The Three C's of Joy: How to Access Joy When You Have No Time For It

Back in 2017, my husband was working 36-hour shifts, which meant I was flying solo.

During the day, I lugged a folding dental chair from nursing home to nursing home across Austin. I worked through lunch so I could pick up my kids from Montessori on time. Then I rushed home to get a meal on the table before anyone melted down — which is a tall order with a 5 and 3 year old.

Rush through dinner. Rush through bath. Rush through bedtime. Every day a race against the clock, just to wake up and do it again.

And when the pressure got too heavy, I snapped at my kids. Be quiet. Leave me alone. When what they wanted — what they needed — was to be seen and loved by a mom who believed they were worth her time.

The guilt from those moments went into the same bag that held the chair. I carried it everywhere. I didn't know where to put it down. Heck, I didn't even know putting it down was an option.

There were days I couldn't look at myself in the mirror.

But the mirror wasn't my lowest point. My lowest point was quieter. It came the day I finally looked, and I didn't just see a tired dentist and a struggling mom. I saw a woman who'd spent her whole life chasing happiness in titles, in achievements, in everyone else's approval. It was costing me my relationships, my health, and my peace of mind.

Something had to change. I had no idea what.

The Question I Get Asked Most

When people hear about my work and the transition from seeing patients to what I do now, the question is almost always the same. How did you do that? What were the steps? What did it actually look like?

The honest answer is that I followed my joy.

I know how that sounds. It sounds lovely and completely unhelpful, right up until you try it — because most high achievers have no idea where their joy lives anymore.

In the last episode, we talked about the difference between happiness and joy. The key distinction is this: joy isn't something you get. It's already in there — the work is simply to stop covering it up.

Which means you didn't lose it.

Why Joy Gets Harder to Reach

Watch a baby. They belly laugh because someone made a funny face, or because a sound struck them as ridiculous. They don't seize up. They don't shrink. They laugh, and then they go explore.

Joy is the factory setting of childhood.

Then the years go by and we internalize what's acceptable. The roles. The rules. The responsibilities. In my family, we do it this way. This is how you earn approval. And approval, our systems learn, is how you stay safe.

For me it was people pleasing. If I could just overachieve, if I could just keep everyone happy, then nobody would be angry with me and nothing would prove I wasn't enough. Until the next thing came along, and then I'd do it all over again.

That's most of the story of why joy feels far away by the time we're running teams and raising families. The access points got covered over. They didn't disappear.

So we uncover them again. Here's how I do that, with myself and with the leaders I work with.

The First C: Creativity

Creativity is the most straightforward of the three and the one people dismiss the fastest.

Art. Music. Dance. Writing. Listening to a song, playing one, making one. Building something with your hands. My podcast is creativity for me.

If you're already telling yourself you're not a creative person, or that creativity is irrelevant to your work, I want to challenge that gently.

We're all creative. Some of us have easier access to it. Others run more on data, on logic, on step-by-step reasoning. That doesn't make you uncreative. It usually means your creativity has been pointed at something other than a canvas.

In data-driven fields where standards and protocols exist for very good reasons, creativity combined with that structure is exactly what drives innovation. It's how medicine improves. It's how technology improves. It's what problem solving becomes when it gets good.

I have a client who's a practicing physician, routinely in life and death situations with children. She came into a session and said, you'll never guess what happened.

Her team had been stuck on the same problem for a long time. Too many patients, not enough beds, not enough rooms. A hard constraint that wasn't going to move. They had to figure out how to deliver care to everyone who needed it while operating inside it.

So she invited creativity into it. And what struck me most wasn't just that they solved the bed problem. It was everything else she found along the way — the pearls she didn't expect — simply because she gave herself permission to approach a clinical operations problem the way an artist approaches a blank page.

The Second C: Community

Community is groups of people coming together around something shared.

It can be family, genetic or chosen. The people you went to school with. The people you went through a specific season with. The parents whose kids are the same age as yours.

My husband went to Texas A&M. I didn't go to a big school, so I never had that particular sense of belonging. But every time we visit campus, every time we go to a game, I feel it. That's a real thing, and it's not small.

Community makes us less alone. It makes life sweeter and stress lighter.

It also shows up when we come together for something bigger than ourselves. Spiritual growth. Personal development. A cause worth giving to. When you lend a hand and create belonging, it does something specific: it makes us feel whole, worthy, capable, and like our lives actually mean something.

One caution. Community only works when it's the right community. Belonging you have to perform for isn't belonging. It's another job.

The Third C: Connection

At the root of both creativity and community is connection.

Connection to people, places, and things you care about, yes. But underneath all of it, connection to Self.

This is the one that matters most, and it's the one high performers are least practiced at. Most of us built our careers by getting very good at silencing ourselves.

