I'm going to say the thing nobody in your life will say to you. The reason you keep saying yes — the reason you give and give and end up empty — is not because you are a kind person. It is because you are frightened. And until you can see that clearly, nothing changes. In this episode I unpack the difference between kindness and the survival reflex that looks like kindness from the outside, why most people-pleasing advice doesn't work, and the small, hard question to ask yourself the next time you say yes. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

This is a different kind of episode. No list. No three takeaways. Just one conversation about something I think we don't talk about enough — the particular pain of wanting today to be different than it is. The mood you woke up in. The argument that's still sitting in your chest. The day that already feels heavy when nothing has even really happened yet. We're going to sit with this together, gently, and I'm going to offer something I learned the hard way. Take your time with this one. It's not a quick listen. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If you grew up being the one who kept everyone calm, you didn't choose it. It was assigned to you. And the role you played as a child often becomes the role you play everywhere — at work, in relationships, in friendships. Today I want to talk about what it actually costs to be the family peacemaker. Why your nervous system probably still scans every room. Why you can't relax when other people are tense. Why "I'm fine, don't worry about me" comes out of your mouth before you've even checked whether it's true. And what it might look like to gently put the job down. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

You've been told to set boundaries. You've tried setting boundaries. And somehow you're still exhausted, still over-explaining, still feeling like you have to defend the smallest "no." So today I want to push back on the most-recommended advice in the wellness world and tell you what I actually think happens when you keep being told that the answer to other people's behaviour is just to draw a clearer line. There's a deeper conversation underneath this one, and we're going to have it. By the end of this episode I want you to walk away with a different way of thinking about the energy you keep handing over without realising. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

Most people don't know they're burned out. They just think this is who they have become. In this episode, Monique walks through five quiet signs of burnout that almost nobody talks about. Not the obvious ones. Not "you're tired" and "you're working too hard." The ones you can have for two or three years without ever realising you have them. You'll hear why losing your anticipation for small things is one of the very earliest signals, why going quiet on the group chats isn't antisocial — it's a system in power-saving mode — and the specific kind of evening tiredness that gets misread as personality. Number four is the one almost everybody recognises but nobody connects to burnout. If you have started to wonder whether you used to be more fun and you just got older — this episode is the one for you. Burnout is not a personality. It is a state. Which means it can shift. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

Monique has spent fifteen years around genuinely calm people — and she means the real ones, not the ones who post about it. They all do nine very specific things that the rest of us don't. This episode walks through all nine. Not personality traits. Not temperament. Habits. Which means they're learnable. Number six is the one almost no one believes is actually a calmness skill. Number eight is the one Monique personally got most wrong, for the longest time. You'll hear what calm people do with small decisions, why they refuse to run a tight schedule, why they don't argue back at their own thoughts, and the very specific thing they do with other people's moods that the rest of us get backwards. If you have spent the last year feeling slightly behind, slightly buzzing, slightly never-quite-arrived — this episode is for you. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

There is a kind of permission that arrives — sometimes in your fifties, sometimes later, sometimes never — and it quietly changes everything about how you live the next thirty years. In this episode, Monique walks through seven specific things the people she knows who have this permission have stopped apologising for. Not the obvious ones. The ones almost nobody talks about. You'll hear the story of a woman who came back from ten days at her sister's house, exhausted, and realised she hadn't said the word "no" once in the whole visit. The cake at the lunch table that closed a small loop in someone's head forever. And the moment in a workshop in Auckland when a room full of people went quiet at the same question. Number five is the one most people quietly admit they didn't realise they were even allowed to do. This is an episode for anyone who is starting to notice they have spent a lot of years explaining themselves — and is ready to take some of that energy back. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

There is a kind of tired that cannot be explained by anything you did. Not the tired you feel after hard work or a bad night's sleep — those make sense. You can trace them. You can point to a reason. This episode is about the other tired. The tired that arrives in the late afternoon when you have barely done anything. The tired that finds you sitting on the edge of the bed at nine in the morning, already wrung out. The tired you cannot explain to anybody else and have started to wonder if something is wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you. The tiredness has a name. And once you know the name, you can start to put some of it down. Monique tells the story of a woman who sits in her driveway for ten minutes every evening before walking into her own house — not because anything is wrong at home, but because she needs ten minutes before becoming the person her family needs her to be. And a moment in an Auckland workshop where she asked forty women when the last time was they had been alone with their own thoughts, and the room went silent. This is an episode about emotional labour — the invisible, unpaid, constant work of regulating everybody else's feelings. And one small, specific practice to begin getting fifteen minutes of your own life back each day. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

