Anthony Poponi Focuses on the 40% of Happiness You Control Now

Title: Anthony Poponi Focuses on the 40% of Happiness You Control Now

 
In this episode of the In the Rising podcast, host Bettina M Brown interviews Anthony Poponi, a corporate trainer, motivational speaker, and coach who focuses on happiness and positive psychology. The conversation delves into how Anthony got to this point in his career and his passion for helping others through science and service.

Anthony shares his belief that happiness is not something that should be pursued solely in the future, but rather something that can be cultivated and enjoyed in the present moment. He emphasizes the importance of combating the tendency for the brain to habituate to goals, leading to a lack of fulfillment even when those goals are achieved.

Throughout the episode, Anthony highlights the practice of gratitude as a powerful tool for cultivating happiness. He explains that by actively practicing gratitude, individuals can shift their focus to appreciate the present moment and find joy in everyday experiences.

Additionally, Anthony discusses his own journey towards finding a career that combines his passion for science and his desire to be of service to the world. He shares how he evaluated his gifts and interests and ultimately found a way to bring more joy into his work.

This episode serves as an insightful exploration of happiness, positive psychology, and the potential for finding fulfillment in the here and now. Listeners are encouraged to consider how they can embrace gratitude and focus on the 40% of happiness within their control.

Topics covered:
- The brain's tendency to habituate to goals
- The practice of gratitude as a means to cultivate happiness
- Anthony's background and career journey
- Finding joy in work through aligning with personal gifts and interests
- Embracing the 40% of happiness within one's control

Learn More about Anthony here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Anthony Poponi: And the problem is, is that the brain habituates to this goal coming in front of us. And just as we're about to get to that goal, we celebrate it internally in our brain without even thinking about it. And then when we get there, we're like, I thought I'd be happy when I got here and now I'm just here.

[00:00:13] Anthony Poponi: You know, and we can combat that, right? You know, the, the active practice of gratitude.

[00:00:30] Bettina M Brown: Hello, hello, and welcome to In the Rising podcast. My name is Bettina Brown, and this is the platform I've chosen to talk about living a life that's in alignment with your hopes, your dreams, and your goals. Turn in your back on shame and blame and really everything that drags your life down, not where you want it to be.

[00:00:49] Bettina M Brown: So my guest today is Anthony Poponi and he is someone who really enjoys going after happiness now, not just in the future. You hear that in the words he speaks. You see that on his podcast himself. You can just feel that happiness is not something that's going to happen one day. You can focus on that right now.

[00:01:13] Bettina M Brown: And so I'm really grateful for your time today. And thank you for listening to Anthony and my conversation. So Anthony, thank you so much for your time today. I'm grateful for your time to be here on in the rising podcast. I read about you. I've researched you and I'm really interested in learning more about what you do regarding positive psychology.

[00:01:35] Bettina M Brown: So welcome. First of all, it's in the writing. Thank you for the welcome.

[00:01:38] Anthony Poponi: Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:40] Bettina M Brown: All right. And so. What I have here is that your background, you're now a corporate trainer, motivational speaker, a coach. I'd like you just to share how you, how you got to this point, because not everyone is just full of happiness, full of joy and excitement.

[00:01:55] Bettina M Brown: From the get go, like, what how'd you get here?  

[00:02:00] Anthony Poponi: Well, this is only supposed to be a 30 minute podcast. I don't know how much time we have. It is the abbreviated version. I'll do the abbreviated version. I think 2 things have come together. I love science. So, I love the practical application of positive psychology, which I think we'll probably talk about a little bit.

[00:02:15] Anthony Poponi: And then the other part of it is I'm service focused. And so my career leading up to. Transitioning to my own company was almost always public sector or nonprofit. And, you know, I think the thing that I figured out, and maybe we could pull on this thread as the conversation goes on, is that I was trying to figure out the thing that I could do that could be of great service to the world.

[00:02:35] Anthony Poponi: And it didn't have as much suffering to it. You know, and I think that we sometimes get caught in the trap of saying, like, you know, that, that, oh, the suffering, the hard stuff is really, really good. And we should just do that all the time. And I don't, I don't agree with that. You know, so I had to, like, I really had to sort of, I don't want to call it a midlife crisis, but, like.

