The HAPPE Method of Journaling with Lara Zielin

Interview Episode with Lara Zielin

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[00:00:45] Hello, friends and welcome to Curiously Wise. I am so honored to have a person who has been a mentor to me, but also I really feel like she's a good friend though we don't see each other often enough. I want to introduce you to Lara Zielin. And I was telling Lara that I usually let people introduce themselves but her bio is so fun.

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[00:01:33] And I also want to add, cause she forgot that she's written this fabulous book called “Author of Your Life”. So you can get that one as well. Lots of good books. So welcome, Lara. I'm so happy to have you here.

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[00:01:48] Thank you so much. And I have a little dog that you might hear in the background, so apologies to anyone who’s listening.

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[00:01:56] Lara: All right. Oh, I'm so honored to be here. Thanks for having me.

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[00:02:18] But I went through a program that you had before that I don't think you're running anymore, but it was a wonderful opportunity to really dig deep in a structured form of journaling that was still open enough to really get out what I needed to get out. So I just want to thank you for creating this amazing program.

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[00:02:40] Laurin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, we're both writers, so

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[00:02:46] Laurin: I always call myself a word girl. So, so tell us a little bit about how you came to journaling.

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[00:03:19] It was in financial, you know, is in young business, just in its first few years, I won't say in financial straits, but just, kind of struggling to get off the ground. So things in our financial life were very different. It caused friction between us. We were sort of in a really distant place from each other.

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[00:03:53] So it felt like the universe was just slamming all these doors in my face. And I was really reeling. I was lost. I was just feeling like such a loser, failure, just eating, drinking too much, just in a dark place. And in this dark place, I really was just struggling for a light, struggling for a way out. And as a fiction writer, I thought, alright, what if I just decided to start a book where I just write this story as if this was all fiction and I'm a character and I felt well, what I have happened to the character of Lara to get her out of the situation?

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[00:04:46] I turned to trying to put her in situations where she felt happy and where she was able to connect genuinely with people. And she and her husband had a better relationship. And. After doing this for about a year, the results were so transformational that I had to reverse engineer the whole thing and try to figure out what, what, what just happened.

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[00:05:09] Lara: What did I just do? I wanted to not only reverse engineer to figure out like why in the heck did this work, but I also wanted to see if I could shorten the timeframe for results. And so that is part of what led me to the HAPPE Journaling method that you mentioned in the intro, which is sort of a the reader's digest, condensed version, of all of this.

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[00:06:05] Laurin: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's manifestation on paper. I mean, where you can go back and look at it and go, wow. I created that. I thought it, I wrote it, I believed it, I made it. Yeah. It's crazy.

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[00:06:33] Laurin: Do that. Tell us a little bit about the science. Cause I know the handwriting there's a scientific reason. And as a writer, I know when I get stuck, I turn back to handwriting.

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[00:06:43] Laurin: So tell us why that works.

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[00:06:58] So, picture me back four or five years ago in this dark place, depressed, drinking too much. The whole thing, I really wanted to be able to like, think my way out of my problems, but everytime I thought about them. They just seem to grow larger and grow bigger. And it was just, it felt like this toilet spiral, down the drain, right.

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[00:07:34] It's very good. So Chatter talks about this brain noise that happens when we try to think our way out of our problems. And so one of the ways that Cross has a thing about this as like seeing the forest through the trees, if we're ruminating and we're just getting stuck in our heads, we're just too close to the tree.

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[00:08:09] And so there's a few ways that he advocates getting Cognitive Distance and one of them is writing, but we're not just writing. We're actually writing in the third person. So he talks about thinking about yourself in the third person. This is specifically research-based in his book that thinking about yourself in the third person makes you much more able…

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[00:09:06] So the H is. By hand, I'm just going to jump into this.

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[00:09:11] Lara: So the H is write by hand, which is also, as you mentioned, really good for your brain, it slows your thoughts down. So you can actually process them. When you write by hand, you connect your handwriting, it's a motor skill and you connect that to your thoughts, which is more likely to make those thoughts stick. That's why people have done a lot of studies on kids who take notes in class, and they found that kids who take notes, on laptops and just furiously type, retain a lot less information than the kids who actually write by hand.

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[00:10:09] Right. We want to get that good cognitive distance. The next P is that we're going to keep it positive. So we want things to the brain is terrible at negatives. So if I tell you Laurin, don't think of an elephant. Our brains just aren't good at negative. So we just have to keep it positive and then our brains will get it.

