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The Power of Being Present and 5 Ways to be More Present

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Are you struggling with being distracted? I know I often struggle with not being truly present in the moment. The reason this is so important is that ALL of your personal power lies in the present moment.

When we live too much in the past, we’re living in regret, maybe even in victim land, and we may have some sadness or depression. When we live too much in the future we may have a lot of fear or anxiety.

We are giving our power away to all those things. Whatever we’re distracted by in the present moment, we give little bits of our energy and power away to.

If you feel like you don’t have the energy and power you need to live the life you want, it’s probably because you’re giving it all away.

When you can bring yourself back to the present moment, you get back your energy and your power. There’s nothing more amazing than somebody who’s truly present in the moment.

I don’t think I have ever have met, especially a child, who was more present in the moment than our Thomas. He brings all of his power, and all of his energy right now, and in every moment.

It was awards day at his school, and Stevie was talking to him about awards day and said, “Are you going to get an award buddy?” And he said, “I don’t think so. I think they only give that to kids who don’t get in trouble,” and Stevie said, “Well I bet you’re going to get a bunch of them. You never get in trouble do you?” Thomas kind of snickered and said, “Dad, I get in trouble every day.”

But I knew how his teacher was going to do awards, and she is the most precious angel ever to have graced the earth. I didn’t know what the award was going to be, but the girls and I went to awards day, and I was already walking into the building feeling emotional because I know how much she loves him and I know how much he loves her.

I wanted to be really there for all of it, so I thought, “Okay, Miss Edie, forget everything else. Just savor this moment. Be present in this moment.” I enjoyed the whole thing so much that I really couldn’t stop thinking about it.

When we got there, they did all their pledges. It was so precious. They sang their little patriotic songs. Then she started giving the awards. She wouldn’t say the kids’ names before she gave the award. She would start describing the kid and then give the award.

What was so cute is the kids would know who she was talking about. And when she started talking about Thomas, she said, “I’ve never met anyone ever in my life with so much of a zest for life. With so much enthusiasm.” And everybody started saying, “It’s Thomas, it’s Thomas.” And she said, “He changes the room when he walks in,” and everybody knew it was Thomas.

It was so sweet when he got this award for enthusiasm!

I recently listened to a podcast, and Jordan Peterson was talking about the root word of the word enthusiasm means full of the spirit. So as soon as she said the word, I was already crying, and I just started thinking about how much magic this kid brings to my life.

So much of it is because of this powerful presence, present in the moment, ready for what’s to come, ready to experience things that you can only experience in the present moment.

Guess what you miss when you aren’t really present in the present moment? You miss all the good stuff!

If you’re sitting there worried about your past or worried about your future, worried about the bills, what you’re going to do, or mulling over the past, you’re missing all the good stuff.

I heard somebody say our sense of time intersects with God’s sense of time in one place, THE PRESENT MOMENT. God is present in the moment. When we miss the present moment, we miss Him. We also miss the fruits of His spirit.

Think of all the things we miss.

Love

Joy

Peace

Longsuffering

Gentleness

Goodness

Self-control

Faith

Meekness

All the good stuff is in the present moment, and we are often distracted and not really there for it.

1. Pay attention to your thoughts.  

Start to pay attention to your thoughts. When I pay attention to my thoughts, so often they’re nothing related to the present moment, nothing. When I redirect them to the present moment, I get to experience what I experienced last Friday in Thomas’ school.

Nothing could have distracted me from that moment. I wanted to be fully present. I wanted to experience everything. The sounds, everything in the moment.

I noticed so often that I’m not there. Are your thoughts in the present moment? This is where God is. This is where all His fruits of the Spirit are, right here in this moment, right now. They can only be had in the present moment. It’s all we really have.

2. Pay attention to who you’re with.

Paying attention is the gift of the present. I’m as guilty as any. How often are we with people, but we’re not with them? You know who knows that more than anybody else? The people that you’re not really with, they know.

Thomas will bust my chops for this faster than anything, “You weren’t even listening.” He said that to me last night actually. I was doing a story about him, and I was typing up the little story on my phone. He was mad because I wasn’t tracking with him. They know when we’re with them.

How are they doing?

What are they feeling?

Make eye contact.

Do you realize how often we don’t make eye contact?