[00:02:53] Anthony Poponi: More of a, I have this thing that I'm really good at and I have the surface mindset. And so, like, how do I find a different way to do that as me, that's maybe more joyful for me.

[00:03:03] Bettina M Brown: So, you also evaluated where, what your gifts were and your interest in science, but also how can you do something with that? So that is fearful for some people that, you know, trying to figure that out.

[00:03:19] Bettina M Brown: Are you a person that just kind of, there's some of us that are a little more okay with change and risk. And others of us, like, we have to focus on that. Where, where where were you on that spectrum? 

[00:03:30] Anthony Poponi: You know, I think a little bit of both, you know, like, there's, there's equal sides to that. Right? And so I think that, you know, if we were to look at, like, you know, the wheel of someone's life, or I use an activity called pillars of a balanced life, and I call them batteries, you know, and there's these different aspects of our lives.

[00:03:47] Anthony Poponi: Like, how do we feel about fun and play? How do we feel about our career? How do we feel about our community relationships, fitness, you know, all those sort of things. And for me, I, I think that I was looking to kind of like, push on the, the more fun factor in things of things that I recognize. I was pretty good at and then I was paying attention to cues that were going on around me being like, oh, like, this is, you know, what?

[00:04:10] Anthony Poponi: Oh, I can't the author's name right now, but he would say rare and unique gifts. You know, like, what are the things that you can do that other people can't do? Thank you. And, and for me, that's, that's professional speaking, but, you know, the, the fear part of that for me has been eased over time because I've done a lot of it in different ways that led to this.

[00:04:29] Anthony Poponi: You know, I was a school teacher for a while. If you can teach a bunch of 7th and 8th graders, you know, they're going to be your worst audience on a regular basis for the entire school year. And so I wasn't, I wasn't afraid to be in front of those groups when I was even working in science, a lot of conservation based work.

[00:04:45] Anthony Poponi: With sea turtles, and I was always the 1 that they were like, we need someone to give a presentation to the public and I was like me, you know, and so where that's really maybe different from standing on a stage in a conference with, you know, hundreds or thousands of people there. I've kind of worked my way through that, you know, and I worked my way up to that.

[00:05:05] Anthony Poponi: Whereas I think if, you know, 15 or 20 years ago, you would have said stand on stage with 2000 people and give them a 45 minute motivational talk. I would have been like, ah, you know, like, but it's been this process. And I, and I think that that's something that we it's even an activity I do with my, my clients of, you know, like your life in 5 parts.

[00:05:20] Anthony Poponi: You know, if you can look at the things you overcame, you can start seeing these patterns of resilience that we have within us.

[00:05:24] Bettina M Brown: I like the way you frame that patterns of resilience. Do you feel when you're working with clients or having your, your presentations, do you feel that in general, we as people are aware of our patterns of resilience, or are we just tend to focus on the, the tasks that we can't seem to overcome when we feel stuck?

[00:05:47] Anthony Poponi: I think it depends on the person, honestly. I mean, so much of that is self awareness, you know, and some, you know, I think the big difference for a lot of the people that I work with sometimes is like, Hey, are you aware of who you are and like, the really good side of you, the really cool things that are strong in you.

[00:06:04] Anthony Poponi: And then let's talk about the patterns you build up that are, you know, saboteur ish, you know, that have. That have been built up to protect you, or they're the default pattern of how you approach every problem. And sometimes, like, the resources that we have that default doesn't getting get us through it.

[00:06:19] Anthony Poponi: You know, that, like, we have to learn to flex as leaders and flex as humans. And say, you know, like, I've kind of hit this, like, this ceiling above me and for me to push through that, I've got to do something different. And if we can look at how we've hit those ceilings before and push through those, then we can say, all right, next bigger challenge.

