Creating the FUN

In this episode, I’m talking about fun — and why so many of us feel so disconnected from it as adults, especially when it comes to our work and our businesses.

We don’t lose our ability to have fun.

We just stop making space for it.

I talk about why fun isn’t something that magically happens once life gets easier or calmer, but something we actually create. We explore how responsibility, overwhelm, and “adulting” slowly push fun to the sidelines — and how that impacts our energy, creativity, focus, and motivation.

I share real-life stories and very practical ways to bring more fun back into your life and business, including:

• turning things into games and challenges (especially helpful for ADHD brains)
• finding the sweet spot between work that’s too hard and work that’s too boring
• learning to be lighter with yourself instead of taking everything so seriously
• using your senses to make everyday tasks feel more alive and enjoyable

This isn’t about forcing positivity or pretending things are easy.

It’s about creating conditions that make you actually want to come back to your work — and your life — again and again.

Links!

National Networking Dance Party: March 8th

https://www.tamarcoaching.com/dance

Free Group Coaching Call Open to the Public:

https://www.tamarcoaching.com/group

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey, hey, hey guys, welcome back, brave little things. By the way, guys, I'll tell you, the hardest part of the podcast for me is just the hello, the initial hello. It is I've had I just actually re-recorded. It's the only thing I will kind of edit. I just re-recorded like five times the intro because there were last the last one I was like, hello. I don't know why. The intro is the hardest for me. Once I get past that, I am totally fine. Maybe one day I'll keep all the intros actually just for fun. But speaking of fun, hello, that's exactly what we're talking about today, which is creating the fun. Like, how the heck do we create the fun? Because I gotta say, guys, there's too many of y'all out there that are just not having it. You are just not having the fun. And I'm talking about creating the fun in your businesses and creating the fun in your lives and just creating the freaking fun. So that's what we're talking about today. We're gonna jump into it because I truly believe this is what it's all about. I believe this is what life is all about. I believe this is what business is all about. I believe that you will get to wherever you want to go if you know how to bring the fun. So that's what we're talking about. And I will say the first thing is speaking of fun again, we are having a lot of fun over here, my family. We are in deep into birthday season. I for some reason decided to have three out of four of my babies born in January, February. And my husband's birthday also is in the end of January. And so we're like back to back-to-back, which is not actually the fun part. It's actually very stressful and exhausting and not fun. And I really have to coach myself on like, I think I literally said to one of my kids the other day, I'm she it was her the the next one was hers. I'm like, I need a freaking break from birthdays. And then I'm like, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I really want to celebrate you. I'm just tired. But that was the truth. She got it. But but the fun part is my kids bought my husband for his birthday a ninja creamy, and we are having so much fun. Do you guys know about the ninja creamy? If you don't, go check it out and go buy yourself one because it is awesome. We are making, like, you know, I mean, it's funny because we bought it for my husband who is vegan. He's the vegan rabbi. But so far we have made lots of non-vegan things because me and my kids are not vegan. Um, I'm vegetarian. My other kids, we raise them vegetarian until they're 13 and they could decide what they want to do. And there's some folks who have stayed and some folks who have gone off the railing. But we're having so much fun with the ninja creamy. We're making milkshakes, making ice creams, making sorbet, making all this stuff. It is such a cool machine, guys. Check it out. It really is amazing. So I think that's actually the perfect thing to bring up as we're about to talk about, you know, the fun, because yeah, I will say again, the birthdays have not been so fun. This is definitely a fun part within the birthdays. So there you go. Well, thank you for being back, guys, and thank you for thank you very seriously, though, coming back week after week to work on yourself, to grow, to give yourself time. I love that I feel like what is amazing about podcasts, it is kind of like forces you into like, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever the podcast length is on you time. You know, time for yourself. So I love that you're giving yourself time for yourself and time for your own personal growth amongst the craziness and chaos of your own life and all the different things that you are holding and balancing. So incredible. Well done. Well done, guys. Okay, well, again, I want to talk about fun today because I think that many of you out there really believe that some things are either fun and some things are not fun. Like some things are like innately, that's how they were born, that's how they were created, they're just fun, and some things are just not, and that's just not the case. We are the ones that create fun. We are the ones that create something that's really boring, right? It's all in our hands, it's all in our creation. I'll give you actually a great example. My coach actually once shared this, that she was she had to go to the dentist's office. I I forgot if there was like particular, I think so. Yeah, there was some kind of like issue, I don't know what it was with you know the dentist. And she decided that, oh no, she went to the dentist. This is what happened. She went to the dentist, and the dentists were like, What happened to you? She was