3. Pay attention to your body.

One of the best ways to come back into the present is to come back into your body. Often I will ask myself, how am I feeling? Like what’s going on in my actual body, because I think one of the things that’s hardest to do.

We talk about this a lot in life mentoring school, my coaching program. I find that one of the things that’s hardest to do is to actually feel your emotions. I teach people how to do feel their feelings because it’s a powerful skill.

Once you can feel your emotions, you’re not afraid to do anything. You’re not afraid to set big goals because you know how to feel disappointed and rejected, and how to experience failure.

One of the reasons I think we want to skip the present moment is because we don’t like the emotion we have. Something really powerful that I often teach people how to do is be present.

Decide what are you feeling.

Why are you feeling that?

What thoughts are causing that feeling?

Is that something I want to feel?

Process through it.

If I need to process through it. Oftentimes that’s exactly what we need to do. We need to process through it, and then decide, how do I want to feel? What do I need to think in order to feel that way?

In order to become present in your actual body, you have to ask yourself how you feel in this moment right now?

4. Pay attention to your breath.

This is probably one of the ways that I do it the most often. I will just take a few deep breaths.

How many of you even in the course of reading this, you’re already gone? You’re already distracted? You’re already not here with me? Come back to me and let’s do this together.

Take a few really deep breaths.

Deep breath in through the nose.

Deep breath out through the nose.

Again, deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Your breath is present with you in the present, so becoming conscious of my breathing is one way that I bring myself back, to the present.

5. Pay attention to the powerful presence of God in your life.

Pay attention to the presence of God in your midst right now. This is where He can be experienced, in the moment, right now.

The capacity to experience joy is right now.

The capacity to experience peace is now.

When you worry about the future, you don’t really experience peace for the future. You have peace and you have it now.

I want you to think of all the best things in life. They come from being present. Think about how your life would change if you brought the generous power of your presence to everything you did. The energy that you’re now giving away to worry and sadness and fear. You’re giving it all away and you don’t have that energy to bring to this current present moment.

This is something that I think we have to practice, that we don’t necessarily automatically get good at. I am committed, especially this summer with Tom out of school, to presence.

I want to be present for myself.

We talk about this a lot in my mentoring school, you know what happens when you decide not to be present for yourself? You start to buffer with all kinds of things. You don’t want to be present with yourself so you overeat. You scroll social media. You spend money.

Really being present with ourselves is a powerful thing.

Being present in the moment with the people that you’re with is a powerful thing.

Acknowledging that the presence of God is present, and that’s where we can experience it, is a powerful thing.

A huge part of learning to live a life that is meaningful and joyful and deeply satisfying, is learning to live in the present.

If you’d like to practice, jump on the waiting list for Life Mentoring School! We’d love to have you next time we’re open!

Uplevel Your Life With These 3 Small Shifts

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We think we need really big, major things to happen in order for our lives to be better.

One of these days, when I get to this level in my life.

When I finally get that house.

When I finally married that guy.

When I finally have those kids.

When I finally get that job. When I finally win the lottery.

We all think there is one day coming that it’s all going to get better, and we think it’s some kind of big thing. I really have most of the big things, and this is what I realized: that’s not what does it. Dang it.

I feel like part of my job in life is to help people who are maybe a little younger than I am, and a little less far along the path than me avoid some of the pitfalls, and avoid some of this thinking.

When this happens, then it’s going to be amazing. Then it’s going to all be better. Then I’m going to really enjoy my life. Then you’re going to do whatever the thing is you think you’re going to do if and when.

I want to share with you three small shifts you can make that will really uplevel your life today.

They’re SMALL shifts.

You don’t have to win the lottery. You don’t have to have all the kids, or have the husband, or get the big job. But they really are important shifts. It’s always those small daily commitments that I make to myself that really help.

1. Change your physical state.

This morning, I woke up at my normal early hour and I wasn’t feeling great. Have you ever had a slightly hormonal day where you’re just not feeling it?That’s how I woke up today.

I got on my phone and looked at the workout at the gym where I go, and I saw it was going to be running today. I did not want to go.

But here’s what I know. One of the really important ways that I change the state I’m in is through movement.

We live in physical bodies, and we have never not really lived in our physical bodies more than we do now, because we have all these screens and we don’t really have to move.

You were created to move.

If you want to change your mental and emotional state, change your physical state.

