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!

When I was growing up, I grew up around really miserable, slightly mean sounding Appalachians. The way I heard people talk, especially when I was really young, was very negative. Even if they didn’t actually feel that negative about the thing they were saying, it just sounded to me like they were always mad.

The way that I internalized that was, I just assumed they were mad at me. It’s really common in the area where I’m from, among more mountain people, there’s just this way of talking that just sounds mean.

When my cousin and my sister and I get together, we talk that way. I’m really good at it, and when we get together we speak it, because it’s like our first language!

I was talking to a friend about this, because we were both kind of raised by these Appalachian savages, and I realized that this way of talking had a huge impact on me. It was basically the script that was going on in my mind all the time and it was really negative.

Not my mom, by the way. My mom provided a different way of talking, but it took me a while to realize the difference.

Now, it’s like slightly comical. It’s kind of the way Tom talks. He always sounds mad, even when he’s not. He talks loud and is kind of harsh because he was also raised by an older Appalachian woman.

I love my roots so much. If you’ve read my book, you know I love my people and I have a lot of respect for them, but I will say that it took me a long time to deprogram myself from this negative talk.

I think I had enough of an awareness about it when I started having kids that I really never talked to my kids that way, but I always heard that script in my mind. If you were raised by people who were kind of loud, or yellers, or people who are super confrontational, you know what I’m talking about.

I have never really struggled with yelling at my kids. I think because I was so tender, and hurt often, by the way I was spoken to. I remember when I went to kindergarten how gentle and how kind my kindergarten teacher was to me. I thought this is like another world. I was amazed by her level of her soft- spokenness and her level of kindness.

After I wrote my book a few years ago, I actually went back and found her and told her what an impact she made on my life. Her words to me, 45 years ago, still make an impact on my life, and I went back to tell her that.

In my coaching program, Life Mentoring School, we’re studying nurture this month, how we nurture ourselves, how we nurture our children, and how we nurture our own gifts within ourselves. One of the things that people struggle with so much is this topic like yelling. People don’t want to be yelling at their kids. Nobody wants to be at Walmart and hear people yelling at their kids.

We all live as humans in reality, and sometimes we shake our heads and think, “Yes, it is necessary. Have you seen my children? The savages that they are!” So I get it.

The thing that I want to remind us all of is how powerful words are. I think we know this intellectually. We know how powerful they are, but I want you to think of a time in your life where somebody spoke it to you harshly. It was probably when you were younger and you carry it. You’ve carried it forever. You hear it over and over in your mind.

I think we know from our own experience that words are so powerful.

People have done science experiments where they speak kindly to different things and they record the results. In the one with water, they speak positively over this water, and it freezes is this beautiful, amazing pattern.

They do the same thing with negative words with crystals, and the way the crystals form, it’s ugly and not in a pattern.

It’s basically an experiment to tell us what we already know, which is that our words carry power.

Words either bring life or death.

I don’t say that to make us all feel guilty for the times when we don’t speak kindly, but I want to bring in awareness to how we speak to our kids. You may think this is backwards but first you have to pay attention to how you speak to yourself.

The first step to speaking more kindly to other people in your life is to speak more kindly to you.

Many of you have a lot of negative self-talk about yourself. The reason it’s so easy for you to speak negatively to other people is because you do it all day long to yourself. You have this rut worn in your brain of how you talk to yourself, and it just carries over.

I think becoming aware of how we talk to ourselves is really important. I don’t want you to use this to beat yourself up, or to make yourself feel more guilty. I want you to realize you’re just one of the humans who happens to not speak kindly to yourself and to your kids sometimes.

You can decide, “I want to grow in this area.” Heaping on a bunch of guilt and shame about this is actually not going to help you change it.

The only thing that I would recommend is that if you do have a lot of guilt about it, that you just pray and you ask for forgiveness. God will forgive you, and you move on, and you become a lot more aware of how you talk to yourself, and how you talk to the people in your life.

You are either helping people grow and flourish and learn how to talk to themselves right, and learn how to talk to other people, or not.

The funny thing about my experience with raising Thomas is that even though he has this sort of harshness with the way he does it, he’s very sensitive to everything I say to him. He’s very sensitive to my tone of voice. He’s very sensitive even if I’m just tired, he can sense that I don’t have the same inflection in my voice, because I’ve over the years really tried to work on the way I talk to the people in my life.