like, Your teeth are dirty, they're like, you know, they were going on and on in more dental, you know, speech, but explaining what like she that she was not brushing her teeth well enough, she was not flossing well enough, all the stuff. And, you know, she doesn't like going to dentists like all the rest of us. But then she decided, you know what? My next appointment is in three months. I am going to do a competition with myself. I'm going to brush and floss like I've never done before. And then three months' time, when I sit in that chair, I'm going to listen up and hear what the dentist has to say. And so she like made it this fun thing for herself. Like every time she was brushing and flossing, she was like, as if she was in a competition. Now that's really fun for her because she's a very competitive person, and so it will work if you're like competitive in that kind of way. But it was, she turned this like very unfun thing into a very fun thing. And, you know, would you know when she sat in that chair three months later, the dentist was like, holy moly, I need to hire you to teach people how to brush their teeth and floss their teeth because you did an amazing job. Right? So things are not innately fun. We make them fun. And I will tell you that we were born though. However, what we were, what is innate is that we are wired for fun. Anytime you want to see how, you know, what we were actually born to do and born in a way that we were born, look at your own children or children in your lives or children that you just see out and about, because they will they will give you the trail of what we were really supposed to be doing. Because let me tell you, kids know how to have fun. They will give up everything. They will give up meals, sleep, like anything to continue to have fun, right? Like you will like I remember I saw this really hilarious reel where this mom was coming, the I think the title was like, you know, living in the 90s, and she was bringing out apples to the playground, to not the playground, to like she to her backyard, which had a play set or what a playground set to her kids. And she was like, you know, we're practicing pretending to be kids of the 90s, okay? So you stay outside all day here. Here's a little bit of snack, and then she's like, Do you know where your brother is? He's like, No, I don't. He's like, she's like, perfect. That's exactly that's exactly in line with staying in the nineties. Like, we would just like I don't even remember, guys, like we would stay outside freezing cold and so hungry because it's like totally dinner time, but we would like do any anything we could to not go back to our home so we can keep on playing and keep on having fun. That's how we were born. And then we grow up and we think that we have to put on this whole new role, this responsible role, and we've got to do all these kinds of things. And listen, our fun is not gonna be what our kids' fun is. I think a lot of us beat ourselves up for like not having fun with our kids. But like, listen, playing Playmobil for like three hours, it ain't fun. I don't care what you say, I don't care what lies you tell yourself or other rest of us, but their world, how they play, is very different than how we play. And so we have to understand what is fun for us. But too many of us do not make the time to do that because we're like, we can't, we don't have time, we have way too many responsibilities, we have too much stuff going on, and we don't make the time. But we were built for this, we were wired for this. It is an important part of what we need in order to move, right? So, like I was saying before, right? Fun is not something that just is or is not, it is something that we create. I want to give another another good example. Before I became a coach, I was an English teacher for Chinese and Japanese students. I think I've mentioned it before on the podcast. We had to wear a red polo shirt, a particular kind. It was a whole setup. I had to have like a company sign on the back of my chair, and the students would were the ones in charge of rating us, giving us a one to ten. And there's always those like serial kids out there, like who would give us a one, one star, which would then mean you wouldn't get as many classes. It was like all this kind of stuff. And I like took this job very, very seriously. I took it very seriously. And I remember even when I was working, I remember I was working on my birthday because if you cancel classes, then again, you get less classes, you get less pay. And so I remember like being at the pool on my birthday and leaving every once in a while to go like teach a class so that I could like keep it. Anyways, bottom line is that this job was not fun. I did not have fun with it. I did not make it fun in any way. However, there were many other teachers there who were having the time of their lives. They were making puppets, they were singing songs, they were like I spoke to them like on a real level, like not just, you know, they like they really love this job. This was like super fun for them. And they were doing things to make it fun, right? Now, there's times when like we don't want to make it fun. Like I did not want to make this job fun. This was not my calling. This was not, this was like a perfect job for what I needed it. And I wasn't like up for the task of like making it fun. However, I could have if I wanted to, and I think that's an important point for us to know that we really like just example of my coach and taking the dentist, having to go to the dentist and make it into his fun experience. We have the ability to be able to do that, which is important for us to know. It allows us to remember like how much in control we are of things. And I think that's a beautiful thing, right? And when it comes to our jobs, guys, I'm talking right now specifically to all my entrepreneurs out there, which I think is most of you who listen and who are part of my world, but there's also folks who aren't, or maybe you're playing