I have been teaching happiness at over seventy colleges for fifteen years. And I have watched the wellness industry get almost everything wrong. Not a little wrong. Wrong at the level of the question. In this episode, I'm telling you three things the happiness industry is selling you that are actually making you worse. Not because the people selling them are bad — most mean well. But because the entire premise is built on a misunderstanding about how humans actually work. Happiness isn't a feeling — it's a baseline. Forced positivity isn't wellness — it's shame with a ribbon on it. And the thing being sold as self-care is usually comfort, which is a different thing entirely. If you've been doing all the things and still feel flat and behind — this one's for you. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

Most perfectionists have been praised their whole lives for being perfectionists. That's the thing that makes it so hard to see. In this episode, Monique unpacks what perfectionism actually is, underneath the praise: a survival contract your younger self made with the world that said, if I get this right, I will be safe. She tells the story of a woman called Nina — a successful lawyer whose family and team had stopped bringing her their rough drafts because they'd learned she had a very accurate ruler. And the story of a brilliant writer friend with a folder of forty-three finished, unsent pieces on her laptop. This is an episode for the high achievers who have quietly been paying the price of their own perfection for years. Who can't tell the difference between high standards and fear anymore. Who finish things and feel relieved instead of proud. You will leave this episode with one small, specific experiment to try this week. Not a breakthrough. Not a life overhaul. Just eighty per cent, one thing at a time. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If you say sorry when someone bumps into you — this episode is for you.   In this conversation, Monique talks about the slow, quiet erasure of yourself that happens when you've spent years apologising for existing. The waiter, the wrong order, the friend who talks over you, the text that begins "so sorry to bother you." All those tiny moments where you choose someone else's comfort over your own legitimate need. Again. And again. And again.   She names where this comes from — the fawn response, the way some of us learned, very young, that small was safer than seen. And she shares a moment with a friend who apologised for crying at her own father's funeral, an apology so deep it had become a reflex, ready before the grief had even fully landed.   This is not about becoming inconsiderate. It's about the difference between real warmth and compulsive self-erasure. One is a choice. The other is a held breath.   If you've been doing this for so long that you can't tell the two apart anymore — please listen.   Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

You are caring for your kids, your parents, your work, and your own grief — and somewhere in that pile, you forgot you were a person too.   This episode is for the women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are holding more than anyone is acknowledging. The ones who know their mother's medication schedule the way they know their own phone number. The ones who track who needs which form, which appointment, which gentle phone call. The ones who park outside the supermarket for five quiet minutes because they cannot face one more aisle yet.   Monique tells the story of her friend Maeve — fifty-two, two teenagers, a mother with dementia — who phoned her from a carpark after a specialist appointment and realised she couldn't remember the last time anyone had asked her how she was doing. She tells the story of a woman at a workshop who hadn't seen her own GP in three years because it had started to feel selfish.   This is the long, quiet grief of caring for someone you love while they slowly become less of who they were. Of doing something extraordinary in almost complete silence. Of being asked to be infrastructure when you are, in fact, a person.   If you've been holding everything together — please listen. You are not failing. You are doing something almost no one acknowledges. And this episode is one quiet acknowledgment.   Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If Mother's Day was harder than you expected, and now it's Monday and you're not okay — this episode is for you. Not the catastrophic kind of hard. The quieter kind. The kind that happens when your mother is still here, you maybe even saw her or rang her yesterday, and yet you spent the whole day performing a version of your relationship that felt three inches away from the truth. The kind of hard that doesn't fit on a sympathy card. In this episode, Monique talks about what she calls the Mother's Day hangover — the flat, hollow Monday that lands after a day of holding it all together. She shares a story about her friend Tess phoning her in tears the morning after, and a quiet moment in the supermarket card aisle looking for a card that didn't exist. This episode names something most people are carrying alone: that you can grieve a relationship that still exists. You can grieve the mother you needed even while the one you have is still on the end of the phone. And you don't have to have any of it sorted by today. If yesterday was hard, please listen to this. You're not the only one. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If you are the person everyone calls when they're falling apart — who do you call?   This episode is for the strong ones.   You know who you are. You're the eldest daughter, the friend everyone leans on, the person who keeps the family together, the one who organised the funeral. And you've been wearing that role so long you might not even realise it's a costume.   In this conversation, I want to talk about the hidden cost of being the strong one. The way it gets handed to you so early you don't remember putting it on. The slow, quiet loneliness of always being the giver and never quite knowing how to receive. And the strange panic that can rise up when someone genuinely asks how you are — because you've been so fluent in everyone else's pain you've lost the language for your own.   I share a story about my friend who organised her father's funeral and then spent months crying in supermarket car parks. I share my own honest experience of trying to put the costume down. And I offer one small, slightly terrifying invitation: tell one safe person you're not okay. Just one. One crack in the door is enough.   You are allowed to fall apart. You are allowed to need things. You are allowed to be held.   Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If you've been calling yourself lazy lately, this episode is going to gently change something for you. We've been taught to read exhaustion as a character flaw. Can't get off the couch? Lazy. Can't reply to the message? Lazy. Skipping the workout? Lazy. But what most of us call laziness is actually emotional depletion. They are not the same thing, and treating one like the other is making people sicker. In this episode, Monique walks through the difference between lazy ("I don't want to") and depleted ("I literally cannot"), the way emotional debt accumulates without us noticing, and what to do when your body is sending you a signal that your mind keeps trying to override. If you've been waking up tired, snapping at people you love, or staring at a task you "should" be doing and feeling absolutely nothing — this conversation is for you. You're not broken. You're depleted. And those are two very different roads. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

