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How to master your emotions and stop being triggered

February 24, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

Is there someone you always let get under your skin, or you always get your feelings hurt when you’re around them? It could be your spouse, or your mother-in-law. It could even be Karen on Facebook, or some guy at church who always talks about politics. What about one of your kids?

I have to practice this all the time because I’m raising a very highly energetic and spirited eight-year-old. It’s very difficult sometimes for me to stay in my own emotions and decide how I want to show up for him, and for me.

It’s so easy for me to think to myself, “He’s just so hard. He gets under my skin. He did that thing again.” I’m working on this right alongside of you.

A tool that I want to teach you is a very key pause. A pause between the thing the person says or does that you think hurts your feelings, or triggers you, and then your response to that.

I do want to mention, I’m using triggered in the sense that we commonly use it every day. I’m not talking about if you have PTSD and there’s something that triggers that.

You might think, “There is no pause. I pretty much just react.” But we create a pause for ourselves so that we can decide how we want to show up, so we can stop blaming other people for being angry or being resentful or having hurt feelings.

When I’m coaching my clients in Life Mentoring School, I will often say to them, “Why are you hurting your feelings like that?” We really do have control of our own emotions. I’m going to help you take more control of them and stop blaming other people.

We’re going to create space for ourselves and we’re going to control our emotions, but that doesn’t mean pretending like everything’s fine. Don’t worry, we’re going to talk about what to do instead.

I also want you to realize that you don’t need to remove people from your life that you don’t agree with. You don’t have to remove people from your life that irritate you. You can live in all kinds of amazing unity with people who think very differently from you, and people who have very different ways of communicating.

We do that by creating a pause, by holding space for ourselves, and by holding space for other people.

We live on a lake and Tom loves to go down to the lake bed and explore, since that water is down. Every night he was trashing a different pair of shoes and getting completely muddy so we got him a pair of boots. They are the kind you can just spray off with a water hose.

Yesterday, I go look outside and realize he chose to spray his boots off right by the door. There was so much mud that it was even dripping off of the sidewalk.

My first thought was, “Stevie’s going to kill us!” The next one was, “Why does stuff like this always happen?” This is the moment I get to decide.

What I really want in my relationship with this little guy is connection. I want a strong relationship. I want to teach him all kinds of amazing things. I know that I can do that when my relationship with him is strong.

I also know because of his trauma, and because of his upbringing, every criticism he takes as a personal attack that he’s not good enough. I know I have to be really careful.

Sometimes I don’t do great and it’s something that I’m hyper aware of, and that I’m really, really working on with him.

Now, some of the people that know how to get you, know how to get under your skin, you’re not in charge of raising them. I think you’ll understand why it’s still really important to create a pause for ourselves so that we can show up the way we want.

1. Identify the emotion you feel.

This is a step that we often skip because we think it’s not important. We think if we’re going to try to change it react better, then I don’t want to be identifying what I feel.

But it really is important to identify what you feel, and not beat yourself up about it. You are just a human.

When I opened the door and there was mud all over, of course that’s irritating. Of course, I’m frustrated because I’m just one of the humans. I just step back for a second and think, “Wow. That really made me irritated.”

Get curious about yourself.

It’s interesting how fast my heart rate went up and I felt hot. It’s just amazing how fast that irritated me.

Ask yourself what is the actual emotion? Do you feel scared? Do you feel frustrated? Do you feel disappointed? Do you feel rejected? A lot of times whatever the initial reaction is, there is a deeper feeling behind it.

2. Allow the emotion to be there.

Don’t resist it. Don’t pretend like you don’t feel it. I don’t want you to pretend like everything’s fine. I want you to identify the feeling, and just take a deep breath and allow it to be there.

Here’s what happens. When we resist our emotions and we push them down and we don’t allow ourselves to feel them, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests they get trapped in our bodies and in our minds. It’s not good for us.

Emotions are waves of energy and those waves of energy can become trapped.

You want to just breathe through it. There’s a really good study that showed that emotions are waves of energy, and if you allow them, they only last 30 seconds, 60 seconds, a minute and a half at the most.

They come and they go like waves.

Right in that moment, you feel whatever you feel. Frustrated, rejected, fearful. If you take a second and pause to ask yourself what is it that you’re feeling, take a deep breath, and allow it to be there for a minute, here’s the magic thing. If you take that bit of a pause, almost as fast as it comes, it goes.

We have caused ourselves lots of problems by not being willing to feel our emotions. You want to become a master of your emotions? Here’s how! You feel them.

