Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 137 of the Wildly Successful lifestyle podcast! I hope this finds you well! I genuinely hope the stories I tell and the mindset work are making your life better.
It certainly is making mine better. Sometimes I write an episode just because I need it.
Ok how many times have you heard someone say “That’s just how I am” or “That just runs in the family. How about when someone says “i can’t change it, it’s in my DNA”. Well it Turns out that CAN be true but it doesn’t HAVE to be true.
We do have certain inherited genetic traits, in other words if we did nothing new, learned nothing new and stayed in the same routines, same predictable actions then of course our lives will end up just as our genetics were originally wired.
But it does not have to be this way!! If we aren’t loving the way our life is headed, or maybe we don’t want to live the life of our parents and ancestors, We can change it. It does mean getting a little uncomfortable but how many times have you heard that life happens just outside your comfort zone. Turns out it’s actually true.
In order to change the course of our life we either have to learn new things or we have to have new experiences, this is per Dr Dispenza in his book “Evolve your brain”.
Like I always try to do with you guys, I’m going to be really honest and tell you my experience with this. There have been times in my adult life where I just wished time would go by and we would just be retired already and I would not have to be doing what I was doing, but because I am a confessed self improvement junkie, along with that thought came the thought right behind it that “that’s no way to live”. Wishing life away because I wasn’t waking up excited for the day is sad when I look back on it.
It all boils down to “I had stopped creating a life I was excited about and had kind of fallen into a routine that had stopped lighting me on fire”. If you feel that way or if you feel bored in your life, I’m just going to say I promise it doesn’t have to be that way. I wake up excited about what I’m doing and what I have going on all the time now. Not every single day but on the days where I wake up and maybe I get up on the wrong side of the bed, I know that once I have listened to my positive podcast, done my meditation and my journal and then set an intention for the rest of the day including what time my workout will be, I know I will be back on track. That’s my baseline. I do that every day. I schedule it on my day planner and it feels so good to mark it off as complete. I love that feeling.
Living a Wildly successful lifestyle is different from person to person of course. Everyone has varying ideas of how their perfect life would look. Having good habits is so important because the days when we aren’t firing on all cylinders, those good habits will at least keep us from derailing completely. And it takes time to create those habits, but you CAN create them. It just takes consistency. We aren’t going to live the life we’ve dreamed of if we just wake up and hope for the best. We have to live on purpose, think on purpose. If it seems like that is getting harder and harder to do, it’s because it is.
I was thinking the other day about what has changed in the last few years that has made the outside world seem so chaotic and then it hit me. I was falling for the exact narrative that the media wants…they want us to feel like everything is chaotic so that we stay tuned in because you wouldn’t want to miss the next crisis, of course not. It behooves certain companies and leadership and the media too, to have everyone conform to the way they want you to think, or not think is a better way of saying it. Social media and 24 hour news is designed to keep us addicted, to keep us glued to our screens. And this really is a relatively new thing…being addicted to our phones/social mediat/24 hour news is a relatively new thing….we are kind of just now waking up to the idea that maybe it’s doing more damage than we think. But it’s insidious, it’s subtle so we don’t realize it.
So what to do? I thought you’d never ask…Remember at the start of this episode, I talked about how Dr. Dispenza said that in order to change your life you have to learn something new or experience something new? Well it’s time we all learn to “Think on purpose”. I’m learning it right there with you. I can’t tell you how much better my outlook on life is since I stopped watching the news, paying attention to politics, or the latest crisis. That’s a huge chunk of time I’ve had freed up to devote to things that matter, things that affect my life like friends, learning new ways to get my message through with video and cartoons, I’m having so much fun with that and I am learning something new, it feels like every day. Now that COVID is almost in our past, we have started traveling again too. Even just experiencing new things in our own city without having to go anywhere.
And can I just add I don’t know when we decided that Saturday and Sunday were the only days we were allowed to have fun without feeling guilty. Go out on a Tuesday. Take a day off if you can and visit something cool in your city, go have lunch at a new place. It might feel a little uncomfortable at first but it’s worth it.
Most of all though, “Thinking on purpose” means realizing you don’t have to be stuck in a life you don’t love just because it’s in your DNA, you get to change it. No-one is going to change it for you. No-one is going to knock on your door and offer the solution. You have to make the call. And sometimes when people hear that they automatically think it means you have to move or you have to change partners or something drastic…Remember from Episode 134..You take you with you, changing those things may give you a temporary high but the same issues are going to pop up eventually. We have to work on getting ourselves in a good, happy place before we make major changes. Esther Hicks always says “Get happy then…”
My challenge to you this week is to come up with your baseline day. Come up with 3-4 habits that you know you can accomplish and will without a doubt be able to do, even if you have to get up a little earlier than normal, it’s so worth it I promise. You can copy mine if you want, I listen to a positive podcast like mine the first thing. Usually under 15 minutes, while I make coffee, then I meditate for up to 15 minutes, if I’m in a hurry, it will be 5 minutes and then I journal. Your journal may just be writing down 3 things you are grateful for, make it work for you and your routine, but remember it may be a little uncomfortable at first but eventually you won’t want to live without it. Once you’ve chosen 3 things, this is your baseline day. Your baseline means every day at a minimum you do these 3 things…Stick with it and Watch how it changes your life. I love you guys and I’ll talk to you in a few days!
