Choosing Joy: Finding the Gift in Every Single Day

Joy isn't something that simply happens to us—it's something we intentionally choose. In this inspiring episode of Elevate Her, we explore how shifting your mindset can transform the way you experience both life's victories and its challenges.

Rather than promoting unrealistic positivity, this conversation dives into the power of perspective. You'll learn practical ways to recognize lessons in difficult moments, develop mental resilience, and create daily habits that help you focus on growth instead of perfection.

Whether you're navigating a busy season, overcoming setbacks, or simply looking for more peace in your everyday life, this episode offers simple tools to help you cultivate gratitude, strengthen your mindset, and find meaning in every day.

Key Takeaways

• Why positivity is a daily choice—not just a feeling.
• The difference between healthy optimism and toxic positivity.
• How asking better questions can change your perspective.
• Why every day has something to teach you.
• The science behind gratitude and positive thinking.
• How to build a resilient mindset one small step at a time.
• Five practical tools to shift your perspective during challenging moments.
• Why celebrating small wins creates lasting confidence and joy.

Hosted by Theresa Gonnella, a pharmaceutical sales leader and transformational coach who has led large teams and helped shape national sales strategy. After an unexpected layoff in her early 30s, she moved to Italy, built a private wine label, wrote a book, and returned to corporate America with a new perspective on risk, reinvention, resilience, and success on her own terms.