What you realize is, it’s not that big a deal.

I can feel frustrated.

I can feel disappointed.

I can feel a little rejection.

It’s not going to kill me.

Once you do that, you gain so much power because you realize it’s just a feeling. It comes and it goes. It doesn’t last forever, and I can just take a deep breath and breathe through it.

If you move through the emotion, you can get to an emotion that you actually want to feel.

I want you to stop trying to pretend like you don’t have the emotion. I want you to stop buffering the emotion, which is also what we do. We go eat something or buy something or hide or numb. That doesn’t help.

The way through is through.

I practiced this yesterday. I kind of stepped back from the situation and I looked at the mud and I was thought, “Wow, that made me so irritated so fast.” I took a deep breath, and here’s the funny thing, you guys. By the time I allowed myself to feel it, and to be with it for a minute, it probably only took 20 seconds.

Then the whole situation was kind of funny. I went and got my camera and I was like, “Well, here’s Tom. And here’s what he’s doing. He’s got the water hose out.” Then he and I cleaned it up.

I said, “Buddy, this is not the best place to choose to do this. So let’s do this. Let’s get the hose out and let’s squirt all this off, and then we’ll put the hose back up.”

We made it into a teaching moment, andI saved myself a lot of upset.

In those kinds of moments, it really teaches your kids a lot about how to have relationships. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to mess up. Sometimes I do mess up, and sometimes I do react in a way that I don’t like. When we do that, we just say we’re sorry.

3. Realize that you are creating the emotion.

You have to take responsibility for your emotions. You think that the reason you’re irritated is because your son cleaned off his muddy boots by your front door. That’s not why you’re irritated. Newsflash!

We have feelings because we have thoughts. Our thoughts are what cause our feelings.

So when he cleans his muddy boots off right by the front door, that doesn’t mean anything to anybody else, right? It doesn’t make you irritated that Tom cleaned his boots off by the front door. The reason it means something to me is because I’m thinking to myself, “Oh my gosh, Stevie is going to kill us. He has gotten this mud all by the front door. This is going to take forever to clean up!”

I have a bunch of thoughts about it, and then from my thoughts, I feel frustrated.

What I was able to do in my pause was I was able to just reevaluate. I was able to feel that feeling of frustration and decide.

Is it worth it? Life’s pretty short. Is it really worth getting that worked up over? We can just squirt it off with a water hose. Not that big of a deal. And because I changed my thoughts, now I don’t feel irritated.

This is so crucial. You can take all your power back. You can stop getting offended so easily because nobody can offend you if you don’t allow it.

The reason this is so powerful is because when I get really frustrated at my eight-year-old, guess who gets to feel the vibration of frustration? Guess who gets to feel the tightness in my chest? Guess who gets to feel the heat come up my neck? I get to feel it, not him.

I’m not punishing people with my feelings of anger or resentment. I’m punishing myself.

This pause will create better relationships with others, but it will also create a better relationship with yourself. You’ll like the way you show up in your life!

I want you to take back your power. I want you to decide what you want to create in your internal body for yourself. Want to create resentment and anger and negativity and rejection? Probably not.

I’m really into love and joy and peace. How do we do that? By creating the emotions that we want. How do we create the emotion that we want? We decide what we want to think about what just happened. We decide what we want to think about what somebody just said to us. We decide how we want to show up for ourselves in our own life.

4. You’re going to fail.

You’re to read this today and you’re going to go out later today and fail at this. So am I. The key to making this a habit is to forgive yourself and try again.

When you don’t do it right, when you let resentment get the best of you, when you lose your temper, when you let frustration take over, when your body makes a big, juicy, negative cocktail of rejection and fear, you just recognize it and you say, “Oh, there I went again, making myself some fear. I don’t want to do that. Let me just forgive myself and move on.”

Learn how to allow people to be who they are.

Guess what? They get to be who they are either way. We might as well allow it. We might as well decide that the only thing we can ever control is how we show up, how we respond, and how we take a little bit of a pause.

I practice this. I make it almost like a game. After you start practicing this, you will look for situations to practice, and of course you’ll find them all the time. You’ll think, “There’s another one. I get to practice again and again.”

5. Take action and create the emotion you want.

Nobody is to blame for your emotions. You are fully 100% responsible for them.

If you feel bad a lot of the time, if you have a lot of negative emotion, if you have a lot of sadness, or a lot of fear, I want you to recognize that you have agency over that.

