faith

Who you really are and how to live that way every day

February 18, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

Have ever struggled with thinking, “I just don’t know. I don’t really know who I am. I don’t really know what my place is. I’m struggling to figure it out.” If that’s you, I have some good news for you!

All of us at one time or another struggle with who we are, and what our place is in the world. We feel lost, and like maybe what we’re doing is not contributing that much. We often get really down on ourselves, and are really hard on ourselves.

We have our relationship with God, we have our relationship with ourselves, and we have our relationship with other people. All three of those relationships are very important. We’re going to go through those three relationships and talk about who we are in each one.

Who you really are in relation to your creator.

You are an adored daughter of God. He made you, he loves you, he is for you. I think it’s so easy to forget that, especially after the year that some of us have had.

Sometimes it feels like maybe we’re just alone here in this life. We are looking to see if anyone is in our cheering section. We wonder if we’ve been forgotten. Is anyone actually in charge? Are we really loved?

Your heavenly father has not forgotten. He loves you. He is for you, and every single situation or circumstance in your life, he will use to bless you.

I want you to let that sink in. I want you to start to live as if that’s true, because it is true! I want you to really start to live as someone who is loved and adored.

We are adopting an eight year old, and we’ve had him for almost two years. I think he’s been through so much and loss and a lot of trauma, and I’ve noticed it’s so easy to get discombobulated about who we are and is everything really going to be okay?

It has been a journey for us to just consistently be there, and show up for him, and show him that he is loved, and remind him of who he is. Once that message really settles in your heart, you live differently.

When you know that somebody has your back, when you know that what’s happening in your life is happening for you, not to you, when you can cling to that faith that God loves you, and that everything in your life he is doing for you, there’s a different way that you live. You live as someone who is loved.

I started thinking about The Lion King. You must go rewatch it with different eyes and ears!

There’s this part in the Lion King, where after Mufasa dies, Simba goes off with his friends Timon and Pumba, and he’s just frolicking around. He’s not really living into his purpose. He’s not taking his rightful place as the heir to a King in the pride land. As a consequence, the pride land is disintegrating and it’s not good. The evil people are overtaking the land.

Then he has that moment when he gets reminded of who he is, and over and over he hears the words, “You are the son of Mufasa.” We all need to be reminded.

You are the daughter of God.

That alone is such an encouragement for us to take our rightful places in His kingdom, and for us to show up as who we really are.

What would a daughter of God do? Like the son of Mufasa, she takes her rightful place. She fights for the kingdom. She stands up to the evil ones. She becomes who she was created to be.

It’s so easy in the world that we live in to find all kinds of excuses, and reasons, and comforts even, that keep us from stepping into exactly who we were created to be, and what we were created to do.

I can hear God saying to me, “You are the daughter of God, step back into the battle, take your rightful place.”

Who you really are in relation to yourself.

Even if we get the first part, right, even if we begin to live in the faith that God loves us, and is for us, and all of this is happening because he loves us, and because he’s for us, even if we get that part right we have so long lived with the negative habit of talking bad about OURSELVES.

You have this negative loop in your head and it feels like it comes out of nowhere.

You’re not good enough.

You don’t measure up.

You might as well give up because that’s never going to work.

Whatever your negative loop is.

I want you to begin to take responsibility for that. You can feel like it’s just happening to you. Some crazy weird person is just talking bad to you in your own head. No, that’s you!

You have to take responsibility for those words. You have to decide what you want those words to be. You have to listen to God. YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO HIS WORDS ABOUT YOU.

You have to remind that negative voice, “No! That’s not who we are. You can say that about us all day long, but that’s not who God says we are. That’s not who we were created to be.”

Those negative messages wear us down. Sometimes I feel exhausted by the thoughts in my own head!

Let’s say you want to try something new. You want to start a healthy habit. You want to start a business. You want to reach for a goal. Then there’s that voice in your head. “This is never going to work. Remember how you always fail? Remember how you always give up? Remember how you’re not as good as your sister?”

I have good news! Those voices are thoughts. You have agency over those thoughts, and you can decide you don’t want to think them anymore. You can decide they aren’t giving you the results in your life that you want.

If you let that go in your head and let it play like a bad movie over and over and over, like you have for the last 10 years or 20 years, or since you can remember, you will rob the world of the you God created. You will rob us of the joy of knowing what could have been in your life. You will just listen to those voices and think, “Yeah, might as well not try. Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Who we are in relation to our neighbor.

What were we created for? We were created to contribute our gifts to the world, to give our love and service to our neighbor.

I love the scripture that says, you can summarize the commandments in these words, love God, love your neighbor, right? Our gifts are given to us to contribute to the wellbeing and healing of the people around us. Our relationship with those people was designed to be a relationship of love, and service, and generosity.

How would you currently characterize those relationships? Do you spend more time gossiping about your neighbor? Do you spend more time judging your neighbor’s theological viewpoints? Do you spend most of your time criticizing your neighbor’s political viewpoints? Do you spend most of your time comparing yourself to your neighbor?