with the idea of being of, you know, building a small business of your own. But meant too many of us leave jobs beforehand, maybe high tech, maybe just other jobs, and we leave because it's not fun. We have to do projects we don't want to do. We have bosses that give us like rigid schedules and rules, the work is boring, all you know, all these kinds of stuff. And so then we start our own business and we're excited and we're motivated and we're lit up and all those kinds of things, and we finally get to do what we want to do. But then what happens very quickly is we become the exact boss that we're trying to escape, right? We work, we make ourselves work too many hours. We work on things that we don't want that don't light us up, but we think because we have to, right? We push us ourselves into doing kind of things that we don't want to do. Right. There's obviously some level of things that we that, you know, as an entrepreneur and also just someone who works in a job or as an adult, there's things that we have to do that we don't always want to do. But the level that we treat ourselves like employees when we be we start to build our own business is so fascinating to me because we go from this job, we leave a job because it's making us unhappy, and then immediately start to create this unhappiness for ourselves in our own job, in our own business. And it's just it's so interesting to me how that works, right? So, and you know, by the way, I think for like, you know, and also speaking to like ADHD folks out there, when I know I have a lot of clients who have ADHD. This is even more so, right? Your brain is wired even more so for the stimulation. It like needs the spark, it needs the novelty, needs the interest, it needs the little, you know, fun, woo-hoo-hoo kind of things, like, you know, built in like step by step to kind of keep your focus and keep your engagement and keep all those things happening, right? They want to feel like this this movement and this exciting, this exciting stuff. And so many of us adults, you know, we are really exhausted. I think we're really tired. And so instead of creating that fun, we kind of manage everything. We manage our tasks and our responsibilities and our pickups for our kids and our what we have to be doing in our business and all those kinds of things. And then what happens is we are left with like out any creativity or any desire to play and be curious inside of our businesses. So I want to give a really good example. I'll kind of give an example of like why how you can make things not fun, right? Let me give you an example for a second of how you can make things very fun. I think I actually did with my my coach, but here's another one. This is a really this is something I think about all the time, actually. Um I went to NYU for college. I lived in the lower east village, and right around the corner from me was this amazing ice cream shop. I think it was called Coldstone ice cream. It's probably still there. And there's, I think it's even maybe a chain. Anyways, so in this cold stone ice cream shop, it was, you know, just a regular ice cream shop. But there were lines around the block always, always, and I'm telling you, always, there were always lines outside the door. And this is why. Because inside were the employees. The employees who are, you know, actors and Broadway stars, all waiting for their next call, their next gig. And in the meantime, the scoop and ice cream. And they would have so much freaking fun with this ice cream. You know, cold stone is the kind where like you put plain ice cream on this cold stone, literally, like on the countertop, and then you mix in chopped up cookies or, you know, all the different kinds of stuff, and you mix it up, and then they would do is they would kind of like fling the ice cream balls to one another and catch it, and the whole time singing and performing. And so it was this like mini Broadway play for the rest of us, or like rock band, you know, they would be singing, performing while they're like, you know, creating and scooping this ice cream. And so they took this like very mundane, very boring job of working at an ice cream shop and made it incredibly fun. So fun that the rest of us just wanted to sit and watch. I don't even like ice cream. I don't I do like ice cream. I don't love ice cream. But I would go because I would want to see like what are they doing today? What is happening today? Right? And we get to do that, right? We get to create that energy and make that happen. It's so important for us to do that, right? And it's important for us to kind of plug back into playing, like you know, connecting to that fun that we did when we were kids. We want to ask ourselves what lights us up, what makes us feel alive? And it's okay, I want to say, I know these are big questions, it's okay for you not to know. All we're doing is like, if I knew what lights me up, what do I think I would I would come up with? And if I knew what makes me feel alive, what I what would I say? And just like simply to take guesses, because so many of us are even just too far away from even those questions and those answers to even know what would we do. So let me give you, I want to give you four different things that you can do in order to plug back into the fun and joy. And these are definitely, you know, when I was thinking about them, I was thinking about them in terms of business and really helping my entrepreneurs take what oftentimes feels really not fun, right? Which is like oftentimes the marketing for many of my people. They hate the marketing, they hate the visibility, they hate having to post, they hate having to do, they hate having to go to the networking things, all that kind of stuff, or creating, you know, content for a workshop, anything that they're like, you know, just the self-doubt is so exhausting, all the things, right? How to turn that into really playful fun because that is what's going to sustain you to stay in the game and keep on going and actually