I just think it’s so interesting because he’s kind of a yeller, so he can yell and he can do all that, doesn’t bother him. But boy, if I so much as change my tone in the slightest, he’s very sensitive to it. I’ve noticed that over time, the more I just hold space for how he has been programmed, like I was programmed when I was little, and I try to not come down on that too much, and I just infuse all the goodness, it has gotten so much better.

To get better at this, speak more kindly to yourself. Realize that you’re human, that you are loved and adored, and that you’ll do plenty of things wrong and there’s grace available.

As you have more patience and kindness, and even curiosity, it gets better. Sometimes when I notice that I’m not speaking life into my people, I’m think, “That’s interesting because I normally do, so what is going on with me?”

Just get curious with yourself about why maybe you’re not speaking the way you want to, to yourself and to other people. Get curious and compassionate, having lots of grace for yourself, and deciding what you want to speak to yourself.

Decide that ahead of time and practice believing that you are the kind of person who speaks life, who speaks kindly, deciding that you’re not a yeller. Maybe you just rewrite that story. It’s just a story you’re telling yourself that you’re a yeller, so just retell a better story.

We set the tone.

When we’re not in a good mood, everybody can feel it. We don’t have to be in a good mood all the time, but we need to be aware of how our presence affects other people, and how powerful our words are.

Words create things.

What am I creating right now in my family, and in my children?

What kind of words?

What kind of life?

What kind of nurture am I creating by the way I speak to them?

We often teach in Life Mentoring School to just take a little pause, when your tendency is to just react, and think, “Life or death.” That may seem dramatic, but it really helps me.

Life or death, what do you choose?

Are you choosing life or death in this reaction?

Are you choosing life or death in these words?

If you have trouble with this, just give yourself a little space, give yourself a little pause, give yourself a little second to not just react because if we just react, we’re just going to mirror them.

There’s a lot of study on emotion that shows that emotions are just energy, and like energies attract each other. Our tendency is going to be to mirror their energy. If they get all riled up and mad, you’re going to have a tendency to match their energy.

You have agency and control over your reaction, and you can take a pause and decide, “No, I don’t want to match that. I want to hold space for peace right here today. I want to hold space for maybe getting curious about what they’re going through.”

We want to be curious as to why we are being impatient or angry, and we want to do the same thing for the people in our lives.

Write it out.

A lot of times, if I’m struggling with one of my kids, I just brainstorm everything I love about them, and I actually write it down.

How can you speak life by writing it down?

How can you decide how you want to speak and think by writing it down FIRST, and kind of practicing?

As you write it down, what you’re going to be amazed by, is that how amazing your people are. You’re going to brainstorm everything you love about them, and you’re going to think, “Oh my gosh. How was I so irritated and mad the other day? These people are amazing.” Brainstorming on paper really, really helps me.

I think that this is something that’s so fun to practice and here’s what’s going to happen. If you tell yourself right now,”Okay, for the rest of the day, I’m going to be really conscious of how I speak,” there’s going to be plenty of opportunity for it to go south. If you live in a family like mine, there’s going to be plenty of opportunity for you to feel justified in what you say.

I want you to ask yourself today, in all those different interactions…

Am I taking a pause?

Am I speaking life or death?

Is this encouraging them to be who they can be?

Is this my highest self showing up to this interaction today?

Maybe you have specific interactions that seem to always go south. If you can think of those times ahead of time, and you can think, “I want to show up as my highest self in this interaction today.” That intention, I’m telling you, will change your life.

When we spend a lot of time yelling and being angry and frustrated with our kids, who is it that’s actually feeling angry and frustrated most of the day? That would be us, right? I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot of other things I would like to feel besides angry and frustrated, and we do have the power to choose something different.

Choose well. Life or death, choose life.

I spent a lot of my life feeling heavy emotions all the time. I assumed that was just how it is. If you grow up in a certain environment or you struggle with feeling down or heavy, sometimes you just assume this is how it’s always going to be. You feel like you don’t have any choice. This is the way I felt.

This is just how I have to feel because life is hard and there you go.

The problem with that is, it made me sort of unwilling to face my emotions because they felt overwhelming. I would do everything possible not to feel them.

One of the craziest ways that we do this in the modern world is we take medications that often block our emotions so we don’t feel them, which I think can be maybe helpful in the short-term, but in the longterm it’s blocking something that we want to get flowing again.