You can decide, by the way you think, that you want to create something different for yourself, and you deserve it. You deserve to feel joy and peace and love and generosity and kindness and compassion. When you generate those emotions for yourself, you are the first recipient of them.

You can’t make anybody else feel anything, and you are responsible 100% for the way you feel.

Master your emotions.

Stop blaming other people.

Stop being triggered.

I want you to practice this. When you jump on the internet today, and you read something, and just for a moment it set something off in you, I want you to take a pause and decide, do I want to make this cocktail of resentment today? Maybe you do, but I want you to choose it consciously.

I promise you that after you do this for a while, you will decide, you want to be a person who feels love and joy. You will not want to be a person who’s always feeling anger and resentment and negativity.

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.

How likable are you and why does it matter?

February 10, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Studies show that people who are highly likable just have better lives. They have better relationships. They have more success in life. They have more contentment. They enjoy their lives more.

Cultivating this kind of likability could really help in your life.

Your likability is directly proportional to your ability to like.

They have done these studies really likable kids in high school, and they asked what it is that makes people really likable. You might guess it would be kids who are really attractive. Maybe they are really skilled in something like sports.

None of those were the first things that came to mind for teenagers when they were ranking likability. The thing that they noticed about kids who are highly likable is that those kids like more people than anybody else.

I love that correlation because I often teach that in my coaching program about lovability. Your lovability is just your ability to love. Likability is very similar. It’s really your ability to like other people.

We live in a time when the world could use more people who like each other.

Be more childlike.

Children aren’t caught up in what people are thinking of them. Kids just go up to each other and say, “Hey, my name is such and such. I like you. You want to be friends? You want to play?” They’re very direct with how they like someone else.

I watched this happen a few weeks ago when Thomas and I were at the park. He just has this charisma that a lot of other people don’t have. He saw this kid at the park that he knew, but he hadn’t seen him in a long time. This kid used to go to his school.

He runs up to him and gives him a big hug. He doesn’t hide at all how excited he is to see him. They chat and they start playing. They played together for about 30 minutes, and as they were getting ready to leave, I literally thought Tom was going to start crying.

He goes up to his friend, and he just gives him a big old bear hug, like almost lifts him off the ground. He tells him how exciting it was to see him, and how fun it was to play with him. He said, “I’m going to tell my friends at school, how fast you are now,” and he just said it with such sincerity.

He found something about the other person to admire and he said it out loud, and he said it was such sincerity.

I will never forget that moment. It was so precious, and it just reminds me how not childlike we are. It reminds me of how hard we are to impress. How much it takes for us to really enjoy other people, and how much it takes for us to like other people.

We often go into a situation all worried about ourselves, but to be more childlike means to go into the situation and just enjoy what’s there. How can we just be in the moment and enjoy what we have together?

Even his body language conveyed his like, and love, for this other friend. He leaned in, he was excited, and before we left he gives him a big bear hug. You could tell how much he really liked this other kid just by his body language.

What’s interesting about that is, now this other kid really likes Thomas. Why? Because Thomas was kind of irresistible in that moment. It’s hard to resist how much he really enjoyed his friend in this situation.

I want to be more like that. I want to be more willing and able to show that I enjoy other people.

Research confirms it. They did a study of people watching Ted Talks with the sound off. There was a consensus of, “we like this speaker,” or ” we don’t like this speaker as much,” and was all their body language.

Within seven seconds, we make a judgment about somebody. We like them, or we don’t. We trust them or we don’t. And a lot of that is just how we show up, our body language.

We show with our body language that we’re interested, that we’re engaged, that we’re actually present.

I love this example with Thomas, because he’s like on the edge of his shoes, ready to go, ready to have fun, ready to enjoy being together.

I want you to think about, as you go today in your interactions, “What is my actual body language showing? Does my body language show that I’m interested in other people, that I’m engaged, that I’m present, that I’m here, that I’m excited to be here?”

My favorite way lately is to just give people ‘compassion circles’ on their back. I’ll touch them on their back and rub their back, or pat their back. It’s kind of my way of saying, “I’m here. I’m glad you’re here.”

Find ways, even in weird times, that you can show up like kids do, that we can show each other we love each other.

The more we allow ourselves to be present in the moment, the more we can really enjoy what we’re doing, and who we’re with right at that moment.

Find common ground.

We are experts at finding differences. We’ve become literal experts in finding what separates us. We have to get back to finding what unites us, to finding our humanity. We’re so the same.