Even though I for sure did not want to go today, I drug myself there anyway, because it’s my habit. When you build a habit and get in the habit of doing something, you just start doing it and you don’t even know you’re doing it.

Before my brain could argue with me, I was already getting ready. I thought, “Oh well, I have my gym shoes on now. Might as well go.”

I went there with a little bit of a bad attitude, but I’m always so amazed by how just getting out and going for a walk, or changing the scenery that you’re in, changing something physically, really helps.

It’s a gift I give to myself consistently day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and it pays off in a million ways. It raises my quality of life. It up levels the quality of life that I have, because it’s a consistent part of my life.

It’s seems small.

You may decide for yourself that every day you’re going to go for a walk, or every day you’re going to do some weight training, or everyday you’re going to move in some way.

Are you in the habit of moving your body? That’s one of the best ways to change your state, and to uplevel your life, and to change your mood.

It’s hard to keep a bad mood when you’re outside enjoying God’s creation and you’re moving your body and you’re breathing hard. You forget why you were stressed in the first place.

2. Change your mental state.

We’ve been talking about identity in my coaching program Life Mentoring School. It can feel like we’re just over here living our boring lives, and we can start feeling a little blah.

I want you to remember that you’re a child of God, and you’re part of his grand amazing story. I think remembering that and constantly reminding ourselves of that makes a huge difference.

What makes for a great story or a great adventure? Realizing you’re in one is a great place to start! This is crazy what’s happening here! This is amazing the life I’ve been given to live. I love remembering that, especially when things are hard, especially when things I wonder why this or that is happening to me.

Think of all the best stories. They best stories have these twists and turns hard things and conflicts.

I think we forget that, and then we resent that our life is like that, instead of just anticipating what happens next.

I feel this way a lot about our adoption with Tom. I feel like we’re on a crazy, amazing adventure with this little guy. It’s so exciting to see what will happen next! It’s so much better than being fearful, or being anxious about it, or worrying about it. What if we just anticipated how cool it is to live the story that we’re living?

And then, so we have our physical and we have our mental, and then I think about the spiritual side, you guys. And I think about that he way we’re created and the way we’re made, we really are made for hard 

3. Change your spiritual state.

Life often is suffering. In order to bear up against that, in order for that to not knock us over, because it’s hard and there’s a lot of difficulty, what can we find to do that brings us meaning? I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson’s latest book and it’s so fantastic. He talks about this a lot.

What can you aim at? What could be your goal so that bearing up against the hardship of life has meaning and is worth it?

What is your why?

Instead of getting bogged down in all the little things of your own life, how can you see that you’re made for this, and this is always the way it was meant to be?

Think about the story of Christ. Can we be ready and willing, and even anticipating the part of our journey that’s like his journey? His journey was hard and he was able to bear up against that. Through his power and his grace, so can we, if we remember that we’re part of this big grand adventure.

I love the way going to church shifts my thinking. The stained glass and the pipe organ and the crucifix remind me of sacred things. Whatever it is that shifts your thinking spiritually, it helps if we set up our lives in such a way that we have reminders of who he is, and to remind us of who we are, and what we’re here to do.

Make these 3 small shift and I can’t wait to hear how the quality of your of your life goes up in BIG ways!

Are you living in your past and how it’s affecting you

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The reason I feel so qualified to talk about this is because I feel like I’ve earned a doctorate in living in my past. I have spent most of my life living in my past because I thought I had to. I didn’t know there was an alternative.

I didn’t know that if you had a crazy, difficult, remarkable past that you could just decide not to live from it. Once I discovered that there was another option several years ago, it felt like a miracle to me.

I realized I just get to create my life and what I want to create in my future. Ever since then, I’ve been helping other people do the same.

Do you feel like you still, in some ways, live from your past? One way to know is ask yourself if you’re always getting the same results in your life. If you are, you’re probably living in your past.

When you’re living in your past you recycle the same thoughts, and your thoughts eventually become your life. Thoughts create feelings, feelings create actions, actions create your actual life.

So if you’ve been getting the same results in your life for a while, and you feel like you’re just repeating the same year over and over again, this is a big red flag.

