Do you allow happiness in? I didn't. I didn't even know how to let happiness in. In the episode where I really dug into this, I referred to the lesson that I learned the hard way in 2023 is something I call dropping the sword. Let me explain what that means, because it relates to letting happiness in. If you want to be a happier person, and I really want that for you. You have to end your personal campaign of misery. What does that mean? What that means is you're not only blocking happiness, I'm going to prove to you today, you are actively fighting against it. And dropping the sword is the way that I started to cue myself to this new skill, which is you got to let it flow in. And so I'm going to explain and unpack for you three different ways that I realized over the last three years that I was engaged in this campaign of misery. I literally was fighting to stay miserable. I was blocking the happiness. And if you listen with a very critical ear, and if you are honest with yourself, and if you are willing to call yourself out on your own bullshit, I think you will realize, Oh, my gosh, I'm blocking happiness, too.

And my mission today is to inspire you, to take on a project to become happier, to inspire you to drop the sword wherever it is that you are currently fighting against your own happiness, where you are currently engaged, you are campaigning for misery, I want you to stop it. And I'm going to tell you something, this is very normal. And it's normal because life can be really hard. Maybe you're afraid to be happy. Maybe you don't know how to be happy. Or perhaps you used to be really happy. You were really content. You were the person that was present in your life and content and okay. And then something horrible happened, or somebody that you love died, or there was some awful tragedy. And now you are so scared to drop the sword. You are so scared to allow yourself to feel good again, because What if you lose it again? There's so many reasons and ways that we fight against our own happiness. And you know that I love my metaphors. I've already brought in this idea of the hurricane and whether or not you're the one that's able to be okay or whether or not you're able to stand in the center of chaos and connect to that power inside you.

And so let me bring in a second one, because this visual really helps me understand that saying that happiness is an inside job. I want you to visualize a door, right? Because if you're going to go inside, you're going to pass through a doorway, right? There's only two different types of doors when we're talking about happiness. The first one is the kind that I used to have, which is basically the massive steel impenetrable door that you see on a bank vault. You know those big, thick, they got a wheel on them, big code that you got to do. If you finally crack it open, that door is literally like three feet wide. Nobody has the code, nobody can get in. That was me. That is not the door that you want, because that means you are blocking it. But there is a second door, and this is what I want you to start to visualize. I want you to visualize swinging galley doors. If you've ever worked in a restaurant, I've worked in lots of different restaurants. If you go from the front of the house where all the tables are to the back of the house where the kitchen is, there's typically these swinging doors, right?

And in the restaurant that I used to work in, the Red Rooster Tavern, there were these double doors that used to swing in and out to the kitchen. This is the door that you need between yourself and the outside world. Because when it comes to happiness, it has to flow both ways. Of course, you have to give happiness out into the world. You have to send it out as a signal. You have to give to other people. But the door has to swing in. And what I've discovered is that allowing the doors to swing in was nearly impossible for me. And I think that this has a lot to do with your experiences growing up and what the adults were like when you were growing up. Were they warm? Were they breezy and easy? Did they let the love flow in and out? Were they welcoming? Or were they like a big, cold, steely, closed-off bank vault? That's where this probably comes from. And today, you and I are going to talk about how you can allow more of it in, how you can go from being closed off to being breesier, to letting it flow in and flow out.

So with that metaphor, I want to talk about the first of the three ways that I was engaged in a campaign of misery, because it relates to the this bank vault door. And the first way is, I was so trapped in my head, like behind the door in a vault called my mind, that I wasn't even present in my life. How can you possibly allow happiness in if you're not even there? And this is something I'm still working on. I can give you an example from just a couple of days ago. So over the holidays, we were on a vacation celebrating my mom's 75th birthday. And so we were all together for four days, and my brother's family was there, and my parents were there, and Chris and I and our three kids were there, and it was the last full day of vacations. We have all day together. We have a big dinner that night celebrating my mom. We're going to play cards because our family loves cards that evening, and then everybody's going to leave the next morning. And this is the last time that Chris and I and our three kids are going to be together until our son, Oakley's graduation in June, which means this is the last time we're going to be together for about six months.

Now, do you think on that last day, I was that breezy, easy, warm and present, eye of the storm, happiness person, allowing it to swing back and forth? That would have been wonderful. But not me. Old habits die hard. And on that last day of the vacation, boom, I shut the bank door. I closed myself off in my mind because all I to think about is, oh, my God, the kids are leaving tomorrow, and our daughter, Kendall, lives in Los Angeles, and she lives so far away. And then I was like, what if she marries somebody in Los Angeles, and then all of a sudden she's going to settle out there, and they're going to have kids out there, and they're going to be spending more time with that family? Talk about a hurricane. For crying out loud, I got myself so worked up. I was not only not present during the day, and I basically was closed off in my own mind that I not only didn't let the happiness in, the hurricane inside me started spinning so much that once I went to bed, I woke up every single hour on the hour until 5:45 AM when my alarm went off, which was the time that I needed to meet Kendall in the lobby to make sure that she had her passport and could get into the cab and get to the airport I wasted the entire last 24 hours of the time that I had with the five of us.