We all have same struggles.

We all have similar fears.

We all have similar aspirations.

We all have similar goals.

Look for common ground. How do you find it? You ask people! You really listen to them, and they will tell you all the ways that they’re similar to you. They will tell you all the things that they struggle with, or that they’re worried about, that are similar to the things that you struggle with, that you might be worried about.

Common ground is really easy to find when you ask. Be curious about other people.

I had a neighbor when I lived in my other neighborhood, and all of the other women that neighborhood, talked about how this one precious neighbor, you just couldn’t help but adore her. We were all trying to figure out why she was so adorable? Why was she so likable?

One of the reasons for that was because you could spend 30 minutes with her and she would just keep asking you questions. She would be genuinely curious about your life and about what was going on with you. I remember times that I would leave being with her and realize I didn’t even ask her about her kids or find out what was going on with her!

I would feel guilty, but then I would think about how I just loved her so much because it felt like she had this genuine interest in people. A lot of times I think we’re so consumed with wanting people to find us interesting, that we forget that the way to do that is to be interested.

Be interesting by being curious.

I really think this is a skill we all should cultivate, that we all should get better at. Imagine living in a world where somebody just kept being curious about you, and asking you questions, and trying to find out where you are coming from.

Imagine yourself trying to understand people more and thinking, “Well, that’s interesting that she thinks that. I wonder why.” That curiosity really does go a long, long way.

Show your real self.

We want people to think a certain thing about us, so we show them a version of ourselves that we think they will like. You know who we really like? We really like the real you, the vulnerable you who sometimes doesn’t have it all figured out.

Over Christmas, I did a series of videos on Instagram that were just me making coffee, me making bread. No makeup on, no hair done. Just me putzing around in my life. The funny thing about it was people loved it!

I was trying to figure out why. It’s because we like to see people as they really are, in their element. Usually when I come on social media for a livestream or a class, I have makeup on, I’m ready. But in those little moments that were just like early in the morning, just making coffee, just baking bread, just doing what I do, that’s most of my life.

It was such a good reminder to me that people want to see the whole you. We really do. We want to see the vulnerable side of you. We’re so related and so like each other that when we find this common ground we think, “Oh, yeah, I totally look like that in the mornings too when I make coffee.”

Really learn to be yourself. I think we live in a world where we’re kind of afraid to be ourselves. We like to present this version of us that is put together and has it all figured out. There are certainly areas where I feel like I have it more figured out than others, but there are also areas where I feel like I’m just a learner.

I’m trying to be a mom to an adopted son, and that’s something I’ve never had to do before. I’m continually learning about it, I’m still reading books about it. I’m still crying myself to sleep at night sometimes about it. I’m still going to therapy. I’m still trying to learn from other people and asking, “Hey, you’ve been an adoptive mom for 10 years, teach me, tell me. What can I do?”

Just be willing to be the whole person that we are instead of just this version of ourselves that we think other people will enjoy.

Be more intentional about what you like and enjoy.

How can you like and enjoy more things? How can you like and enjoy the actual life that you have? How can you look at your own life and think, “I really enjoy this. I’m going to take some time to really enjoy this part of my life.”

The people who are more likable, studies show they’re way more positive about their own life. They’ve learned how to see their lives in a way that puts everything in the positive light.

I take a lot of flack, and people think I have a way of seeing the world that’s kind of Pollyanna. Maybe. But maybe it’s a discipline of learning to see the world the actual way it is. Maybe it’s the discipline of learning to agree with God when he says that all things will work together for your good. Maybe it’s not Pollyanna.

Maybe it is just learning to really enjoy the amazing, beautiful, brutal, difficult life that we all have.

It’s a shift in perspective.

How can I enjoy these people?

How can I really enjoy this life that I have?

How can I see it in a different way?

How can I see it more like the blessing it really is?

How can I look under the surface of things that appear to be difficult, and ask myself, “What can I gain from this? Is there a hidden blessing here?”

It’s a skill and none of us are born. These are all skills that we can cultivate, that we can get better at, so we become more likable!

Why do we want to be more likable? Because likable people are more content. They have better relationships.

You know what it’s like to be in a relationship with somebody who’s really likable? It’s really fun because they are cultivating these things in their lives.

They’re cultivating showing affection. They’re cultivating showing how they enjoy life. They’re cultivating seeing life in a different way. These are all skills that we can cultivate, that we can become better at, that make us better at relationships, that make us better at living and enjoying the life we actually have.

