Stop Escaping Your Life: The Power of Small Joys
Most of us know the feeling. Friday can't come fast enough, the phone comes out the moment there's a pause, and a weekend away starts to sound less like a treat and more like a rescue. Nothing is wrong, exactly. It just doesn't feel like a life you want to stay in.
In this episode of Candid Coach Conversations, Kimberly Boyd, founder of Live Life Fully, sits down with Teresa Anderson, a licensed therapist and certified Live Life Fully coach, to talk about building a life you don't need a break from... and the small, almost silly things that make an ordinary day worth coming home to.
Start with what you keep needing a break from
Teresa's first move is a question, not a fix. What do you constantly need a break from? If there is something in your week that has you wondering "when is this going to end?" every time you're in it, that is a pointer. It shows you where you might be escaping... or wanting to. And it opens a second question: where are you surviving instead of living?
With clients, she gets curious about the basics. What feels good about your life? Where does joy show up, and where is it missing? Is your life built around other people's expectations, or around what is true for you? And what routines are in place to support a life that feels well lived instead of constantly exhausting?
Kimberly points out that most people have never asked. We don't know what we don't know, including the places where joy has quietly gone missing. Sometimes the first clue is the remote control... flipping through every channel without watching any of them.
What have you been tolerating?
Kimberly's own version of the question is sharper: what have I tolerated that has now become normal? Not bad, necessarily. Just limiting.
For her, it was scrolling. When she finally did the math on the hours, her reaction was one word: gross. "I was giving my life away to a screen." The two of them talk through what the research is finding, from anxiety and depression to constant comparison, and Kimberly borrows a point from Brendon Burchard: every post you scroll past asks you to decide something. Do I like it? Do I comment? That is a lot of brain power spent on people you may not even know.
Teresa names what it turns into: observing instead of living. Watching other people's lives while yours passes by.
Sometimes the fix is selling the couch
Teresa's own turning point was a big one. She woke up one day, listed every piece of furniture she owned on Facebook Marketplace, and sold it. For about two weeks she had no couch and no table. Then she bought the things she actually wanted and built a home that feels good to come back to and good to entertain in.
Since then the changes have gotten smaller... lighting, the cups and glasses she likes drinking out of, candles, a push-button scent that makes the house smell like a hotel. Things that romanticize the everyday and make it feel like hers.
Work gets the same attention. Her office is small, so she keeps the window open and watches the birds. She steps into the hallway to hug a coworker, or takes ten or fifteen minutes in the sun. She calls it choosing how to enjoy her life, even while she's "entertaining the mundane."
Living by the school bell
Teresa's weekdays are programmed. Morning clients, the car rider line, a couple of hours at home, four hours of clients, back to the car rider line, dinner, then back to work again. She lives by the school bell, and Kimberly is already writing that phrase down.
On days that full, joy has to be intentional. In the car line she reads something she enjoys or has a little jam session, depending on her mood. She has also had honest conversations with her teenager about time management: she has a life too, so the picking up and dropping off needs to happen within certain hours. Weekends are for cooking big meals and finding water... a lake, a river, a pool, whatever is nearby.
Her point is not that the routine disappears. It's that the things that support you belong on the list too, especially on the hard days. If one small thing changes your whole day, or buys you an hour of peace, it's worth it.
A dollar bottle of bubbles
And then there are the bubbles. Years ago a coach talked to Teresa about childlike wonder, and it stuck. Now she keeps bubbles in her car, in her garage, at her front door, and at her office. When a client has something to celebrate... a task finally done, a change they're proud of... she blows bubbles right then and there.
Kimberly is all in. At one Live Life Fully retreat, people lined the bulkhead at the lake blowing bubbles, then came back talking about how refreshed they felt. It makes sense. You have to take a breath in to blow one. Teresa adds that you automatically look up when bubbles float by, and that most of us met them as kids, so there's a little wonder waiting in every bottle. Kimberly would love to see people blowing bubbles from their car to the door of the post office, the grocery store, the dry cleaners. She bets we'd see more smiles.
It costs a dollar at the dollar store. In Teresa's words, it's "this experience that has magic if you allow it to."
That magic turns up in other small places too. A hummingbird tapping at her office window. The red birds and the blue birds and their little patterns. On days when she holds a lot of heavy things for other people, those moments are often the reason she can still say the day was pretty good.
When even the coach wants to run
Kimberly is honest that she isn't immune. With a new event building going up on her property, the decisions piled up: colors, napkins, silver or gold, the menu... and chair widths. Eighteen, twenty, twenty-two or twenty-four inches. She had no idea that was a question.
She caught herself wanting to escape a place she loves, the place she calls her vacation home. Her check for overwhelm is to ask where she's overthinking. Then she noticed something smaller: she hadn't lit a candle in two weeks. So she lit one (never cinnamon roll, it makes her hungry), took an Epsom salt bath, put on music, and sat with her feet in the pool. She recentered, walked back out to the contractor, and asked if he had any more questions for her.
Teresa calls it reconnecting to the part of yourself you've put on hold... something we rarely notice we've done. Kimberly adds one more simple reset, inspired by Dr. Amen: get outside into the morning sun within thirty minutes of waking, bare feet on the ground, before reaching for the phone. As Teresa puts it, so many of the things that change a day are this simple, and we still don't make time for them.
What to take with you
Asked what she wants listeners to leave with, Teresa doesn't hesitate.
"Give yourself permission to want something different, even when what you have is already good."
Kimberly's follow-up is more practical: go get some bubbles.
About the Coach
Teresa Anderson is a licensed therapist, a certified Live Life Fully coach, and the author of The Table, a book about transforming stories of pain into purpose. Learn more or book a complimentary strategy session with Teresa at llfully.com/teresa-anderson.
A certified Live Life Fully coach can help you take the next step, together. Book your complimentary strategy session at llfully.com.