What is that relationship to your neighbor like? Is it defined by contributing your gifts so that your neighbor’s life can be full of joy, so that your neighbor’s life can be easier, so that your neighbor can find healing, so that your neighbor can be served through your hands in the way that God wants to meet their needs?

I love to be reminded of who I am.

I’m a daughter of God.

I was created for love and service.

I was created to contribute my gifts to the world.

I’m not letting anything get in the way of that. Even my own negative thoughts, even my tendency to fail at this. I fail at this so much. I forget who I am. And I do let myself slide into gossip and judgment. I do overreact. I do show up sometimes in anger.

Here’s the difference in people who will continue to contribute their gifts, despite the failure, and people who don’t.

I want you to forgive yourself as fast as God forgives you.

How fast does he forgive you? How fast does he say, “You’re my child. Of course, you’re forgiven. Of course I love you. Of course, you’re my daughter.” We often don’t forgive ourselves that fast.

When we don’t show up to our neighbor the way we want, we are letting not forgiving ourselves for our previous failings be a stumbling block. We let that accuse us and keep us from showing up the next time.

I want you to practice the same fast forgiveness for yourself that God shows you, so then you can just forgive yourself and move on to the next person that you can bless.

We don’t stay stuck in the anger.

We don’t stay stuck in the failure.

We don’t stay stuck in the greed.

We don’t stay stuck in the comparison.

We just confess, “I forgot who I am. Let me be reminded of who I am. Let me be reminded that I’m the daughter of God sent here to be part of the healing of the world. Oh yeah. That’s who I am.

When you show up to your marriage, when you show up to your children, when you show up to work, you’re able to see it for way more than it looks like.

It looks like I’m just making dinner for my family, but actually I’m a daughter of God who showing up to contribute love and healing and service to the world.

It looks like I’m just driving my kids to school. But actually I remember who I am. I remember that I’m an agent of God’s love and healing in this little guy’s life.

This is your friendly reminder of who you are, and of what you were created to do and contribute. I want you to begin to live like it. That will require you to forgive yourself for all the times you don’t. Just try again. Just show up the next minute. Just forgive yourself and continue to show up, and continue to be reminded of who you are.

I invite you to go to click here if you’d like to dive a little deeper. I have an entire handout that will go over each of these points more fully, and will really help you begin to live in this place of who you really are.

3 Powerful Tools to Design Your Life On Purpose

January 20, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

I think a lot of us have been struggling in the last few months. This has been a weird turn of the year. And a lot of us want to have a goal, or want to have hope. We want to make a resolution, we want to have a dream, but we feel like maybe it’s going to be so much more of the same.

If that’s the way you feel, you’re not alone; 2020 was a tough year. For most of us, it changed our lives, in one way or another, and has thrown us for a loop.

One of the things that we’ve learned, is that there is so much that’s out of our control. But I also realized, that’s always been true! We just never felt it to the degree that we felt it last year.

The one thing we can control, that we’ve always been able to control, is how we respond, and how we show up. We can control how we interact with what’s happening to us, no matter what that is.

I want to create more of what I really want for myself in 2021. I really love using this time of year to kind of get back on track, decide what I really want to create, and then go about creating it.

What a lot of us are doing right now is not controlling the one thing we can, which is how we show up to our lives. Instead, we’re trying to control everything else, and everybody else. That can send us into a spin of negativity because we can’t change so much of what’s going on.

We can’t change how things are unfolding in our world. But what we can ALWAYS do is, and what we have only and always been able to do is, control way we show up.

1. Create a vision for your life

I want to give you your power back. You still have so much personal power and personal responsibility. I want to help you cultivate a vision for your life that inspires you. You don’t have to spin in negativity.

What is your dream vision for your future?

If you could design your life perfectly, what would a typical day in your life look like five years from now.

What would need to happen to begin to design your life the way you actually want it?

What would the vision of your life look like if you had more control over it? (Spoiler alert: you do!)

I want you to think about those long term thoughts, and then I want you to ask yourself,”What can I do right now?”

I love brainstorming impossible goals, thinking of things I want to create in the world, and how I want to contribute. I also like to pick that apart and figure out WHO I NEED TO BECOME in order to be the person who can reach impossible goals, and really contribute to the world. That kind of narrows it down to what I can work on NOW.

Ask yourself, “What am I spending my time doing right now that’s really not that valuable? It’s not giving me the life I want, it’s not helping me show up in the way I want to, in order to contribute to the world.”

If we don’t give our brains something noble and good to think about, and to aim for, and to meditate on, they’ll just spin out in negativity.

Our brains will find everything wrong with the world, and you don’t have to look far these days. We’ll spin out in negativity on those things, and we’ll meditate on that day at night; which is called worry. We’ll live in fear.

Deciding how we’re going to show up, and getting curious about what we want our lives to look like, gives our brains something to aim for. It gives our brains something good and noble to think about, to reach for.

When we tell our brains what we want them to focus on, they will do that for us!

Sometimes, we’ll have to redirect our thoughts, and my best tool for helping me do this, is my bullet journal. I do a “lazy girls” way of bullet journaling here I think you’ll love!