[00:06:38] Anthony Poponi: I'm ready for the next bigger challenge. And if we don't, like, if we go back to the stuff that were the challenges when we were 20 or 30. They're not, they wouldn't be challenges anymore. They wouldn't be. They also probably wouldn't bring us the joy of the fulfilling those things and achieving. 

[00:06:53] Bettina M Brown: And you've talked about joy fulfillment focus on that.

[00:06:58] Bettina M Brown: So, where did the jump go from school teacher to now where you say your focus is positive psychology and motivational speaker? Like, where was that? That transition for you and what, how did that help you find your greater joy and fulfillment? 

[00:07:13] Anthony Poponi: Yeah, it's, you know, it's a circuitous route sometimes, you know, and I think that that's the I think that's the grace we have to give ourselves, you know, that sometimes it's life is a series of 2 steps forward 1 step back 1 step sideways 1 step half forward 1 step half back 1 step down.

[00:07:29] Anthony Poponi: I don't know. We're working on multiple planes of dimensions here now, you know, it's. I think that I just had to play in that space for a while, you know, and for the longest time I was, I was like, I'm going to be a professional speaker and even the day that I like said that I was like, I am a professional speaker.

[00:07:46] Anthony Poponi: It was like, boom, I was like, oh, look at that label. I just added that's a good label, you know, and I had to shed some old labels to allow for that label to emerge. And, and I think that the growth has been in all of those places. I told you I'm very service focused. I want to make an impact. I want to have joy, right?

[00:08:04] Anthony Poponi: So, I'm seeing events, super joyful, right? Super silly, easy for me to do. And, and I was playing with professional speaking as a subject matter expert, positive psychology over time, you know, building that up over time, playing with auctioneering, playing with facilitation, any of those realms that could put me front and center with crowds because I'm, you know, I'm extroverted as a tendency.

[00:08:27] Anthony Poponi: And so, I like the energy and the interaction from the crowd. And as I've grown, I like the increasing the increasing complexity. Like, if I walk up to an event, you're like, Anthony, I need you to emcee my child's birthday party. Actually, that's going to be really hard. So, I would do that. And that would be a good challenge.

[00:08:46] Anthony Poponi: But I think if you handed me a script for an event, and just said, we just need you to read these words clearly, I'd be like this. Is going to be boring for me, you know, like, and that's the, the documented state called flow that me high chicks and me high that determine a positive psychology of like, this axis of challenge and ability.

[00:09:04] Anthony Poponi: You know, as we continue to grow our abilities, we can meet bigger, bigger challenges. If we go too far, and the challenge is too big for us, and our abilities aren't there yet, it's not going to feel good and it's going to be anxious. Right? But if our abilities are really great, and the challenge is really low, and we can, you know, we can be apathetic towards that.

[00:09:22] Anthony Poponi: Right. And that can happen and work is you have to find this balance of, like, the right amount of challenge me. I would say 4%. More harder than what we did before, and we should challenge our teams in that same way. And then we should recognize that. Like, we don't need to be challenged all the time either.

[00:09:37] Anthony Poponi: Right? There should be ebbs and flows. So, yes, I think we've all experienced those days. We were like, I would like to not put out any more fires today. Please can I actually go back to my job? That's the job on paper. 

[00:09:50] Bettina M Brown: Yes, the 1 that's not on fire. And you talk about positive psychology a lot. So, say someone's listening.

[00:09:57] Bettina M Brown: They're like, well, well, what is positive psychology? Can we even just start with kind of a general definition? So, 

[00:10:03] Anthony Poponi: yeah, sure. Sure. Well, back in the late 90s, a doctor named Martin Seligman, became the president of the APA and, you know, the, the APA was largely focused on, advancing the science of psychology, but at that point, psychology was really focused.

[00:10:21] Anthony Poponi: If you can think of a scale of negative 10 to positive 10, the scale where they were focused prior to the invent of positive psychology as a discipline from 0 down to negative 10. That's people dealing with depression, people dealing with significant mental illnesses. High anxiety and they were developing, you know, the and all of the approaches and techniques and interventions and even diagnoses of what it would be like to be in those spaces.

