Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 659 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! I love this episode, for a lot of reasons but mainly because it’s a passion of mine to help each and every one of us, no matter what it is we are going through to keep our head in the game and never give our power to have peace away to the circumstances of life.
I was having coffee with my 84 year old neighbor this last week, she recently lost her husband of 66 years. She is very sad and very strong at the same time. She is inspiring to me. She said during our coffee date that this is really hard what they are going through but they will make it, She continued by saying you know, Every family’s got something that their dealing with. Every family has something. She’s so right. You know wisdom comes with experience and at 84 she’s had a lot of that. She is already planning things that will keep her busy now and I love that. She’s not withering away, and her husband would not want her to anyway. But every family does have something. Pretty powerful words.
I used to think that my situation with my family being in such a strict religion was really hard and really worse than what other families dealt with. I would fantasize that other families were just always one big happy family celebrating all the holidays together not having to tiptoe around situations all the time. Until I went through the life coach school. Doing that certification course was pretty challenging but it taught me really more about myself than anything else. So often we want to think we got the short end of the stick in one way or another and woe is me for I have to deal with this but then I realized, hold up…the actual reality of my life is WAY better than I was making it in my head. Yes my parents and two of my sisters are still in a religion that is very strict and has different beliefs from mine but i have a beautiful relationship with my mom and dad and older sister.
My one younger sister who has basically shunned us, we don’t get to see much at all but I don’t control that. When I stopped looking at the things that I don’t like and started really dwelling on the things that were wonderful about my family, something crazy happened. All of a sudden, I have this big happy family that gets together a lot and yeah we have different beliefs but so what? We just talk about all the amazing things we do have in common and life has never been sweeter. And look it’s taken me a while to get there. I had to work through all my own thoughts in my own head. I had to clear my own weeds. It took a lot of work. I went through the life coach school thinking maybe I could change other people’s lives, but I realized the universe put that in my path so I could change my own life. I gradually realized I had more work on myself to do than I knew. I started this podcast thinking I could change the world one episode at a time and it is working. It is changing my world. By me changing my world and making myself the best version of me, that ripples out into lifting others too.
And I really believe when you’re looking for ways to be free of past hurts, maybe current hurts, I believe when you’re truly wanting something better for yourself, the universe lays that path out for you, it may be that this podcast found you right when you needed to hear it. It may be a book that keeps popping up, it could be a new friend comes into your life.
There’s so many ways for us to be free, but the quote I’ve found to be very true and always applicable, is this. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. You may have the book but if you don’t read it, it’s not gonna help. You may listen to a podcast but if you don’t really hear it and apply what you hear, it’s not gonna work. You may have the vitamins, but if they sit on your shelf, they’re not gonna work!
Our lives are what we make of them. No one is free from humanness. I think I just made that up. what I mean by that is this, we each have a journey that is very specific to us. Every human on this planet has good days and bad days. Every person has something in their life they don’t like, it may be small it may be real big, but it’s the person who can pull their own weeds and clear their own land that has a beautiful garden. And other people may walk by that garden and say “look at how beautiful her garden is, her life is so easy with that beautiful garden” but they didn’t see the work she put in, the hours of research to figure out how to grow the different flowers, the cuts on her hands from the pruning, the dirt she washed away from daily weeding, the tears she cried in private over that big storm that wreaked havoc on her little garden, but she brought it back and now it’s better than ever. THAT is the power you have for your own life.
Behind every strong beautiful family is a lot of hard work. Behind every fit body is a lot of hard work, behind every “perfect relationship” is a lot of hard work. Time and effort, forgiveness, and growth. Those are all part of a recipe for success in anything we do in life.
There is no magic pill that other people have and you don’t. If you want a magic pill, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the ability to pull your own weeds and clear your own land, it’s the ability to start again when storms destroy, it’s the ability to choose to look for the good instead of hiding behind the bad.
No one is immune to life and you wouldn’t want to be. The contrasts we experience are what make life Rich and full. The beauty we seek is just on the other side of those weeds that need to be pulled.
Tony Robbins like to say “Your biggest problem is you think you shouldn’t have problems”. .I remind myself of this whenever I start to say “This shouldn’t be happening”. “I shouldn’t have to deal with this”. If I had a dollar for every time I used to say that, but I don’t say that anymore because that was me fighting reality which makes it all so much worse. Now I just keep a toolkit with me at all times. “This too shall pass”, “what good can come from this” “what is this teaching me”. And sometimes problems are BIG.
Any of you remember Elizabeth smart? She’s the young Mormon girl that was kidnapped out of her bed out of her home and kept as a sex slave for months in a tent with a traveling cult. She was rescued thank goodness. No-one would blame her if she ended up depressed or on medication….because her garden wasn’t just destroyed by a storm, her whole world was demolished. she had to start with an entirely new land, and you know what? Today, she is a happily married, a mom of 3 kids, a powerful advocate for sexual violence prevention. she just was in a bodybuilding competition for goodness sakes. She’s thriving living her best life she’s rebuilt her garden so beautifully. She didn’t give her peace away to a horrible situation, she used it to build a beautiful life.
You know I look at her situation and not that we should compare and not that your pain is less than someone else’s, but sometimes it helps for perspective and so I look at what she went through and I think OK so my little sister won’t talk to me. I think I’m gonna make it. And let me just add, as far as my sister’s decision to keep her family away from us, my view now is that that is her tending to her garden the best way she knows how. I may not like it, but that’s my weed to pull not hers, other people may agree with me, everyone might agree it’s not a nice thing to do, but that is still my weed to pull. Not hers. And that keeps the power for me to be happy and have peace firmly in my hands, and that’s where I want it.
The right attitude can fix a bad situation. It’s probably not going to change reality. But as Wayne dyer says “change the way you look at things and the things you look at change”. Its truer than we can ever imagine.
So my challenge to you this week, is Weed your garden, clear your own land. We have the power to live a beautiful life, and a lot of that depends on where this is, to those of you not watching this on video, I’m pointing to my head.
Get your head in the game, intentionally build a beautiful life.
I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days.