It’s one of those life skills, that if you could cultivate it, and you could work at it every day, not only would people enjoy you more, but you would enjoy your own life so much more.

I hope you will join me on the Dr. Edie show, live every Tuesday, at Noon EST on my Youtube channel!

How to focus on what matters most. 3 things that actually work

February 2, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Sometimes do you find yourself in a season where you feel like you’re busy, but you’re not productive?

Your schedule is full, you’re busy, you’re doing things, but you’re not moving the needle. You’re not doing the things that matter most.

Or maybe you find that a lot of the things that really do matter to you don’t end up on your schedule.

Some of you know that the fourth of January, was my birthday. Stevie and I took a little trip together, and we did some hiking, and we just had a great time together. We got away for a few days just by ourselves. We haven’t done that in a long time.

We got out of the driveway and I started crying. Just unexpectedly tears filled my eyes. That might be the first clue that something has gone wrong, when you find yourself instantly in tears and you didn’t expect it.

I was thinking about it as we were driving. Why did tears come so fast?

We had such a great time together. It was so good to reconnect, but what I realized was, because we’ve been on this adoption journey with Thomas, who’s eight years old and has been through so much loss and trauma, and the process of trying to help him heal, and help him through his loss, and his grief, we just let things go.

You might be in a season of your life where whatever you’re dealing with; maybe it’s a health problem, maybe it’s loss of job, or maybe something with one of your kids, and you feel like a lot of important things you just let go, because you were in survival mode.

I don’t think I fully realized how much it was affecting me, and how much it was really a burden that I was carrying, and we’re only human so we can only carry so much. Some of the things that you drop along the way are important things.

I realized that one of the things that I had basically dropped or let go, was just the priority of that most important relationship to me.

It was really amazing to have time together. I can’t even tell you how it has changed our outlook over the past few weeks, just knowing that we can reconnect with each other, and that we can hold on to each other while we’re holding onto him. It has just been a really, really good reminder.

If you’ve been following along with my live streams, or maybe you did our Live your Dream Challenge, you know I love setting goals at the first of the year. I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions.

What do I really want?

What do I really want this year?

What’s most important to me?

How can I make time to actually do the things that matter, to actually focus?

I really do want to get to the end of the year, and have done the things that really matter. I’m sure you do too.

1. Decide what really matters and write it down

I think a lot of times we assume that we know what matters, and we assume that we’re living a life that’s focusing on the things that really matter. But if we’re not actually deciding it on purpose, and writing it down on purpose, I think sometimes we really do forget.

If you’re going to fill a jar, and you have big rocks, little rocks, sand, and water, there’s a certain way you have to do it or it won’t all fit.

You want to put the big rocks in first, and then you’ll have room for the little rocks, the sand, and the water. But if you fill it up with sand and water at first, you won’t be able to get the rocks in.

The rocks are the really important things in you life.

When I’m making my calendar every week, I put the rocks in first. For me, I have to prioritize my own spiritual, mental, and emotional health. Then I’m actually able to take care of the people that I want to help take care of, that I want to be a blessing to, and that I want to serve in my life.

The things I put there FIRST are the ways I can make sure I really am prioritizing health and sanity, and taking care of my mental health.

One of the things that I started doing at the first of the year that I hadn’t been super consistent with is the relationship piece. I’m now making sure I put that piece in when I’m figuring out what I want my schedule to look like for the week.

Ask yourself:

What is my main priority?

What are the things for me that are non-negotiable?

What are the things that really, really matter?

Am I living my life as if they matter?

We can say they matter, but if they don’t make it into our actual lives, then we’re really not living up to the things that we say actually matter.

What are your big rocks?

What are the things that are the big things that you want to make sure you focus on?

What do you want to make sure you pour your energy into?

How can you add those to your life first?

How can you take your calendar, or your planner, and put those things in first?

Somebody asked me the other day why I put sleep in my calendar. Because sleep is really, really important, and if I’m not taking care of myself in that way I start to suffer, and the people in my life start to suffer.

I put things like sleep, make a healthy dinner, and go to the gym and lift weights. I put my church time in there. I put my quiet time. I put all these things in my actual calendar first.

I run two businesses from home, and the things that I put in my calendar first are the ways that I can make sure that I’m fit to serve. Those things give me the energy and vitality so I can do the things I really want to do.

2. Decide who matters most

This is where I was finding that I was lacking a little bit, and not out of not prioritizing the other person, For us, we were just trying to make sure Tom Tom was ok. He has taken priority, obviously, as it should be.

