Author Q&A: How to find joy in hard times
In his new book, Washington Post columnist Steven Petrow explores ways to build joy into your life and your work.
For Steven Petrow, 2017 wasn’t a year to celebrate.
Both of his parents died, he separated from his husband, and his sister, Julie, was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.
But from that unwieldy space of grief, he started an exploration of how to find joy.
In his new book, “The Joy You Make: Find the Silver Linings — Even on Your Darkest Days,” Washington Post columnist Petrow spells out how he did and how we can too.
Here's what Petrow had to say about finding joy when life gets messy, edited for length and clarity:
Kerry Hannon: How do you define joy?
Steven Petrow: The process of doing research on this book helped me to understand that I was a little bit clueless about what joy is.
We have this notion in our culture that joy is the Fourth of July fireworks. But there are all these different dimensions to joy — peacefulness, delight, exuberance. There can be spiritual types of joy. There are many types, but they all uplift us.
There is an important distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is eating a brownie. Joy is baking a pan of brownies to share. It's about connection — that’s the fundamental aspect of joy.
You suggest keeping a gratitude journal. How does this process provide a magic ingredient to build joy?
I was a little bit worried when I started writing a journal. Do I have enough things to be grateful for in my life on a daily basis? But I started to do it and did it religiously. I found that not only did I have big things to be grateful for, but I had many more small things.
Today, I'm grateful for my dog who's sitting over here. I'm grateful that it's sunny. I'm grateful for my friends. Sometimes I'm grateful for chocolate ice cream.
After three months, I noticed that I felt an uplift in my mood. I felt a sense of gratefulness in my world. I usually wrote in my journal before going to bed, and so I went to bed on a high note rather than ruminating about what didn't go right today.
Can a gratitude journal help you learn to love your job?
Absolutely. Many things in my journal were related to my work. Most of all in the workplace, it’s having a sense of connection to your coworkers, feeling like you're part of a team.
You write that celebrating someone else’s success in their career can bring you joy. How so?
When you’re happy for others' successes that instills in you a really positive reaction. That’s kind of the cool thing — it's called a helper's high. Also giving credit to someone else for your success is another way to do this. Catherine Chambliss, a professor of psychology at Ursinus College, calls this “bragitude.” It's where you tell a colleague how they contributed to your promotion. Love the way your garden turned out this year? Mention it to the neighbor who gave you a landscaping idea. Look for ways to reflect your joy back onto someone else.
How can the “sacred pause” — a breath or two that allows us to choose our next action — improve our joy?
The idea behind it is not to be provoked into responding without having a moment or a pause to reflect. In the workplace, perhaps you're having an encounter with a client, or with your boss, maybe they're criticizing you. An initial reaction might be to lash out or be on the defensive. I have found taking two breaths, just reconfiguring and thinking ‘what do I actually want to say?’ is a more useful one. It can change your perspective. Incremental mind shifts can lead us toward greater peace and greater joy.
Steven, I love your take on how learning to play again brings joy. Can you elaborate?
It’s allowing ourselves to find our childlike natures again. I have a puppy, and I get down on the floor with him and just play. How can I not be joyful?
Toward the end of the pandemic, I started playing board games with friends. Sometimes we were competitive; sometimes we were teammates, but there was a sense of being a kid again, and also being unvarnished, taking our masks off and just being our authentic selves, but also maybe just our kid-like selves. We kind of pile on layers as we go along.
You extoll the joy of doing nothing. How does that work?
My grandmother always said to me, ‘Stevie, busy people are happy people.’ So I grew up thinking that meant having a life that was always full of things. Those are not always the things that nourish us. It has actually been a little bit of a scary process to practice doing nothing. You can sit and meditate. You can lie on the floor. You can just be present and allow what's in your mind to say hello.
Can you talk about the joy of taking part in an activity simply because it’s fun?
I started to play tennis again three years ago. I had stopped when I was a teenager. I went back to the tennis court, and I loved it. I suck now, but I'm not doing it because I'm winning. I'm doing it because I'm outdoors. I'm with other people. And there's a comradery there, and it's just fun. I now understand that it's a virtue to do something for fun, not because it's going to get you a better job or because it's going to make you a richer person.
You write about how dancing can bring joy. You even have a terrific playlist in the book for a dance party. Explain!
I'm so glad you said that about the playlist. I'm really terrified that I have three nieces in their 20s and worried they are going to bust me and say, ‘you old man.’
My friends in Hillsborough, N.C., periodically throw a dance party at their house. They have a screen porch and a disco ball, a fog machine, and strobe lights. It is euphoric joy. To be free dancing in that way, to escape from ourselves, and also to travel back to really happy memories on other dance floors, then you have the joy of memory, which is important.
It's partly this ability to leave our bodies and be less self-conscious about how we're appearing in the world. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called this ‘collective effervescence,’ but it's really the harmony that happens and comes out of a group. This convergence and trust is an underlying part of joy.
Finally, what’s the joy we can find in aging?
It's important to shift our minds to find the aspects of getting older that can be joyful. Some of that's the wisdom that comes with age. I'm not making the argument that it's one big party to be over 50, but I am saying that being older is very different from being ill. There are many reasons to celebrate and many things to do.
No matter what age you are, people cannot live without joy. We need that light in ourselves to go day to day.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work" and "Never Too Old To Get Rich." Follow her on X @kerryhannon.
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