Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 370 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle Podcast! How are all of my old souls doing out there? Maybe you’re don’t consider yourself an old soul maybe you’re just a beautiful soul. I know that because you’re human and you’re listening and you’re constantly wanting to improve. That’s what it takes to be happy in this world, it’s knowing that life is working in your favor…always know that, and if you aren’t seeing it, look for it harder, how is this working in your favor? And it may not show itself to you immediately but you will see it when it’s time. Know that.
Ok, I started walking with my friend Lena, we walked for 4 miles or so and so it takes us about an hour and we have a great conversation on the whole walk because we have a lot in common. We have similar mindsets so we were talking the other day, and I said, you know I have really been trying to stop listening or reading things that I know are going to bother me as I said it I thought to myself that sounds really silly I’m going to TRY to NOT to do something that will hurt me. Of course, if we know we are about to do something that isn’t good for us wouldn’t you think we would just not do it? You would think that, but how many times do we do it anyway? Knowing it’s going to cause us problems later? Wouldn’t you think we would be thankful we had that warning message and change course?
Think about it. When you’re driving down the highway. Maybe your mind is distracted on something and you sort of veer to the right too far and you hit those rumble strips that tell you that you’re heading off the road, we don’t just ignore them and keep veering to the right so that we drive off into the grass into the ditch. We do a course correct. Those rumble strips are there for That purpose. To say hey, warning you need to course correct. You’re headed in the wrong direction and if you keep going you’re going to end up in the ditch or worse into a concrete wall. They are there to make us aware that life is about to get harder than necessary if we don’t change course.
I’m glad they are there. Funny thing is. We have those rumble strips built into our inner guidance system for our daily lives. Like it or not, you know you have them and so do I and sometimes instead of course correcting we ignore them and keep the course right into a problem.
It sounds silly but we do it. We feel ourselves about to pick a fight with someone we love but instead of pulling back and changing directions we go full on into the argument. Or we sit down to dinner knowing we have a big day the next day and we still decide a bottle of wine is a great idea knowing you aren’t going to be the best we can be tomorrow because of it. Or maybe we are in a good mood, feeling really good about life but our dopamine addicted brain says pick up the phone and scroll on x or Facebook or the news knowing it’s probably gonna raise our anxiety level through the roof but we do it anyway.
We know that it’s going to make life a little harder and we do it anyway.
Why do we do that? I can think of a few reasons. You can see if any of these resonate or maybe a few of them do. I know for me they do, I can come up with 4 off the top of my head and Im going to give my answer to each of these at the end.
First one living on autopilot. We’re just going through our day just like every other day and subconsciously we know the things we do that are making life more difficult but it never hits our conscious brain to stop doing them.
Second reason. We think it’s normal to do these things because everyone around us does them and we just tell ourselves to lighten up and have a little fun instead of listening to our inner rumble strips that are guiding us towards what we really want. So maybe all of our friends do it and so we think something’s wrong with us if we don’t. or we think we won’t fit in if we’re not like everyone else or maybe even we compare ourselves to every one else and so you think you’re good enough.
Finally third…we just keep numbing our feelings. We don’t want to feel frustrated or sad or fearful so we avoid those feelings by indulging in whatever even though most of the time, the indulging just exasperates the feelings eventually.
For me I think its more the last one than anything. I don’t like negative feelings, so I act like they aren’t there or I distract myself from them, I noticed it this week especially because Im trying to do these new videos for my podcast so I can grow a YouTube audience. But the videos I make are animations and the learning curve is pretty big so I noticed I would get stuck on trying to get something to work and when it didn’t I would get so frustrated and the first thing my brain did was reach for my phone to distract from that feeling…I noticed it and I said ok…Im feeling frustrated….if I stick with it and allow myself to feel frustrated while I figure this out or I can distract myself and then come back to it later maybe and then it’s like starting all over…which actually makes my life worse, but I stuck with it and I figured it out and I realized that frustration is just a feeling, it can’t hurt me. I felt the rumble strip and I course corrected.
The more I am ok with seeing the negative feelings through to the end the better I get at it. I noticed again where that was a recurring thing when we are talking about the house next door that we bought and we plan on renting it. We have had it on the market for 8 days now and we haven’t rented it. I noticed myself not liking that feeling of risk and thinking oh we should just sell it, forget all this stress. But then I said wait a minute. We knew this would be short term pain for long term gain so just chill, it’s a high end rental, it’s probably not going to go in a week, give it time and it will rent. We know that. So I just sat with my feeling of stress and talked it out instead of allowing it to take over when deep down I know everything is going to work out as it should and as it’s supposed to. I heard the rumble strip and I course corrected.
There’s so many times if we just allowed ourselves to recognize that the feeling we have that’s telling us hey, you may want to course correct here because if you stay on this line of thinking or keep going in this direction, it could cause you to run into some trouble….if we course correct before it gets too bad we are generally able to make our life a lot better because deep down we all usually know when we are making a decision that is contrary to what we ultimately want.
And sometimes that’s ok but if we do it all the time, it becomes a habit. And a habit of doing things that go against our inner guidance system..that’s when we make life a lot harder than it needs to be.
So if you’re living on autopilot..it means you aren’t really aware of those thoughts and you’re just going through the motions. Meditation and journaling has helped me stop that because when you become aware of every thought in your head, which is what meditation helps you do, you are no longer on autopilot. You can’t be because you are too aware of the present, too aware of your thoughts which helps give you control over them, and you want control of your thoughts because they control every thing you do. And journaling just makes you be more intentional, especially when you do it first thing in the morning and you specifically set an intention for the day. My intention for most days is to be intentional, confident and present. Which has me questioning all day…am I being intentional, am I working from a place of confidence and am I being present with the people Im with or with the project Im working on. I do that almost every day.
If you’re doing things that make your life harder because you think it’s normal and that’s what everyone does…well guess what….do you want to be normal? Do you want to be average? I don’t. And you don’t either because you’re listening to the wildly successful lifestyle podcast. Normal isn’t for you. You set the standard. Tony Robbins always says Love your family, choose your peers. You may need to put yourself around people with higher standards.
And finally if, like me, you find yourself wanting to avoid feeling a feeling so you distract yourself from it in whatever is your normal way, eating drinking social media the news whatever it is….. notice you’re doing it. The more you notice yourself going to distract yourself from an uncomfortable feeling the better you get at it. Think about it…we don’t do or do things all day long because we are trying to avoid a feeling. The other day I thought to myself I need to step up my gym clothes game, I feel like Ive gotten a little lazy there but I also noticed my thought going no people will notice and that’s uncomfortable. I was proud of myself for catching that thought because it was sneaky and they are sneaky until you really start calling them out. But the opposite is also true. The more you see the feeling all the way through, the more you realize it’s not so bad, trust me this is the work Im doing right now on myself and its not easy but I am willing to put in the work because I know that on the other side of that feeling is pretty much everything I want. If I stop being afraid to feel, who knows what Im capable of…at the very least…I will notice myself about to make life harder and course correct.
That’s my challenge to you today. Figure out the reason you ignore your inner guidance system when it’s telling you to course correct…. is it because you’re on autopilot, is it because you want to fit in, or is it because it’s uncomfortable to feel a negative feeling so you just distract it away? You aren’t destined to make life harder than it needs to be, it’s just what you’ve practiced up until now, it’s time to listen to those rumble strips and course correct.
Share this with 3 people with an inner guidance system! I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days!
