, is a great way to like have the touchstone even throughout the day when you're making some of those decisions. But you're right, I 100% agree with what you're saying, that of course we want to be like paying attention to what is our intuition and what is our heart telling us, and that's a whole other thing that I coach on as well like, so people are like, but I don't know how to do that. I don't know what it's saying, so I love to help with that as well. But I yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's really, it's really wonderful helping people try to move from that place of not knowing to knowing. But I did want to.
Speaker 3:To your point, just say I'm 51, just like you, lexi, and even if there was things that we wish we had done differently, what I would want to say is there's no need to have any blame or shame about the fact that you didn't do something.
Speaker 3:So spending our time looking backwards is not very serving. Yes, it's great to learn a lesson if we can put it in our pocket, put it in our heart and take it with us. But if there's no lesson to learn, we spend so much time being unkind to ourselves and beating ourselves up, which is not very conducive to happiness, I might add. You know. So, while we're here, maybe at whatever age, starting this journey towards happiness I would I always encourage don't worry about what's gone behind. There is just no need to be harsh or shaming to yourself, because you only know in this moment what you know in this moment, now, a moment ago you didn't know it, or maybe you weren't brave enough to do it. Yet you know, and there's nothing wrong with that, because you're doing the very best you can with what information you have in this exact moment, and that's the beauty of the moment.
Speaker 2:And so, true, right, I think that if we, if we dwell on the past and it becomes an anchor, and it's this ball and chain that makes it very difficult to change your, it's difficult to change your reality and go towards something new when you're being held back and not just held back, dragged back and held down and and again, replaying it over and over again does not help your mental state, does not help your physical state or your soul for that matter. So, yeah, definitely right, all of those things, it's, it's, and I think that's it too. I think that that, again, if I think to my own attitude, it's yeah, okay, so perhaps not the best choice, but you know, you know what it it I, I can't do anything about that. The choice was made back then. This is how I chose to behave or this is what happened.
Speaker 2:Um, but I am not just, as I don't define myself by my chronic illness. I don't define myself by perhaps a misstep or a side, you know, sidetrack, or whatever you want to call it. It happened. Okay, give myself the same grace I would give my best friend or my students and move on. So I think that grace piece is so important for ourselves, we're so good at giving it to others, and yet when it comes to ourselves, we're very harsh critics too.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and you just reminded me of something. So the clients I have, they have children and and especially daughters, it seems, and I've got I'm always trying to work on clients being kinder to themselves. So that's another point that I'll work on and I love it because when they can finally get some good habits going with this, it's for them to teach it to their daughters or to their kids, so some of what they learn they then turn around and they offer up and teach to their, their children to. I love, and so, yeah, I just think, like kindness to yourself is such an essential component to being happy, and yet we're so aware of someone's bullying us, or if we had a trauma or a problem, something external happening to us, and we have, you know, so much awareness around it, whether we're blaming or not, but there's so much awareness, but there's no real filter awareness when we're bullying ourselves when we're being unkind to ourselves.
Speaker 3:And yet so many people are constantly negative and unkind to themselves in a way, like you said, they would never be to I don't even think they would be to someone they don't like, to be honest, like nevermind the best friend or a beloved parent or a beloved child, I think even to someone they don't care very much for, they would never actually utter those words in like hearing to this, these people you know and so, and yet we just are so careless with how we speak to ourselves or how we think about ourselves or even how we speak about ourselves, and so I try to work on that with clients as well. I again love the idea of kindness kindness from me to you, lexi, but also I love the idea of you giving yourself the gift of kindness. Kindness from me to you, lexi, but also I love the idea of you giving yourself the gift of kindness as well.
Speaker 2:yeah, definitely, definitely. That's awesome, zoe. I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to share. This has been such a good conversation. I mean, we've also talked for two hours before we did, we did, yeah, no equally as rich and and just so good, like it's it's.
Speaker 2:You brought up so many good points in it and I think that that's it is. Is you know people, will you know, hire a trainer. They'll do all this stuff, they'll eat right, they'll do this, but if you're not minding your mind, your soul and your heart, um again, all of that is together, it's intertwined. It's that circular and holistic piece where, if we don't pay attention to all of those pieces, we have problems.
Speaker 3:Yeah, true, it's sad, but it's true. Yeah, no, exactly, yeah, no, thank you. Thank you, lexi, so much for having me on and anyone watching. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:We'd love to get your comments. So if you watch this, please just interact with us, let us know what you thought. And if you want to connect with Zoe, I'll make sure to grab her link and I'll post that with the video as well, and then that way you can reach out, or you can reach out to me, and then I can pass you on which she's lovely. There's no need to be afraid. So I mean, you can do it either way. But yeah, please let us know what you thought and we will see you next time. Thanks, guys, bye thanks for listening.
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