My Personal Journey with Joy

During those three years, I found myself on contract in Austin, TX. While there, I joined several cultural groups and engaged in many activities, including poetry readings, writer’s clubs, improv shows, sushi rolling classes – the list is long. I auditioned for a role in a street theater company at a renaissance festival and found a new passion.

One of the classes I took in Austin was a creativity class. The teacher, Annie, was a well-known guide and helped us exercise our own creativity in so many ways. I still have some of my “works” – one of them proudly hanging on my wall. When another creativity class was available, I enrolled. The teacher was almost the polar opposite of Annie and treated creativity as almost clinical. Except for one part. Our first exercise was to write down ten things that brought us joy. Homework was to write 100 things. The teacher suggested that when we were feeling low, we could use our joy list and choose something that we could do to bring us joy. For the first time in my life, I was asked to explore joy, specifically my own.

When my contract ended, I went back to speaking at technology conferences, but this time, I was armed with a new story. Thus began my motivational speaking journey. One of the concepts I taught, based on the idea of the Joy List, was to build a personal “I wanna” list. I asked audiences to write what was, essentially, a bucket list.