You’re probably thinking the same thoughts you’ve always thought about your life and about yourself, and about what’s possible, because that’s what we think we’re supposed to do. We don’t often realize that we get to start every day anew.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
    his mercies never come to an end;
 they are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23

We get to decide today that we want to live today, how we want to live today, and what we want to create for ourselves in this day, instead of just repeating the same cycles of thinking, feeling, and acting like we’re on a treadmill.

When I first started learning that my past didn’t have to control me, it felt scary to let go of it. The way I have been most of my life is that I held on to my past tightly. I was sure I would always be a victim to it, and that I would always tell my story from my past.

For most of my life that’s exactly what I did. I told my story. I defined myself and got my identity from my past.

It felt scary to let that go, because who am I if I’m not the girl who was born in this situation and had these disadvantages and went through this trauma? Who am I if I’m not that girl?

Well, I’ll tell you who I am. I started creating my life from my future. I started deciding that I could be who I want to be today, that I could lean into exactly the way God created me and gifted me, and that I could decide what I want to do with my life and start creating it.

I started creating new results and I started creating a new life.

The past version of ourselves and living from the past often doesn’t serve us. There’s a lot of that thinking that keeps us stuck. There’s a lot of that thinking that we identify with, but it’s not serving us. It’s not helping us create anything in our lives right now that we want.

When you learn to make the shift, and you learn that you have control over this, you don’t have to live in your past. You don’t have to be a victim to your past.

When I was first doing this work, my coach said, “Your past happened to you once and you keep reliving it over and over and over and over and over. That abuse happened to you once, but you keep abusing yourself with the story.”

Even if it’s not something that happened in your childhood past, what about that story you tell about how you can never lose weight or how you can never change this one habit? You tell that story over and over again. You make yourself a victim to that story. You let that story abuse you. You abuse yourself with that story.

I have found so much freedom from realizing I can stop abusing myself with stories from my past.

It takes practice. It takes being willing to think something new. Your brain is so used to living in those past thoughts, because it’s thought them so many times, that it’s going to take you thinking a new thought a lot of times to create new patterns.

Your brain thinks it knows who you are. It’s going to resist the energy it takes to be updated by your future self, by what’s possible in your life, by what God says about you.

For a lot of us, it keeps us in this weird place a victim mentality. It keeps us feeling like all we can ever create is what we have created. You look to your past to define yourself instead of looking to your future.

Those new thoughts cost us energy and your body doesn’t want to expend the energy. Your brain has a rut that it has worn so it easily goes to those thoughts, and thinking something new requires practice and work.

It requires faith.

It requires believing in something that you don’t yet believe.

It requires having faith in something you haven’t seen in yourself yet.

I know I can become this version of me in my future. I haven’t seen that version of me yet that loses the 40 pounds, that builds her business, that lives in unconditional love in her marriage. I haven’t seen that version of me yet, but I believe in God’s ability to transform me into that person.

That is powerful.

Pay attention today, and in the next few days, how you talk about yourself and your life. Try to become an observer of yourself and figure out how many times you reference the past, how many times you define yourself by the past, how many times you decide what you’re capable of based on the past.

You are living in the past a lot more than you think, and it will take practice to begin living in the faith of the future that you can create for yourself.

I look at my life right now and it’s unrecognizable to me. The life that I’m living feels like a miracle. It feels like magic. It feels like a life that I never should have been able to create or live because of my past.

It makes me so excited about what else is in my future. It makes me so excited to go ahead and live into that future to figure out what else I want to create. Who else do I want to become?

Maybe you’ve had success in the past and you’re afraid you could never create that again. Or maybe you’re living in the shadow of someone else’s past and what they have achieved.

What you can achieve in the future, and more importantly, who you can become in the future does not have to be defined by who you have become so far. Start looking to the future, have faith in the person that you can become, that you want to become, and you’ll be amazed at your life.

You’ll wake up one day and think, “How is this even my life? How did I manage to create this in my marriage? How did I manage to create this type of relationship with my kids? How did I manage to create this health in my body? How did I manage to create this in my business?”

It’s possible, but you have to stop thinking the thoughts you’ve always thought. You have to decide what you want to think about you and your future so you can create what you can become.

How to Stop Being a People Pleaser

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I am a lifelong, somewhat recovering people pleaser. So, mostly today I’m talking to myself, but I have done a lot of work on my people pleasing. 

Most of us who are people pleasers, wear it’s somewhat like a badge of honor.  I want to show you some simple ways that you can understand if you’re doing it, and give you a little more understanding of what it’s doing to you, and what it’s doing to your relationships.