Here's why it matters so much. Without connection to Self, creativity just becomes one more thing on your to-do list. Community becomes noise — an obligation, another calendar entry you have to show up for and perform inside of.

Same activities. Opposite outcome.

Connection to Self is where joy actually lives. It's infinite, shareable, and expansive. It's deeply healing and restorative. It's also, for me, inseparable from spirituality — not religion, and not a set of beliefs anyone has to sign onto, but the essence of what it means to be alive in this body, in this time and place. That energy is where joy sits.

Finding Your Own Door

Here's where people get stuck: they assume the access point that works for someone else should work for them.

Growing up, my family was one of the only Indian families in the small town we lived in — and the only blue-collar one. The other families were physician families. All their kids played piano, something we could never afford. I was green with envy of those kids. So I made a quiet deal with myself: when I grow up, if I can give my kids piano lessons, that'll mean I made it.

We found a wonderful teacher named Alex. Endlessly patient, genuinely loving. His love for music radiated into his work.

But my kids hated the lessons. After almost two years of raised voices and forced practice, I had to come to terms with something: we're just not a musical family. We love listening to music. Playing it? Not so much. Nobody was lit up. Including me.

What I missed at the time: that was chasing happiness, dressed up as parenting. Creativity only works as an access point to joy when it's actually yours. The second it becomes something you should do, it stops being a door and becomes one more line on the list.

Mine is writing. Thinking deeply about a problem. And dancing to genuinely ridiculous music — if you haven't discovered Sarah Maddack yet, that's your homework. I put one of her songs on before a big meeting or when I don't feel like cooking dinner or folding laundry. Getting into my body that way is creativity for me, and it's real in a way piano lessons never were.

My son's door is bicycles. The mechanics of them, riding them, learning new tricks on them. You can see the joy on his face when he's in the garage figuring out how to upgrade his bike with his friends.

The Three C's also overlap, which makes this easier than it sounds. A walk is movement, so it counts as creativity. Get curious about it and you're connecting with yourself. Bring a friend and have a real conversation, and now it's all three. Everything is a little sweeter that way.

Why Something This Simple Is So Hard

None of this costs much. Most of it costs nothing. So why is it difficult?

Because we're living at a pace faster than we were ever wired for. And in that pace, backing off registers as falling behind. Being less productive. Not operating at full capacity.

If you're a recovering overachiever or a people pleaser, you know the loop. If I slow down, I won't finish in time. If I don't finish, someone will be unhappy with me. And then I'll have to deal with that.

In my book, Connected: Discovering Your Inner Guides, I call those voices the guards. They're trying to protect you. They're just using an outdated map.

Think of it like the maps app on your phone. Before it routes you anywhere, you have to tell it the destination. Type in happiness and it takes you to the promotion, the milestone, the approval. Type in joy and the route looks completely different.

And usually it's not a step backward. It's a step slightly to the side.

There's one more thing joy asks that happiness doesn't. Joy requires you to accept where you are right now, whether you like it or not. That's a big part of why it feels harder, and why the mind reaches for a reason to dismiss it. I don't have time for that. That won't work. That's baloney.

If joy feels unfamiliar right now, nothing is wrong with you. You've simply had a lot of noise covering it. Uncovering it doesn't require perfection or a complete life overhaul. It starts with noticing.

Start With a Door You Can Actually Open

I think often about a client from one of our very first sessions. I asked her what it would be like to take a single breath before responding to a hard situation.

She couldn't do it. Slowing down that much felt genuinely unsafe to her, and it felt unsafe because it was unfamiliar.

So I didn't push. And on her own, she found something else entirely. She started looking for ways to laugh.

Different door. Same room. The challenge in front of her got lighter, communication improved, and the outcome got better — all because she took a moment.

That's what I want you to take from this. There are multiple entry points to the same place.

Creativity might look different for you on a demanding Tuesday than it does on a slow Sunday. It can be gardening. Cooking. A walk. A ridiculous song. It can happen in community, with people you want to be around, even for five minutes.

We tend to treat this as all or nothing. Joy isn't all or nothing. Invite a couple of moments of it into your day, consistently, and things start unfolding differently. That's not a promise about your circumstances. It's a statement about your capacity to meet them.

Wishing you moments of levity, moments of joy, and moments of peace — today and in everything you do.

If this resonated, the full conversation is in Episode 3 of the Joy First Method™ podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen. And if you want a practical starting point, the Stress Tax Exemption™ Guide has specific recommendations on how to stop paying the price for your own success — including some music that might just become your new pre-meeting ritual. For more insight and space to do the inner work that makes the outer work meaningful and sustainable, join the newsletter at drseemadesai.com/signup. To talk about keynotes, workshops, or coaching for your team, connect with me at drseemadesai.com.