[00:10:48] Anthony Poponi: And then what can we do to lift those people from a negative 10 to a negative 8 to a negative 6 to a negative 4 to a negative 2 to a 0. And then what they didn't understand, and we didn't have the science and the discipline was developed as positive psychology of like, well, you know, in the United States, it's about right now, but about 20 percent of the people, you know, have a significant depressive symptom.

[00:11:08] Anthony Poponi: That means there's 80 percent of South that are trying to figure out how to live, like, a better life. You know, and what we call it negative tennis is suffering, right? The positive tennis flourishing. I don't think we're meant to stay at positive 10 all the time. We're meant to touch it from time to time, you know, feel as well.

[00:11:24] Anthony Poponi: And so that's what he worked on is he worked on pulling together people and experts to put the same level of rigorous study and clinical testing. Of tools and techniques strategies that can help people move from wherever they are 6 or 7 up to 8 or 9, whatever that and so that's kind of the discipline of positive psychology in a nutshell.

[00:11:49] Bettina M Brown: And when you're and thank you for that analogy with the math, because that makes sense. It really does help figure that out. Say someone's listening that. Okay. I want to get to that 10. I want to, I want to do a high five to the positive 10 flourish once in a while, and then come back down, not get too low, but flourish again.

[00:12:10] Bettina M Brown: But a lot of the feedback will be, but do you understand my circumstances? Do you know what's outside of my control? Can you share your thoughts on control versus uncontrol and really hitting that. That top 10 once in a while. 

[00:12:24] Anthony Poponi: Yeah, I think there's a big difference between circumstance and excuse. And so if people want to make excuses about where they are, and they don't want to change, that's fine.

[00:12:33] Anthony Poponi: Then you live with the consequences of that choice. It's okay. Control is different, right? You know, if you look at the circle of influence of the things that we can really control. We can't control global war, you know, like, that's just truly outside of our control. We can work towards creating more peaceful societies.

[00:12:52] Anthony Poponi: That's closer to what's in our control to a degree, but that's still really hard. Right? That that requires lots of energy. It's big stuff. Other people focus on that. I don't my focus is more on the, on the community level on the workplace level. And on the individual but we have to recognize where our sphere of influence is.

[00:13:11] Anthony Poponi: And that's really about us. You know, it's about how we interact with the world and so much about how much we, how we interact with the world determines how the world interacts back with us to, you know, and so if you're a curmudgeon pessimist, then you just go around being angry at everything somehow the world's probably not working out in your favor, or at least the lens from which you view life.

[00:13:32] Anthony Poponi: Has this real, whatever the opposite of rose color, you know, it would be a dark gray color, but not like a cool, dark gray. So I'll have to work on that analogy. But I think that everybody has the opportunity to work on things in their lives. And the, the challenge there is to recognize where you can have influence over things.

[00:13:53] Anthony Poponi: In the, in the near term, the midterm and the long term, right? Like, for example, I moved to a new community Bend, Oregon 2 years ago, moving to a new community in the middle of a pandemic. Was really challenging, right? I had to worry about my finances. I had to worry about what I was going to do for work.

[00:14:10] Anthony Poponi: Obviously, the world of professional speaking was largely shut down during that time. Or transitioning to virtual, and all the things that community should provide for you, or a lot of the things that community should provide for you or could provide for you. We're kind of like on pause, you know, like social engagement activities, all the outdoor stuff.

[00:14:28] Anthony Poponi: I love. I could by and large still do those things. But changing community is a big thing. It's hard to do, you know, and, you know, for me, as a single man, and for me, as a guy whose work just I need to have access to an airport or be able to hop on zoom. I could shoot that that provides a lot of flexibility in my life.

[00:14:49] Anthony Poponi: I didn't have aging parents to care for. I didn't have kids in school systems that would disrupt that. I didn't have a job that was really tied to a brick and mortar location. You know, that's a big impact and community can have so much impact on your happiness. But it's, it's a hard 1, right? So, if you're just like, well, I'll, you know, I'm, I'm going to move my community.

