Monique Rhodes

What Happiness Actually Is
Work + Life Harmony with Megan Sumrell, October 2025

The cleanest version of the core idea. Happiness is a trainable skill rather than a mood you wait around for. A good example of how she handles a big claim inside a short answer.

Mindset Shift, Healing Trauma, and Mastering Meditation
Get Your FILL, July 2026

Her most recent appearance and the widest range of these three, including the thirteen years she spent living out of a backpack.

Teaching People How to Master Their Happiness
Be It Till You See It, episode 505, April 2025

A fast format with a host who pushes. Proof she can land a point without needing a full hour to get there.

Let's Go Win at Being Happy
Let's Go Win, episode 265

A business and leadership audience rather than a wellness one. Same material, different room.

Monique Rhodes is a happiness strategist who has spent thirty years studying what actually changes a person's inner state, and the last decade turning it into something ordinary, exhausted people can do in ten minutes a day.

Her program, The 10 Minute Mind, was trialed at University College London and is used across more than 70 colleges and universities worldwide, including every public college in New York City. She has delivered happiness training inside Fortune 500 companies and has thousands of students that she teaches internationally. Monique was nominated for New Zealander of the Year. Her flagship course is The Happiness Baseline.

She toured the world as a musician, opening two European tours for Chuck Berry, and collaborated with Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chödrön on the Heartbeats album before working with the Dalai Lama.

Before any of the happiness work she left the music career behind and spent thirteen years living out of a backpack, four of those years riding a motorcycle around India on her own, chasing an answer to one question: is it possible to permanently raise your happiness levels?

Her daily podcast In Your Right Mind has passed two million downloads. She now lives in the jungle in Costa Rica.

Who she speaks to

The listener who looks completely fine.

She has the job, the family, the reasonably good life, and she still wakes up with a racing mind and goes to bed wrung out. She won't call it a mental health problem, so most wellness content slides straight off her. She's read the books, downloaded the apps, and quietly decided the problem is her.

That listener is everywhere in your audience and almost nobody is talking to her directly. When someone finally does, she messages you about it.

Happiness Is a Trainable Skill, Not a Personality Trait

The case for treating the level you return to as something you can raise deliberately, rather than something you were or weren't issued at birth. This is the heart of Monique's work and the thing she'd most want to say to your listeners.

Successful, and Secretly Miserable

Why high-functioning people are the least likely to get help and the most likely to need it, and what the guilt of "I have no right to feel this way" does to a person.

The Ones Who Tried Meditation and Decided They Were Bad At It

They tried it on a terrible day, felt nothing, and concluded it wasn't for them. They were never going to feel anything. Why the practice is what you do on the ordinary days, so it's there for you on the bad ones.

A short practice to get them started on the path towards happiness.

An understanding of why nothing has worked so far.

A fascinating conversation. Monique is one of the most entertaining guests you will have on a podcast. She is full of stories, practical examples, and is incredibly inspiring to interview.