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The Happiness Club is an online membership club that people join to help themselves look after their mental and emotional wellbeing.
I utterly believe there is nothing more important in life than happiness. It is the most important thing in life bar none because whatever that thing in your life is that you want or don’t want, the thing that you want to change, the thing that you want to have, whatever that thing is for you, what you want in the having or not having or changing of it is to be happier.
Which makes happiness the most important thing in life, and yet, bless our little cottons, as human beings, we pay it no attention whatsoever. We allow life to come at us, to hit us in the face. We don’t proactively, actively go out to take care of our mental and emotional health on a daily basis.
The Origins of The Happiness Club
That’s one of the reasons why I set the Happiness Club up. As a therapist, I could see this gap for my one-to-one clients in between their one-to-one sessions with me. They got this hour with me every week that helped them make sense of what was going on in their heads, what was going on in their hearts, and then they would have to go out into the real world and manage all by themselves for an entire week before their next session.
I resonated with that massively because I’m a therapist, because therapy helped me and I had had that exact experience. Therapy with this amazing person once a week really helped me to understand myself, my thought processes, my behavior patterns, how I was standing in my own way, how I was stopping myself from being happy.
Then I would have to go out into the big wide world and manage all by myself for a week before I got that hour, hour and a half again. At the time when I was having therapy, I was experiencing massive levels of stress, huge levels of anxiety on a daily basis. Nobody I knew knew that that was happening to me. The people I worked with, my friends, my family, nobody knew I was feeling like that except for me and my therapist.
He would help me make sense of it all, and then I’d have to go out into this world where nobody knew I was having therapy and managed by myself. Sometimes, honestly, it would be like clawing at the walls before I got back to my next therapy session. Several years later when I became a therapist myself and started working with people one-to-one, I could see the same dynamic happening for them, and it broke my heart because I knew how that felt, and I wanted to find a way to give them something extra.
I had one-to-one clients saying things to me like, “If I could put you in my pocket and take you home, that would be great” or “If you could just sit on my shoulder and whisper in my ear so I know what to do and how to be in all these different situations, that would be amazing.”
Obviously I couldn’t move in with all my clients because I have my own family and my own house and all of that. I wanted to find a way to support them in between their one-to-one sessions with me.
Meeting Different Needs
At the same time, I was having conversations with people that I was meeting through networking who were open to having full-blown therapy sessions, but simply didn’t have the money to pay for them. Didn’t have the money to invest in themselves in that way.
I was also having conversations with people who lived hundreds of miles away from me who wanted to have sessions with me. At the time, the online world just wasn’t what it is today, and I couldn’t work out how I would ever be able to do therapy online.
Another group of people I had were those who weren’t necessarily struggling with stress or depression or anxiety or anything along those lines, but that knew, understood, embraced the idea that it was important for them to proactively look after their mental and emotional wellbeing. They understood that on a personal development basis, it was a really good idea to look after themselves mentally and emotionally. These were people who went to the gym to look after their physical wellbeing, who knew that it was an important thing to do, to exercise or go to the gym on a regular basis to look after their physical body, but didn’t know how to look after their mental and emotional body.
The Lightbulb Moment
I had these different groups of people all talking to me at the same time, and it all collided in my brain one evening while I was watching television and drinking a cup of tea. I sat bolt upright on my sofa and I was like, “Oh my word, it’s a club!”
It’s an online club, and I’ll give them all something every day. I’ll give them a daily strategy, a daily thought that will invite them to see life in a different way. That will give them a different perspective on the situation that they’re struggling with, that will give them a straightforward mindfulness tool or a hypnotherapy track or a meditation to listen to that will help them make sense of whatever it is that’s happening to them.
For my one-to-one clients, it would give them that support in between the sessions. For the people who wanted therapy but couldn’t afford it, it would make that kind of support affordable and accessible for them. For the people who lived hundreds of miles away, it made working with me a possibility for them. For the people who wanted to work on their personal development proactively, it did all of that.
Growing The Happiness Club
The Happiness Club was born almost 10 years ago. It will be 10 years old on the 1st of April, 2025, and I could not be prouder of what we’ve built.