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[00:10:54] But if you want the jet fuel and you want it to happen sooner, you do the E. So the E is that actually at the end of your journaling, you close your notebook, set it aside and you pick one emotion that came through when you were writing that ideal life, as if it was happening, you pick one emotion, it could be peace.

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[00:11:41] Laurin: I didn't even do it consciously. I just breathed in that joy you're talking about, and I just felt this sort of calm and peaceful and happy. I didn't even do the journaling part. Not today.

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[00:12:04] Laurin: Yeah, secret sauce.

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[00:12:08] Laurin: I can tell you that, and tell the listeners that it's a remarkable thing to write in third person about yourself. I also was a romance writer, so I have a lot of experience writing about other people from their points of view. but writing about my experience from the third person.

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[00:12:37] Lara: Way down

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[00:12:41] Like it never happened. And then it always ends up coming back. So being able to turn and look at it with that distance. I've been working with some of my clients about perspective and I had forgotten about that third person's perspective. So I'm gonna use that.

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[00:12:59] Laurin: But, that magic trick is amazing.

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[00:13:04] Lara: It sounds so simple, but it is just transformational. You'll be amazed. I mean, I just did. I was just telling you, I just did a workshop this last weekend in person. Welcome back to in-person workshops. And, I love watching people's faces when it happens. They're just like, oh my goodness.

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[00:13:27] Laurin: Absolutely. I mean, you know, I'm a big fan of you, but also of the work that you do because I went through it and it was transformational and it was a big piece of me getting to where I am today. Doing podcasts, getting some of those stupid barriers out of the way that we just aren't even aware that we're sort of self-inflicting.

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[00:13:57] Lara: Yeah.

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[00:14:17] And there's a really good book called “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. he talks about how there's this bar that you have in your life. You are going to create circumstances in your life that match up with where this bar is.

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[00:14:52] So it makes sure that it fits this bar. And then you might decide, for example, you've got this life and your bar here is like, I'm really comfortable making $50,000 a year. It's what my dad made. It's what my people around me make. This is what I'm comfortable making.

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[00:15:26] They are going to revolt against this gap. And so what happens is that you will sabotage, you will do whatever it takes to bring yourself back down to this very comfortable level. So in the case of a salary, for example, you might spend that money, you might flake out on your job. You will do whatever it takes to get back to $50,000.

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[00:16:07] …why can't I hit my goals? I set all these darn goals and I can't hit them because you have an upper limit problem. That's what's happening. You have an upper limit problem. So you're like, I'm going to, whatever it is, I'm going to start this business. I'm going to start this podcast or I'm gonna do whatever.

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[00:16:40] These are the things that I really love to help women with because it turns out you just have an upper limit problem. Now the thing is, here's the thing with upper limits, because they're so deep because they're so subconscious skills are so old. They're so stinking old, they've been there forever. Again, we can't get to them solely by thinking about them.

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[00:17:25] To get all of this information excavated we're using writing. And once you see it on paper, you're just like, oh, oh, it's, that'll just not. So for example, let's just say that you really want to find true love and you're really ready for a long-term committed relationship with the person you're supposed to be with.

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[00:18:14] You welcome the experience that life has for you and, whatever it is, then you begin to journal that way. You start to slowly begin to open the door. Not even slowly, it can happen very quickly actually. You can begin to open that door to new possibilities.

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[00:18:44] Laurin: I love that. I love that. And I've never heard it described quite that way. So that's really, for me personally, that's really helpful. So I'm going to call that a negative wisdom. Cause I like to pull those out that we do have these set points that we are not conscious of. And that really, I mean, I've seen them into my own life get in the way of accomplishing. The things I I'm here to do the things I want to do, the things I love to do. And it is transformative when you can pull them out, put them on paper and see them from a distance.

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[00:19:19] Laurin: Yeah. I mean, you actually really have a physical distance there from the problem, from the barrier, from the limit, whatever it is.

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[00:19:31] Lara: Great question. What I love to do are what I call laser consultations, I call them laser performance consultations, which is just a really fancy way of saying, let's just look at those subconscious beliefs and let's get you performing at the higher level than what you're at, because there's some kind of goal.

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[00:20:17] We're going to use the cut, come with me on some conscious journey where we're going to reveal all of these things. We're going to reveal them. And then I'm going to give you a roadmap of journaling to begin to heal them. And actually, we start healing it right there in that session. And you get all the tools to just continue and continue and continue to work.