Everything that I’ve created in my life for the last 10 years, was written down in my bullet journal first. I highly recommend that you have a place where you can write your dreams and your goals down. I use my bullet journal for everything in the world.

I often find that if I don’t have my journal with me, it’s really hard for me to let my ideas come out. We need a place to brainstorm about what I want to create in the world, how we want to contribute. I would say it’s the one tool I use in my life that has doubled my creativity, and doubled my productivity. It has served me so, so well!

Grab a journal and I want you to take some time today and figure out, “What do I really want in my life? What do I want to create? How do I want to contribute, to my family, to the world?” Let yourself really dream.

A lot of times, we find it hard to do this because we feel like it’s necessary to stay stuck in the fear and the worry. When we do, it’s not good for us, and it’s not good for the people in our lives.

Having a vision for your life, something to shoot for, to aim for, and to dream about, is really important.

2. Cultivate Healthy Habits

Nothing changes if nothing changes. You have this vision, this place you’re wanting to go, but then you have your current habits. I heard John Maxwell speak on this years ago and he said:

“You have uphill dreams and downhill habits.”

What we want to begin to cultivate are uphill habits, habits that are noble, and good, and worthy, and give us a sense of meaning, purpose, and accomplishment.

I’ve been working on habits for a long, long time. I realized, when I was thinking about what I really wanted to change personally this year, that I have a pretty downhill, as John Maxwell would call it, habit in the evenings.

I have a stellar morning routine. I wake up super early in the morning, and I get so much done before 7:00 AM! I’m the truest of all morning people, but at nighttime I cannot function. My family is always trying to avoid that time of night where I get, I call it slangry. I get sleepy and angry. I wanted to change that.

A lot of times I wouldn’t fully clean my kitchen. I would just do the bare minimum, get everything in the sink, some of the stuff in the dishwasher, and then I would call it a night. I also got into the bad habit, of taking my computer to bed with me. I would finish doing work and watch YouTube videos. I got into bad nighttime habits, and I wanted to start to change that.

One of the small little goals that I made was, and this may seem so dumb and stupid, but no dishes in the sink, and no computer in the bed.

I wrote down all the things I wanted to cultivate at night. I wanted to start reading actual real books again, instead of just listening to everything. I wanted to get back doing my meditation. I had a whole list of things I wanted to do, but I thought those two things would motivate me.

When you’re cultivating a new habit, practice the belief that you want to believe. I decided, I cherish my nighttime routine. Now, right at the current moment, that kind of feels like a lie, but I’m going to keep practicing that.

I put some things in place make it more fun.

I had read the book “Becoming Mrs. Lewis” about the life and love story of CS Lewis and Joy Davidman. I love CS Lewis! So I decided to order Joy Davidman’s book of sonnets, and every night I just read a sonnet. That just little treat, and then doing a short little meditation, gets me excited to do the other things that I don’t want to do.

Often pairing the habit you want to create, with some kind of little reward, is really powerful.

Maybe there’s something you know you need to stop doing, that you know is getting in the way of you creating the life you want. I knew that bringing my computer to bed at night was not a good idea, but it’s so hard, y’all!

The first night I did it a few nights ago, so many times I wanted to run back downstairs and get it. I thought,”This is crazy, how I feel so attached to it.” But after just a few nights, I thought, “What a relief? I don’t have to answer emails at night.”

It’s been really, really good. You might think that’s a crazy thing to want to cultivate, but for me, I know I want to be the kind of person who does those nourishing things at night.

I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t have the computer in bed, and who reads poetry. I want to be the kind of person who leaves no dishes in the sink, and who gives herself the gift of a beautiful sparkling kitchen the next morning, the kind of person who goes to bed reading love sonnets. That sounds like a pretty awesome thing!

The tool I use for developing these nourishing habits is Google Calendar. I just put it in my calendar every day to do my nourishing night routine. That’s a reminder to me, and I’ve even started doing it earlier so I leave myself plenty of time. I’m seriously a granny when I start my nighttime routine at 7:30, and that’s okay with me!

“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” ~Aristotle

3. Keep your promises to yourself

One of the things that keeps us from keeping our promises to ourselves is, we tell ourselves, “I’d never follow through.” Stop saying that and start saying, “I love how I follow through.” What will happen is eventually you will follow through if you keep telling yourself you follow through.

Find ways to make it fun! Ordering a book of love sonnets, to me makes my new little ritual fun.

Being really careful what you make failure means is also a key. What if I don’t do my routine tonight? Am I going to make it mean that I’m just destined to be a person who doesn’t go to bed with a sparkling kitchen, and read love sonnets at night? No, that’s the person I’m cultivating, the person I’m becoming.

I just make that failure mean, “What can I learn from that? Why did that happen? Was that because I went out to dinner and I got home later?’ And if that’s the case, I just give myself some grace. Be careful what you make failure mean, and find a way to make it fun.

What is the one thing you need to change first, in order to begin to create and design the life you want?

For some of you the answer will be a habit you need to get rid of, and for some of you the answer will be something you need to cultivate. What I want you to do is write your dream down.

What’s your dream?

My dream for the next few months that I’m working on is to have nourishing nighttime habits.

