Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple O' Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and who out there wants to be happy and full of joy and peace? I doubt there's many of us who would say no. We all want joy. But the thing is, a lot of us tie our joy to an identity. Whether that's being a mom, a dad, a husband, a wife, maybe being a certain employee or employer.
But those things can be temporary. And when that goes away. And you lose yourself, you lose your joy. So today I have for y'all a joy coach here to help you find that joy that is within you, that we all have within us. Ms. Moj, would you please introduce yourself for us? Yes, yes, thank you so much for having me, Whiskey.
I'm excited to be here. Yes, my name is Moj Razmi, and as Mr. Whiskey explained, I am a joy coach. And as one of my clients coined it for me, was also a spiritual catalyst. So, I believe that joy is our innate right. We are born. Thank you. With it and as, as, as children, we are, we were, we don't, we won't do anything if it's not fun.
We won't do anything if it's, it doesn't bring joy and laughter. It could be a puddle of mud that as an adult, we think is ridiculous. But as a child, you know, it's like a whole lot of fun. So we're going to jump into it. Doesn't matter how much did we get? So, my, my work is to, to remind. To bring that, bring us back home so we can remember that joy and to discover.
That innate joy and have it from within us versus from the how the society and how the economy wants us to find it outside, no, to kind of find it from inside, so regardless of any other variables we'll, we'll have it. Yeah, you know, you touched upon something so interesting that I want to discuss for a little bit, which is the difference in joy between adulthood and childhood.
Yes. For example, what I thought of, you were talking about, kids won't do something if it doesn't bring them joy, if it's not fun or happy. And a lot of kids don't like eating vegetables. Now, they'll eat vegetables if they like it, if they think it tastes good, it makes them happy. But most kids don't like the taste of them, and they'll, you know, throw it away.
You know, whatever they do, they'll make a mess. And the way my mom got me to eat broccoli was she would melt all cheese on top of it, and cheese is joy. So therefore, the broccoli became joy. But think about this, in adulthood, you were the same way. I mean, our taste buds change slightly, but a lot of us, we don't eat vegetables because we enjoy it.
The joy comes from being healthy. And so, what we get to in adulthood is really We look past the temporary to the long term, the multiple steps of joy. For example, I remember years ago, I had read this study. that there was a social experiment where children of various ages were presented this opportunity.
You can have one marshmallow right now, or you can wait a few minutes and have two. A majority of children chose the instant gratification, what brought them joy faster. The older the children got, the more likely they were to wait to have that self discipline, knowing that we can bring about greater joy if we wait.
So it's interesting to look at how joy changes how our happiness and our gratification goes from instant to having a more disciplined and waiting for greater rewards. Now, that's not to say that social media hasn't made instant gratification even more ingrained in everyone. And it's definitely interesting what we place our joy in, and speaking of social media, just investing our happiness in followers and likes and attention, but Moj, we got to start with your personal journey of discovering joy, your ups and downs that you've been through throughout the years that led you to where you are today.
Yeah, so I want to go back on a couple things you've mentioned. For sure. All of things are kind of learned as far as, you know, as children the taste is one of the strongest senses. That's why whatever you can grab, like they can grab dog poop. First thing they do, they put it in their mouth because that's how they can, Figure out what it is and then kind of distinguish it.
That's a very primal way of saying if something is okay or something is not, you know, something is good, safe or not safe or, or, or very importantly, edible or not. So, but one of the thing is that this is, this is kind of, kind of may diverge the conversation elsewhere, but I'm going to just touch upon it very quickly is the way we fed our children the way we trained their taste buds into liking certain things like salt and sugar and stuff like that.
Yeah. That's what takes them away from vegetables. If, if you keep the palate clean for the kid, if the kid is being breastfed or, or, you know, whatever that needs to be, and then they move into let's call it I don't know, clean food they would be okay eating vegetables. Yeah, it's just the combination that you give them.
But when you start, when you start the kids with the the food that the food industry that the way that they has all these sugar and all these salt and all these flavors in it, then the vegetable becomes really bland. So even as an adult. You know, I, I, I do, I do, I do have a holistic way of eating also.
So for me, a cucumber tastes very differently. Like I savor a cucumber, but somebody else, Cucumber doesn't taste like anything, right? People don't like bitter taste, but bitter is one of the tastes that you ought to try. You got to have in your diet. So when you have the bitter system, it actually accentuates other flavors, tastes.
So that, you know, Yeah, you give them options. You show them a grass is greener on the other side of the fence kind of thing. So you say, Hey, here's this other option that might be better tasting, but not better for you. I think you're absolutely right. Especially when you look at Humans in their existence with nature, vegetables are found in the wild M& M's and Hershey bars are not.