If you wake up and immediately start running through a 12-step morning routine — cold plunge, journal, gratitude list, supplements, workout — and somehow still feel anxious before you've even made coffee, this episode is for you. I'm a meditation teacher and I'll tell you something honestly: there are still mornings I wake up anxious before my feet hit the floor. After decades of practice. So if that's you too — if you've worked at a morning routine and you're still waking up tense — please hear that you're not failing. Something else is going on. In this episode, I unpack why so many of us are quietly performing wellness instead of actually feeling well. The 5 AM club. The perfect morning routine. The optimisation stack. None of it is making us calmer. In a lot of cases it's making us more anxious, more self-critical, and more disconnected from what our bodies actually need. I'll share my own honest morning — the dog, the kettle, the small thing I've settled into after years of trying everything. The one question I ask myself before the day starts running me. And what a real, embodied morning practice can look like (it's much smaller than you've been told). If you've been feeling exhausted by your own self-improvement, take this as your permission to do less. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next…  Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

MIT researcher Sherry Turkle found that just placing a silenced phone face down on a table between two people reduces the depth of their conversation and their empathy for each other. In this episode, Monique explores what our phones are actually doing to our happiness baseline, why we reach for them so compulsively, and shares real stories of people who made small changes to their phone habits and saw their relationships and their wellbeing transform. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next… Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

"Think positive" is the most common advice in self-help. It's also one of the most damaging. In this episode, Monique breaks down the science of why forcing positivity actually makes things worse, what toxic positivity really does to us, and what to do instead. Drawing on her own journey and decades of happiness research, this is the conversation you wish someone had had with you years ago. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next… Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. But the advice we keep hearing — "get out more, join a club, be more social" — isn't working. In this episode, Monique explores the crucial difference between isolation and solitude, why introverts experience loneliness differently, and why you don't need more friends. You need deeper ones. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next… Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.

I was mid-song, spotlight on me, when Chuck Berry waved me off the stage — and in two seconds flat, my brain went straight to: it's me, I'm not good enough. In this episode, I share what that moment taught me about why we take things personally and why it has absolutely nothing to do with weakness. I walk you through three practical tools to help you stop letting other people's storms become your story. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you need to try next… Take the Happiness Quiz at https://iintendtobehappy.com/ — it's a quick (and eye-opening) way to discover what's actually impacting your consistency, focus, and overall wellbeing. Most people are shocked by their results — and even more surprised by what it reveals about the patterns holding them back. Take the quiz here → https://iintendtobehappy.com/ Let's take this work deeper, together.