[00:15:06] Anthony Poponi: I'll be happy. Then there's 2 things there. 1, you're going to move in your community. It's going to take you 2 years to do that or a year to do that. And so, you know, you're waiting for this thing that's coming and you've just put criteria on when you choose to be happy. I'll be happy when I move. Yeah.

[00:15:22] Anthony Poponi: Yeah. Fine. How about being happy now and recognizing why you want to shift and why you want to move or. If you can't move, then understanding what it is that you're looking for in this other community and seeing if you can find ways to craft a way of crafting. I love that word because it's an active process.

[00:15:39] Anthony Poponi: You know, that's you being the master of your life. And taking control of your happiness, and that's the whole framework for focus on 40. 

[00:15:48] Bettina M Brown: Yeah, yeah, and, and I like the way that you describe that, because when we think that will be happy when it is always outside of your reach. And for most people, and I have a, I'm, I'm a physical therapist, so I talk to a lot of people who are not their most mobile when I meet them.

[00:16:05] Bettina M Brown: And there's a lot of regret as they get older. I should have done this now. I can't do it now. I have surgery. But there's also this, this awareness that comes across often, like, I should have been happy then, because I could have done this. And so my main goal to with this podcast is not to wait until then.

[00:16:25] Bettina M Brown: But do it now. Now is a good time to get started. Now may be messy, but now is a good time to create something and to get to realize what you do have control over, which is a lot more than we want, maybe to have control over or to acknowledge the responsibility of that control that you really do have it.

[00:16:44] Bettina M Brown: Yeah. 

[00:16:45] Anthony Poponi: Yeah. I don't, I don't like responsibility any more than anyone else, you know, and my favorite term is adulting. You know, it's the active process of being an adult. And I'm like, I'd like to not be an adult some days, you know, and have all the responsibilities and the choices and the balances and that.

[00:17:01] Anthony Poponi: Like, you know, today's big question. Can I count salsa as a vegetable in my daily account because I'm recognizing the impacts to my health and I have to pay attention to those things. So, yeah, and the thing you said, and then there was, you said a lot of really great things in there. The 1 thing that validated by positive psychology is this process called hedonic adaptation.

[00:17:23] Anthony Poponi: And, you know, like rotation, there's kind of 2 parts. You said, you know, waiting, reaching out for happiness. It's always in front of me. Right? And if you consider happiness, parts of happiness can be a treadmill. This I'll be happy when is putting happiness out there for you in front of you. Right? And you're just like, as soon as I get there, I'm going to be happy.

[00:17:43] Anthony Poponi: Well, that could be when you get married. That could be when you get divorced. It could be when you have kids. It could be when your kids move out. It could be when your kids would call you when they're in college. And then after a while, your kids are always asking for money and you'd be like, you know, it'd be great if my kids would quit calling me and I'd be happy then.

[00:17:58] Anthony Poponi: Right? So these are all those happy, like, out there in front of me when moments. And the problem is, is that the brain habituates to this goal coming in front of us. And just as we're about to get to that goal, we celebrated internally in our brain without even thinking about it. And then when we get there, we're like, I thought I'd be happy when I got here.

[00:18:14] Anthony Poponi: And now I'm just here. You know, and we can combat that, right? You know, the active practice of gratitude of just being grateful for what you have now versus what you don't have and what you crave, right? This brain is wired to go after new things. It's always going to want you to do that. Your job is to try to tame that message and not understand that message.

[00:18:34] Anthony Poponi: And to not let that detract from, from all the things you should be grateful for. 

[00:18:39] Bettina M Brown: And I love that with, with being grateful because there's so much to be grateful for. You don't know what you have to lose it, but you don't always have to lose it to know what you have in those moments. 

[00:19:04] Bettina M Brown: Yeah, so you talk about. This entire focus, and I'm going to quote you was great. About what we know of human happiness is that 40 percent of our happiness is within our control through intentional action.

[00:19:19] Bettina M Brown: Yeah. And. Intentional is a very good word and then action. So just because you're actioning or you're moving doesn't mean you're going forward or going places. You can jump in place and run in place, but you haven't moved. Right? So, explain what, what is a little bit more with intentional action? 

