Living With Gratitude and Joy

Living With Gratitude and Joy Abbie Mirata is a corporate executive, speaker, joy coach and business owner. From the title of wife and mom to the title of franchise owner to the title of corporate leader, whatever hat Abbie is wearing, she is focused on impacting people, creating community and building a kinder world. She believes people are looking for a human connection in the companies they do business with. Abbie draws from her experiences to help others focus on cultivating joy and finding the light they give from within themselves, each and every day.Abbie Mirata uses her process of 5 Exercises to Strengthen Your Joy Joints ™ to empower individuals at work or at home to be able to gain control of their own responses and reactions to the world, redefine joy as a value and help you maintain your sanity, while keeping your humanity.Podcast HighlightsWho is Abbie Mirata? Abbie’s story began when she had her first child because that experience changed the trajectory of her life completely. She needed to figure out how to take care of her child and that led Abbie to a career in real estate. 20 years later she was at the top of her game but felt like she hadn’t accomplished anything. Now she’s still in the corporate world, but Abbie is also a co-owner of a retail business with her husband, a joy coach, and a non-profit that teaches young people compassion and how to bring joy into their life.Joy JointsJoy Joints are an analogy for your ability to build joy as a value inside yourself, in the same way that you build muscles. By exercising your Joy Joints, you can take control of the way that you engage with people in your life.We have to be self aware of how we come across to other people and humble enough to try to change those perceptions. As a leader, Abbie used to expect people to do what she said simply because she was the boss. When she felt that she wasn’t being fulfilled with what she was doing, she realized that part of that was how she was operating and her relationships with her team.Abbie left the corporate world and began to study compassion. It began with asking more questions and after a few years of transformation Abbie had the opportunity to reenter the corporate world with a new, more compassionate mindset.Abbie now focuses on empowering her people and pulling ideas out of them, then celebrating them. She encourages communication among the team and tries to be more supportive and understanding of where people in her team are at over the course of the day. It’s much more common now for Abbie’s team to tell her that she made a mistake.Many people in a leadership position are afraid of getting that honest feedback from their team, but there are a number of people that would benefit from that kind of open communication.TrustYou and your team can achieve exponentially more when there is a high level of trust.What does joy mean?Joy means lots of different things to different people. For Abbie, joy is a value and guides her in a way that most people don’t think of.We feel emotions based on the things that happen around us and most of the time we don’t have control over those things. We are placing an enormous amount of expectation on other things and people to make us happy, which often leads to us feeling disappointed when they don’t live up to those expectations.As a value, joy is up there with integrity and trust. When it becomes a value it becomes a guiding star that helps you make decisions. It will also help you shape your reactions to negative situations and help you see the interaction through the lens of joy. Joy and StressWhen you develop your joy muscles, it allows you to handle stress in a different way. A component of joy is letting the little things go and when y