Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 488 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! How is life treating you? Are you taking care of your mindset first before you allow that brain to run away with the many thoughts you have running through your mind or maybe before you get yourself worked up over the state of the world, have you taken 10-15 minutes to show your brain who’s boss and show it that no matter what it wants which is to run straight for the juicy topics because the meditation and the journaling are boring……We know that’s what it wants to do! How many times have you been driving and there’s an accident or some sort of chaos on the other side of the road and you cant take your eyes off of it even though it means you aren’t paying attention to your driving? That’s your brain being left to it’s own devices…so every morning you have to show it who’s boss. I fight it every morning and every time I win that fight I am 100% better for it for the rest of the day. And you are too.
Ok, As an interior Designer I’m pretty picky about every aspect of my projects but there’s one area that I am super passionate about and that is lighting. Bad lighting can make a good design seem awful and a bad design seem not so bad. It’s everything when it comes to the feel of your space. Now, I never used to worry about which bulbs clients would buy for their lights, it was pretty cut and dry. You just run into Lowes and get the wattage you want and it would look great. But you guys can relate I’m sure that now it’s not as easy too buy a bulb. There are tons of different options and not all of them are great. This is the result of the government deciding that incandescent bulbs are bad for the environment. So for the last several years they have been slowly but surely taking incandescents off the market and LED bulbs are all you can get. When LED’s first came out they were without a doubt horrible.
They would cast a bluish or greenish color which makes everything including us look terrible and don’t even try to dim them, most couldn’t dim. So I fought this change for a very very long time, hoarding incandescent bulbs like my life depending on it. I still try to buy them in fact, but that’s more an act of rebellion. Now, as long as you get the right color temperature which for most purposes will always be 2700 kelvin. If you look around your house and you notice the white blue lights just do yourself a favor and change all bulbs to 2700 k you’ll thank me later. I am telling you this because I didn’t want that change. When it first happened it was terrible but now the bulbs are so good the dimming capabilities are just fine and the color temperatures if you get the right one looks great. In fact I have to say, I have had LED bulbs in my lights since our renovation a few years ago and I have yet to change one of the bulb, they last so much. Longer, put out way less heat and are overall a really good upgrade if you ask me. So I fought something that ended up being better in the end, better for the environment and better for our electricity bill too. It didn’t look like that was going to be the case as I was going through it. I literally thought they were ruining everything about design by ending the use of incandescent bulbs, and here we are on the other side of it better for it.
I have grown a lot since then and now I would like to think that I would handle the change a little better if it happened now because I know now that life is always working in my favor and even though changes seem hard at the time, I know there’s something great that is going to come from it if I allow myself to look for it. I was actually proud of myself recently because I let myself go with the flow of a a recent change rather than fight against it. I actually let myself in real time go with the flow of it.
It was when I was walking into the gym locker room a few days ago and I thought oh it’s so interesting how things have changed. My friend Leena has recently moved and I used to see her every day at the gym, that’s how we met. I had a thought that it was sad not seeing her and us sitting in the sauna or swimming or walking in the afternoons. I acknowledged that it was sad but I also realized the change for her is a good one I think, she is excited and I’m excited for her, and we still talk and I will get to see her in a few weeks when we go to Florida for vacation so it is the end of the way things used to be but the start of something fun too and and how it opens up other new opportunities at the same time and as long as that’s what I focus on instead of the loss the better everything is.
The more we allow ourselves to see that the ending of everything is a new beginning of something else. Life demands change, and we have to decide if we are going to flow with it or resist it which makes life harder than it needs to be, I look back at all the angst I had over LED bulbs only to have them working even better than the incandescent and my focusing on the good that is coming from Leena moving doesn’t mean I won’t miss her, it just means I am going with the flow of life’s changes even when I don’t love them. It makes life a lot more fun and a lot more peaceful. Change is inevitable. Human nature likes to be comfortable, and change for a lot of us is uncomfortable. So the natural thing is to fight it, but the more we grow we realize that change is part of life.
With every ending there’s a new beginning. It’s always how you frame things.
John Templeton says the powerful potential behind change lies in the possibility that each new beginning will bring us greater joy and freedom than we have ever known. Whether or not that happens and whether or not we continue to grow through the cycles of our lives, is largely up to us. We play a part in what happens by choosing how we see our changes, our beginnings and our endings. He goes on to say we can see each ending as a tragedy and lament and resist it, or we can see each ending as a new beginning and a new birth into greater opportunities.
My challenge to you this week is if you’re going through a change of some sort, maybe it’s the end of a relationship or the end of a job, maybe it’s the end of one phase of your life into another…don’t allow your brain to do the thing that it will do if you aren’t being intentional…don’t allow it to focus on the loss…intentionally look for the possibility for greater joy or greater freedom or just a new door opening that you would not have normally seen. Intentionally focus on the new beginning. Share this with 3 people who are doing big things. I love you guys! I’ll talk to you in a few days.