You could write down your short-term dream, you could write down your long-term dream, but write down something that you think would get you closer to the life you envision for yourself.

There’s so much power in writing it down. Get yourself a bullet journal and write it down. It’s so powerful because your brain kind of perks up, and notices. It’s going to think, “Oh, so we’re the kind of people who have nourishing night routines. Yes, we are.”

The other thing I do is use a sticky note to write the sort of beliefs that I want to practice. I’ll just write them down every day. Or I’ll write them down, and I’ll move the sticky note from day to day in my calendar.

I just keep practicing the things I want to believe, until I create the life I want to create.

Using these 3 tools you can design your life on purpose!

I’ve started doing the Dr. Edie show every Tuesday at 11am EST, live on my YouTube channel. I’d be so honored to have you join me! Click here to subscribe!

Three Choices You Can Make Today That Will Make Your Life Better

November 25, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 3 Comments

Today is your day to make some decisions! If you struggle with decisions, today is the day to get over the struggle. I’m giving you three decisions that you can make today, that will make your life infinitely better, and heal your body, mind, and soul.

1. Stop Lying

Liars don’t heal. ~Carolyn Myss

Stop lying to yourself about your life. Stop lying to yourself about your job. Stop lying to yourself about your marriage. Stop lying to yourself about your kids. Sometimes we so get into the habit of not living in the truth of who we are, that we basically learn how to live sort of mediocre lives. We basically learn how to live a lie.

When I read that quote, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Learning to live with integrity and learning to live with intention, learning to actually walk the talk, learning to actually do the things you say are important, and learning to live as if they’re actually important, is the way we heal. So often we don’t live that way.

When I was practicing medicine, there was a part of that whole lifestyle that I loved very much. I loved the recognition. I loved the income. I loved being with people. I loved working in an office. I loved dressing up every day to go into an office. I loved science so much. I loved figuring out how things worked. It seemed like it should be the perfect fit for me.

It seemed like it, but I was miserable. You know why I was miserable? Because I missed my kids, and because I would miss so much during the day. At that point, both Stevie and I were working a lot, and there were so many things about it that I didn’t like.

I hated to admit it because I’d just spent 13 years of my life getting a degree. I’d spent a lot of money, and hours upon thousands of hours to do this. There were parts of it I loved doing, yet it was a lie to me in my heart. I knew it, but I didn’t know how to fix it, because how do you fix a giant lie like that?

When I started to untangle myself from it I got a lot of flack. People decided that it was a bad decision, and that I shouldn’t have gone through all that training if I was just going to give it up.

Here’s what I know after all these years, God’s the one who made me love these kids like crazy and couldn’t stand to be without them, he gave me that. Not everybody feels that way. I still work, and I’m still separated from my kids, but I do it in a way that’s honest for me.

Going to an office every day just wasn’t how I am wired emotionally, so I’m not casting judgment on anybody else’s choices at all. I’m so glad we have female doctors that are out there, but what I know for myself is, that’s not how I’m wired, and I wasn’t living the truth of who I am and how I made.

It’s so true in so many areas of our lives.

We are dishonest in relationships.

We blame other people for how we feel.

We think we’re entitled to a certain kind of life.

There are so many ways every day that we’re not living in accordance with what we say we believe, or what we say is important, or what we say is the value that we want to live by.

I do it too, so here’s the thing. We can make ONE really important choice, that then makes a hundred choices for us.

When I was actually practicing medicine, I was the most unhealthy maybe that I’ve ever been, which is kind of an oxymoron. Why? Because I was living completely stressed out, I wasn’t cooking any food at home, I didn’t value sleep, I wasn’t getting regular exercise, all the things that I know actually make you healthy.

I was supposed to be a purveyor of health, and I was doing none of them. So my patients would come in, and I would tell them what they should do, but I was not a practitioner of it.

What I’ve discovered about myself in the last few years is, I’m a healer. That’s how God made me. I’m a healer and I love helping myself heal, and helping other people heal. The way I can do that with the most integrity, and with the most intention, and with truth, is to live it.

So today I got up and I made a tiny little decision to go to the gym. And then I made another tiny little decision to eat a chicken breast and some spinach and tomatoes for lunch. Tonight I’ll make a tiny little decision to go to bed early.

I’ll spend some time today reflecting on God’s word and meditating on a Psalm. I meditate on that because I really am interested in living what I actually think is true.

2. Stop waiting on other people.

You’re not entitled to anything.

Nobody’s to blame for your life.

Stop waiting for somebody else to do something.

Stop waiting for somebody else to change.

Stop waiting for somebody’s opinion of you to change.

Stop waiting for somebody to stop rejecting you.

Stop waiting for somebody to give you permission.

Stop waiting for somebody to do anything.

You don’t need any of that. What you need is for YOU to take responsibility for the life that YOU want to live, fully and intentionally, in wholeness. You need to do that. Nobody needs to do anything else.

We have to stop waiting for other people to do what we think they need to do so we can do what we need to do. No, no, and no. As a matter of fact, some of you put your life on hold because your kids are all messed up, and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, or because you feel like your marriage is in a weird place, or because you feel like your job is in a weird place.

