Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 416 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! How’s it going? I hope you’re having an amazing week. I hope you’re doing the things that make you feel invigorated and alive.
Eric and I visited my little sister Molly and her husband in Nashville for the weekend recently. It’s about a 3 hour drive from our house to hers. Part of the fun of the trip, any trip actually for me and my husband is the drive. We love it. Ive given it a lot of thought and it’s because it’s just the two of us. I always say it’s when I get him all to myself, usually he’s busy taking care of business. He’s one of those that is always taking care of something which is good But in the car, there’s none of that to do. So we get to just spend time with each other with no real distractions. So what we usually do is pick a podcast we will both love and we listen to it, but we don’t just listen to it, we absorb it and dissect it, we pause it and talk about it, it will take us 3 hours sometimes to get through a 1 hour podcast, especially if it’s really interesting. The drive on our trips is always one of my favorite parts because we do this every time.
So this last trip was no different. We both love Tony Robbins, if you don’t know this, I know Ive talked about it on episodes before, but Eric and I actually met at a Tony Robbins event in California in 2005. Well Tony was being interviewed by Theo Von on Theo’s podcast. And he is amazing just as he always is. But here’s the thing….Eric and I used to both go to Tony’s seminars, obviously because we met there but even early in our marriage we would go and hearing him on this podcast reminded both of us that we need to get back into some of Tony’s workshops because it really really puts our mindset in such a different place when we fill our head with empowering messages instead of what we sometimes allow to drift in. It’s an election year and Eric and I both also enjoy politics to a degree and so we have been taking some of that in recently and that’s an entirely different mindset to be focused on politics rather than a lot of the things Tony talks about.
So it was a 2 hour and 45 minute podcast, we got through a little over an hour of it on our drive home, listened when we got home because it was snowing and we weren’t going anywhere and I think we finished it the next day because we got snowed in. So it probably took us over 6 or 7 hours to listen and talk through a less than 3 hour podcast. There’s not a lot I love more than doing that, especially with Eric because he and I align in our thoughts so we feed off each other. It makes us both feel really good, and the reason it makes us feel good, well I should say reasons, because there’s not just one….the reasons are…we connect with each other because we have deep long conversations which is awesome, Tony has an abundance of forward thinking knowledge and he always shares it, so we are learning things which is growth and it reminds us of areas where we really could be doing better which is self improvement. For the week after that weekend trip, both of us were internalizing and replaying some of the things Tony shared and really trying to apply it in our daily life. It made us better.
It’s really easy to get caught up in our day to day activities and forget that life is what you make it. The decisions you make every single day are creating the life you will have tomorrow. The best doesn’t have to be behind us. Where you are today is because of what you did up until now. If your life is really good…and you want it to keep getting better, you have to not only keep doing the things that got you there but also keep upping your game. But a lot of us get to where things are really good and then we get complacent and comfortable and kind of take the pedal off the gas. That’s what Eric and I realized on that drive home form Nashville listening to Tony Robbins on some Comedians podcast.
Over the last 6 or 7 years we have kind of gotten a little off track in some of the habits we both used to have. We both used to spend a lot more time going to events that keep us on track. At least once a year we would go to some sort of seminar that evaluates where we are and where we want to be and what we need to be doing to get us there.
It made us reevaluate what we’re doing, it made us reevaluate where things have gotten a little off track. A little more sugar here and there, a little more alcohol here and there, a little less focus on what’s going right and maybe a little more focus on what’s going wrong. Not too bad, but think about it, if you are driving somewhere and you veer to the right when you’re supposed to veer to the left and now you’re heading in the wrong direction or you maybe miss an exit but you’re still moving so you should be fine right? Nope, you could be moving along but going in the exact wrong direction of where you want to be. I remember one time I was traveling home with family from a wedding in Illinois and at some point my brother in law had been driving the whole time and I could see he was getting tired so I said let me drive for a while and you take a nap and so thats what we did, he said we are on this highway for another 2 hours so you don’t have to worry about taking a wrong turn so I thought great. So he goes to sleep well he slept longer than he planned and I wasn’t really paying attention to time so when he wakes up he looks around and he said where are we? I said I don’t know you said just stay on this highway and that’s what I did. Well unfortunately I had missed one little veer to the right and we had been heading in the wrong direction for about 30 minutes, fortunately he woke up when he did!
But you see just because you’re moving doesn’t mean you’re heading where you want to go.
I tell that story because it’s super easy to veer off track just a little and sometimes that causes us to slowly but surely get way off track. So maybe your friend you walk with moves away and now you stop walking every day…that’s a little veering off track, maybe you go on vacation and while on vacation instead of drinking your regular black coffee, you start drinking a coffee drink every morning that has lots of sugar and once you get back home you keep that up, that’s a little veering off track, maybe you notice yourself instead of just drinking on the weekend you start having a few drinks every night…that’s a little veering off track. But all of these could cause you to veer in a direction you didn’t intend and don’t want to go.
It doesn’t have to be a big change, sometimes it’s the little ones that get you. That’s why it’s so important to keep a check on where you’re heading and making sure you keep doing the things to get you there. Keep doing the things that make you better.
My challenge to you is to take a quick pulse of your life. Are there little things that have snuck into or out of your daily routine that is veering you away from the life you want to live? It’s ok if there are, you’re a work in progress, we all are, but progress is the goal, not regression so do what you need to do to get back on track, do what you need to do to make yourself better. Share this with 3 people who love self improvement as much as we do. I love you guys, Ill talk to you in a few days!