build the business that you want to be building. So, okay, so the first one is churn things into games. And again, something that my coach did is the same aligns of this, you know, same kind of thing, but to create challenges and competitions for yourself. So, for example, my clients, when I'm working with them, and visibility is a really hard thing for them, they really have a hard time creating and showing up and sharing. We will do a visibility challenge. Well, I'll give them a certain amount of times I want them to be posting in a certain amount of days, and we will create a sticker jar or a sticker chart or a marble jar that they will get to fill up. Every time they put up a post, they get to put a sticker on the chart or a marble in the jar. And then when that's filled up, they have it already beforehand, they decide of a really amazing prize that they're giving to themselves. People have done many different kinds of things. And it I know it's like very childish, but guess what, guys? The reason why it works for our kids is the same reason why it works for us. That dopamine hit, that adrenaline rush when you put that sticker on is huge and it makes it fun all of a sudden. When something was not fun, you know, you want to be able to give like a physical reward signal to yourself, to be like, ooh, this is fun. I want to do this, I want to keep on going, I want to be pushing forward, right? This works for us too. Okay, a second piece I want to share about the second thing that we could be doing is really finding the sweet spot between something that's really challenging and something that's really boring. Okay, again, I'm using examples right now that are like business related, but this really does relate very much to life as well. Okay. So you want to take things that might feel like, you know, because when we're really, really challenged, it's not fun, as we all know. It's so exhausting. But also when we're doing things that are really, really boring, like folding like 12 loads of laundry, we're like, it's also really not fun. So it's kind of that sweet spot that we want to find. And sometimes it's gonna be where we're kind of like going, like kind of tapping into the hard, because we have to do the hard. We gotta do it. There's no way through it, you gotta do it. And then tapping into that sweet spot of like the in-between, and then tapping into the boring, because the same thing, boring, we gotta do it, it's gotta happen, and tapping back into that sweet spot. So it's kind of coming in and coming out. So let me give you an example. So, as you guys know, if you've been listening to the podcast, March 8th, International Women's Day, I am throwing a big networking, national networking dance party for all my Israeli entrepreneur women. It's going to be amazing. It's gonna be, it's gonna be dance, but it's also gonna be really fun networking activities. It's gonna be yummy food, it's gonna be connection, it's gonna be raffle prizes, lots of fun stuff. So anyway, I'm planning this, you know, dance party. I had to spend an entire day trying to figure out how to connect my sales page that's on Wix to my email sequence and email automation that's on kit, which is like my email system. Literally, guys, this is like my hell. I'm sure it's for many people, and it was torturous. So what happened here was like I was not having fun. It's something I had to do, but I was not having fun. And so at some point I was like, you know what? I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna take a break. And what feels really fun right now is actually thinking about what kind of raffle prizes I want my people to be able to get. If if folks bring other people, other friends with them as best best business besties and write it down, share it with me, then they're gonna be entered into the raffle to ruin prizes. And I was like, I want to take a break and I want to like think about what kind of fun raffle prizes would be would be great to have here. And that was like, you know, right in the middle where it's like, you know, I still like I have to like figure out like, do I want to ask people to kind of donate, do I want to think other prizes, whatever? But it was like in the fun zone, right? And that's kind of what I see it. It's kind of like the very, very hard, very complicated, and then the fun zone, and then the very, very like underwhelming, boring. And we want to kind of tap in and tap out, tap in and tap out, okay? So you think about that when you're like creating your schedule for the week, when you're thinking about what I'm you're doing. If you know that you're doing something really very hard and very complicated, make sure right after what's going to happen is something that feels a lot more that lights you up. Still maybe a little bit challenging, but really fun. And the same thing with like boring and kind of underwhelming, okay? Okay, the third thing, the third suggestion I have for you is be light with yourself. Be really light with yourself. This is something I've really learned, even from one of my own mentors, Elizabeth Gilbert, who I really love and I really respect. I've spoken to her about her many times. And I notice I tend to gravitate towards people like this in general, and maybe you do too, but people who don't take themselves so freaking seriously. Right? If you've ever heard Elizabeth Gilbert speak or read her work beyond E Prey Love, even or just or just E Prey Love itself, one of the things she does so well is laugh at her own humanity. She talks, you know, she'll talk about being completely obsessed with someone, about being convinced this time it's different, about making choices that in hindsight are kind of ridiculous. You know, she doesn't tell those stories like, look at how enlightened enlightened I am now. She tells them, like, yeah, this is what it's like to be a human. I'm a freaking mess, right? There's humor, there's warmth, warmth, there's no there's no self-shaming, you know, it's just lightness that takes the