What’s wrong with easy street?

Episode 247
Wildly Successful Lifestyle

LISTEN TO: What’s wrong with easy street?

Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 247 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle Podcast! How’s it going out there?

Everywhere I go it seems people right now are talking about how awful things are and the state of the world is so bad. I just want to say this, yes, there are things we can dwell on that make us angry, scared, depressed even, and you can focus on that stuff that makes you angry, scared or depressed and you’d be justified to do it, but is that serving you? There is way more good going on in the world than bad. That is simply the truth, the bad just gets magnified because it confirms a narrative. Don’t fall for that. Focus on what’s good. What you focus on is what you get. It’s not sticking your head in the sand, it’s actually pulling your head out of the sand and if you would do it for a while, you would see how much easier it is to breathe when you’re able to notice that life, while there are hard aspects to it, of course, life can be really really good and nothing external has to change for that to happen except for your focus. Be really intentional about what you allow in to your mind.

Eric and I are grateful to be able to get back to traveling and people are so lovely and beautiful in every part of this world. We had a wonderful time in Belize, it’s such a beautiful place. We went scuba diving while we were there. We got to see so many beautiful creatures and coral, As we started getting deeper into the dive there was this 6’ Nurse shark that was swimming along with us. There were 5 divers and the dive master. At first, I were like why is this huge shark just hanging with us? We’ve seen them before but they don’t usually just hang with you the whole time. Well we soon found out. Im not sure if you guys have heard about the lion fish in the Caribbean, they were some how brought in, they aren’t native and there are different theories of how they got there, but one female can produce 2 million eggs a year, it’s kind of insane so they are really a problem, and they are damaging the reef, (Im telling you this so you aren’t as traumatized by my story as I was by it actually happening) so they encourage divers to kill them whenever they can. Our master diver was unusually good at it, so he would spear the lion fish and feed them to the sharks, if you don’t know what a lion fish is look it up because I will not soon forget the image of a shark swimming around with half a lion fish hanging out of it’s mouth. So the master divers every time they saw a lion fish would spear it and the shark would just be right there waiting for it. At one point we were kind of feeling sorry for the lion fish. I even saw a lion fish off to my right that the master diver didn’t see, I looked at my husband under water and pointed to it, at this point we had seen probably 10 lion fish die so my husband puts his finger to his mouth in shhhhh way so that we let that lion fish live to see another day.

You see the shark can’t really catch the lion fish, they don’t really recognize them as food and they are quick and they get in the reef and the rocks but they know when they see the divers coming, it’s going to be an easy meal..they know they just have to swim along and they will have food handed to them. Lots of it.

In my mind, I wondered if these sharks had come to rely on this food or if it’s just a tasty easy snack in between other meals.

I mean they probably aren’t very different from us. We tend to like it when things are easy.

But my mom used to always say don’t start feeding the birds if you don’t intend on continuing because they come to rely on it. So if those sharks come to rely on the divers for their source of food, they could be in big trouble when it stops and it will stop at some point. So the easy meal isn’t so great long term.

If you’re like me I would like for most things to come easily. In fact if they aren’t easy sometimes in the past, I would chuck it off as they aren’t meant to be, or maybe we quit because it’s just too hard. I’d like for my Marketing, sales, to be easy I would love it if fitness and nutrition were easy and let’s not even get started on relationships. Who doesn’t want those to be easy?

Have we fallen into the trap of what’s easy? Are we settling for short term gains at the expense of long term vitality?

I read a blog post by train ugly that was the name of it. But they were talking about easy or better.

It’s easier to eat out, it’s better to cook at home.
It’s easier to do it how it’s always been done, it’s better to stretch and challenge yourself.
It’s easier to talk about goals, it’s better to get in the game and take action even if you know you can fail.

We all desire certainty. It’s one of our 6 human needs. But another human need is uncertainty or better said variety. Being certain can be comfortable. Being comfortable isn’t better it’s just familiar, it’s easy.

We think we want easy but easy gets boring. And the easy path is what most people follow. The path that is well worn. The path where things are all laid out where we are certain of what’s coming next. But that path can become a rut. Have you ever been in a rut? Like literally? On the road you’re driving, to get out of it, your car could swerve, you’re going to bounce around a bit, it could be a little uncomfortable but once you’re out of it, it’s smooth sailing. You could stay in that rut and not experience the discomfort of getting out of it, but then you are only headed in one direction, wherever that rut is heading. When you get out of it, you can go in any different direction you want, a lot of good things in life happen just on the other side of a rut.

There’s the easy path in life where we can be hand fed everything, just like that shark being fed the lion fish, but is that good for you long term? My guess is that the lion fish is just an easy snack in between that shark’s other meals. And that’s ok. It’s ok for us too. We can take the low hanging fruit, no problem, just make sure we aren’t settling only for things that come easy.

The fact that you’re listening and you continue to listen, tells me that you are already really good at most things. You have a lot heading in the right direction in your life. But so did that shark and then along comes the easy meal of hand fed lion fish, how easy it would be for him to just coast and be hand fed every day? We all know that’s not what’s best for him. Same thing for us. There are so many things to distract us from excellence. Society telling us it’s ok to be average. We can easily fall into the easy path too. We can say this is good enough. But how does that leave room for excellence?

My challenge to you this week is to look at the 5 most important areas of your life….Relationships, Career, Finances, Physical Health and Mental Health and ask yourself “How often am I settling for what’s easy?” Where do I need to shake things up? Where can I choose what’s better instead of what’s easy or just simply good enough?

Share this episode with 3 people and if you haven’t already go give me a 5 star review if you’re loving the episodes and if you want to chat with me more about how to up level those 5 areas of your life..sign up for a coaching session for me or another life coach of your choice. You can do that by emailing me at heidi@heididawson.com or simply visit my website at heididawson.com. I love you guys and I’ll talk to you in a few days.

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