04: Joy Is a Prerequisite, Not an Outcome

What if joy isn’t something you earn after everything falls into place?

In this episode, you’ll explore a shift that changes everything. The belief that joy comes after achievement is what keeps so many people stuck, depleted, and waiting. If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll feel better once you get the result, fix the problem, or prove yourself, this conversation will challenge that pattern. Joy is not the reward. It is the fuel.

You’ll be guided to reconnect with the small, often overlooked moments that are already available to you. The everyday experiences you rush past or dismiss. These “breadcrumbs” of joy are not insignificant. They are what restore your energy, your creativity, and your ability to move forward. This episode includes a simple practice to help you notice and fully experience those moments so joy becomes something you access daily, not something you wait for.

Chapters 

00:00 – Joy is not the reward

01:20 – Why we have it backwards

03:20 – How joy actually returns

04:45 – The power of micro moments

06:30 – The moments you’re overlooking

08:24 – Reconnecting to your life force

09:56 – Joy as fuel for creation

12:07 – Why joy comes before achievement

12:54 – The three ways joy shows up

14:30 – A practice to notice your breadcrumbs

17:21 – Joy is already happening

19:31 – When you can’t feel joy

20:24 – Coming back to the basics

21:52 – Your daily practice

Connect with Monica:
Website: www.monicapandele.com
Instagram: @monica_pandele

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who’s ready to feel more alive. Follow the show and leave a review to help this movement reach more hearts.

You’re not here to survive your life. You’re here to experience it.

This is your invitation.
This is your reclamation.
This is The Joyful Rebellion.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

What if joy isn't selfish? It's strategic. What if your aliveness isn't a luxury? It's the fuel that you need to show up for what matters. This is the joyful rebellion. I'm Monica Pandele, a heart centered leader, a ecologist, a professional leadership coach and facilitator. And someone who spent years trying to save the world, forgetting to actually live in it. This isn't about toxic positivity or bypassing hard truths. This is about reclaiming your aliveness as the fuel for sustainable change. Joy is our power, presence is our practice, and play is our way. This podcast is for those who care so much and give so much, they have forgotten what it feels like to be truly alive. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. Let's explore this together.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Joyful Rebellion.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

