LOA Today - Your Daily Dose Of Happy

When Walt sat down with life coach and LOA teacher Joel for an episode of Your Daily Dose of Happy, a simple phrase from one of Joel’s TikToks became the doorway to a powerful, uncomfortable truth: “Excuses are expensive.”
At first glance, it sounds like a clever slogan. But as Walt admitted, the moment he read it, he realized how true it was - we pay a real price for excuses, while getting nothing of value in return.
Joel explained that for him, excuses are usually a procrastination tool and often a symptom of something deeper: a victim mindset. He doesn’t want excuses from people who work with him. As he put it, he’s fine with someone saying, “I got 4 of the 5 things done; I’ll do the last one tomorrow.” What he doesn’t want is the story:  “My dog did this, this happened, and that’s why I couldn’t do it.”
Walt pushed the idea further, asking why people cling so hard to excuses. His take: we’re often pre‑emptively defending ourselves from anticipated blame. We’re bracing for the blame game, so we start playing it first. Joel agreed, connecting this to the broader culture of blame, where responsibility is dodged instead of owned.
One of the most powerful moments came when Joel described appearing before a judge back in 1995 for crimes related to his gambling addiction. The public defender told him, “Everybody pleads not guilty.” Joel refused. When the judge asked for his plea, he simply said, “I’m guilty, Your Honor.”
Joel didn’t use his addiction as a shield: “That’s not an excuse. I knew exactly what I was doing. I stole the money, and I’m ready to pay the price.”
Instead of five years in prison, the judge gave him 30 days and probation, openly admiring his courage. That moment became a cornerstone of Joel’s philosophy: radical responsibility moves life forward; excuses freeze it.
Walt contrasted excuses vs. explanations. Both are rooted in real events, but they’re used differently. An excuse carries emotional charge and self‑protection. An explanation simply states what happened without trying to dodge responsibility. As Walt noted, when Joel described his gambling at sentencing, he was offering context, not justification - fact without victimhood.
The conversation then turned to relationships and the destructive need to “be right.” Walt shared how he realized that, when he insisted on being right with someone he loved, what he was really doing was trying to prove they were wrong and unconsciously choosing “being right” over the relationship itself.
Joel now regularly asks people, “Is being right worth more than the person you care about?”
A recurring theme throughout the conversation: energy. Excuses, blame, and the quest to be right are emotionally expensive. They drain energy that could be invested in healing, action, connection, and joy. As Joel put it, the faster he simply accepts what is and asks, “What’s my next step?” the easier life becomes.
In the end, Walt and Joel brought it back to happiness and responsibility: when you drop the excuses, you don’t just lose your defenses - you gain your power back.
Key Takeaway Questions to Ask Yourself:
Where am I making excuses instead of taking action?
Am I offering an excuse, or a simple explanation without blame?
Is being right more important to me than this person I care about?
What is my next actionable step, right now?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/excuses-are-expensive
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What if the part of you that hurts the most is also the part of you that knows the way home?
In this powerful conversation on LOA Today, Christine shares how growing up with a brilliant physician father and an alcoholic mother launched a lifelong quest to answer one haunting inner question: “I need a doctor. I need somebody to help me. I need some help. I need somebody to fix me.”
As a child, she had access to medical excellence, but not to the emotional safety she desperately needed. The family looked solid on the outside -success, status, financial comfort but, as Christine put it, “We had an interesting shell of a life, there was a lot missing on the inside.”
There were no emotional conversations, only trauma, distance, and a deep, unspoken loneliness. That gap pushed her into a lifelong search: How do we heal?
Christine devoured psychology books as a teen, explored countless modalities - psychology, plant medicine, reflexology, bodywork and eventually earned a master’s in Counseling Psychology. But the real turning point came when she faced the grief she had buried for decades: “It took me into my 40s before I could really acknowledge it and feel the grief and feel the child that was extremely afraid and felt abandoned.”
During her graduate program, in the “strange safety net” of learning to help others, she finally turned toward her own wounded inner child. This is where the conversation dives into one of the deepest themes of the episode: the wounded healer.
Christine realized that if she tried to heal others instead of healing herself, she would always be unconsciously using clients to fix her own pain. So she made a new commitment:
Heal herself while helping others.
Clear her own patterns so she could be “a clear channel” for her clients.
Stop “secretly, subversively, unconsciously” trying to heal herself through them.
Host Walt connected this to his own experiences as a Reiki practitioner and former partner of a psychotherapist. He echoed a vital truth his ex-wife learned from a supervisor: “It’s not your job to heal them. It’s your job to provide the information. It’s their job to heal themselves.”
Christine’s work as a clinical hypnotherapist rests on that same foundation of empowerment. She dismantles the myth that hypnosis is about losing control: Hypnotherapy, she explains, is actually about giving people more control over their minds, not less.
