A Former Litigator–Turned–Life Coach Cooks up the Happiness Recipe 

When Rebecca Morrison was transitioning from law to personal coaching, she joined a writers’ retreat with the express purpose of developing a framework that she could test on people via in-person lunches and networking. “My idea was that I would work in this structured space and create impactful content,” she recalls. “In the first group meeting, I said, ‘I support you in writing your books, but I’m not here to write a book.’ And then I wrote a book. They still tease me about that.”

The book is The Happiness Recipe, which presents empowering “thought makeovers, needle-moving activities, and practical approaches for each season of life so that you can create the easier, happier, priority-aligned life of your right-now dreams—and the life that builds toward your future dreams, too,” she writes.

Morrison defines a “priority-aligned life” as one in which “you do more of what matters most to you—and let go of the rest.” 

The Happiness Recipe is coming out at an opportune time that has been coined in the press as the “Great Resignation.” After the pandemic upended the traditional 9-to-5 workday, many people began to rethink their concept of work and career. “When everything went down in March 2020,” Morrison says, “people went into survival mode. But when it became clear things were going to be different for longer, and maybe forever, we entered a period of what I think of as a period of the great reprioritization. People are looking at their world and asking, Am I living in alignment with what matters to me? Do I even know what matters to me, or have I been so swept up in the hustle culture that I have lost touch of what really drives me, what is meaningful to me? They’re doing that personal analysis and finding they don’t want to stay employed where they are.”

Something like that happened to Morrison. A litigator for more than a decade, she experienced two aha moments that compelled her to take stock of her life. The first occurred in 2005 when she was working as a litigation associate at a large national law firm. As she recounts in her book, she was juggling her job and being a mom to a toddler:

Sometime around eight p.m., I found myself kneeling on the floor of the bathroom, legal pad perched on the toilet seat cover, cordless phone clipped on the back of my pants, expert report spread out on the bathroom floor, and toddler happily splashing in the bath. I attempted to actively participate in a conference call with a team of legal experts and be somewhat present with my daughter at her day’s end….I had a moment of clarity that brought two thoughts in quick succession. Who says you can’t do it all? That was quickly followed by This is exhausting. This is unsustainable. Right now, I’m being neither a great lawyer nor a great mom. What if I can’t really do it all? What if I don’t want to?

Her second wake-up call happened later that year when she nearly died from an ectopic pregnancy. She returned to work a few days after her surgery. She writes: “I put work before my health and family, including my daughter, because I thought if I made work my top priority, I’d be rewarded with opportunity and financial abundance. And, frankly, I thought it was what I was supposed to do.” 

Supposed to and should are words at the root cause of much unhappiness, Morrison says. “We should stop ‘should-ing’ all over ourselves. That’s not what life is about. It’s about going a step further and determining if what I supposedly should do is what I want to do and finding the right balance. And that will evolve as your life evolves.”

Morrison earned her coaching certification with the intention of coaching successful people who were not happy. But friends, noting her penchant for taking nontraditional life steps, had long come to her for advice. Says Morrison, “They would say, ‘Tell me more about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you were brave enough to take that leap.’ ”

What she is doing is working full time as a leadership and happiness coach. She has a website (untanglehappiness.com) and is a sought-after podcast guest. The Happiness Recipe, praises Kirkus Reviews, is “a personal and inviting investigation of how to find real happiness….Her advice is plainspoken and experience-tested, and the latter quality gives the work an extra resonance.”

Prior to writing her book, Morrison had been “a voracious reader” in the self-help space, she says. “There are a lot of books that give you great aha moments and ideas. What I thought was missing in books I read were the practical applications to one’s life.” 

In The Happiness Recipe, she notes the three roadblocks to living a happy life are: the Authenticity Gap, the Emotional Energy Gap, and the Physical Energy Gap. The mental exercises and strategies she presents are devised to help readers “architect their lives so they are living in alignment with their priorities,” she says.

In cooking recipes, it is up to the individual to supply that unique ingredient to truly make that recipe their own. Morrison believes it is no different with happiness. “Among the essential ingredients,” she offers, are “curiosity, a love for others and for yourself, and an openness to life’s possibilities. Then, beyond the general frameworks, we pick the ingredients in those spaces that either need to be added, subtracted, or tweaked to make the final dish a satisfying one.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.