It’s not helping.

It’s not authentic.

It disconnects us from people rather than connecting us to people.

People pleasers think it’s our job to make everybody happy. We think it’s our job to make sure nobody’s upset. We think it’s our job to make sure everybody’s having a good time, and everybody’s having pleasant emotions.

We will sacrifice ourselves at this altar.

The problem with this is it assumes we can have some kind of control over someone else’s emotions. That’s the toxic part of people pleasing I think we don’t realize.

When we people please people we actually are just manipulating them.

We’re trying to control their response, control their emotions, control what they’re thinking. We usually do it because we want some kind of approval from them. We like to have people like us, we’re addicted to approval.

I do believe it often stems from a good place. I think a lot of my people pleasing came from my childhood where it was the way that I coped. It was the way that I got accepted. I was a performer, an achiever. How can I make everybody happy? I think most people pleasing usually comes from a similar place.

But, if we don’t learn some skill to outgrow people pleasing, it becomes very toxic in our relationships.

People pleasing might look like you doing something that you don’t want to do, but you pretend like you want to do it, so somebody else will like you.

Or maybe you say yes to something that you clearly shouldn’t be doing and don’t want to do. You say yes so that people will think a a certain way about you, so that they’ll approve of you, so they’ll like you.

Maybe you pretend to agree with something that you don’t really agree with so that you don’t hurt someone’s feelings or so that you don’t cause any disturbance of any kind.

I want to show you a side of people-pleasing that’s not very pretty. And when I discovered this, it really changed my life. It made me realize I’m not doing myself any favors, and I’m certainly not doing the person in my life any favors when I’m people-pleasing.

People pleasing is manipulative.

You’re using your behavior as a way to manipulate somebody else to think of you a certain way, treat you a certain way, or approve of you, It’s manipulation because you’re not being your authentic self, and so the whole situation is false, You’re not being true to yourself, so whatever they think about you, they don’t really think about you. They think it about whatever version of you that you have presented to them.

People pleasing is lying.

We are lying to other people when we people please and it does not build healthy relationships. We basically end up betraying ourselves. We basically end up disconnecting from our true self.

We think we’re doing it in order to connect with other people, but we really aren’t because they’re connecting with a version of us that’s not really us.

In the end we end up feeling resentful, bitter, disconnected, and lonely. In the moment people-pleasing feels kind of pleasant, because we often do get the response from people that we want right away, but then in the long run we just feel resentful and bitter.

The short-term discomfort that not people-pleasing will bring, and it will bring some short-term discomfort, is worth it in the long run.

It’s worth it to build stronger relationships.

It’s worth it to build a relationship with yourself that’s true in integrity and in honesty.

People pleasing is not love.

It’s actually the opposite of love. Sometimes we do it because we feel like we want to appease another person, or because we love them. We just want to make it easy, but we’re not making it easy in the long run, and it’s not love.

There’s a huge difference between people pleasing and true, authentic, unconditional love.

I will be the first one to tell you to serve your neighbor. I believe we are called to sacrifice. I believe we are called to service in generosity to other people. I believe we are called to kindness and compassion and all of those things, but what I want to show you is that people pleasing is not that. It’s actually the opposite of that.

It looks like we’re doing the right things on the outside, but on the inside, we’re seething, we’re harboring resentment, we’re getting bitter, we’re showing up passive aggressive. There are all kinds of net negative benefits.

I do think a lot of times we think we’re doing it for the right reasons, or we think we have good intentions, basically what we have is this deep need to be liked and accepted.

We think we can easily get that need met by being whatever people want us to be, and doing what we think other people want us to do. In the long run, that disconnects you from them, and it disconnects you from you.

Often what you will do is ignore yourself.

You will ignore your own beliefs.

You will ignore your own desires.

You will ignore your own priorities.

You will ignore all those things in order to make everybody else happy, and here’s the truth. You can’t make other people happy. You can’t use your behavior to manipulate them to feel happy because other people’s emotions are caused from their own thoughts.

Actions we take that are not really true to who we are, and true to how we want to show up in the world, they’re very superficial. They won’t work.

If it seems to works for a while, what will happen is when you do start showing up as who you really are and what you really think, it’s going to be a rude awakening.