Transcript

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Hello, and welcome back to the Elevate Her podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about growing into the strongest, most grounded, most powerful version of yourself. One conversation at a time. And I am so happy that you're here with me today. So if you're walking, driving, folding laundry, or sitting with your coffee before your day begins, thank you for being here with me today and carving out some time. Today's episode is something that I absolutely love discussing. And we're talking about choosing a positive mindset and how it actually is able to catapult you into success, find value in every day, find the lesson in every day, and the gift that stands with it, having a positive outlook in everything that you do. So why choosing a positive mindset matters? Let's start here. Positivity is not something that happens to you, it's something that you choose. I know, I know that might sound something printed on like a throw pillow, but please stick with me here because this is real substance. And I think this is such an important subject. Most of us walk around assuming our mood is a reaction. Something good happens and then we feel good. And then something bad happens and then we feel bad. Simply cause and effect, right? Well, here's the truth. Between the event and your reaction, there's a gap, a tiny space. And in that space, you have a choice. You can choose how you interpret what just happened. You can choose what story that you tell yourself about it, and you can choose what to focus on next. The gap is where the power lies. Now, I want to be really clear about something because I don't want this episode to come across as toxic positivity. This is not about pretending everything is fine when it's not, and it's not about slapping a smile on during a hard day or ignoring real pain or real grief or real struggle. It's not about that because that is not healthy. And honestly, all of that backfires. We're completely talking about something very different. It's about training yourself to look at what's true and what's good, even in the middle of when things get hard. Both can exist at the same time. You can be having a rough week and still notice the way the light looked in the morning, or the fact that a friend checked on you, or that you handled something difficult with grace better than you expected. Positive mindset isn't the absence of difficulty, it's the presence of perspective. There's a lesson in this every single day. And I want to share something that happened that changed the way that I move through my days. A few years ago, I started to ask myself one question every single night before I go to bed. What did the day teach me? Not was today good or bad, or not, did everything go according to plan? Just what did I learn? What did this beautiful day teach me? And here is what is so wild. Even on the days that I felt like a total dumpster fire, the days where I snapped at someone that I might have, you know, not deserved it, or someone that I loved, or a plan fell apart, or I felt completely overwhelmed. There was always an answer behind it. Always. Maybe the lesson was that I needed to set a boundary with that person. Maybe it was I'm not drinking enough water and it's affecting my mood. Or maybe it was I didn't get enough sleep because I've been traveling enough. Or it could be I need to ask for help instead of trying to do everything myself, which I'm completely guilty of all the time. Sometimes the lesson was even smaller, like I forgot how much I love cooking and I should do that a lot more. When you start looking for the lesson, something completely shifts. The day stops being bad, it just becomes information. It becomes data that helps you build towards a better tomorrow. Think about this. If you only ever evaluate your days as good or bad, you're sorting your whole life into two boxes. And most of your life ends up feeling kind of random and out of your control. Box one, good, box two, bad. But if you start asking yourself, what is this day trying to teach me? You become a student of your own life. You start to notice patterns, you start to grow on purpose instead of on accident. So I want you to try this tonight. Before you fall asleep, just ask yourself, what did today teach me? You don't need a journal, you don't need a system. Just ask the question and let the answer come to you. And here's a bonus practice. If you want to take this a little step further, pair that question with what's one good thing that happened to me today, even if it was small. And let's start looking at the positive. This is sometimes called a gratitude practice. And look, I know those words get thrown around a lot. And there's actual science behind gratitude. Multiple studies have shown that people who regularly notice and write things down that they're grateful for report higher levels of happiness, better sleep, and even improve physical health markers like lower blood pressure. Who wouldn't want that? So, why do we want to do this? Because what you pay attention to grows. Your brain has something called confirmation bias. It looks for evidence that supports whatever belief it already has. So if you believe today was terrible, your brain will go hunting for proof of that. But if you ask yourself, what was good today, your brain starts hunting for that instead. You are literally retraining your brain and retraining your own attention. So mindset is a muscle and not a switch. Here's something that I think gets lost in a lot of the just think positive messaging out there. Mindset is not a switch that you flip on or off. It truly is a muscle that you build. You wouldn't expect to go into the gym for the first time and do like a deadlift of 200 pounds or run for two hours on the treadmill. You'd start light, you'd practice the form, you'd build up slowly over time, you'd build up mental and emotional resilience. And that worked at the exact same way as building your positive mindset. So if you're someone who tends to worry a lot or have self-criticism or you catastrophize things. And honestly, a lot of us out there do that, especially a lot of women who've been conditioned to be hard on themselves year after year, please don't beat yourself up for being a positivity expert overnight. That's actually not how it works. And frankly, expecting instant mastery is just another form of self-criticism and self-sabotage in disguise. So instead of thinking it in small repetitions, every time you catch a negative thought, gently direct it and make it a repetition of a positive thought. Every time you choose to respond instead of react, that's a positive repetition. Every time you find something to anticipate in a hard moment, that's a repetition. So instead, anticipate the posity in the moment. Anticipate what good came out of the moment. Anticipate what you can learn from that moment. And just like the gym, some of those days where repetitions feel hard will soon