This is episode four. If this is your first time, I'm so glad you found your way. If you're returning, it's a joy and pleasure to be with you. Last episode I told you about losing my joy. About going to Barbados and realizing I couldn't receive love until I was willing to love all of myself, including the outrageous, depleted, messy parts. In the same episode I was sharing the parallel story of Alyssa Liu, how losing joy eventually led her to winning Olympic gold. Not because she achieved first, because she reconnected to joy first. And we practiced together. That self acceptance. I see you, you're allowed to be here. I ended up telling you that when I came back from Barbados, something unexpectedly happened. I started noticing small moments I'd been dismissing for quite a while. Breadcrumbs leading me back to joy. Today I want to tell you about those breadcrumbs and what they were and why they weren't just nice moments. They were actually giving me something much bigger back. My capacity, my inspiration, my ability to create. This process has been another proof that we have it backwards. We think that I'll be joyful when I achieve the thing, I fix the problem, I get the result. But joy doesn't work that way. Joy is a prerequisite, not an outcome. Let me show you what I mean. So when I came back from Barbados and I started noticing something, joy was coming back, but it wasn't coming back in big achievements or breakthroughs, in tiny moments, micro moments. Remember in episode one, I invited you to start an aliveness and joy list. To notice what makes you feel alive. Well, those things on your list, those are your micro moments and macro moments. And these are a few of mine that come to mind. Those life walks with my dog Bosco in the oak forests near my home. My dog he loses his mind in these walks. Every oak tree is the most exciting oak tree he's ever encountered. Every ten feet, new smell, new discovery, complete presence. And I started thinking, what if I approached life that way? Just fully this three here, this moment. Zumba classes, moving my body without perfecting anything. Just filling in the music, letting my hips move, not caring if I'm getting the steps right or wrong. Just dancing, just alive. Cooking dinners and hosting my neighbors. Listening to their stories, their wild stories from their sixties and seventies, a complete different America, their laughter, their resilience, just being at the table with people I love. Driving my car, my red jack, top down through the redwoods. Like wind on my face, the smell of the redwoods, you you can't describe. You can only recognize. Just smiling. The wind, the smell, alive. Grilling oysters with garlic and parmigiano. Remember, I'm from Transylvania. I love garlic. That first bite, the texture, the brininess, the warmth, the garlic hitting my tongue. Mm mm mm. I close my eyes and I smiled because this is an absurdly simple pleasure that brings me so much joy. And I thought, how many oysters have I eaten while scrolling my phone and not tasting anything? How many moments have I dismissed because I was waiting for something more impressive? My dad's homemade smirrata. This is a raspberry liquor from raspberries he grows himself in his garden in Romania. Every sip carries memories of home, of being his daughter, of his big hands picking each berry. I mean it's nothing fancy, nothing Instagram worthy, but they're mine. Joy wrapped in connection. And my strength training with the amazing trainer Christow. Those high intensity intervals where my muscles are burning, where I'm out of breath, where everything hurts. And I'm smiling. When she asked, How are you? All I can say, feeling so alive. And Alyssa Liu said the same thing when she came back to skating. She says, I love to struggle actually, because it makes me feel alive. Not the easy part, the hard parts, the challenge, the intensity. That's a source of joy too. That aliveness in the struggle. So these moments, the dog walks, the Zumba, the neighbors, the wind, the oysters, the training with Crystal, they're so ordinary, so unimpressive, but they are filling me back up. They were filling the void, like breadcrumbs, they were leading me back to myself, back to joy. Through these micro moments, I started to sense something deeper. I wasn't just cheering myself up. Something deeper was happening. When I walked with my dog, when I moved in Zumba, or I tasted my dad's murata, when I pushed through those intervals with Crystal, I could feel something flowing again. Like reconnecting to a flow that runs through everything. Through me, through the trees, through the music, through memory and connection. Some people call it life force. Some people call it energy. I don't know what you call it, but I know when it's on and when it's off. And when that current was flowing again, everything shifted. Ideas came back, solutions I couldn't see before started appearing, reappearing. That thing I think of as my inner knowing, my ability to sense what wants to become and happen next, you know. Everything came back online. I could look at uncertainty with curiosity instead of fear. I could feel the awe again. That's what I'd be missing. Not just joy, my full aliveness, my full capacity. And when that life force started flowing again, something shifted. I started this podcast. And just think about it. For months I couldn't create, I couldn't generate, I was in deficit. But those micro moments, that reconnection to aliveness, that gave me the capacity again. Not after I launched a podcast, before. Joy wasn't the reward for creating something. Joy was what gave me the energy to create, to really see new possibilities. The idea started flowing, the vision became clear. I could imagine it. I planned it. I actually did the work to make it happen. And that's what I mean when I say joy is a prerequisite, it's not an outcome. We have it backwards. We think I'll be joyful when I achieve the thing, once I launch the thing, once I prove myself. Does it resonate? But when you're seeking to create from depletion, you're actually not generating your full capacity, your genius. And that's exactly what happened to Alyssa Liu. Her joy didn't return because she won gold. She won gold because her joy returned. Those two years after being a normal teenager, getting her driver's license, going to UCLA, playing video games, dyeing her hair weirdly, skiing, that wasn't time off after her goal. That was the work recharging her capacity of reconnecting her to her aliveness and becoming that whole person who could access joy. And when joy returned through skiing, through play, through being whole, that's when she had the aliveness to go back to competitive skating. Not as a reward, as fuel. She didn't