pressure off. And I like to try to practice that too, right? I'll be snapping at everyone, and one of my kids will say, Isn't this literally what you do for a living? Instead of hiding, you know, that I'll just like share it. Yeah, I'm a coach, yes, I invested in growth, lots of money, in fact. And also sometimes I totally lose my shit. Yep, that's me. I'm the coach, right? And all that can be true, and I can make fun of it. of all of it. And we stuck when we stop like turning that into a problem, fun can come back to us, right? It can be very playful and very fun. And it gives an invitation to other people to be like, guess what? This life doesn't have to be as serious as we think. And that's very much my motto when it comes to businessing as well. I think that the major thing that I help my clients do is not take it so seriously. Because when you don't take it so seriously, you get to have fun. And when you get to have fun, then you create the most amazing things. Okay. The last piece is engaging your senses. Okay. The last this is the last suggestion. Engaging your senses. Our senses don't just keep us alive. They wake us up. They we pair things you can what you can do is you pair things you don't love with things that you do love. So for example, so what I mean by in terms of engaging your senses, like getting your senses involved in the things that we the actions you have to take, the tasks you have to complete. So when I was building the habit of writing emails equ each week, I would go to my favorite cafe, get a fresh orange ginger juice every single time. That became a ritual. Now by the way it's kind of changed to sparkling water with lemon and ice which I also, it's like does not sound like a treat, but it is such a treat for me. I like to listen to podcasts while folding laundry and now I actually like runt I can't wait. I can't wait to fold laundry. I'm like oh my gosh I get to then like put things in my ears not listen to anybody else asking for a million other things and I get to just like listen to a podcast. Yes, please bring it on. I like to diffuse cinnamon oil in my office especially if I'm feeling like low energy and just kind of like you know bring a kind of sense of like joy into my office and what I get to do. And speaking of dentist by the way I want to say also I remember I remember going to the dentist after my third kid I think it was my third kid yeah and I remember feeling it was my first cavity that I ever had. And I remember loving it because there was like nothing there. There was no computer no kids asking me for things. I was just lying there. It was like you know it was like I was able to there was just it it doesn't give the perfect an analogy of what I'm talking about because it but it was just like this thing where I was like pairing, you know, giving up those things to be able to enjoy something that you normally wouldn't enjoy, right? Kind of like what my coach was doing with the dentist as well. But we just want to we want to pair like what our sense is like some people like to light a candle before they either coach or you know write marketing material and things like that. Maybe putting on certain kind of music you want to just like kind of waken up these you know sometimes even also really nice this is a nice one also where you get like your favorite lotion and you massage yourself in um like you know really really nicely and well before something. You just want to pair something that you love that wakes you up and wakes your senses up it's smelling touching feeling hearing all those kinds of things with what you are about to jump into. Right? So those are really good I think ways and you can grab one of them and try it out this week and see like okay if I want to bring more fun into what I'm doing let me see if I can shift it around with this particular suggestion. Right? And try it out for like a week a two even three and see like how much it can shift and how much how much it feels like it can shake things around a little bit. Because here at the bottom line folkies fun again is not inherent inherent we we get to create it. If we want more fun in our lives and our businesses we have to be willing to put some energy into making it happen. I mean that's true for everything right we have to be willing to put you know time and energy into our marriages if we we want them to be great time and energy into our you know our parenting relationship with our kids and the same thing with fun. We have to put you have to like think about fun as like you're in a relationship with fun. And you have to put time and energy into it in order to have it in your life because fun is what makes us want to come back to the work and to the habits and to the things what we're building over and over again. So it's important that we put time into it. Alright guys well I think that's what we got going on here. I freaking love fun. Fun is like one of my favorite topics to talk about it's one of my top values so I'm glad that we have this time together to just chat about it. And before I go I just want to say again thank you guys for listening and I so appreciate when you share when you share my podcast with friends I've had a few people reach out and be like oh my friend shared your podcast with with me and I love it. I listen to all of it. Keep on sharing it and I want to invite you guys into my monthly group coaching call space. It happens every month a space for you to get coached your business to get coached to be with like-minded folks and make that happen and if you really want to have fun and you are a female entrepreneur living in Israel let me tell you I've got the answer for you you want to be at the National Networking Dance Party March 8th International Women's Day here in Israel dance activities all the good stuff and the link will be in my show notes so you can just grab it. Hopefully it won't be sold out by the time you get there but I love you guys. Have a beautiful freaking fun ass day I'll see you guys next time