become easy. And some of those days when they feel impossible, that is normal. That's not failure, but that's what training looks like because over time it gets better and better. I also want to talk about something really important here. And that's the difference between optimism and denial. So optimism says, this is hard, and I believe I can handle it. And there's something likely good to come from it waiting on the other side of this. Denial will say, this isn't actually hard. Everything is fine, and I don't need to feel anything about this thing. So see the difference. One acknowledges reality and adds hope. The other ignores reality altogether. So when life gets difficult, and it will, because we're all human, give yourself permission to feel what you feel. Cry if you need to cry, vent to a friend, sit with the disappointment. And then when you're ready, ask yourself, okay, now what? What's the one small thing that I can focus on that's within my control? What's the one positive thing that came out of this today? What is the one thing that I can do to look at the joy and the positivity in the situation that I can take away from and make my life better? What's the one thing about today, even if it's hard, that I can be grateful for? That sequence of feeling it and then reframing it is actually a real practice. Not skipping straight to positivity, but actually moving towards it and moving through it. So here's some practical tools that you can use today. Let's get practical with some of the things that can make you really successful in this area. Because I know if you are listening, you're thinking, okay, this all sounds really great, Teresa, but how do I actually do this on a Tuesday morning when my kids are screaming or when I'm sitting in traffic and I'm missing that important meeting or I'm running late and my coffee just spilled on my beautiful steamed and ironed white shirt. That's super fair. And let's go ahead and talk about the tools. So the first tool is the morning anchor. So before you check your phone and before the day starts, take 60 seconds, just 60, to set an intention for that day. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It can actually be something like today, I'm gonna look for something good, or today I'm gonna choose to be patient with myself, or today I'm gonna find some beauty in the day. This tiny little practice acts like an anchor. So when the day can potentially get chaotic, you have something to come back to. You can actually write it on a piece of paper if you want to, or put it on your phone screen, or paste it on your steering wheel. But just remember to return back to that simple intention that you created for the day. So a second tool is the reframe sentence. When something goes wrong, instead of saying this is ruining my day, or this is awful, and this always happens to me, possibly try saying this is just part of my day. It's just a small part. It sounds like a small shift, but it can actually be huge. So instead of ruining the entire day and make the whole entire day awful, make it just a part of your day. Or you can simply say, hey, this is ruining this 15 minutes that I've been in, or this is ruining the hour, or this is just a small part of this 24-hour day. It actually puts it into proportion. It's just one little tiny piece of a much bigger picture, and that is a really powerful shift. So, tool number three that you can use is the three-minute reset. So if you're spiraling, and this often can happen, like anxious thoughts that are on repeat, give yourself a three-minute timeout. Step outside if you can, take a deep breath, name three things that you can see, name three things that you can hear, and one thing that you're grateful for in that exact moment. This isn't about fixing the whole problem. It's about interrupting the spiral so that you can actually think super clearly. This is a super powerful practice. Sometimes just shifting your environment for three minutes and thinking about something else for three minutes can start transforming the energy very quickly. So, tool number four, surround yourself wisely. This is one that's huge and often overlooked. Pay attention to who and what you're consistently consuming. Pay attention to the people that you talk to, the accounts that you follow, the shows that you watch before you go to bed. Mindset is not a vacuum. If you're constantly surrounded by negativity, comparison, or drama, it's gonna be so much harder to maintain perspective. No matter how much gratitude lists that you write, if you're consuming stuff that is opposite of that, it's going to start having an effect on you. So be wise about your choices. You deserve relationships and inputs that lift you up, not the ones that constantly drain you. Tool number five, celebrate the small wins. We are so quick to acknowledge what went wrong and so slow to acknowledge what went right. Did you get out of bed when you were knowing that you're facing a challenging day? That's a win. Did you have a hard conversation you've been avoiding? That's a win. Did you make it through a meeting without losing your patience? That's a win. Start noticing these. They add up and they retrain your brain to see life as a full list of small victories instead of just problems. So a few things that I want to leave you here with today as we wrap up, every single day of your life, even the boring ones, even the challenging ones, even the ones that feel like they're just on repeat, like yesterday, every single one of those days is something. It's information, it's growth, it's a chance to practice, it's a chance to notice something beautiful that you might have missed otherwise. You do not have to lose every day. You don't have to find a silver lining at every single moment either. But you can choose again and again to be someone who looks for value. Be someone who asks themselves, what can I learn here? instead of why is this happening to me? Just having that small little shift, even in the middle of a hard time, can be one small victory that you can actually be grateful for. That choice, repeated day after day, is what builds a life that feels super meaningful. Not because everything went perfectly, but because you showed up for it. You paid attention and you chose to grow. So here's your homework for this week. And if you want, tonight is a great day to start. Ask yourself what today taught you. And tomorrow morning, before you check your phone, take 60 seconds to set an intention. Just try this and see what shifts for you. If today's episode of Elevate Her is a conversation that meant something to you and you found some value, I'd love for you to share it with a friend who might need to hear this as well. Sometimes the right words at the right time can change someone's entire week. You have the power to choose how you show up in your life. So choose well, my friend. Choose kindly, choose positivity, and choose to find the good in your day. Be bold, be beautiful, and have an amazing day.