No, so, I wish they were. You have this analogy in coaching that when you want to work with your client, you cover, you offer them chocolate covered broccoli. Because nobody wants broccoli, they say, you know, a lot of people like broccoli, but when you, you, you cover, you try to offer a chocolate cover broccoli, so then you give them what they, so you give them what they want, but then you, then you give them what they actually need.
Right. So put that, put all that bucket aside. What was your question? Yeah, so your personal journey with joy and hardship over the years, how you got to where you are today? Yeah. Yeah. So I have, I have, I'm full of stories, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm generation, I call it zero, but usually they say generation one in us.
So I have a lot of stories. I come from my, my country is Iran. I went through a couple of wars revolution. I, I have a very strong female bond with leaders in my, in my hierarchy of family. And so there's a lot of stories and there's a lot of things that I can tell that, you know, a lot yeah, I actually need to find, get a ghostwriter so they can, they can, we can put something.
But I think one of the main things that was for me was I was the second child of the family. There was only me and my brother and my brother is a is a three, three and a half years older than me, three and nine months older than me. And he innately is very kind, very charming, very easygoing and very accommodating.
So he was off the bat as a, as a baby, he was the favorite in, in the family amongst the cousins amongst, and then here comes me. You know, afterwards. So, and I'm following my brother like he's, he's the God because he's older. He's like there for me and all of that. But then what it was is I realized that if I don't complain, if I don't cry, I don't get any attention because he had it all.
He had all the attention. So it was it was to a point that I was basically became one of those whiny people. Kids like I remember maybe I was three or four years old. I was very young and I remember this very distinctly and I was very my mom was a very busy woman. She worked. She was she had her own career.
She was doing things. So to get my mom's attention. It was it was It was challenging for me, and I was always very playful to this day. I won't do anything. It's not fun. So I'm very cool and I want to do fun things. And so I was very close with my grandma, and I remember I was sitting with my grandma and my grandma kind of came to my level and she goes, you know what, you can be sad now or you can be happy now.
No matter what difficulty you have, but if you look at it later, when you're a grown person, you would say, wow, things were so odd and hard. And I still was happy. So you will be happy year because of that. However, if you're complaining and angry and upset, you would look back and you would say, things weren't that bad.
And I was so upset and so angry. Then you would become angrier that you were angry and you would blame yourself. And that's somehow, even though I was very young. hit me like in a, in a, at the right spot. And I became it was just like a, like that over, over that conversation, I became kind of like a happy go lucky kind of a kid.
I literally became very oblivious about the things that were going on. For that coming at me and to be honest with you, even throughout my adult, I have a technical background. I have an engineering background from, I went to school at UC Berkeley and I was in a high tech for, for 13, 15 years. And that saved me, that was such a survival skill for me to be oblivious to comments being a woman in the industry, you know, being in a, in high tech, you know, female driven.
Yeah. And this is I, I, this is like 30 some years ago when I was, was working, so it's way, very different than that. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So. That kind of gave me this beautiful shield to kind of do my own thing, you know, have my own thing. And even though the work was very serious, it was very masculine energy.
I still had my own clan of people around me that we would have fun doing serious work. And serious work and serious money was coming in, but we are still having I would, I would infuse this, this pointer is all fine. So that that time for me helped me a lot throughout my life throughout. You know, my teenage years, you know, through the revolution and toward coming to us and being generation zero without and having five jobs and going to engineering school, I could be kind of like, have all these sob stories, but I still kept my head high and I still had fun.
I still, you know, climb trees and enjoy life and played volleyball and went to the beach. I still found ways. To do what it is that I innately enjoy in life. Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that. And there's definitely a lot of I think it's important what you said is if you look back and you just think to yourself, I was always so unhappy because of things that didn't matter.
And then You regret that. Regret is, is one of the most powerful emotions when it comes to eating away at a person and just really making their life miserable. So like you said, it's so much better to just be happy because the, often times, you know, as they say, tomorrow's gonna come regardless, right? So, you can either be sad or be happy.
You know, move forward with it. So I think that's an important message for everyone to have. And so what are you doing with your life now as a transformational coach and a joy coach and a spiritual catalyst, you know, what is your day to day life looking like, you know, working with clients and, and helping them?
What exactly do you do? Well, the, the work I do is it's more of an inside kind of a job work. So, to me is no matter what you do, no matter what you need to get done, you got to address this. So you can, you can always, you know, say, Oh, I'm going to wear this kind of a clothes. I'm going to match the color with my eyes and you know, I'm going to lose this much weight and I'm going to exercise and all of that.