You know who’s in a weird place? You are. And you know who can fix it? You can. You can fix it. It’s all just deciding that this is exactly the life you’re supposed to have right now, and living it with all your heart, with integrity, with intention, the way you say you think it should be.

3. Stop looking back

Let me tell you something about your past, there’s nothing there. All it is are thoughts you have in your head. Stop living there. Why? Because you’re using the past as evidence for what you can and can’t do right now.

You’re using the past to blame.

You’re using the past to make excuses.

You’re using the past to live in depression.

You’re using the past to live in anxiety.

You’re using the past to live in fear.

The past does not exist except in your head, except in your thoughts. The only way that you can live in the past is to keep thinking the thoughts of the past. Why would you do that to yourself?

You need to have enough respect for yourself and love for yourself that you say, “No more! I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to keep saying those things over and over. I’m not going to keep reliving that memory over and over. I’m not going to keep blaming that person over and over. I’m not going to keep resenting over and over and over.”

What happens when we do that is, we think that we somehow can punish the people that did this to us. You’re punishing you. You’re keeping yourself from your incredible, amazing present life! You only have one chance to do this day. It’ll never quite be like this again.

I thought about this when I was at the gym this morning, there probably will never be exactly that combination of people there again, in that state of being, in that state of generosity, and love, and community, I don’t get to do this again.

Why am I going to go back and live something that’s not even there and forsake what’s actually here right now? So you just decide.

You don’t need years of therapy. I did years of therapy. It didn’t help. I’m not saying that you might not need some therapy sometime, but I’m saying that in order to get over the past, it’s a thought in your head, and you just DECIDE that you’re going to live from your amazing, beautiful, grateful, generous, abundant, loving, present. You can make right now whatever you want!

A little primmer on decisions...

Decisions aren’t hard, YOU JUST DECIDE. You just stop waiting and you decide. Here’s what I’m doing. How can I make today better?

You don’t need anybody’s permission, you don’t need anybody to change, you don’t need the relationship to iron itself out, you don’t need this job to figure itself out, you don’t need any of that.

You’re capable of creating the reality that you want. You ARE creating the reality that you want right now! The question is, will you take responsibility for it and actually do it? Or will you keep blaming? Will you keep feeling entitled? Will you keep comparing? Will you keep judging? You can do either one you want.

I promise you, if you will stop waiting and start living, you can have the life you want today.

I want you to do some soul searching this week. I want you to think about what decisions you are making, right now, and every day, that are keeping you stuck. You’re making some.

You’re eating the same food that’s keeping you sick and is keeping you stuck. You’re still not getting exercise that you know would make a difference. You’re deciding to still live in resentment. You’re deciding to hold your husband hostage. You’re deciding to have expectations of everybody else so that you can feel better. You’re deciding that you don’t like your job, so you’re miserable, and you make everybody else miserable. You’re deciding to hold a grudge against your best friend because she didn’t invite you somewhere. You’re deciding that you’re angry with one of your kids because they didn’t behave how you thought they knew to.

You’re hindering your present joy on a million things that are outside of your control, when you could just lay hold of it, and have it right now.

That’s the power of the choices that you make every day. You make one amazing, beautiful choice, and it makes a hundred more for you.

I remember when I became a Christian. One, what seemed like little tiny choice, has now made a thousand choices for me. The power of choosing what you want in your life, and doing it on purpose, and letting that choice reverberate and reverberate and reverberate is incredible.

So what little decisions, that turn out to be actually big decisions, can you make today, that will make a thousand choices for you in the future, and will give you the life of service, and love, and generosity that you actually want?

If you’re still feeling stuck, watch this!

How to get your mojo back

October 29, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 3 Comments

Do you feel like you’ve lost your mojo? Are you thinking any, or all, of these things?

What has happened to my life?

My house is a mess.

I haven’t been to the gym in months.

My eating is off plan.

I’m not sleeping well.

I’m scrolling social media too much and getting ragy!

What do you do when you’ve lost your Mojo?

Start with the end in mind.

I find it’s helpful to look ahead and decide what result I want. Let’s don’t drag up 75 reasons why we haven’t done it so far. Let’s just decide the result we want and start living into that space. Start living as if…

What would I do if I was a person who took really good care of her health and was fit?

What would I do if I was a person who had a really organized and peaceful house?

You start figuring out what it is to live in the result. You might even brainstorm it out into your bullet journal. What does it look like? How do you feel?

Let’s say your house is driving you crazy. You’ve got kids doing school from home or now you’re working from home, and you feel like your house is always just a dumpster fire. It’s always a mess. It’s disorganized. You hate being there.

What I want you to do is envision what it would be like if it was organized, uncluttered, peaceful, and nourishing. What would it actually look like and be like? How would you feel when you woke up in the morning if you knew that it was organized? You put yourself into the position of having achieved the result and you learn to live there.

What we tend to do instead is we look to the past and think, “Well I haven’t been doing that so far. My house is pretty much a dumpster fire. Everything is cluttered. Everything is everywhere. I can never find what I want. I hate being here. It’s always a mess.”