She collaborates with clients to craft language that fits their truth and their goals, then delivers those suggestions to the subconscious in a relaxed, focused state. It’s not magic. It’s a partnership.
Throughout the episode, Walt keeps returning to one core insight: “You can always trust your heart, but the last thing we’re willing to trust is our own heart.”
Christine admits she didn’t even know how to feel her heart for a long time. Her parents never mirrored her, never reflected back, “Oh my gosh, I just love you so much.” So she had to learn later in life how to recognize and interpret those heart signals.
The big takeaway?
Healing isn’t something a guru, doctor, or therapist does to you.
Healing is what happens when you reclaim your heart, your story, and your sovereignty.
Helpers - whether they’re hypnotherapists, Reiki practitioners, or friends don’t fix you. They help you clear the blockages so your own “spark of the divine” can do what it’s always wanted to do: heal.
You can’t think your way to that kind of healing. But you can feel your way there. One brave step, one released pattern, one kinder thought toward yourself at a time.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/christine-brodmerkel
Christine Brodmerkel's Website: https://christinebrodmerkelhypnotherapy.com/
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“What do you do when nothing’s changing, even though you say you want your life to be different?”
That’s the unspoken question at the heart of this powerful conversation between Walt and Joel, where they explore what Joel calls the Law of Action - the missing piece so many people leave out of the Law of Attraction.
From the start, Joel makes his stance crystal clear: “I have never been successful using the law of attraction and not taking action. I’ve never been the guy who sat on the couch, and a guy with a million-dollar check showed up.”
For Joel, action isn’t optional. It’s the ignition key. Even the wrong action is better than no action, because movement allows life (or the universe, or God, depending on your belief system) to redirect you, like a GPS that only works once the car is moving.
Walt presses the point with a real-world example: a young woman recovering from a devastating car accident and depression. He highlights her choices:
She didn’t just stay where she was.
She changed therapists four or five times.
She kept taking action, even when it was hard.
To Walt, the lesson is obvious: “It was the action she took, the repeated action, the adjusting action that made all the difference in the world in terms of her healing.” Joel agrees. Action isn’t just physical; it’s also mental action - choosing to try again, to shift, to refine.
Joel weaves in ideas from Atomic Habits: when the staircase of change looks like 1,000 impossible steps, you don’t climb them all - you just take the next one. “Break it down to the next step, always be moving forward. Doesn’t mean there’s always forward progress, but it’s still action.”
He shares how he launched a complex intensive outpatient program in a matter of days by starting messy - inviting beta patients for free, accepting a “train wreck” day one, and then engineering improvements from the chaos.
Walt connects this to software development - ship, break, fix, repeat. Joel links it to Elon Musk’s rockets blowing up on purpose so engineers can learn exactly where the system fails. Failure, in this worldview, isn’t condemnation. It’s data.
A powerful theme emerges when Joel opens up about living with ADHD. His mind wakes up at full speed every day: “Imagine having a brain, where you wake up, and everything happens all at once in your brain.”
For him, structure is not a prison; it’s freedom. Routines, workouts, meditation, and a tightly organized schedule keep his powerful brain from turning on itself. When he tried a “free” unstructured day, even napping was impossible. The takeaway?
The “right” system is deeply personal. Walt found calm through mirror work, not structure. Joel found sanity through structure, not slowing down. Both discovered the same principle:
You must find the processes that work for your nervous system.
Then take action within those processes every day.
Walt and Joel both return, again and again, to vibration and hope. You don’t have to be high-vibe all the time. On your worst days, the win might simply be:
Getting out of bed.
Eating something.
Saying, “I have hope that there could be hope.”
As Joel puts it, even moving from “no hope” to “I have hope that there is hope” is progress.
The real question they leave you with is this: What is one tiny, imperfect action you can take today that starts your own GPS and lets life finally begin to redirect you?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/law-of-action
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Sometimes life whispers. Sometimes it nudges. And sometimes, as Walt put it, it brings out the “two by four method.”
That’s exactly what happened to Carolyn, whose life changed in a split second during a devastating car accident in her senior year of college - a moment that nearly ended her life and ultimately transformed it.
“I was a senior in college. I was in a life‑threatening car accident, and I grabbed my seat belt seconds before the accident,” Carolyn shared. “I was lucky to be alive. It was a huge turning point for me, because I had struggled so many years with depression and anxiety, it finally was that little shift I needed to wake up and focus on what was important in life.”
Walt asked the question that so many people secretly wonder after a crisis: “People go through these ‘crash and burn’ moments and they come out the other side and then they say, ‘I never want to have to go through it again, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ Was it the best thing that ever happened to you?”