The thing I want to remind you of when you’re making your list of who matters most, is not to throw a bunch of guilt on there. Stevie and I have been doing the best we can. We’ve been taking really good care of him. We’ve been taking good care of our other kids. We’ve been trying to take good care of each other. We’re doing the best we can.

We want to look back with kindness to the season that we’ve been in.

We’re all in different seasons, and we want to look with kindness to the season that we’re in, and just give ourselves a little grace, and a little bit of a break. We’re all doing the best we can.

When we think about who matters most, this may seem obvious to you. Of course, it’s my spouse and my children, it’s my faith, my relationship to God. It’s the people in my community. We all would probably say the same things.

Here’s my question. Is that actually how we live? Do we live as if those people and those things are really important to us? How do we know?

It shows up in the way we spend our lives, the way we spend our energy, the way we spend our time and our resources.

I think what happens to us if we’re not careful, and if we don’t do this with some intention, is that we end up spending time trying to please, or arguing with people we don’t even really know on the internet, sometimes to the neglect of the people we actually love and want to be spending our time with.

How are we actually spending our time? Are we spending hours a day scrolling through, reading about people’s lives that we don’t even really know, or are we really investing in the relationships that we know we want to be investing in, that we know matter most?

One of the things I’ve been doing that really helps me is to pick a person of the week. You could pick a person of the month or a person of the day. I tend to do this by the week.

I kind of try to figure out whose birthday it is, or who in my life really needs my love and attention right now. Then I write it on my actual calendar, and for that week, I really try to be super intentional about how I love on that person.

It’s so easy for us to take the people for granted that we love the most. It’s actually almost always the people who we love the most that we take for granted.

I know that a lot of times for Stevie and I, we will have a busy week, taking care of all the stuff we need to take care of. He’s doing his medical practice. I’m running my businesses from home. We’ve got Tom Tom, we’ve got our other kids. We have all the responsibilities that two people building a life together have, and sometimes the only pause I feel like we get is when we’re at church together.

It’s almost like we both just kind of collectively sigh, and he’ll put his arm around me at church and rub on my shoulder. It’s a moment of, “Oh yeah, this is what really matters.” I want to build in more times like that.

We’ve been trying to be more intentional about how we can spend time together, how we can connect, even in small moments like moments together at church, or taking a hike together. Like the trip we took together. Really prioritizing what we say is important, and not just saying it’s important.

3. Decide when you will focus

In my coaching program right now, Life Mentoring School, we’re talking all about how to create pockets of focus.

Decide when you’ll have your focus time each week and decide what the most important things that you can put into that time. Planning that time will really help move you toward the life you want.

Maybe it’s a goal. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s some dream that you have that you’ve been wanting to do.

Set aside time to do it, and decide when you’re going to do it at the first of the week. Then put it in your actual calendar. For me, that’s almost always those two hours in the morning before anybody else gets up. I call it my dream time, my sacred time.

I have gotten so accustomed to that time that I can barely stay in bed. I look forward to that time that I know I’m going to spend doing something worthwhile, making some dream come true, working hard at something that’s really important to me. I want you to figure out when you could do that.

Be ready! If you’re not used to sitting for two hours and doing something, you’re, or for however long you decide your focus time is going to be, you’re not going to be great at it at first.

You’re going to get restless.

You’re going to want to be distracted.

You’re going to work for literally 30 seconds and think, “Yeah, this is not as much fun as I thought.”

It’s not that easy to sustain focus and to do something that really matters to you. You’re going to have to practice. You’re going to have to be willing to be bad at it for a while.

I know when I first started doing this, I thought, “Man, where has my attention span gone?” I had set aside two hours, but literally after three minutes, I’m was thinking, “Okay, I don’t know if I can do this.”

So just expect that it’s going to take you a while to be able to get into the groove of really creating some focus time where you can do the things in your life that really matter.

There’s a secret in life: What you focus on, that’s where your energy go.

Even writing it down is powerful. Even if you do terrible at it the first seven times you try to do it. Just continually create that pocket of focus, where you’re going to spend some time working on the things that really matter to you.

Maybe you know you need to write a book.

Maybe you know you need to get your health in order.

Maybe you’re working on your finances.

Whatever it is, dedicate some time every week where you can really focus on that.

There are a lot of things that I have in place to make that time really precious to me, and make it the most productive part of my day. But if you haven’t been in the habit of doing it, I just recommend that you set aside at least two hours a week and focus on what really matters to you.