All of that is great. Yeah. It would, it would release some dopamine, it will release some serotonin and it's, it's cool. You will feel good. But the thing is, there is the moment that you're going to come home and you're going to be by yourself, you know, in your, in your PJs, in your raggedy clothes. And that's when that counts.
Like, so literally who you are when nobody's watching is, is what that matters, who you are when nobody's watching. So, You know, there's, there's this story that this guru sends one of the disciples to go on a silent Retreat kind of by themselves up the mountain. Yeah, and after like several weeks he comes back and on the way back when he comes back the the guru says so What happened for you?
So he tells them all this story and he said did you do anything that you think you shouldn't have? He said no, I was really good below but you know what on the way back I kind of like throw my garbage You In the, in the heel and the guru says, oh, boy your, your, your thing is kind of wiped out. Like the work you did is wiped out.
He goes, but nobody saw it. He goes, yeah, but you saw it. So it's, it doesn't matter. What is it that happens in the outside or doesn't happen in the outside is what happens inside and what it is that we see. From ourselves, what it is that the conversations that we are having with ourselves and and all of that that that matter.
So my work is more on on that domain. I, I do have My work is very spiritually oriented. I'm not religious, but my work is very spiritually oriented. I get downloads that I, as I speak with clients and and my thing is that again, as a catalyst, I create a space for them to come up with what it is that they truly want.
And when you, when you pinpoint what is it that you truly want then having it is not that difficult. Because when you truly know what you want, the work that you do may look hard to other people, but to you is not. It's pure joy. It's pure inspired action and it comes with a lot of joy too. And, and, and you know, it's like everybody else is like, how do you do these things?
It's like, how do you wake up that early? How do you, you're like, I just do. It's, it's, it's, it's. It's like I do it with so much enthusiasm, so much fun. I just do. So, that's basically in a nutshell how I, you know, work with individuals or in groups, even it's, it's I can, I can give steps. I can give seven ways to do this, you know, 10 days to do that.
But it's, it's more of what it is that you want, and then you would know what the next step is. Yeah, for sure. And then it's more of progress over perfection, kind of like one step at a time. And before you know it, you know, they say like, sometimes people say, Oh, I can't do that thing because it's going to take four years.
Yeah, but if you do it, start today, it's going to take four days, years, and one day less. four years and two day less, four years and one month less. And before you know it, the four years over, but if you never start, it's always four years. Yeah, I agree. If you don't start, you know, I think that's always great.
It starts with the first step and you know, you can either make, When people push it off, you know, you have zero progress made, and then you have to start from zero later on, and it's only, most of the times it only gets more difficult in life when you push things off, but what you talk about, I think is important more now than ever before, knowing what, what you want, what you actually want, because so many people are stemming their joy from what Right.
Their parents want what their friends want, what their job wants, what social media wants, what, you know, the system wants, whatever it may be, if not a, you know, a combination of all of the above and they're not really having a, what they want. Some of this is conscious decision making because of peer pressure, and some of this is just subconscious because of the force feed of social media, main news outlets, or, you know, just also, especially when you were raised a certain way, sometimes you're raised in an environment where you can't think independently, and I've had a couple episodes on the show discussing all of that, and how important it is to know what you want, and I'm sure you've had clients where you ask them that question and they say, I don't know, you know, it's not a client.
It's it's to be honest with you, Mr whiskey. It's like most people don't know what they want. Yeah. And or they think they know what they want, but when they go deep, they don't know what they want and they know what they don't want. Which is, which is a clue. They know what they don't want. So if, if you, if you ask them, like somebody, somebody was this, Hey, I don't like the way my relationship with my, is my, with my other half.
And then you tell them what, what do you want? And then they say, Oh, I want to be trustworthy and I want to be happy. And I want to, and you're like, what does that look like? Like, what does that mean? And that scares them because what they have to put in to have that They're not willing to to put in that they're scared of putting that and it's and it's also something that they may have not experienced, so they don't really know what that looks like and all of that basically means that you got to go and you got to create your own story.
You got to create your own movie. And as, as you do, whatever you do now that's when, that's how it is. Like that, the thing that, you know, if you're upset and then you'd be more upset later, that's how you create your past. So whatever you're doing now, it's going to be something that you look back tomorrow.
It's your past. So you always have a chance to recreate. What it is that you want, but then it takes that inspired action to, to get it to make it happen. Yeah, I think that's such an important point you're making, which is it requires work. And I know people are thinking, but you all said that, you know, joy is an innate right that everyone has.