That’s living in the past. That’s the way your house used to be. What I want you to do is go to the future. What does that result look like? How can you start living there already? What does it look like to be a person who can easily keep a decluttered house that feels nourishing and peaceful?

Many of you look at the thing that’s bothering you the most in your life right now, and you feel like it’s impossible. I promise you, it’s possible when you learn to take action from a place of feeling like it’s already there.

Then the action feels easy and doesn’t exhaust you. The reason you’re exhausted by the result you’re NOT getting is because the thoughts you think about it are exhausting.

You think to yourself all the time, “I hate how I’ve been eating lately. It’s driving me crazy. I hate my house lately. I can’t keep up.” Those thoughts are exhausting to me even just imagining thinking them! How can you change that and live into the results? Start with the end in mind.

Expect failure.

You’re not going to do it perfectly. Don’t wait until Monday to start, or the first of the month, or after the holidays. The reason you’re going to try to wait until Monday is because you’re afraid of failure, and you think if you just had a little bit more time to get yourself organized then it would be fine. That’s not true.

You need to expect failure. You’re going to start, you’re going to do it fine for two days, and then you’re not going to do it great. This is where the key moment is. You’re going to keep your house organized or you’re going to eat on your plan, or whatever your thing is, and you’re going to do it really really good for two days, and then you’re going to blow it! Am I right or am I right? I’m right!

The question is not whether you’re going to fail. You are going to fail. The question is, what are you going to do about the failure?

What are you going to make it mean? Are you going to make it mean you are incapable of making a change? Are you going to make it mean it’s just not “you” to have a clean organized house or that you’re just not a one of those healthy people?

Or are you going to say, “Oh yeah! There’s going to be failure along the way, so let’s just jump back right in.”

You don’t ask yourself, “What am I going to do IF I fail?” You know you’re going to fail. You decide ahead of time what you’re going to do with the failure, and what you’re going to make it mean.

You’re going to make it mean you’re human and you’re going to jump right back into the thing that you were doing!

Expect failure instead of running from failure.

The reason you don’t want to start until next Monday is because in your mind, that puts off the failure a little longer. No, we embrace the failure. We know what’s going to happen, and when it comes, we know what to do with it because we’re expecting it to come.

Stop making excuses and blaming other people, things, and circumstances.

The reason we lost our mojo is on you and on me. Yes 2020 has been crazy. Yes working from home is different. Yes there are a whole host of things we can blame. Let me tell you why you don’t want to do that.

If you blame the fact that we’re dealing with a crazy virus, or you blame the fact that now you’re having to work from home, if you blame a circumstance or someone else, you make yourself a victim to whatever you’re blaming. Then the only way your situation can change is if your circumstance changes, or if those people change.

NEWSFLASH: those people aren’t changing and your circumstances may not be changing either!

How can you learn to take responsibility and manage you? You take care of the only thing you can take care of, which is how you respond to the crisis, and how you respond to the situation, and how you show up to crazy 2020, or how you show up to the working from home life.

You can only control you.

Here’s the beauty of taking 100% responsibility. You CAN change you. You might not be able to change your circumstances. You might not be able to change the people in your life, but you CAN change you. That’s a powerful place to be!

Don’t put yourself in a place of weakness by thinking you need something or someone to change, and THEN you’ll get your mojo back. Stop making yourself a victim to the circumstances, or to the other people. You take responsibility for you, and decide what result you want in your life and how you can start living into that now.

Get some accountability.

It really helps when you want to achieve a certain result to tell someone, or do it with someone, so you have some accountability. That’s why we’re doing a challenge together in November!

A lot of times the holidays are when it all falls apart. You’re doing your exercise plan just great, or you’re keeping your house nice and tidy and decluttered, and then the holidays come and it all goes to pot!

“Well, I guess now I’m just waiting until January.” No! We don’t want to do that. We want to really get back control of the things we want to have happen in our lives, so that as we go through the holiday season we keep these practices in place.

Instead of just letting everything go, we just keep it in place.

We’re starting the challenge on November 2nd and it’s called The Honor Challenge: 12 Ordinary Days, 10 Life-changing habits. It’s based on this scripture out of Romans 12:10.

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. ~Romans 12:10

Go here to sign up and get the Honor Challenge Guide. I will be doing live videos every day here on my Lifeingrace Facebook page, and TOGETHER, we’re going to get our mojo back!!!

I can’t wait to get started!

You always find what you’re looking for

September 16, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 1 Comment

As you know, we have been through kind of a strange time as a nation and as a culture, and it has given us a lot to process and work on and think about.

There are the people who process change and hardship and suffering by over performing and people who process by under performing. Both ways end up at the same place.

I’m am an over performer, so I come out of the gates like, “I’m going to learn everything. It’s going to be great. I’m not going to let quarantine get me down.” Then about four weeks later, I’m crying on the floor. And then there are those who underperform. They start their crying on the floor and then they slowly get up and start to function.

One thing that I’ve noticed about myself over the last couple of weeks is I’ve been letting the division get to me. We say to ourselves in our mind that there are these camps of people. The truth of the matter is most of us are somewhere in the middle, but what can appear to happen is this divide, and you can tell who’s on one side and who’s on the other.