We’re going to decide what to focus on, and we’re just going to write it down. We’re going to decide who matters most to us, and then we’re going to give ourselves these pockets of time where we can really do the things that matter.

We as women, we as doers, we as dreamers, we really do want to help. We sometimes get lost in doing things for people, in spending our time in ways that are not actually congruent with how we want to be doing life.

It’s never too late to start. I’m so excited that we get second and third and fourth and millionth chances. So don’t tell yourself, “Oh, I’m not good at this. I’ll never find a way to be focused and make my dreams come true.” Yes, you will.

You just keep starting, and you let yourself be bad at it for a while, and then pretty soon you find that you’re consistently showing up for yourself, and you’re consistently showing up to your life in the ways you really want to.

Keep Commitments to Yourself Starting Today

January 27, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 3 Comments

Do you have trouble keeping commitments to yourself? Do you set goals, make resolutions, and then feel like you’re so bad at the follow through?

I’m going to give you 7 simple and powerful ways start keeping the commitments you make to yourself.

So many times we set a goal, decide we’re going to do something, then we fail, we don’t do it. Pretty soon we think we’re so bad at it that we just stop trying. We don’t even want to set a goal anymore because we think we never follow through with what we say we’re going to do.

One of the things that I’ve really struggled with, especially the past year, is my nighttime routine. I would get sleepy and angry (I call it slangry) in the evenings, and I felt like I’d done so much good stuff during the day that I didn’t have one more ounce to give. I would just shirk off things that I really wanted to do.

I might leave my kitchen a little messy. I might be on my screen before bed instead of doing reading. So I’ve set a personal goal to not leave the dishes in my sink at night and to not take my computer to bed.

Now those might sound like easy things to do, but not for me lately. Because I work from home, and because I work on my computer, I always feel like there’s a few things I need to do.

I’ve been able to make some real progress and headway just in a few weeks on this goal, and I’m hoping that what’s been helping me might translate into what you’re wanting to do.

Maybe you’re wanting to lose a little weight. Maybe you’re wanting to save some money. Maybe you’re wanting to start an exercise program. Maybe you’re wanting to beef up your morning routine, maybe it’s work on your relationships.

1. Decide it

Decide what you want to work on, even if you’ve felt like you’ve been a failure before. I want you to just decide something, and not just the thing you want to work on, but how you want to talk about it. Here’s why.

I had this nudging that I needed to do something about my nighttime routine. I don’t like being so crabby at night, and I don’t like just going to bed and not doing things that I feel like I should do. But then there’s this other part of my brain that thinks, “You get up really early and you’re a morning person, and you don’t have to be a nighttime person too.”

My thoughts were, “You should, you should, you should.” I don’t want you “should” yourself with your decision. Shoulding yourself isn’t very inspiring.

Instead of saying, “I should do these things at night,” I decided that my statement was, “I love being the kind of person who reads poetry at night, instead of being on her computer. I like being the kind of person who leaves her kitchen spotless.”

Reframing the statement of what you want to do into a positive, will really help you. Thoughts, and the things that we speak, generate feelings inside of us.

If your thought and statement is, “I should want to lose weight,” that probably doesn’t give you a great feeling. Come up with a way of saying it that makes you really feel inspired and excited!

2. Feel it.

Make sure the way you’re talking about your goal, or your commitment, actually inspires you. You want to feel motivated by it. When I say to myself, I am a person who reads poetry at night,” that’s very inspiring to me. Now that might not be inspiring to you, so you have to figure out how you can talk about your goal, or resolution, or commitment, in a way that inspires you.

Don’t talk about it in a way that shames you into doing something, but in a way that motivates you and inspires you. Our feelings are the fuel of what we actually do in our lives.

If we want to take better actions, we’re going to have to have better feelings.

This might be a newsflash for you! I hope it is because this will change your life!

YOU’RE IN CONTROL OF YOUR FEELINGS.

Your feelings come from your thoughts, so you just decide what you want to think and say about your life, about your goal, about your commitment. You get to control your thinking, and when you change what you think, those thoughts will give you feelings that motivate you.

You decide, on purpose, how you want to talk about what you’re doing in your life. As you decide, you will generate feelings for yourself that will motivate you to keep going.

Make sure the emotion that you’re generating is actually motivating you to take action, that it’s inspiring you, not shaming you.

3. Write it

Writing it down is so powerful. When I started to work on my nighttime routine, I started to think about how I wanted to think about the whole process.

