What If It's Wonderful?

Release Your Fears, Choose Joy, and Find the Courage to Celebrate

By: Nicole Zasowski

Narrated by: Nicole Zasowski

Family therapist Nicole Zasowski challenges you to let go of dwelling in your anxieties and fears and instead ask yourself the question: What if it’s wonderful?

These questions haunt many of us, leaving us sick with anxiety and frozen into inaction: what if my hope only leads to disappointment? What if I embrace joy only to have it ripped from my hands? What if my celebration is the cause of others' sadness? What if my joy takes me away from the God I knew so well in my pain? But these fears don’t have to control your life.

Author and marriage and family therapist Nicole Zasowski knows what it's like to suffer a blow that makes it difficult to look to the future. Despite the struggle, she found the courage to celebrate, and discovered that God is as present in our joy as He is in our pain.

Yes, God's purpose for us is worked out in our struggles. But what if it is also worked out in our dreams and our delighted joy? In What If it's Wonderful? Nicole helps you:

Overcome the fears that keep you from looking toward the future with joy

• Let go of the lies you've believed about happiness and embrace celebration as a part of spiritual growth
• Approach life with an expectant heart and courage to trust God's good gifts

With a psychological and spiritual case for celebrating, Nicole challenges you to let go of the habit of practicing disappointment and fully embrace joy, beckoning you to ask yourself a new question: What if it's wonderful?

Reflection questions are available in the audiobook companion PDF download.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Nicole Zasowski (P)2022 Thomas Nelson

Be Expectant! It’s wonderful!

I enjoyed this book! It is one I will go back to over and over with tears of celebration through the happy and the sad.

Permission to celebrate!

As a client and student of Nicole‘s, who is naturally inclined to celebrate, I could not be more grateful for this incredible work.

Through this book, Nicole has enlightened me and reinforced the truth that joy and celebration are just as rich and valuable to God as contemplation and reflection. Knowing that it comes from Nicole, who is more inclined to contemplate and reflect has made it even more valuable.

Thank you for continuously doing the hard work, Nicole! It will ripple throughout eternity.

You Need This Book!

This book has been so encouraging to help me have a good outlook going into unknowns. As someone that started experiencing anxiety as an adult, it’s hard to tell myself “what if it’s wonderful” going into a situation that’s hard for me. Even good things, it’s so easy to prepare for the worst instead of being hopeful for the future. This book talks about how celebration actually is a quality that showcases the glory of God in our lives. “Hope is not a denial of the cost. It honors the painful reality but does not fall to fear because it knows that what we can see is not all there is. Hope celebrates God’s promises and delights in what is possible with Him.”

Suspicious of joy? A must read!

It might make my whole life to learn to apply some of the truths in this book, but I’m so thankful for this eye-opening read.

Hopeful perspective from a Christian Therapist!

The experience of listening to this book, read by the author herself, has given me so much peace. Her voice is calming and when I need a reminder to dig for what is good and find some peace in my day, I listen to a chapter!

Reading this book has been life-giving and has strengthened my hope and faith. I’ve noticed a shift in my daily perspective around moments of peace and goodness that I might historically label as insignificant. Themes from the book even have found their way into some meaningful car-conversations with my teen kids; turning scenarios of discouragement into areas of potential growth. I’ve also realized how much of our future joy and ability to be present is stolen when our brains are busy thinking up worst-case scenarios and preparing for the worst!

Nicole, a licensed marriage and family therapist, invites the reader into her life and shares her faith through relatable stories woven with scripture, compassion and current psychological research. She shares practical ways to train our brains to help us greet life with more hope, gratitude and thankfulness.

Life gives all of us situations that are incredibly wonderful and at other times terribly awful. But I deeply believe the truth I learned while reading: that even amidst pain we can find peace. This book does NOT ask us to push pain out of the way and ‘get happy’. Rather, it encourages us to consider how what we go through might grow us or even re-order the focus of our hearts toward what matters most. What we can see is not all there is, and it’s worth becoming curious about where God is in both our harder times and when life is going well.

I’m beginning to view the idea of celebration in a new light—as a *practice* that helps us connect to hope and joy. Nicole explains that, for the human brain, feelings follow actions. Digging for joy or good things doesn’t require anything significant to change in our lives; it can be as small as noticing an ounce of progress even if we’re not where we had hoped we would be yet. So simple, but powerful!

Perhaps most importantly, this book challenged me to think about what it could be costing me to minimize celebration and goodness… that was huge! This message has been a blessing in my life already and I know it will be for many!

One of my top 5 favorite books. It’s THAT good.

This is absolutely one of the best books I’ve listened to in a really long time. It came at the perfect time in my life, for sure. Nicole is like a wise, older friend, bringing all her experience—life, counseling, and faith—to the words on the page. This book affirms a call I already felt from God to practice celebration, and offers tons of tips for how to start. I’ve already seen amazing shifts in my mindset and demeanor just in the few weeks it took me to read the book. Please do yourself a favor and read or listen. It’s well worth your time!

Not what I expected

This book was not what I expected it to be.
It should come with a trigger warning for people who are living with permanent childlessness not by choice, because I would have bypassed it altogether had I known it was going to be the story of her multiple pregnancies after many miscarriages. The message of the book was lost to me as I struggled through the details of the pregnancies and then the tiny details of her children’s lives. The book was not for me. It probably isn’t for anyone who will never have children. I’m sure it’s good, but it wasn’t good for me.