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[00:20:37] Laurin: I did. I was gonna say, that's how I started with you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even remember how I found you initially, but I think that was like the thing that drew me in it's like, oh yeah, I need that.

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[00:20:54] But man, if you can get something done in 90 minutes, like just while it's 90 minutes in a follow-up, but you don't have to labor on this.

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[00:21:09] Laurin: Yeah. Now that makes me want to go back and pull my journal out and reread our laser session.

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[00:21:18] Laurin: Yeah, because that's been probably two years. I want to say. Since we did that and my life has changed radically in those two years. I mean, never mind the whole pandemic thing, but I mean, the trajectory that I'm on now is completely different than I was two years ago. So I'm sure that there's something in there that I'm going to go, oh, look there.

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[00:21:41] Lara: Yeah.

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[00:21:56] Now they're just manifesting differently because you're at a new level. My old chestnuts are always gonna be feeling worthy enough, like feeling am I, do I feel worthy enough? That's going to be a big one for me, a fear of, you know, gosh, am I in trouble?

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[00:22:25] Laurin: Yes. Yeah. Cause I'm aware that there's still some there, so I might need to like do another session with you. There's one. That's just hanging on like this.

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[00:22:41] Laurin: All right. I want to go on to our rapid-fire questions.

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[00:22:46] Laurin: This is just top of the head, whatever pops into your brain, that's what can share with us. So my first question is who is, or was the wisest person in your life?

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[00:23:06] Laurin: Yeah,

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[00:23:22] Like she just said it in a way that I was like, oh my God, like just cracked me open in the best way.

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[00:23:53] She's amazing. And she has a podcast. So if, if anybody listening is interested…

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[00:24:00] Laurin: Yeah. Yeah, she's great. What a life.

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[00:24:06] Laurin: What's your favorite self-care practice?

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[00:24:30] Right. That's how I was raised. So many of us gen Xers were like raised that way. It turns out I have a body turns out she needs some care and turns out that she loves stretching.

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[00:24:50] And it's just been a really lovely way for me to give myself old TLC.

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[00:25:00] Lara: Yoga has never been something I felt connected to. So I literally Just get on the floor and roll around and stretch it out.

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[00:25:28] So.

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[00:25:34] Laurin: It's the only place with enough space for summer, the next one is what lights you up when you are feeling down?

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[00:26:01] And I have started doing that and it is as simple as turning on a song, like turning on some Lizzo. Right. And just like, not even dancing, I won't even say when I'm down, I don't really want to dance, but could I like shake my shoulders a little bit? Yeah. Can I go for a walk? Yeah.

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[00:26:19] Laurin: Excellent. And the last one is, do you have a favorite mantra or affirmation?

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[00:26:27] I have so many that this one's shutting me down a little bit. Which one do I pick?

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[00:26:37] Lara: No, I'm going to show you this one that is on my wall here. It's a little post-it note and it says, does this feel good to me? And that is such a good one, I put it on my wall because it's a guidepost for me because I have so often asked, well, what will you know, is this right for so-and-so or what will my friends think?

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[00:27:10] Laurin: That's great. That's when I do, when I remember to.

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[00:27:17] Laurin: Yes. Can you tell us where the best place to find you is online?

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[00:27:35] Laurin: It's simple, simple, no extra vowels.

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[00:27:42] Laurin: Well, this has been such a lovely time with you. Thank you so much for joining me. I always loved being in your presence and your joy, and I just, I miss seeing you regularly. So this has been a real treat. So thank you for being here with us.

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[00:27:59] Laurin: Yes, and I want to thank them as well. I thank you for showing up. If you loved this conversation, there's others available already and more come. I will say a little pitch, you can always subscribe so you don't miss anything. And I just want to finish the way I like to finish with, from my heart to yours.

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[00:28:39] Thank you so much for joining us today on Curiously Wise, I hope you found a nugget of wisdom that resonates with you, perhaps it brings comfort or strength, or simply the peace that comes from knowing you aren't alone in your experience, or perhaps it illuminates the wisdom already within you. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe.

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[00:29:24] Curiously wise is a team effort. I am grateful for the skill and enthusiasm. Arlene Membrot, our producer and Sam Wittig our audio engineer bring to this collaboration. Our music is Where the Light Is by Lemon Music studio. I'm Laurin Wittig. Please join me again next week. For another episode of Curiously Wise, from my heart to yours, may your life be filled with love, light, joy, and of course, curiosity.