1KHO 826: Play is the Antidote to Performance | Nicole Zasowski, What If It's Wonderful?

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And we're going to be talking today about life being wonderful, enjoy and celebrating. And author as well as licensed marriage and family therapist and mother, Nicole Zasowski is here. Welcome, Nicole.

**Nicole Zasowski** (1:33)
Thanks for having me. I'm so excited.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:35)
So I read your book. This is your second book, What If It's Wonderful. And then there's also a Bible study that you can do that kind of goes along with it called Daring Joy. But what if it's wonderful? Release your fears, choose joy and find the courage to celebrate. You talk in this book about something that I think a lot of us feel, which is preparing for the worst.

**Nicole Zasowski** (1:55)
Especially as a mom, right? Well practiced in that.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:59)
Yeah. Can you talk about how you say that preparing for the worst case scenario sometimes feels prudent?

**Nicole Zasowski** (2:06)
Yeah. I think we have rebranded pessimism as like, oh, I'm just a realist or I'm practical, or it feels like the wise thing to do. I think most of us don't realize how vulnerable joy is. I know I certainly didn't until I confronted my own parenting journey, which I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation.
But we don't realize that joy actually is one of the most vulnerable feelings we feel, because if you've been through pain or trauma of any kind, you know that it can often feel safer not to hold that joy at all than to hold something that might break.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:47)
Yeah. So you talk about you being highly suspicious of it, highly suspicious of joy, overlooked it because of being too afraid to embrace it. But then you say, what if I'm missing out on delight in the present moment because I'm dreading the pain that the future might bring? Though you do have a lot of pain in your life. You talk about miscarriage, chronic loss.
So can you talk about how you reconcile those two things?

**Nicole Zasowski** (3:13)
Yes, my husband and I went through a long season of infertility that took different forms. There were seasons when nothing was happening. There were seasons where we were miscarrying. We've lost five babies to miscarriage. We are the grateful parents of four children.
We know the cause. It's a genetic thing. So just for context in this conversation, when I get pregnant, I have about a 40% chance of getting to meet that baby. So the odds are not in our favor and you can imagine what this was like emotionally. And yet I realized that when we did start encountering some good news and some breakthrough in our story, I was really hesitant to embrace it. And I was so sad when I realized that yes, I've experienced a lot of tangible loss.
But a lot of the loss I've experienced has been my refusal to embrace the very good things in front of me. And I thought, no more. I don't want to miss out on this beautiful life that I've been given because I'm so busy preparing for the worst. And so I took a deep dive into neuroscience. I'm a person of faith, so I took a deep dive into scripture and really to understand how can I embrace joy in a more meaningful way and have the courage to actually hold on to it.