[00:19:38] Anthony Poponi: Yeah, I mean, this comes from some research looks at things that we know that would provide us with sustained happiness, right? Things that can alter our happiness with either some level of permanent permanency, or at least longer lasting than the positive feeling of being like, oh, a piece of chocolate. Oh, you know, that that feels good. You know, your brain is like, oh, salt and fat and sugar.

[00:19:59] Anthony Poponi: Like, those are hard for us to find. And my brain likes it when I find that. And then you're like the 5th piece of chocolate, you're like, all right, this is turning into a problem, you know you know, and so a lot of what you were talking about where you're talking about, like, the happiness that's that conditional happiness, like the, I'll be happy when the stuff is they've proven how, how that doesn't affect our happiness as much as we think it would.

[00:20:20] Anthony Poponi: So, for example, you know, I was, I was having some fun with this earlier being like. I'll be happy when I graduate from college, right? Okay. College typically takes 4 years. You're going to be wait, you're going to wait 4 years to be happy because of that. Right? How about saying I'm going to enjoy my college experience and I can't wait to start my career as well.

[00:20:39] Anthony Poponi: You know, like, you're allowing for happiness and all those. You know, the happy now on the happy later, right? I'll be happy when I get married, you know, like, and marriage people that are married are statistically happier than people that are single or divorced. There's a lot of unhappy people in marriages, right?

[00:20:56] Anthony Poponi: That may be happier if they would end their relationship. I'll be happy when I buy a house. I'll be happy when I get the next job. I'll be happy when I get the next promotion. I'll be happy. I'll be happy when I take my vacation to Europe in two years. Like, fine, you, you should have things to look forward to.

[00:21:13] Anthony Poponi: Yeah. But if you keep casting happiness out there in front of you, then you're, you don't have the opportunity to enjoy it in the moment. And so intentional activities really come down to like recognizing within, within the, the model within positive Psychology is called perma. It's p, it's an acronym that stands for positive emotions.

[00:21:31] Anthony Poponi: We should feel those. Engagement in life, relationships, meaning and achievement, you know, and so those can be used to sort of stimulate happiness for us in our lives. That comes with some degree of, of, of, like, in the now positive emotions, right? Experience those versus things that don't always, like, feel great at the time, you know, and so, you know, for example, like, we should learn to stimulate more positive emotions in our life.

[00:21:59] Anthony Poponi: So, when we understand neuro chemistry, and we understand the wiring of this kind of, like, ancient brain of ours that hasn't changed to kind of meet the current day. Criteria, we can do that, right? Like, you can recognize in your career, like, I'm holding a microphone. I'm entertaining an audience, they're laughing at my dad jokes, even though I'm not a dad and I somehow still have a dead body that they can have joined.

[00:22:23] Anthony Poponi: Like, I can have joined that moment. They can have joined. We all get a neurochemical cocktail from that experience. And then when I step off stage. Metabolizes and I come back to my set point and then the idea is to try to bring that set point up and up and up and we can do that. You know, we can change the range of what we feel in between the highs and highs and lows.

[00:22:41] Anthony Poponi: Let's call it a positive 10. Let's call that elation and joy. Right? And then when we come back to that moments in between, and we can stop and think about our lives and Dan Buettner from blue zone says this really? Well, we have purpose in our lives. Do we have pleasure in our lives? And do we have pride and I think that really captures a lot to be like.

[00:23:00] Anthony Poponi: How do I feel about my life? Like, when I look around and like, I'm thinking about what I do with myself at different scales, you know, per hour, per day, per month, per year, per decade, you know, can you, can you say like, oh, yeah, I feel purpose. Like, I'm doing good things in the world. I feel I have moments of pleasure in my life.

[00:23:15] Anthony Poponi: That's awesome. Then I have pride about what I'm doing and how I'm carrying myself. 

[00:23:19] Bettina M Brown: Yeah. And you have this. Focus on 40 you know, program that you work on, and you really talk to a lot of workplaces. Do you feel that just injecting some happiness in the workplace within ourselves will make a bigger difference in other parts of our lives?