I was one of those people that if I was super, super tired, I would mostly clean up the kitchen, but then leave stuff in the sink. Then I would think, “Oh my gosh, if something happens to me at night, my poor sister is going to have to come clean up my kitchen.” I would have these kind of shameful feelings that I SHOULD do better.

Should never motivated me to do better.

I started working on how I wanted to say it to myself, what feelings that generated, and then I physically wrote it down. I physically wrote it in my calendar every night, and it was really kind of cool. It gave me a sense of looking forward to it!

“Tonight I’m going to be a person who reads poetry and a person who doesn’t leave dishes in her sink.”

Your brain gears up for things that you write down.

4. Habit stack it

This comes from a book called Atomic Habits. Pair your new thing with something that you already enjoy.

Here’s what I noticed. I love YouTube, and I love watching the uploaded videos of people that I follow at night. I would kind of save those for when I would go to bed at night. What I decided to do instead is watch those while I’m cleaning the kitchen because I decided I didn’t want to take my computer to bed.

It worked out kind of like magic. I wasn’t really in a super hurry to get done in the kitchen, because I knew when I finished in the kitchen, then I’m ready to go to bed without my computer. I knew I better watch what I want to watch here while I’m cleaning the kitchen, because then the computer is getting put away.

Now cleaning the kitchen is becoming something that I look forward to. After dinner when everybody else scatters, and I’m in the kitchen working on the dishes, it gives me a good time to catch up on podcasts, and catch up on YouTube channels. Then when I go to bed, I don’t take my computer. I don’t open it again.

I can’t even tell you how much it has blessed me, and how much easier it has been, because I paired the thing I was struggling with to something that I really enjoy.

5. Fail at it

We think failure means we’re not good.

We think failure means we’re never going to do that thing.

We think failure means we never were meant for that.

Be willing to fail. Accept that failure is part of the process. Failure is part of getting better at something. A lot of times what we do with the failures is, we make it mean that we’re bad people. WRONG.

Ask yourself what you can learn from the failure, not what does the failure mean about me. THE FAILURE MEANS YOU’RE HUMAN. Let’s ditch all of the shame and guilt that we heap on ourselves when we say we’re going to do something and then we don’t. Let’s just learn from it.

6. Get back at it

So you fail at it. So what, what did you learn from it? The question is not, IF you will fail, the question is, WHEN you fail, what will you do then?

You’re going to fail at it, then you’re going to get back at it. You’re just going to learn from the mistakes that you made and get back at it.

7. Celebrate it

Make it fun!

For me, making it fun was deciding I really wanted to be a person who reads poetry at night, so after I get my kitchen tided up I get to read my new poetry book. I got a couple of new books, and I have something to look forward to, since I’m not going to be on my computer.

I have to say the first night I felt a little deprived. It was hard. I knew it wasn’t good for me, I wasn’t sleeping well with my computer in there. I would get sucked into news cycle stuff at night, and then my mind was going crazy. It just wasn’t good for my rest, and it wasn’t good for my brain. I needed to find something to replace that with.

Taking something away in your life, you’ll feel the void, so what can you put in there to make it fun, and to celebrate?

Replacing it makes it seem like I’m not losing anything. I get to go upstairs and read my books now!

You can think you’re not good at keeping your commitments to yourself, but that’s just a thought. If you want to change that thought you can. You can just decide today that you are good at keeping commitments to yourself.

What will happen is, you will prove yourself right either way. So be careful little mind what you think, and decide you’re good at keeping your commitments to yourself, then watch yourself get good at actually doing the thing. It’s really exciting!

Pick one way, even if it’s a tiny small way, that you can honor your word to yourself today. Pick something that will make you excited for yourself that you did it!

Maybe you decide that you need to walk more.

Maybe it’s something with the way that you’re feeding yourself.

Maybe it’s something in your relationships.

Maybe it’s your bills.

Maybe your taxes

Maybe it’s that book you want to write.

I want you to decide that you’re going to do something, and then I just want you to practice thinking about how you’ll keep your word to yourself. As you build trust with yourself, and increase your capacity to keep your word to yourself, you will also increase your capacity to keep your word to other people.

With practice, you just get good at honoring your word.

Write it down first, and then decide what you want to think about it so you can generate feelings that are motivating for you. Then habit stack it and make it fun!

Set yourself up in a way that you can actually follow through with the things that you say you’re going to do. You’ve got this mama!

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!

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