Better Than This Ep. 4: Show Notes
🎙 Episode Overview
Why Prioritizing Joy Is a Key to Flourishing, Leadership, and Wellbeing
How to Break the Cycle of Guilt and Rediscover What Makes You Come Alive
When was the last time you felt joyful—deeply, expansively, fully alive? If you're like many high-achieving women, joy may feel like a distant memory—or something you think you'll get around to once everything else is done.
In this episode of Better Than This, Meghan explores how working women have become disconnected from their joy—and why reclaiming it is essential for flourishing in both life and leadership. Drawing from personal stories, research-backed insights, and an annual “joy trip” ritual that changed everything, this episode is a powerful invitation to redefine success by putting happiness, well-being, and joy back at the center.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why so many women feel guilty prioritizing joy (and how that guilt is socially conditioned)
- The long-term health and leadership benefits of positive emotion, including Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory
- How joy supports resilience, better decision-making, creativity, and thriving relationships
- Three powerful practices to reconnect with your joy and prioritize flourishing every week
- How taking a “joy trip” can radically recalibrate your mental health and leadership presence
Key Quotes from the Episode:
“Joy is dangerous—it is a threat to the systems of control and power-over and is therefore one of the best tools we have as leaders making change. It allows us to move from extracting from others for our self-centered benefit toward transformation for all society.”
~ Leading With Joy by Akaya Windwood & Rajasvini Bhansali
“The expectations we put on mothers manifests for a lot of mothers in terms of guilt. And guilt is a form of social control. Mothers feel so overwhelmed by what's being asked of them that they don't have the bandwidth or the community or the wherewithal to demand change. Guilt makes you quiet and shrink and not want to talk about things.”
Resources Mentioned:
- Harvard Human Flourishing Program
- The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Maté
- Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory
