Are you ready to break free from the chains of negativity and embrace a life filled with joy and fulfillment? Join happiness expert Matt O’Neill, the author of Good Mood Revolution: Igniting the Power of Conscious Happiness, as he reveals the groundbreaking strategies to revolutionize your mood. In this latest episode, Matt offers a refreshing perspective on happiness, emphasizing the power of choice and mindset. Discover the eight primary bad mood emotions and learn practical strategies to overcome them. Life can feel chaotic, but Matt will show you how happiness is a skill we can learn and master. He will share the tools to revolutionize your mood and experience lasting joy. Tune in to this episode so you won’t miss a thing!
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Revolutionize Your Mood: The Secret To Lasting Happiness With Matt O’Neill
Welcome back to another exciting episode. I am joined by Matt O’Neill. Matt, tell us who you are and what you do.
Zander, I am so freaking jacked to be here. I’m feeling epic. It’s an honor. I am a happiness expert. I say this because, at this point, I’ve had over 100,000 people consume my content on how to live a happier life. I’ve written the Good Mood Revolution book. I have the Good Mood Revolution podcast. It’s not just coach speak. This is real-world-tested stuff.
I’ve got 80 employees, a tremendous amount of people who are unhappy. We have had over 5,000 clients, and a lot of them aren’t happy. This puts a strain on our own happiness. At the same time, I’m juggling an awesome but big family. We’ve got four young kids under the age of ten. Life can be really busy, it can feel chaotic, and it can feel out of control for all of us.
When we’re going through a big life and problems pop up, it’s like, “How can I be happy when this is happening? How can I be happy when we have a health challenge?” Here’s the thing. Happiness is a choice. That’s what I teach. I teach that happiness is a choice, and there are just eight things that get in the way of that choice. Those are the eight primary bad mood emotions. I teach how to get out of each of those emotions and choose happiness again.
I’m all about that. Happiness is definitely a choice. In my own life, I absolutely live that. I remember years ago, I was taking a coaching course, and we had to read books. I can’t tell you anything more than that I took this one little nugget out of a book, but that’s the whole point of reading a book. If you take one thing away from a 200-page book, you prove that the author was successful.
It’s called The Diamond Cutter. Anyway, what I wanted to share is that in Buddhism, there’s this idea that things aren’t good or bad. They’re inherently the way they are. However, how we choose to look at them is what matters. The example I always like to use with people is that I’m in California, and the sun is out. I think that’s a good thing. Inherently, the sun being in or out isn’t good or bad.
If we’re in a drought and I’m a farmer, then the sun being out is not good because it’s killing my crops. It’s that whole idea the sun being out isn’t good or bad. It’s how we see it. I think the things that happen in our lives are not necessarily good or bad, it’s how we choose to interpret them. Yes, there are bad things that happen in life. I certainly have experienced some of those, but even in those, I have a choice. I think choice is so powerful.
I know a little bit about your story. Just reading the name of your book about the lemonade stand brought tears to my eyes.
Thank you.
The Power To Choose Your Response
I also heard you talk about how sometimes you just can’t have an answer to some questions. That was a choice that you made. Sometimes, I think we’re given grace. I heard you tell a story on your show about how you were coming over a highway, and you remember exactly where you were on the highway, and an insight came to you that said, “You’re never going to know, and that’s okay. You have to let this go.”
Absolutely. I tell that story.
We have a choice at that moment, too, and you were given grace. That insight that was given to you was given by something greater than you. It didn’t come from your own brain. It came from something else, something beyond you. We have a choice, and we’re given that grace to either accept it for the grace that it is and to say, “I’m going to accept this teaching. It’s what I need right now in order for me to move forward in a positive way.”
Go start the Epic Begins with One Step Forward podcast, write books helping people going through terrible times, or reject this grace and continue to wallow in the suffering of not knowing and wishing that things were different. I think what you and your family had to endure is something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I think that your understanding as you came through it and what you’ve done to make the world a more beautiful place is the best anyone could possibly do with that situation, and that is how we choose happiness.
Thank you so much for all of those kind words. When I talk about my sister, Lucy, and the work that I do and my family does, I like to tell people that it feels so much better to celebrate the rainbow that was her life and do good things in her memory versus just focusing on the dot at the end of the rainbow that was her death. My sister lived for 30 years. There’s this vibrant, beautiful life. She was an awesome person. Why shouldn’t I celebrate that? Let me tell you, it feels so much better to be doing good things.
This is what I’m saying. You’ve got this beautiful perspective, and you’re using your choice to choose the beauty of the perspective. One of the eight bad moods that gets in the way of our happiness is sadness. It’s grieving what we’ve lost. Sadness is beautiful, too. It tells us how much we love. The more we love somebody, the more we grieve when they’re no longer with us. It’s two sides of the same coin. However, we can grieve with gratitude. As you beautifully put it, here’s the reality. We are not guaranteed any time with people we love.
The more we love somebody, the more we grieve when they’re no longer with us.
It’s not guaranteed. We’re not entitled to it. I’m not entitled to live another ten years with my wife. I’m not entitled to be my children’s dad when I walk them down the aisle. I’m gifted time with my wife. I’m gifted time with my kids. You and your family were gifted 30 beautiful years with your sister, and you recognize that. These are perspectives that allow us to get back into happiness after times get tough.
I’m on an epic journey with the loss of my sister, and every day, I make a choice whether I want to talk about her or not. I think that’s an important part for people who may be grieving, on a given day, it just may not be a day that you want to talk about your loss, but it doesn’t mean that you never want to talk about it.
My experience was that lots of people knew about my loss. It was very public, it was all over the papers and on the news and stuff. When I went back to work, people came by, and they’d stop at my cubicle, but then they’d move on. I’m a highly social person. People not talking to me was torturous, honestly. I put up a sign that said, “It’s okay to talk to me.”
It’s so funny.
Sadly, here in America, we treat death as if it’s the most communicable disease. If we acknowledge it, we may catch it and stop. It’s not. What I tell people all the time is I don’t have a miracle sentence that will make it better for you. You don’t have a miracle sentence for me, but that’s okay. There is a lot of healing that happens when our grief is acknowledged on both sides.
There were lots of people who came to my sister’s funeral and were standing in the receiving line. Before I went through that, I always thought a receiving line was an unbelievably torturous thing. Why are we doing that? Once I went through it and was honestly on the receiving end, my family and I felt more. We felt seen, we felt heard, and we weren’t as worn down as we thought we were going to be. In fact, I felt a little more energized.
I realized at that moment that everyone needed their grief to be acknowledged. There is something so powerful about having your loss acknowledged. There were all these people who knew Lucy and my family and wanted their grief acknowledged. They wanted to say, “I do feel this loss.” It was really powerful.
Thank you for sharing all of that. You are an inspiration to me because you have turned something extremely painful that you’ve gone through into a source of inspiration and healing for so many other people. I just wanted to acknowledge and applaud you for turning that pain into a purpose and making the world a better place after a really dark experience.
Thank you.
Typically, I teach happiness with much lighter experiences.
Let’s get back to the happiness.
I love going into someone who’s learned how to make an epic life after a really dark experience. They are the heroes in our world. I just wanted to acknowledge you on that before we got started here because most of the time what we do is we make a mountain out of a molehill, and we get all bent out of shape over things that are not life and death.
However, we treat them like they are. We’re having a financial problem, we’re having an issue at work, we lost our job, or we’re having a relationship strain, and it consumes our whole life and torpedoes our happiness when it doesn’t need to. What I teach is how to choose happiness and get out of these bad mood emotions when things are not on the extremes of loss and pain.
Good Mood Revolution
One of the things I talk about in my book and as an ongoing segment in my podcast is what I call Epic Unexpected. Sometimes, I’m talking to other people about sibling loss or other losses, but I’m also talking about other life events that change your life. Back in October 2022, I crashed on my mountain bike. I shattered my shoulder and broke my humerus pretty badly. I had to have surgery, and then I had to go in for another surgery because I broke the titanium plate in my arm because the humeral fracture didn’t heal. It affected me a little. I’m not back on my mountain bike yet, but I’m back on my road bike, and life is good.
I don’t have a 100% range of motion in my shoulder, but I’m doing okay, and I’m not in pain. When that happened, Matt, I treated the whole thing as a huge accident. I looked at the opportunities I had to learn about how I heal, how I deal with adversity, and how I’m going to have to make adaptations. I think how we deal with those unexpected things in our life matters. I’ve been through all the different words for getting laid off, reduced in force, downsized, outsourced. It stinks. What I personally did was get back on the horse. I had to find what my next adventure was.
You talked about two of the positive moods I write about in my book. In fact, we’re very in sync here. I wrote my chapter on choosing responsibility about how I tore my labrum in my left shoulder. I start out with the story of playing basketball with a new group of guys. This was just a few years ago, maybe two years ago. I’m playing basketball with this new group of guys, and I want to impress them because I want to get into this game. I want to be a regular in the game. I play really tight defense, and I’m trying to do the best I can for my team to win.
I’m playing against the most aggressive player, and he doesn’t like that. I’m playing really tight defense. He also wants to show me that he’s the alpha, to teach me a lesson. I steal the ball from him, and he doesn’t like that. He calls a foul on me, and I’m like, “Here’s the ball.” I steal the ball again, and now he’s pissed, and he calls a foul on me. This time, I say something back. I say, “Those were two steals, not two fouls.” The next time down the court, he runs into me so hard that I get thrown off my feet, and I put my left arm down to brace for the fall. That’s when I tore the labrum. A labrum isn’t something that you can fix. They can do surgery, but it doesn’t put your shoulder back the way it was. It just is what it is.
I absolutely feel you.
You’ve been through this. The pain is so great. I can’t lift a basketball with this arm anymore. The basketball is just too heavy to lift. I can’t do a single pushup. I’m struggling to pick my kids up. I’ve got young kids, and I’m feeling like a total victim. Like, why did that guy have to hit me? As I’m feeling like a victim, I’m suffering.
One of the keys to happiness is that anytime we take the stance of a victim, whether we have justification or not, we’re not happy. Victims always suffer. Did the guy need to hit me and tear that labrum? No. Was I a victim? Probably. His aggression was unwarranted. However, choosing to think that way, as long as I stayed there feeling like a victim, was going to perpetuate my suffering.
What did I decide to do? I said, “Victims suffer. I’m going to be the opposite of a victim. I’m going to be responsible. I’m going to take full responsibility for the situation.” Did I come in playing as aggressively as I could? Did I not know that I was playing against the most aggressive guy? I didn’t, but maybe I could have picked that up the first time I took the ball.
He told me with his actions and his words, this isn’t going to go well for you. I could take some responsibility for the way I showed up in that interaction. Doing that starts to lessen how upset I feel about it. I say I had some responsibility in creating this, but ultimately, even if we’re a full-on victim, and the other day I was driving in my car with my family and we got T-boned by somebody looking at their phone. They were going 40 miles an hour. Our car got hit so hard, we went up on two wheels. Literally zero I could do to prevent that.
In that case, my only responsibility was that I chose to drive a car. In situations where you’re saying, I really cannot take even the slightest bit of responsibility in this, we still get to choose responsibility. Maybe we weren’t responsible for what happened, but we are certainly responsible for making the best of what we’ve got. In the case of my shoulder, when I chose to take responsibility for my shoulder, I started to do everything that you just talked about. I went and saw three different specialists.
I went and saw physical therapists. I went in and hired the best personal trainer who worked with the USA women’s soccer team that won the gold medal. I said, “You know joints and how to get athletes back on the field better than anyone. Would you please work with me?” He took me on as a client. It took me six months of intense rehab, but at the end of six months, I was doing 50 pushups in a row, and my shoulder came back to maybe 95% because I added more bulk and strength.
I ended up drinking 100 grams of protein a day and taking creatine. I strengthened all the muscles around the shoulder to the point where maybe it’s even better today than it was before I injured it. That’s because I took responsibility and took my life back into my hands. This is one of the things I teach: as long as we want to be a victim, we won’t be happy. As soon as we choose what we can do about it, we feel better.
A different way of saying it, the way I say it, is, and I’ll change it because instead of talking about loss yet again here on the podcast, I’ll just say your situation. You can define your situation, or it can define you. I choose to define my situation. Certainly, I had absolutely no responsibility, I was a victim when my sister was killed. If you participate in any kind of sport, whether it’s basketball, riding your mountain bike, or whatever it is, you will fall off your bike at some point.
You are going to get injured. It’s not a matter of if I get injured playing basketball, it’s when I will get injured playing basketball.
Here’s the thing, Matt, would you rather hurt yourself playing basketball, or for me, being active, riding my mountain bike, or have a heart attack because I sat on the couch, afraid I was going to get hurt? I’d rather be on my mountain bike and say I wrecked my shoulder and, down the road, I’ll probably have to have a shoulder replacement. Howdy, did I do it good?
Yeah, and my mom, just to give you some relief on this, my mom is 76. She’s super active. She was always doing step classes, aerobic classes, lifting weights. At her older age, she started to do yoga and was doing headstands, all this stuff. She ended up ruining her right shoulder and needed a full shoulder replacement. They couldn’t do the normal procedure, so they had to do a reverse shoulder replacement. She moved in with my wife and me, and my wife had to shower her. We got real close to my mom.
Shoulder replacement surgery is a big deal. It’s a major surgery. We’re six months out from that surgery, and I’m like, “Mom, how’s the shoulder?” She’s like, “It is so good. I’ve got all my strength back,” and she’s picking the kids up and doing her yoga again. Just so you know, even if you do have to go down that road, the technology for shoulder replacement surgery is fantastic. This is me again, helping us define our life and our reality. If we define our life as going to be the greatest it can be, regardless of what’s happening or what will happen, it’s going to be the greatest it can be.
Here’s the thing about whatever your epic journey is. For me, the word EPIC stands for Every Pilgrimage Includes Commitment. Whether it’s writing a book, you’ve written a book, I’ve written three books, it’s definitely a pilgrimage. I use pilgrimage not so much in the religious sense but more that you’re on this long journey and there is struggle, doubt, and all of that. In the end, is it great when you finally get done?
I don’t know about you, but for me, the editing of the book was twice as hard as the writing of the book. I had to read my books six times because they proofread it, and you go through and read it. I got done with my epic book, and I was like, “I know what I’ve said in there, but I don’t actually want to reread my book for a month or two because I spent a month and a half reading every word multiple times.” That’s not to say I don’t love my book, but like anything, if you read the same book six times, you need a break from it for just a month.
I was the other way. I obsessed. It took me four years to write my book because I obsessed about creating a book that I could stand behind as the greatest work I could produce. I also wanted, because my book is about how to get out of the eight destructive moods that sabotage our happiness, to fully experience all eight moods and find my way out so that I knew my teaching wasn’t just theory. It was actual. This is what you do to get out of anger.
This is what you do to get out of debilitating fear. This is how you get out of the destructive emotion of feeling rejected and shameful. My book took me a long time because I wanted to experience all of what I needed to experience to teach it. The second half of the book is the eight good moods that I want to live in. The highest aspirational moods are feeling love and compassion all the time. I’m like, I don’t always feel loving and compassionate.
I felt inauthentic. I said, “I can’t write a chapter about how to feel loving, compassionate, and empathetic all the time if I don’t feel that way. I had to grow my compassion, empathy, and love.” It took me a year to grow my compassion to the level where I could write a chapter about how to live compassionately all the time. Anyway, one of the other moods I wanted to talk about that you hit on earlier was this feeling of confidence. It’s one of the eight moods I talk about for living a really happy life.
There are things that we can certainly do to strengthen our confidence. The things that destroy our confidence are anxiety, stress, and self-doubt, the journey we take on that pilgrimage you’re talking about. What we want to do is work to grow our confidence. The first step to growing our confidence, all confidence is, if you think about it, is saying, I believe I can get the outcome I want. I have confidence.
The Foundation Of Self-Belief
I believe in myself that I can do what I say I’m going to do. The foundation of self-belief is keeping the promises you make to yourself. We are all guilty of breaking our promises to ourselves more than anyone else. Every time we don’t follow through on what we tell ourselves we’re going to do, we believe ourselves less the next time we tell ourselves we’re going to do something. A simple example is we say, “I’m going to get up tomorrow morning, I’m going to go to the gym, and I’m going to run six miles.” This is a thought we’ll have.
The foundation of self-belief is keeping the promises you make to yourself.
If we stayed up late watching movies on Netflix, didn’t sleep well, got a little bit of a cold, or have a crick in our neck, it’s so easy the next morning to say, not today. I’ll do the gym thing another day. Every time we break that promise and commitment to ourselves, we erode our self-confidence because we don’t think we can trust ourselves. One of the foundations of good moods for me is being very careful with the commitments I make to myself because I know that if I make a commitment, I have to follow through on it.
When we keep these small commitments, like going to the gym even when we don’t feel like it, we then keep the big commitments. I’m going to finish the book, or I’m going to start the podcast, or I’m going to achieve this year-long goal because we start to believe that anything we say we’re going to do, we’re going to actually do it.
I talk about this all the time. A couple of things here. First of all, don’t be afraid to fail because we are going to fail at things in our lives. The example I like to give that helps make it real for people is to say that in baseball, you make it into the Hall of Fame if you have a lifetime batting average of over .300. Imagine this: let’s say you’re working for nine hours, and for you to have a Hall of Fame day, you only have to get it right three hours out of that day. You had a Hall of Fame day. Who among us wouldn’t want to say, I only have to get it right one-third of the time?
I’ve had a great day. I think sometimes it is a matter of perspective. As an entrepreneur, I’m a generous man. I have spent money on productivity tools, marketing tools, and stuff. I end up not using them, or they’re not the right thing. It’s not that they’re bad. They’re just not the right thing for me. The only way I’ll know what is or isn’t going to work is by trying it and making a commitment, saying I’m going to do this. I also accept that there are things I’m going to fail at. That’s okay. That is life.
I agree with you. We’re all afraid of failure. Of course, we are. We’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid of looking bad in the eyes of others. It’s actually the number one thing that keeps us from going after our dreams, that we’re afraid we’ll fail and people will look at us as if we are failures.
How about this one, Matt? Sadly, the meanest person in your life is you.
Not me.
Maybe.
Not me, because I’ve done the work. I know what you’re saying, Zander. This is where I’m correcting you because it’s not. When I was in my twenties, I was my harshest critic. No longer. This is one of the foundational things I teach everyone because everyone is their harshest critic except for me. I started a practice many years ago that changed everything about the way I talk to myself.
It’s so simple. Every morning, the first thing I do, well, it’s not the very first thing I do, but one of the first things I do is write down three things I did well the day before. It takes less than five minutes. I will not miss a day because it makes such a big difference in my life. When our mind says, “You messed that up, you said that stupid thing, I can’t believe you forgot to do that,” our mind is always saying what we didn’t do well. That’s what our mind’s job is. It thinks that if it points out all the things we’re doing poorly, we can make them better. I said, “Screw that. I want to tell my mind what I’m doing great at.”
Every morning I say, “Yesterday, I did a fantastic workout, and I did it with my wife. Yesterday, I made dinner for my whole family, and I let my wife take a break. That was awesome. Yesterday, I coached my team, and I helped them through a really challenging situation our industry is going through. That was my three things this morning.” Doing that every single day starts to happen as I’m doing things like that 3 out of 10 you were talking about that Lou Gehrig might have. As I’m hitting the ball 3 out of 10 times, I’m like, “Good job.”
I’m clapping for myself because I’m noticing what I’m doing right. This is what’s happened. It’s been amazing as I started to notice what everyone else is doing right in the world. I’m like, “You’re doing that great. You’re doing that great.” All of this, that harsh critic that I used to be on myself, has completely gone away because I affirm what I do well rather than tell myself what I didn’t do well.
I call that the 97-3 rule, which is that 97% of your day, Matt, is actually going really well and up to 3% isn’t. I came up with that because when I was doing my internship for my mental health license, I was in middle school, counseling middle school and high school students. I heard them come in and complain about all the things that were wrong. My mind works where I’m like, “How can I help them shift their perspective?”
I asked them, “What’s your least favorite subject in school?” A lot of them said math. I’m like, “I get that. If you got a 97 on your next test, how would you feel?” They’d say, “I’d be so excited. I’d tell my parents to be proud of me. I’d tell all my friends.” I’d reply, “Great. Would you complain about the three points you didn’t get?” They’d say, “Are you kidding? I got a 97. This is great.”
I’m like, “Yeah. In your day, why are you focused on that 3% that isn’t going well, just like you said, the things you didn’t do right or whatever, when there’s so much, an overwhelming amount of stuff you did do right?” Matt, you and I got up this morning. That’s a really good thing. Here, we are getting to do this podcast together. That’s an awesome thing. Dare I say, epic.
It is epic. If you’re reading this, you put on something inspiring. Pat yourself on the back. We don’t give ourselves credit. Zander, I totally agree with you. We do not give ourselves credit for how many things we do well every day. I know. Food on the table for your family, getting yourself dressed and going to the office when maybe you don’t really feel like it—these are things that we have to pat ourselves on the back for and say, “Great job.” No one else is telling us that they’re proud of us. It’s our job to tell ourselves that we’re proud of us.
We should pat ourselves on the back and say a great job today. It’s our job to tell ourselves that we’re proud of ourselves.
You’ve got to be your number one cheerleader. How can anyone else support you if you aren’t supporting yourself?
I’ll tell you what. You and I are so alike. I’m so glad that I’ve had a chance to meet you. It’s always fun to talk to somebody who values shifting their perspectives to the happier side like I do.
No, this has been great. You and I have been going on for quite a while here, Matt. I have had a fantastic time. I want to thank you so much. How can people get ahold of you? How can they find out about the eight things for happiness?
Yeah, the best thing is to get the book on Amazon. It’s Good Mood Revolution, or plug into the podcast, which is also Good Mood Revolution. If someone is saying, “I need to take this further. I really need some help figuring out how to make my life the most happy it can be,” I do offer one-on-one coaching, and you can get that at mattoneil.com.
Matt, I want to thank you so much for coming on. This has been incredible.
Certainly, two peas in a pod here.
Totally.
It’s been so much fun.
I want to remind everyone that you can find my information at EpicBegins.com, and if you go there now, you can get a free eBook of Epic Begins with One Step Forward. And as always, I want to remind people that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
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About Matt O’Neill
Matt O’Neill is a happiness expert whose work has positively impacted the lives of over 100,000 people worldwide. He’s the author of the “Good Mood Revolution” book, and host of the “Good Mood Revolution” podcast. Matt teaches us that happiness is a choice, even when life gets tough. His teaching isn’t just theory, it’s tested in the real world too. Matt has 4 young children and runs two successful businesses with over 80 employees. Life can feel chaotic, but Matt will show you how happiness is a skill we can learn and master.