You’re supposed to hate all the people on the other side of whatever your camp is, right?

We tend to villainize the people who aren’t in our camp.

I started to see this huge divide and think,”Oh my gosh, we’re so divided. People can’t see the nuance. We’re just so divided. We are pitting people against one or the other.”Then I realized, wait, this is how I see it because this is how I choose to see it.

When I made that revelation for myself, it helped me kind of step back and think,”People are probably not just one way or the other. They’re probably nuanced like I am.”

I don’t feel like I know everything about everything. And they probably don’t either.

It kind of drove the point home that I’ve been learning for the last 10 years, which is

You always find what you’re looking for.

What I mean is if you look at your spouse, and your story in your head about your spouse is that they don’t contribute and they’re not supportive, you will look for evidence for your story and you will find it. You will find LOTS of evidence for your story, which will confirm your story.

Your brain likes to confirm its story and that’s okay, except ask yourself, “Do I like what I’m finding?” Because if I don’t like what I’m finding, I probably need to look a little closer, see a little more nuance, see both sides of the story.

Those of you who have that story about your spouse, you could probably tell another story about them. My spouse is supportive. My spouse goes to work every day and he takes care of our family and he loves us, right? You could tell both stories.

Which story helps you like the way you show up?

If your story is he’s not supportive, he doesn’t help, he doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t support me, then you’re going to show up pretty needy and pretty defensive. But there’s always another side to the story.

If you live from the other side of the story, you’re going to probably give him the benefit of the doubt, and show up with more curiosity and compassion and love. That’s probably where you want to be living your life, I would guess.

The same thing is true when you see somebody on the internet that you don’t agree with.

Can we hold the same space for people?

Can we see that there are two stories?

Can we see that telling ourselves everybody who thinks THAT way is awful and I don’t like THOSE humans, pretty much Xs out about 50% of the humans!?

I found myself going down into this place where I would do that. I would think, “Well, they’re one of THOSE people and I don’t agree with that,” and I would kind of discount them and lump them into this group of people that I don’t really respect or agree with.

Can we hold space for each other?

Can we at least acknowledge that there’s another part to the story, and that person who’s really worried about going out might have a sick child, and it feels so personal, and it feels like everybody that’s recommending that we do something different is against her child.

Can we just be curious about the people who are on the other side?

This is what I have ask of myself, because you will always find what you’re looking for, and if your brain is looking for division and looking for people to be wrong and looking for the negative side of things, you will always find it.

Then you have to ask yourself, do I like living from the place where I think half the world is wrong and awful. I really don’t. I really like holding a bit more curiosity and love and respect for people who don’t see it the way I do. So it’s been a good exercise for me, honestly, because I found myself saying, “Oh, everybody’s crazy. The world’s going crazy.”

It does feel like the world’s going crazy, but can we hold space for people and can we just be a little bit curious? Can we step back just a little bit and say, “I can kind of see why that person with that upbringing from that part of the country could see it that way?”

Where in your life are you doing this? Are you doing it in your marriage? Are you doing it with one of your kids? You may have a story in your mind about one of your kids and everything they do just confirms the story that you already have. I would beg you to ask yourself, “What’s the other side of that story?” What if more of the time you lived from the other side of that story?

We’re all doing this in different parts of our lives, in different settings, in our marriage and our families, and in the culture. It just makes us better humans to be willing to HONOR other people and the way they think, even if it’s not the same as us, and to try to find some understanding.

It makes us better humans to listen a little bit more to their side. Ask, “I wonder why they think that,” or “I wonder why they so quickly go to that.”

I’ve really been working on this. This year has been difficult for us in a lot of ways, and we have the choice of how we want to see it.

Even if I looked at last year and all the different things that have happened, I could think,”Oh my gosh, God hates us. This has been hard. Why do bad things happen to us? Why has it been like this?”I could look at it that way, but when I look at it that way, I feel like a victim.

I’m not a victim. I don’t want to feel like a victim.

The other choice I have is,”Wow, look at what has happened FOR me. Look at the chance that I have gotten to see things differently, to really grow, to accept the suffering and challenge, and let it be my teacher and let it change me in the ways that it can.”

What if we looked at it like that?

We have a pandemic in front of us. You can tell yourself a story about that. And you live a certain way, according to that story. Remember though, there’s another side to the story.

I do believe that the pandemic of fear is real, and when we live in fear, do we like the way we show up? It’s okay to do it either way, but I’m just asking us, asking myself, to step back from all of our dogma and say, “Is believing this story helping me show up the way I want to?”

It’s a question that’s worth asking, because if it didn’t matter how you looked at it then we would all see it the same way, and obviously we don’t all see it the same way.

We don’t see the pandemic the same way. We don’t see marriage the same way. We don’t see suffering the same way, right? What that tells me is that the way you see something really becomes your story about it, and you can choose how you see it.

Sometimes we look at a circumstance like a pandemic and go,”Well, there’s no other way to see it, except that this is terrible and we’re all going to die. We should stay in our houses forever.” That’s one way to see it.

