Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 362 of The Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! I’m glad you’re here….welcome if you’re new, and welcome back if you’ve been with me for a while!
So we have had more storms and you know what that means if you live in Memphis, or maybe you don’t but for us it usually means we lose power! Which we did. Again. So it’s 95 degrees and we don’t have power, no big deal we will camp out downstairs with the battery fan like we did last time, it will be fun! And it was fine….we slept ok. But the next morning I get up and I can’t make my coffee or my breakfast and I found myself sort of thinking you know what screw it, Im going to go and just eat McDonald’s and blow off my morning routine to just veg out on social media and I’m not going to yoga because I just don’t feel like it and as I was saying all of these things to myself I also remember how it feels to eat food that causes me inflammation and how my mood is lethargic and negative when I veg on Twitter or instagram and how not going to yoga is only going to make m more irritated. I was going to make a frustrating situation (not having power) WAY worse by blowing off all of my good habits. So I calmed down and I ordered eggs and bacon and fresh tomatoes from the local deli down the street, then I came home, did my meditation, did my journaling and went to yoga. When Eric came home, he said Im taking you to lunch because we have no power. So off we go and I noticed when we ordered I had another urge to just order whatever I wanted because we were having a frustrating day…but I caught that one too and ordered salmon and a salad which was yummy anyway.
I realized though that when things are not going as we planned or wanted it is so easy to just throw caution to the wind and blow off all our good habits and just tell ourselves we deserve it. But what we really deserve is to continue to take care of ourselves even when everything else seems to be falling apart because if things are falling apart, we don’t want to be falling apart too. And I don’t know about you but when I disregard all of my good habits because Im stressed, it just makes me more stressed. Whereas when I fight the urge to disregard them, it empowers me to be strong, it empowers me to handle the situation with grace and thoughtfulness.
Eric and I at one point were complaining because it was 80 degrees upstairs which is where our bedroom is and I laughed and said, you know, It is perfect timing that Im reading the book “Endurance” right now because it’s a book about a group of men on an expedition in Antarctica that goes terribly wrong and they survive 2 years stranded in Antartica and a majority of that time they were half frozen. It’s an insane story of human survival. So I said when we complain about it being a little hot, I think about those 27 men literally having their clothes freeze on their body and their tears freeze before they could make their way off their cheek and they did that for 2 years. The way they survived was their leader knew the only way to keep that many men alive in those conditions was to keep up their good habits and routines. He made sure every day they kept their routines of work and training the dogs, preparing for emergency evacuation and hunting for food. I encourage you to read it, I’ll put it in the show notes. We forget how blessed we are to the point that when things get a little uncomfortable we throw up our hands. The guys on the Endurance had every justification to throw up their hands, but they never did, mainly because their leader Ernest Shackleton knew what it took to keep people from giving up and that’s never allowing yourself to be defeated by your own thoughts. Because Ive been talking a lot about thoughts lately, mainly because Im becoming SO aware of how much they really do set the tone for our life. I’ll give you an example..
Molly my baby sister is a medical device rep, if you know anything about them they are driven by their quota. So she this last quarter as 5 days away from the end of the quarter and $48,000 shy of her quota. Which is a lot when you’re selling a product that’s $1000. So she could have and started to just give up and start working on the next quarter but then she said words I don’t use lol but she told herself you know what if Im strategic enough I can do this. And she hit the road and she did what she had originally told herself was impossible, she did it by allowing her thoughts to create a path instead of a roadblock. She targeted her best relationships and her biggest customers and one of the big PO’s she got was from a cold call she did on one of her brand new clients that she just straight up walked into the hospital grabbed a person with the right badge and told them I need to meet the director of the OR “I have some very important information that they need to hear”. I don’t know if that person was startled or amused but she led her right to the OR Director where she promptly got a $9000 PO all because she changed her thought from “there’s no way Im going to do this in 5 days to “Im not going to get any closer by doing nothing so why not pull out all the stops?” Which may or may not have included accosting people. But she did it in spite of her original thoughts. She overruled those thoughts and created the thoughts that led her on the path to reaching quota. Im proud of her.
When you have a situation, whether it’s frustrating like me losing power or stressful like Molly missing quota or even devastating like a divorce or a death in the family……when you have those situations it is so easy to be torn by whether to keep your whits about you and stay the course of being who you are meant to be or to just throw in the towel. But when you throw in the towel sometimes that creates a situation on top of a situation like drinking too much when you’re stressed which just compounds the stress or skipping your workout when you’re frustrated which just compounds your frustration..…you see now you have a situation on top of a situation. I said this in an episode recently….when you get better, everything else does too. The opposite is also true.
In a podcast this week I heard a coach say that we have two parts of our brain so of course it’s normal that we will have two competing thoughts about what to do when a situation arises. Just keep this in mind, it’s very normal to feel like you have a split personality because we really do have two parts of our brain with very different goals….one of the parts of your brain will always want you to take the short term pleasure route and the other one will have you taking the route that makes you better long term. You can look around and see that most people make a majority of their decisions from the part of the brain that wants immediate pleasure and those results are predictable. But for those that make a majority of their decisions from the intentional brain or the front part of their brain….those people stand out and always will. They still have the part of their brain that tells them to skip the gym or there’s no chance just give up, but they override that because they know that when things are falling apart it just makes it worse if you fall apart with it.
My challenge to you today is to notice that you have both parts of the brain that are working…one that wants immediate pleasure and the other that knows what is best for you long term…acknowledge that both are working and then acknowledge which part you make decisions from the most. Don’t take this as a chance to beat yourself up, take it as a chance to see that it’s very normal to have conflicting thoughts about just about everything you do…just remember you have the power to override the thoughts that aren’t serving you because what if when things are “falling apart, what if they are falling together just not in the way you thought they would. Share this with 3 intentional people I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