The daily strategies are still a massive part of what we teach and what we give the members. We operate now via an app platform, and every morning on the app, the daily strategy comes out. It gives them something to think about, something to hold onto, something to try that day, something to do. This isn’t about adding more stuff into your day for you to have to do, or for you to have to convince yourself you haven’t got time to do, because who’s got time to do all the things that we’ve got to do? This is about a short and sweet little something that just gets the cogs in here whirring in a slightly different way.
When you listen to the daily strategies on a regular basis, what happens is 2, 3, 4 months down the line, you find yourself in a situation where you would ordinarily have reacted in this explosive way. You find yourself responding in a gentler, more gathered, more content way to the same kind of difficult situation because what’s happened very gently over those months is the way you see the world has changed. The way you see yourself has changed, the way you deal with other people has changed. It is a little slice of utter magic.
Filling the Gap in the Therapy World
That’s why I started the club—to help and support those different groups of people. Now it’s really become that gap in the therapy world. There is a gap in the therapy world where you either have nothing or you have full-blown therapy.
Here’s the thing: Not every human being, whilst I heartily believe that every human being would benefit from therapy, no question—not every human being wants full-blown therapy, but they still understand that they would benefit from some kind of therapeutic support. That’s where the Happiness Club sits.
Expanding Our Resources
We have the daily strategies. They are an absolute given. That’s part and parcel of the Happiness Club membership. Over time we added in more resources for our members.
Many of our members said that they were experiencing high levels of anxiety or full-blown depressive episodes and they wanted some more tailored support with that whilst, again, not necessarily wanting the full-blown therapy situation. We created a series of online courses that people could do in their own time in the safety and comfort of their own environment and work through, but know that they’ve got that support of the club behind them as they work through.
All they ever have to do is reach out and ask for help. Also, they don’t have to reach out and ask for help. They don’t have to fess up to anything. They don’t have to admit to anyone that they’re feeling like shit. They just can get on and help themselves with the resources on the club app.
Connection Through Live Sessions
The members wanted to have more of a connection on a regular basis, and we introduced a live monthly masterclass. We would go out to the membership and ask them what they would like us to speak about or teach about on that month’s masterclass. The answers that came back, we would then create a masterclass specifically for the membership, their wants and their needs.
We have masterclasses on everything and anything you can think of. They’re delivered live and then they’re all recorded and uploaded onto the app for members to access at their leisure. We have classes on procrastination, motivation, burnout, stress, anxiety, depression, mindfulness, hypnotherapy, EFT. We have masterclasses by me, by different members of the team, and from guest experts who have other modalities at their fingertips. Those masterclasses have really become just the most beautiful addition to the club.
During the pandemic, a lot of the members came forward and said, “We love the monthly masterclass, but actually we are all feeling a bit isolated. We’re feeling isolated. We need a bit more live connection every week if you can.” We swapped the masterclasses out for a live meditation. Every week on a Sunday evening, we would meet online and either myself or a guest expert or one of the Happiness Club team would run a live meditation for the members.
It helped us to feel more connected. It helped us to feel more comfortable with each other, with ourselves, with how we were feeling. It helped people to feel less isolated, less alone during one of the scariest times I think the world has ever experienced.
When we started coming out of the pandemic, out of lockdown, I said, “Let’s go back to the monthly masterclass.” We got this flurry of messages from members saying, “Can we have both please?” Now we do a monthly masterclass and we do a monthly meditation.
Empowering Self-Care
There is an absolute wealth of resources on the Happiness Club app from the daily strategies that come out every single day without fail to the opportunity to work at their own paces, to work at their leisure, to learn how to help themselves.
For me, that’s a really important part of the club. It isn’t me coming into other people’s lives and saying, “You have to live this way. You have to do X, Y, and Z, and then you’ll be happy.” This is about us as a team, helping other people learn how to look after themselves.
The thing that gives me the greatest pleasure is when a member of the Happiness Club emails me to tell me that they are leaving the club because they feel completely able to stand on their own two feet now. That gives me more joy than when they first joined the club and ask for my help because I know that the club has done its job of helping somebody learn how to look after their mental and emotional wellbeing for themselves.
It’s helped them learn to prioritize that. It’s helped them learn how important that is for them in their own lives, and I just know that those people will continue to use the tools and techniques, to use the perspectives that we have given them to help them live the rest of their lives in a happier, more content, calmer, more relaxed way. That gives me a buzz like no other.
If you’re interested in joining The Happiness Club, click the link below to learn more about our supportive community as we approach our 10-year anniversary in April 2025.