[00:23:40] Anthony Poponi: Oh, yeah, like, you know. I mean, and I, and I say this with the work groups and, you know, even when we're looking at, like, that wheel of, like, you know, how do you evaluate your life? If the thing that's really impacting your life is work, then you take it home with you, right? And if the thing that's really impacting your life is at home, you take it to work.

[00:24:01] Anthony Poponi: Right? And so if when I'm working with a group, I'm like, I want you to focus on the thing that you can make some easy moves on to bring a number up for you to really make a shift in some aspect of your life. And then we're also going to pay attention to the stuff that's like out there in the future that we're going to work towards.

[00:24:16] Anthony Poponi: Like, if what you think is, and we could talk about money for a while, but if 1 of the things is, I need to make more money to support my family. Right? The term support my family can mean different things to different people, right? Supporting my family could mean well, I think everybody in my family should have a yacht.

[00:24:32] Anthony Poponi: So I'm going to make more money to get everybody to God versus. I need to make more money for my family so that we can have. My kids can go to college and have a, you know, or trade school and have, you know, really advanced career and have and do something fulfilling with their career, right? Instead of just doing a job, you know and so we play with all that, you know, it's that what I call it, like, this fulfilling life for us is like this unique algorithm.

[00:24:54] Anthony Poponi: That's for each of us. Because we all come from different places, but we can employ the same tools to shift our happiness towards something more and then we should honor like, you know, what really made us happy at 15 and 25 and 35 and 45 that's going to keep shifting and moving and that's okay, but you've got to be the active crafter in in taking the world around you and making it to the one that you want that provides you with fulfillment.

[00:25:19] Bettina M Brown: Yeah, and I think that I thank you for saying the way you said it, you're going to take it home. Are you going to take home to work? And where can you make those changes? Because sometimes to increase your fulfillment at work. You need to adjust something else. Maybe work is not the problem. It's just where you have been attention or can let down your guard to think about it.

[00:25:41] Bettina M Brown: Now say someone's listening to this and they're like, you know what? I think he's onto something. I like his analogies. I like how he thinks. And I definitely could use this for my work. How can people just learn more about you and the program? Where do you like to guide people? 

[00:25:57] Anthony Poponi: Oh, I would say back to my website is the easiest way.

[00:26:00] Anthony Poponi: It's anthonypaponi. com. And, and on, there are tons of resources. For people, you know, and it's a mix of there's a free resource on there for, like, dealing with stress that what I call the big 3 of stress. I create that and then there's, you know, workbooks and things if people want to dive in a little deeper than coaching services.

[00:26:19] Anthony Poponi: And of course, if you have some miserable people in your workplace, you can buy them the resource and leave it on their desk without them knowing it. Yeah. And so that's basically the best way to connect with me and they can get on my email list there and stay in touch. 

[00:26:32] Bettina M Brown: You know, if you've ever questioned your happiness, your happiness right now, or your happiness when something happens.

[00:26:39] Bettina M Brown: I encourage you to learn more about Anthony Papponi, his program, and listen to his podcast. I really liked his analogies and emphasis on focusing on the gratitude we can have right now because you know what? No one has a perfect life. There's always something behind us that has been not so great, but it is the perception of that that can change our entire view moving forward.

[00:27:07] Bettina M Brown: There does not have to be a perpetual grief for what you thought something should be. Some of these circumstances are just designed, by design, going to help us grow, even though they're not the circumstances we wanted or wished for. So I'm really grateful for your time today because that is something we don't get back.

[00:27:27] Bettina M Brown: So if you feel that this podcast was a benefit to you today. I encourage you to share it with someone, putting it in the hands and ears of someone that it can make a difference for does so much for that person you're thinking about. Also, my ask to you is to leave a heartfelt review. If you feel these topics are beneficial, go ahead and put that on that review.

[00:27:49] Bettina M Brown: So that way this podcast can just reach more people. I encourage you to email me at Bettina in the rising. com. And until the next time, let's keep building one another up.