I made myself miserable. And you know what? I actively did that to myself. And I'm sharing this with you, and I'm sure you can hear the intensity in my voice. It doesn't sound like a happy Mel. Why am I intense? I'll tell you why I'm intense, because I can see how engaging in a campaign of misery, blocking happiness, not being present in my life Life robs me of those moments. And these are skills that you're going to have to practice. And clearly, I'm still working on it. I'm giving you an example from just a couple of days ago because you got to watch this like a Hawk. It is It's so easy to just slam the bank vault, go up in your head, start worrying about stuff, get trapped up there in your emotions. Next thing you know, you're spinning around like a hurricane that you have personally created for yourself. You're no longer present. You can't possibly let any love in, and you're no longer the centered, okay, happy eye of the storm. You yourself are the freaking hurricane. And I did it to myself. And I'm sure you do it to yourself time and time and time again.

What does it feel like when your baseline day-to-day existence is that you got to be ready for a fight, that you literally wake up and it's like, boom, the Avengers. You've dropped into the day and you're bracing for the fight and everything's going to be a struggle, and when you walk into work, and what your boss says, and that text that you didn't get to. That was me. That was me. That there's this way of moving through your life where you convince Rince yourself that somebody's mad at you, or that something's going to be hard, or that you're annoyed with something or disgruntled with it. The first time that somebody really called me out on this, again, because I, on the outside, am a very positive person. I'm great with other people. It's how I relate to myself that is the real problem. It's the energy that I create internally that is robbing me of happiness. I had no problem spreading it. It's that, boom, I would shut the door and block it from me experiencing it. So here I am. This was a couple of years ago. I was hosting a daytime talk show.

I'm standing at CBS Broadcast Center here in New York, and my executive producer casually turns to me, and she's like, Why are you always so mad at Sony Pictures, your production company? It's like, you have to have somebody that you're against. You have this energy, Mel, where you're like, It's like our team against Sony. And she was right. And when I look in the mirror and I see the human being look back at me, that's been in my DNA for as long as I can remember. That there is someone out to get me, that there is someone that I'm against. And so if you're the person who seems to always be mad at somebody, whether it's your boss, or you're annoyed with your spouse, or you're mad at the school because the school is doing this thing, or you get all fired up about politics, or the news, or you're in line at the airport, you're all agitated because the line next to you is moving faster than the line that you're in, and the agent is... This is an example of having a sword in your hand. I was the same way. I want you to just stop and think about that.

What does that feel like in your day-to-day life? You're walking into the grocery Are you breezy-easy with the swinging doors? Or are you walking in there steely, bank vault, sword in your hand? I was the person that moved through life with a smile on my face and a fight in my belly. And if you're nodding along going, Yeah, that's me. I brace a lot. I'm prepared for the worst. I'm waiting for the next shoe to drop. I'm angry at people. I don't get it. Drop the sword. There is no fight. And if you've been bracing for one your whole life, trust me, if there's a fight, you'll be ready. You got that handled. What you don't know how to do is to be at peace. What you don't know how to do is to not let the things outside of you create a storm inside of you. That is so unnecessary and unhealthy, and it is a learned behavior that you can unlear. And what I love about this visual of the sword is you can feel it in your body, can't you? If you're not driving a car, I want you to take your two hands like you're gripping a sword, right?

And your elbows automatically come up, and you brace. And that is what it felt like for me. The bills would arrive in the mailbox, bracing. I'm trying to pick a line in the grocery store, bracing. I'm going to pick the wrong line. There's something that's going to go. Tell me, does that internal energy. Does that feel like a bank door that's closed off? Or does that feel like this swinging thing? You know the answer. Because in some area of your life, you've picked up the sword. You've got to fight. You're bracing for something. And that is a way in which you're blocking happiness. It's a way in which you are engaged in a campaign, which is a fight for misery. And You have the power to stop that, to drop the sword. Now, the third thing that I was doing that was really blocking happiness, and this is a mindset thing. We have talked about this a lot on the podcast. I always thought about mindset more from the standpoint of success and focus and productivity and training my mind to help me get what I want. I had never quite connected the dots between this and this deeper level of okayness, this breeziness that I want you to be able to create in your life, where goodness flows in and flows out, that you allow it in.

And it's this: being focused on what's wrong. Today, you and I are digging into the topic of happiness. The single biggest barrier to my happiness for Mel Robbins was me.