We will often end up feeling lonely and disconnected, and the reason we feel that way is because we have disconnected from who we really are, and from what we really believe, and from what we really desire. That disconnection will be very painful for us, and then we will blame the other person.

We’re also assuming all kinds of things about the other person. It’s kind of a lack of trust in them, and it’s a lack of trust in you, in who you actually are. When we people please, we’re lying. We’re lying to ourselves and we’re lying to other people so they will approve of us. We have this addiction to approval.

People pleasing looks on the outset like love. It looks from the outside like you’re trying to love that person. But it is not love. It’s a lie.

How can we untangle ourselves from this? Here are 4 ways:

1. Become aware of it in yourself.

Be honest with yourself. I would venture to say that everybody, at least at some time or other is a people pleaser, right? We have to admit when we see this in ourselves.

We don’t like to be manipulated. We don’t like to think others are just being fake or they’re just doing things in order to make us feel a certain way, right? We don’t like it when it’s done to us, and our awareness in ourselves when we’re doing it is really important.

I want you to get curious about it though. I’m a lifelong people pleaser, but beating myself up for being that way is not going to help. I want you to have some curiosity and compassion about why you ended up being a people pleaser.

You’ll probably see where it stems from, and you’ll might see that your little self learned how to do that as a way to survive. I look back at my eight-year-old self, and my 12-year-old self, and my 14-year-old self and I have compassion for her.

Because I had never recognized it and dealt with it, when I did come unhinged, I really came unhinged. That’s why recognizing it is awesome. You can have compassion and kindness with yourself, and that compassion and kindness to yourself will then eventually lead to true compassion and true kindness to other people, instead of manipulating other people.

You learned to do this for a reason, and it served you for a while. It helped you survive, you’re here. So we’re not going to beat ourselves up for how we’ve used this coping mechanism to sort of get by, and get through, and get what we needed.

I want to teach you a better way. I want to teach you how to give yourself what you need, instead of always farming out your self-worth and your approval to someone else.

2. Build your sense of self-worth from the inside out.

You agree with God about who you are, and why you’re here, and how he made you. You agree with him. You stop looking to other people to validate it, and you just look to him.

He will look you in the eye and say, “I love you. I created you. I made you for a purpose. I adore you! I’ve equipped you with everything you need to live a full life, and give your gifts to the world.” We agree with him about who we are, and we stop looking for other people to validate us. We stop looking for other people to approve of us.

If you’re a people pleaser, here’s a news flash, you don’t have a good relationship with yourself.

You’re always disrespecting your own beliefs and your own wishes and your own desires.

People pleasing is different than choosing to sacrifice for someone else, recognizing that maybe this is not what I would choose, but this is what I want to do, is different than doing something hoping that by doing it you’ll get their approval.

When you people please you’re ignoring you.

You’re ignoring your sense of self, your sense of what is right and wrong, your sense of the world, your sense of relationships.

You’re not having your own back.

You’re not being true to yourself.

You’re not liking yourself or accepting yourself.

Then you’re wanting everybody else to do it for you.

No, that’s your job. That’s an inside job.

How you strengthen that sense of value in yourself is just how you think about you. You just start trusting and believing that God made you and he loves you. You’re here for a purpose. You don’t need everybody else’s approval for what you’re doing.

You have to decide how you want to think about yourself. You decide what relationship with yourself is like. You reinforce it. You give yourself what you need. You stop ignoring you.

All of those things will help you build a sense of self-worth from the inside out. Learn to be you, and learn to like you so you’re not always looking to other people to do it for you. That’s what people pleasing is.

We’re afraid someone will be disappointed in us. I hate this feeling so bad! I hate it when someone’s disappointed in me. I want to fix it. I want to do whatever I can to undo those feelings they have about me that are unpleasant, but we can’t.

We have to allow people to have their own thoughts about us. What other people think about you is none of your business. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we just go to work, fixing the things inside us that need fixing, tending to our own sense of self-worth so that we’re not farming it out to other people.

We never can control what they think anyway so trying to control it with your actions, or with your words, just doesn’t work. What is does do is leave us feeling like we’ve let ourselves down. We have let ourselves down, because we never pay attention to what we think. We’re always wondering what someone else is thinking!