Carolyn didn’t dodge the weight of that question: “That’s such a loaded question, but honestly, in a way, yes. It just forced me to tackle my mental health issues and confront all the demons I’d been trying to ignore.”
From that moment forward, she stopped just existing and started living. Writing became her lifeline. What many people do privately in a journal, Carolyn did through a book - “Unbreakable” turning raw pain into words that could help others.
“Writing was the thing that poured out of me,” she explained. “It was the most healing thing for me. I got to write things down and just let them go.”
Gratitude and mindfulness also reshaped her inner world. After the accident, Carolyn began practicing gratitude almost daily, not as a trendy habit, but as a survival skill: “Looking at life with gratitude was something that I didn’t really do until after that accident, now I try to practice that almost daily and just really find little things to be grateful for.”
Simple practices - like her therapist’s “deep three” breathing tool - became powerful anchors: “You take three deep breaths, it regulates your nervous system. If you’re in a manic state or you’re about to panic, it helps reset. I’ve practiced it over and over, and it really helps calm me down.”
The conversation also explored the courage it takes to get help. Carolyn was honest about her years of depression, anxiety, self‑harm, and the struggle to find the right therapist. She even admitted to once going to therapy and pretending everything was fine: “Don’t go to the therapist and lie to them either, because that is only going to hurt you in the end.”
Her journey also includes living with a nonverbal learning disability and learning to see it not as a flaw, but as part of her superpower - the part that can write a song in 10 minutes and craft a book that reaches people exactly when they need it most.
One review captured the impact perfectly: a reader said the book “didn’t resonate” at first - until they went through their own trauma, came back to it, and found it helped them through an incredibly hard time.
That’s the ripple effect of being, as Carolyn titled her book, Unbreakable: “Even if you think some pieces are shattered or broken, they’re really not, because you can always pick up the pieces, and that’s what makes you unbreakable.”
Key Takeaway: You may not control the crash, but you can choose what you build from the wreckage. Therapy, gratitude, mindful breathing, honest connection, and sharing your story can turn a breaking point into a doorway to purpose.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/carolyn-sophia-skowron
Carolyn Sophia Skowron's Website: https://www.carolynsophia.com/
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What if the smallest moment - a single question, a single choice could begin to rewrite your entire life story?
In this powerful conversation on LOA Today, Walt, JodieLynn, and guest Doug explore addiction, forgiveness, recovery, and the quiet power of asking, “What if?”
Their stories remind us that transformation doesn’t always arrive as a lightning bolt. Sometimes, it begins with waking up in the center seat of an airplane, with no idea how you got there.
Doug describes his past with disarming honesty: drugs, alcohol, theft, and the collapse of his father’s business. He remembers the moment he realized how far he had fallen, flying back home after stealing the last of the money: “I had to fly back and face him. And it was at that point that I realized my life's probably not going in the way it should be going.”
But what happened next wasn’t punishment. It was a doorway. Doug’s father lost his business and much of his financial security, yet chose forgiveness over resentment. Doug recalls: “You know that man never resented me for it, he became probably one of my biggest fans.”
One of the most emotional threads in this conversation is the question: Who shows up when you’re in the hole? Walt shares the story of a man who falls into a hole, and the friend who jumps in with him: “Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out.”
Doug experienced his own version of that when he walked into a 12-step meeting and saw two fishermen, customers from his old store, standing on either side of him: “One of them looks at the other and then looks at me, goes, we've been waiting on you.”
The conversation repeatedly returns to one key idea: everything can happen for the better, even when it looks unbearable in the moment. Doug quotes his mentor, Fred: “Everything that's happened in my life happened for the best. I just didn't know it always at the time.”
JodieLynn echoes this from her own life, including surviving childhood trauma and financial collapse in her twenties: “I remember being shook when I saw that phrase and actually tested it against my life and the crappy things that happened, always something better.”
So where does “What if?” come in?
Doug’s book Start With What If grew out of a simple yet profound intervention early in his recovery. Overwhelmed by the damage he’d caused, someone gently reframed his world: “What if today, you just went a day without a drink or a drug?”
From there, Doug turned what if from a phrase of regret - “What if I hadn’t ruined everything?” into a tool of possibility: “What if I changed how I think about this moment?”
He teaches a simple three-step What If Rule: Pause. Question. Go.
Interrupt the autopilot, ask a better what if, then take one small action. JodieLynn beautifully ties the episode together by asking us to bring this down to the present moment: “What if we just focused on this moment today? What would change? How would our lives be better?”
The real magic of this conversation isn’t in a massive, dramatic change. It’s in the invitation to ask yourself, starting right now: What if today was enough to begin again?
What if one question could be the first step out of your own hole?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/doug-fleener
Doug Fleener's Website: https://www.dougfleener.com/
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