We have to ask ourselves,”When I look at it that way, do I like the way I show up? Do I like the person that story makes me into?” It’s really worth asking, “How do I want to see this? How do I want to look at life? How do I want to look at my relationships?”

You might be saying to yourself,”Well, you’re just looking at it with rose colored glasses.”Possibly, but what I always ask myself is,”When I tell myself this story and live from this story, is that the best, highest version of myself? Am I living from love? Am I giving people grace and the benefit of the doubt and all the things that I would want people to give me?”A lot of times I’m not.

It’s been a really good time of learning and growth. That’s what I think is so cool about collective hardship, collective suffering. We talk about this a lot at my gym, voluntary hardship.

Sometimes we sign up for things that are hard and we, in our minds, tell ourselves, “No, this is good for me. It’s good for me to challenge myself. It’s good for me to deny myself. This is going to teach me so much.”

Then we have the involuntary hardship, involuntary suffering. Sometimes we don’t change our mindset about it and decide how we want to think about it, and then we get into this weird victim mode where everything’s happening to me and i’ts all wrong. Woe is me!

I just find that I like the way I show up when I truly believe that God is doing this for me. This is for me, not because I need to be punished or did something wrong. We’re all sinners. We all need to repent. We all need God’s grace, but coming from the aspect of this is for us. He’s doing this for us. This is for our good.

He will turn every situation into good.

Is there any harm in believing that? How does it help us show up when we believe that?

Especially in the divide that I see in my own life, the divide that I see in my own family sometimes, the divide that I see in my own town, in my own Facebook feed, it’s worth considering giving people a little bit of space and being curious about what makes them tick. It’s worth being curious about how we are interpreting things, and how we are seeing things.

Do we like ourselves when we interpret things that way, and when we show up the way we are showing up? Because we always find what we are looking for.

How to make any relationship better

July 22, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 1 Comment

We all have been having a lot of together time, and it can push people different ways, especially if we’re talking about marriage. You can both be on the same page with how you think about what’s going on and how you’re processing everything, or you can think and process totally differently, or it can be a mixture of both.

Stevie and I think the same way but we process differently. It can either make you come closer together or it shows how much difference there is. This is not just true with your spouse, but with your children, and just with the world at large.

I’ve learned most things through a lot of heartache, and I’m still making a ton of mistakes, but this one thing makes a huge difference in relationships.

More curiosity, less judgment.

I’m an enneagram three, so when life gets crazy I process it by getting productive. We’re having a quarantine? Ok, I’m going to learn how to make sourdough bread, and I’m going to organize my whole house, and I’m going to start raising ducks and chickens.

It would be really easy for me to judge everyone else who doesn’t deal with it the same way. There are a lot of people, even in my own house, who don’t deal with stress that way. They don’t want to make 10 loaves of sourdough bread in five days and watch endless videos about how to organize their pantry!

We have to be really careful about how we judge ourselves.

I was doing just fine on the surface, and praying for people who I knew were being greatly affected, but I didn’t think I was being affected that much. Then I took some friends of mine some sourdough and as soon as I saw them, my eyes welled with tears, and I was emotional for days afterwards.

It opened something up in me that I was covering up with productivity. Seeing people from my real life made me realize I was grieving. I missed my friends, and my gym, and having the house to myself.

I started spiraling, wondering if anything is ever going to be the same. But then instead of judging myself for being emotional, because I can be pretty hard on myself, I got curious.

I could have judged myself for having three naps and not getting anything done for a few days. Instead I treated myself like a kind aunt. I told myself it was alright to grieve, to be angry, all of it.

I started to let myself feel the hard things. Maybe you have been frozen with fear. The best way to get out of that is really lean in and feel it, and let yourself be where you are, and have more curiosity and less judgement towards yourself.

Then we can work on having less judgement and more curiosity about the people in our house. Right now they may be driving you crazy, but this is what I’m learning.

However quickly you can get to curiosity and leave the judgment behind, is how soon you get to peace and laughter.

We had a situation where someone let our dog Bandit out. I was judging the whole situation and everyone involved! I was thinking, “I should be in house, having my bath and enjoying my life, not out in the mud chasing a dog.”

I was judging Tom for having his best day ever during this adventure. I was judging the teenagers because they didn’t run out and help. I was judging Stevie because he was irritated.

When we start judging a situation, it becomes a domino of judgement.

I had to be on to myself and start by not judging myself harshly for being judgmental. Then I had to get curious and I thought, “Of course Tom is loving this! It’s the most excitement he’s had in weeks. Of course the teenagers don’t want to be out in the mud. Of course Stevie is irritated. Who am I to say it shouldn’t bother him?”

Once I switched off the judgement and let everyone off the hook, it became a funny comedy of errors.

More curiosity and less judgement of the people we live with really helps our relationships.

What if we had more curiosity and less judgement of the wold? We all think we have the answers. No one thinks anyone else is doing it right. I find it so interesting that everything going on has brought this out in us with such force.

What if we just let people do things the way they do things?

Let’s all give each other

more grace,

more peace,

more compassion,

more curiosity,

less judgment.

Maybe we’ll start to see a little more joy and even some lightheartedness.