That is true. But joy is also something that. You know, you have to work for in some sense yeah, so it's can be easily earned or given by the stuff around us, but our true joy for what we really want in life that requires you to put in work and a lot of times the greater your ambitions and the larger the thing, whether that's a certain goal or many goals that will bring you joy, they're going to require more work and one thing I want to go back to that you said is I pulled up a Bible quote from Genesis 29, So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her.
And I bring that up because you talked about how, when you are actually bringing and getting joy or happiness from something, that time will go by. And I, I, you know, that example is specifically for love. But I think love, true love brings great joy. And so not only is pushing it off, just delaying it and making it more difficult, but you know, it's that time needs to start and that time will go by if you are truly, like you said, if you truly enjoy something.
The, the work there is going to be difficult, but also the more work you put in to have your joy, all the more joyous you'll be to look back and be like, wow, look at what I accomplished to get here, to have this joy. And so I think it's really important. And like you said, a lot of people just have, I'll call it surface level answers.
I want to be X, Y, and Z, but they can't go deeper on that. I think it's the same with their purpose. Which is part of their joy, you know, when people think they know their purpose and then you ask them and they tell you kind of what they do or why they're doing it, but they don't go deeper into why, you know, so I think articulating why you want something, why you need something is so important to that and that's something that you help them with, correct?
Yes, yes. And you know, the thing is, you know, when you, when you, we talk about work as far as you know, the work that you do for your purpose or what is it that you truly want there is, there's no problem with hard work. There's no problem. I don't, I don't have any, I don't have any problem with that.
However, hard work. With because, you know, I'm, I'm in, I'm in Bay Area, I'm in California, in Bay Area, I'm in Silicon Valley, and I see a lot of hard work that it comes with a lot of agony, it comes with a lot of pain, it comes with a lot of agony, and however, you can still do that hard work, Meanwhile, enjoy what it is that you're doing make the best out of what it is that you're doing.
And the work is actually it's not in doing. It's more in undoing because it's our percept is our perception because when it is. that I'm working for, let's say I'm working for money. I want to have more of the stock options. I want to have the promotion. I want to have a bigger pot, you know, slice of the pie for my promotion, all of that.
When my goal is that, that's when I become like, God, I gotta get this. I gotta get this. And you're just like hanging with, you know, nail and teeth and you know, you're just like, kind of like, right, working 500 hours a week, you know, to make it happen and all of that. Whereas, If you are doing your work you know, sometimes we're made, we may have to do a work that is not full in full alignment with us because we just have to do, we can do that other thing, but we can still say, hey, I'm doing this because as you said, my why for that.
But meanwhile, we can still have this. Pleasant, enjoyable, we still can make friends, we still have a good time connecting with people and, and doing our best in, in, in learning what it is that we need to do and performing and what it is that new. So all of that takes a lot of undoing. In in here.
Yeah, for that show up outside. Yeah, for sure. So as we start to close up here, I will have the ladies and gentlemen, the website Moses website will be in the description below. But most who should visit that. I know you mentioned master classes and coaching. So can you tell us a little bit more about your website and, you know, what you do and who should reach out to you?
So my website, I actually created that site, and maybe a a few years back. So, yeah, maybe. And I, and I, I wrote it myself, so I actually That's awesome. Took it course and I wrote it myself and you know, don't, don't ask me to do it again, . But . But, you know, nowadays, I believe it's much easier to create that.
Oh yeah. But I do have a Facebook is the best way to, to get in touch with me. So I can, you know, you can tag me in there or I can go tag myself in there. I have an ebook that I put out recently which is called the beginner guide for empty nesters, rediscovering joy. This is the cover and it's called new chapter, new joy starts here.
And that's in my private group, which is called the global she circle and she stands for support, harmony, and empowerment buried there in the guide section and and again, I do have people, I'm aiming more for empty nesters, but I do have people who don't even have children that show up to my sessions. So I have a Instagram account.
My handle is Coach mj. And that's a name that my kids, my and their friends gave me because I coached most of their sport teams. So I, I became coach mj very early on. My kids are adults now, and so I picked that name up as, as coach MJ. And and so Facebook would be a good place, which is more UpToDate as far as information.
And people can get to know me more and see if you're the right fit for them to have a conversation with me. Yeah, so ladies and gentlemen, we'll have the Facebook link in the description below so y'all can just go straight to that and find what you need. And. Moj, I really appreciate having you on the show and sharing this, so, ladies and gentlemen, if you, or someone you know, if something just doesn't feel right, if you don't feel like you have joy in your life, or you're having more trouble feeling that joy than usual, definitely be sure to check out Moj's Facebook and her website, and share this episode with whoever might need it.
That way they can rediscover that joy in their life. But most, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yes. And I appreciate you and I appreciate the work you do and spreading the word for us and power to you. Thank you so much. Whiskey.
