Meet Dannie De Novo

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dannie De Novo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dannie, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is something that you develop over time, little by little. That initial dose of resilience needs to blossom out of something really important–a relationship with a loved one, a moving sense of purpose. But once you feel that thing we call resilience, you can build it like a muscle. You may even come to the point of testing your own resolve just to see how strong you can make it.

Growing up, I had suffered a very hard depression beginning in my teens and lasting through my early twenties. I had a terrible time with antidepressants and was hospitalized in a psych unit more than once for suicidal tendencies. Finally, after no therapy appeared to be working, I was given only one more option—electroconvulsive therapy. Not knowing any better and simply wanting to be free from the prison of my mind, at age nineteen, I dropped out of college and consented to weeks of the tortuous “treatment.” The treatments were so intense and horrific that I started pretending I was no longer depressed just so everything would stop.

The resilience I had at that time came from two places. The first was from my little brother. I could not bear the thought of him going through life asking why his big sister chose to take her own life. The second was stubbornness. I really wanted to prove the doctors wrong and show everyone I could get better.

When the dust settled from everything, and once I got over the shame I was carrying, I saw my remarkable fortitude. I realized how strong I had to be to survive it. And once I acknowledged that strength, I started to test it–more and more. That’s when I learned that the more you build up your strength, the faster it will grow.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Not too long ago, I was living the life that I thought everyone wanted to live. I had a good-paying job as an attorney, a husband, a house, and the most adorable baby girl. The problem was, though, that aside from the time I spent with my baby, I was actually pretty miserable. I was depressed but still functioning at a level of basic survival from day to day.

I remember one evening, mindlessly stirring a pot on the stove, lost in my misery. My baby was sitting on the kitchen floor playing with some pots and wooden spoons of her own. Suddenly, she looked up at me with her big brown eyes, picked up a pot and a spoon and started mimicking me! I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I bent down and said to her, “Yes! Just like Mommy!”

And then, I fell to the floor. A crushing wave of nausea came over me and I was faint. It immediately became apparent to me that my daughter was watching me and copying everything I was doing, and what I was, in fact, doing was teaching her how to live a very depressed, lonely, anxious, unoriginal, and uninspired life. So, that day, I set out to learn what real happiness was because I could not bear the thought of my daughter ever having to go through what I had forced myself to endure for so long.

I started studying happiness at the level I had once studied law—the spiritual side, the neuroscience side, the health side—everything I could get my hands on. I studied with spiritual leaders and gurus and coaches all over the world. The next thing I knew, I was at my lawyer friend’s office signing my divorce papers when I got a call that the company I was working for was being acquired and that I was not part of the deal. It seemed like the universe opened a new chapter for me right then and there.

I stopped being like everyone else and I began working as a happiness and success coach, coaching men and women globally. To date, I have 4 bestselling books. My first book, Get in a Good Mood & Stay There, chronicles my first steps of pulling myself out of depression, dealing with anxiety, and finding happiness.

When the pandemic hit, I wanted to help as many as I could, so I started going on TV. I am now a resident happiness television expert on multiple stations nationwide and have done well over 135 TV appearances across the country. These days I am focusing more on speaking and my seminars.

I am working on a number of new seminars for next spring on happiness, confidence, and performance–in all aspects of life. I am also working on another book that looks at how we interact with the people in our lives and the masks we wear while interacting.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I think learning self-care at a young age is imperative for any kind of success in life. You can’t do anything for anyone else if you aren’t giving yourself what you need. Learn the art of self-care now, and learn how to distinguish the need for self-care versus letting yourself off easy or giving yourself an excuse. You learn the difference by learning about yourself and being honest.

Patience is a skill that you should always be working on. To help with patience, learn compassion. To learn compassion, learn about people. To learn the most about people. learn about yourself on a deep level.

To accomplish anything of importance, you have to learn how to be okay with failure. This was a hard lesson for me to learn myself, but I would have saved myself so much grief and stress had I learned it sooner. Stop caring what other people think and your failures will be easier to accept, and once you can accept them, you can learn from them and make real progress.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
The most impactful lesson I got from my parents, from watching them live very unhappy lives, was that nothing external to me was ever going to make me happy. If I wanted to be happy and live the life I wanted to live, it was up to me to make that happen.

There is no amount of money, no relationship, no lifetime milestone, and no thing that can give you happiness. It must be cultivated from within and requires you to be brave.

You must be brave enough to listen to the true voice in your heart. That voice will tell you everything you need to be happy. And once you are brave enough to hear it–and not lie to yourself about what it is saying–you must be brave enough to act in conformity with that voice. You must be brave enough to act despite what anyone else has to say about it.

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