Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 455 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! Welcome. I’m happy you’re here. If you haven’t heard it yet today, you’re doing great…keep moving forward and don’t look back.
So, This last December this local garden store called the garden district had these gorgeous succulents, those are the plants that have thick sap filled leaves. Oh they are gorgeous. There are lots of different types but they had some that were I think 7 or 8 inches wide and the most beautiful green color. I had to have one and I felt like my friends needed one too! So I bought three and I found the perfect wood pots and filled each one with rocks and placed the succulent on top and it made me so happy to have found them and be able to give a gift that keeps on giving. I have been loving mine and taking care of it exactly how they told me to care for it.
They don’t need too much water, their natural environment where they thrive is a desert where they don’t get much water and they love the sun. A couple weeks ago I noticed that it looked like it needed a little bit of extra love and it was a beautiful hot day so I put it outside just for the day where it could be in its perfect environment and it was loving it! It just seemed happy out there. Eric and I had a lot going on that day so it was dark when we got home. And that night it rained harder than we’ve seen it rain in a very long time. And I hadn’t brought that succulent in so it got soaked all night. The next morning I saw it and immediately pulled it in and drained the water. Carefully turning it upside down and trying to dry it out. To no avail.
Nothing I could do or knew to do would save it. I placed it in the sun inside in hopes it would somehow survive. It did not. It died so quickly I felt sick. Out of love for it I destroyed it. In my attempts to show it love I destroyed it and not only it but the orchid next to it by association, call me crazy but I thought one of my super healthy orchids would help the succulent while we were gone out of town so I put it near the succulent for support. The opposite happened. The orchid next to the dying succulent didn’t thrive while we were gone. My other orchid and plants not near it at all thrived.
The reason I’m telling you this story is I feel it applies to our society today. Sometimes because of good intentions we destroy things. And often by association, it’s perpetuated so we lower our standards too or at the very least we are weakened.
I say this because Society today glorifies things that are not healthy at all out of good intentions . I get that but what we are ultimately doing is telling everyone else those are the new norms to our new way of living. They tell us These are new thriving norms when they really are the opposite and we all know it but we just turn a blind eye to it because it’s easier than standing up and saying wait a minute… a society with no standards destroys itself fairly quickly and we are doing that because we are so afraid to tell the truth. We want everyone to feel embraced and loved and in an effort to do that we are destroying the fabric of our society. I’ll give you a good example.
The new National American Miss Alabama. She is morbidly obese. Out of Good intentions and love, in a round about way we are telling other young girls that that’s the goal. Obesity is our new norm and we should embrace it. That’s what society is telling us when they do that. When we all know at our core that that’s not the path we want our daughters to take, obesity is a path to disease no way around. Those good intentions will destroy the lives of no telling how many girls because they see that and they think oh I don’t have to give up my sugar addiction now because it’s normal to be obese. It’s normal to be addicted to sugar and it gives them the idea that they don’t need to change. It takes the leverage to change away because they think that’s just the norm now so why go through the pain of doing anything different? It messes with their heads. Our intuition looks at that and we innately know something is off with it. But it also encourages other girls to be like her.
We can love that young lady that was just crowned Miss Alabama without parading her as a role model for our young girls.
I saw an article this week that said a study was done and processed foods do not in fact cause obesity. Now how many people believe that? Probably not you and me but my guess is there are people who read it and said see I can eat all the processed food I want. And that just sucked all the wind out of any chance they had of stopping.
In the last few weeks a nfl kicker gave a commencement speech to a catholic school graduation and he praised his wife for her vocation of being a homemaker and a mom. He pleaded with the men in the group to embrace their masculinity. He was eviscerated for these comments among others. I don’t know about you but I think being a mom looks like one of the hardest jobs out there and there’s nothing better than a masculine man taking care of his family. He wasn’t saying women cant be lawyers. He just said if you want to be a mom and homemaker that’s a really satisfying and beneficial job. But society doesn’t want women to hear that.
And how many people think it’s normal to be on prescription medications by the time you’re 50? With 75% reporting they are on them at 50…That’s a societal norm. There are tons of functional nutritionalists who have proven diet and exercise can overcome most of the diseases we have in society. But that’s a radical idea.
There is so much advice that society gives us that turns out to not be helpful in fact it turns out to be harmful. They mean well I know they do but it’s harming us. It’s time we free ourselves and decide based on our own intuition what’s good for us individually and what’s not. What’s good for our family and what’s not.
It’s really a matter of common sense and being honest with ourselves and our family.
Obesity isn’t healthy. Girls can’t be boys and boys can’t be girls. Single parent families are not as nurturing and healthy as having a mom and a dad. There’s a hundred other things I could list but you get the point.
The side effect of glorifying these things is we get more of it. More obesity leads to more disease and depression. More gender confusion leads to more depression. More single moms leads to more poverty and crime. This is no way to build a strong healthy life. The message we need to be sending is we love you but this is not healthy or normal. We can love without glorifying. That’s a societal norm I can get behind.
We want to love everyone and we want everyone to love themselves too. We can’t do that without honesty and truth. Good intentions may have gotten us here but honesty can get us out.
My challenge to you today is to follow your intuition not societal norms. They’ve gotten us off track for long enough. Those good intentions have done enough damage to our society. It’s time we start being honest. Share this with 3 people who are rising above societal norms. I love you guys! I’ll talk to you in a few days!