3. Get clear on you.

Get clear on your goals, on your priorities, on what you believe, on what’s important to you. This is the one that has really helped me, because I’ve had the hardest time in my life saying no. The thing is, when you say yes to something, you are saying no to a bunch of other things.

I’ve realized that I can’t say yes to everything. I get resentful and too busy and then I don’t have enough energy to do the actual things that I say are important in my life.

When you get really clear on what’s important to you, and what your priorities are, then it’s easy to say, “I can’t do that thing,” and you don’t have to apologize for it. “I would love to help, but I can’t.”

This will change with your season of life. This has changed for me over the years, but I know what I have the bandwidth for, and I know what’s really important to me, and what takes a lot of time and energy to do.

You can learn to say no to the things that don’t fit in with what is important in your life, even though it will disappoint people. You will disappoint people.

Don’t you wish we could just manage them, and make them like us? But we can’t, and the sooner we realize that the more we live in the power of the thoughts and feelings we can create for ourselves. The more we live in how we can take care of ourselves. The more we can learn to approve of ourselves instead of asking other people to do it for us.

4. Choose unconditional love instead.

People pleasing is not love. People pleasing is lying. People pleasing is manipulation. It’s not the authentic version of you. It’s not love.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

Luke 10:27

That assumes you’re taking care of you first, that you’re putting your own oxygen mask on, that you’re deciding what you need, and that you’re meeting your needs.

You’re not expecting other people to do those things. You’re good at being clear about your own priorities and your own goals. You’re learning to honor yourself, honoring the commitments you make to yourself, honoring the beliefs that you have about yourself.

Notice how you feel.

Over time, people pleasing leads to bitterness and resentment. If what you’re doing in your life, for your spouse, for your kids, or for your job is leading you to feel resentful and bitter and disconnected, you’re doing it wrong. You’re people pleasing.

If what you’re doing in your life is leading you to feel love and connection and kindness and compassion, both for you and the people in your life, then you’re operating from a place of love.

They’re not the same.

If somebody asks you to do something and you feel like kind of icky about it, but you decide to do it anyway, you just people pleased them, you just manipulated them, you just lied to them. Instead you can say no in a really kind way.

I want you to get into the habit of taking care of yourself. We expect other people to take care of us, but we don’t take care of us. You take care of you. You know what’s important to you.

People pleasing sometimes does feel good in the moment. We get this little hit of dopamine, because we feel like everybody is happy with us. Everybody loves us. Then we wonder why six months later, or a year later, or 20 years later, we’re bitter and resentful.

It’s because we’ve been people pleasing. You’re choosing that instant gratification of saying yes in the moment so people will like you, instead of in the moment feeling a little bit uncomfortable, but in the long run choosing love, compassion, and kindness for yourself and others.

Notice how you feel.

People pleasing will eventually make you not like yourself deep down because you know you’re lying to yourself, then you’ll blame the other person. You’ll think it’s their fault.

Resentment feels bad, love feels good. Love always includes the truth. We have to stop lying. We have to say the truth, and we have to be true to ourselves.

Unconditional love of course will require sacrifice and lots of it, but it will not require you to lie.

People pleasing will require sacrifice, but you’ll be lying, and you won’t like yourself in the end. When we live a lifestyle of people pleasing, it disconnects us from the deepest part of ourselves that has wisdom and love. We choose this sort of superficial connection.

It’s not really connection, because the person isn’t really connected to us, they’re connected to a version of us that always does what they think we should do.

If you want to honor yourself tell the truth. Be clear about your priorities and your goals.

Unconditional love is fierce, because unconditional love is the truth.

People pleasing is not true and It’s not love.

I was so used to people-pleasing that when I ran into Stevie, and he’s not a people pleaser, I thought, “Whoa, is that legal? Can you just tell people you don’t want to go somewhere, and like not do it?”

He’s really clear about his own priorities for himself. I started to bump up against that and see what a better way it is to live. It’s a little bit more uncomfortable at the first, but then you know where each other stands. You live in more integrity and you live with more honesty, instead of just doing what everybody thinks you should do and then secretly seething inside.

These are the kinds of things we are talking about this week in my first ever 5 day #RelationshipGoals Challenge! It has been powerful so far and we’re not even half-way through yet! You don’t want to miss it!

Sign up here for tomorrow’s zoom link, and I’ll also email you the replays!

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

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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

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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!

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