achieve and then felt joyful. She reconnected to joy and then had capacity to achieve. Remember the commentators talking about that, that flow state? That wasn't icing on the cake. That was actually the cake. That was her competitive edge. Joy as a prerequisite, not outcome. And I've been reflecting on this, on how joy returned, on what it actually gave me. I've noticed something. Joy shows up in three different ways. Sometimes as a feeling that arises spontaneously when I taste the oysters, joy just happens. When I dance, I just feel the vibration. Sometimes as something we can practice and cultivate, choosing to notice the micro moments, training my attention. And the third way is sometimes joy is a way of being, a joyful approach to life, regardless of circumstances. In the next episode, we are going to explore all three dimensions in depth. Because understanding how joy works, that's what allows us to access it consistently, to build joyfulness as a way of life, not just experience it as an occasional feeling. But today, I want to give you a practice for noticing those breadcrumbs. As you know, in this podcast, we practice together. So I invite you to play. Okay, I want to try something right now, and I'll give you my example first. This week I looked at my hands at the end of a long day and I noticed dirt under my fingernails. Proof I've been planting cedar trees, one of my favorite all time. Gardening is just filling me up. But I've been so focused on getting those plants into the ground between coaching sessions before the rain arrived that I rushed through and actually forgot to even savor the moment. So, what I invite you to do right now, think back over the past week. Just one moment. One small moment you almost missed. A moment that could have been joy, but you weren't present to it. I'll give you some examples. Maybe it's your coffee, but you were scrolling. Maybe it was the sunlight, but you didn't look up. Maybe it was laughter, but you were already thinking about the next thing. Maybe it was your body feeling good, but you simply dismissed it. Something small. Something you brushed over. If you're drawing a blank, that's okay. That's actually information too. Just notice that. And if you've got something, even one tiny moment, stay with me. I want you to go back to that moment now. Really go there. Close your eyes if you can, not if you drive, or if you cut something. And now squeeze the zest out of it. Really let yourself have it. See it, feel it, taste it. Let yourself be in it. Not rushing to get to the next thing, not checking it off. Just there. The joy was already there. You just weren't present to it. And this is what I'm learning. Joy isn't something you have to create or achieve or wait for. It's already happening multiple times a day. You just have to train yourself to notice it, to squeeze the zest out of it, to let yourself actually have it. So if you're playing with me and willing to play more, this is your practice. At the end of each day, take two minutes. Look back over your day, find one moment that you almost missed, and squeeze the zest out of it. Really savor it, even retrospectively. And as you practice this, looking back and claiming this moment, you'll start to catch them in the real time. You'll start to be present as they are unfolding. That's how you train your attention. That's how joy becomes fuel. Not by creating more joyful moments, by actually being present to the ones that are already here. And if you're listening to this and think, but Monica, I can't really feel joy right now. I can't even notice micro moments. Everything feels gray. That's okay. Really. It means you're still human, you're still feeling, and you haven't numbed so hard that you don't even notice anymore. So when you don't feel joy, the question isn't what's wrong with me? The question is, what do I need right now? And if you don't know, I didn't know for months, remember in the last episode? And that's okay too. Just sit with it, be curious instead of judgmental. Those micromoments I mentioned, sometimes they're just basics. Nutrition, sleep, movement, rest, not as achievement, as acts of self-love. The joy of a good sleep, the joy of preparing a nourishing meal and savoring it, the joy of moving your body, these simple things actually shift your body chemistry. They create the conditions for the aliveness to flow through, the joy to return. And when it does, even in small moments, that's when you have capacity again. Not after you achieve something, before. Alisa, you remember her, yeah? I spoke a lot about her in the last episode. So last month in Milano, she won Olympic gold, both singles and teen. The youngest US national champion at 13, she retired at 16. Two years of being a whole person, then back on the ice at 18, with that infectious joy the commentators couldn't stop talking about. Gold at 20. That's what joy as fuel looks like. So here's your invitation until next episode. Notice those micro moments of joy each day. Your coffee, your sun, your dog, the wind, a taste, a memory, a burn in the heart workouts, dirt under your fingernails. Don't dismiss it. Just let it have it. Just let yourself have it. Squeeze the zest out of it. It's your fuel. Next episode, we are gonna dive into those three dimensions of joy I mentioned. I cannot wait. How to move from experiencing joy occasionally to living joyfully as a way of being is what this podcast is about. That's episode five. And if this conversation is resonating with you, if you're realizing that you've been waiting to earn joy instead of recognizing it as your fuel, I want to invite you to go deeper with me. I'm hosting this live training in April called Become Fully Alive. Here's where we are going to explore those three dimensions of joy in real time. We'll identify your personalized ways of experiencing joy to strengthen then the practice dimension. So joy isn't just a matter of circumstance, something that happens to you, but something you can actively cultivate. You're gonna work on unlocking the steps towards building a joyful way of being that allows you to feel fully alive, to make that impact from wholeness, not deficit, to access your full capacity. If this resonates, join the priority list at monicapandele.com and you'll be informed first when doors open. Subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss the next episode when we dive deep into those dimensions of joy. And until then, notice the breadcrumbs. Let yourself have the micro moments. Squeeze the zest. They are just there, they are present, they're fuel. Joy isn't something you achieve. It's what gives you the capacity to achieve. I'm Monica Pandele. This is the Joyful Rebellion. See you next time. Be alive. Be alive.