I spent a lot of my life blocking my emotions in various ways. We do this with food. We do this with alcohol. We do this in so many ways. I don’t want to feel, so let me have some Krispy Kreme donuts! I had a kind of emotional poverty.

There were only a few emotions that I felt were safe to feel, and I hid myself from the rest of them. When you do that, you shrink your life. Because our emotions fuel our lives, and they fuel the actions we take, they’re really, really important.

If you only allow yourself to feel a narrow range of emotions, then you only get to experience a narrow range of life.

When I opened myself up to let all of the emotions come, it was kind of like the dam breaking. You hide yourself from emotions because you’re scared of what’s going to come out if you ever let yourself go there. That’s how I used to feel.

Finally, the emotional backpack got too heavy. The dam had too much pressure on it, and it broke. What I learned is that I can feel emotions. Why had I been running from them for so long? Why have I been trying to protect myself from that? They came and they went.

When I opened myself up to a full range of emotions, my life also opened up. There were so many things that I was able to experience because I was willing to have a bigger life, because I was willing to have a wider range of emotion!

We often get stuck in emotional ruts because we don’t think we have any choice. We think this is just how it has to be, and we just wake up feeling the same way day, after day after day. We think to ourself, “I get so tired of feeling this way,” but we think we don’t have a choice. We think this is just how we feel.

I want to share with you today how I learned to really overcome that feeling of being emotionally bankrupt, and really embrace the full range of human emotions on both spectrums, good and bad.

When I just opened myself up to it my life exploded. My life opened up in the best way. My life got so broad and beautiful because I was willing to experience life! I was willing to have the human experience of having human emotions that I wasn’t blocking anymore, and that I wasn’t afraid of anymore.

Being open to all of it kept me from staying in this rut of having the same emotions all the time.

If you feel like you’re emotionally bankrupt and you feel like all you ever feel is stressed and anxious, or all you ever feel is down, or all you ever feel is heaviness, you’re not alone. That’s the way I would have described my life several years ago.

Probably nobody else would have known. You learn how to get by and everything seems fine, but I wasn’t really experiencing the fullness of life that I do now. I think this is so common.

I think if you’re at this point in your life where you really want your life to open up, and you want to experience a wide range of life, and a wide range of emotion, you have to be willing to take some risks.

You have to be willing to let the dam break, open yourself up, and go there.

The first thing I had to confront was my past, and I was for sure that I had to think the way I thought about my past. I believed there was no other option than to have these heavy emotions about my past.

I learned that you don’t have to continue to have the same thoughts about your past that you’ve always had. You can re-imagine your past. I teach my clients how to do this all the time. It’s the most magical thing!

You think you know all the lessons from your past, or how you’re supposed to feel about your past, but if you’re willing to loosen your grip on that and you’re willing to reimagine that, you can totally change it. It’s the same exact process for how you just decide what kind of emotional life you want.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank. It doesn’t matter how big your house is or how many nice cars you have. If you don’t learn to manage your emotional life, if you don’t learn to build emotional wealth, none of that will matter because none of that makes us happy.

None of that brings contentment.

None of that is fulfilling or meaningful.

If you don’t learn how to create your own emotional experience that you enjoy, which only you can create, then you’ll live in emotional poverty no matter what you have on the outside

Stop delegating your emotions to other people and things.

Stop delegating your emotions to the past.

Stop delegating your emotions to what your spouse did.

Stop delegating your emotions to your children.

Stop delegating your emotional life to that coworker that makes you crazy.

You have agency. You have the ability to create for yourself whatever you want.

No matter what they’re all doing out there, the reason you have the emotional experience that you have is because you are creating it for yourself. How do you create it? You create it with your thoughts.

When you get in a rut with your thinking, you also get in a rut with your emotions. Be on to yourself. You think the same things all the time.

My life is stressful.

The world is crazy.

They won’t listen.

I’m overwhelmed.

I’m stuck.

Thinking the same thing all the time creates a thinking rut, which creates an emotional rut.

I know you don’t think you have any choice. You just always feel that way. You do have a choice, and it’s important because the choice you make here is what is going to give you the result in your life.

I joined a gym about four years ago and they do things in that gym that I’ve never done before. Hard things, like lifting barbells and doing certain weightlifting things, and certain gymnastics moves that I knew as a kid but hadn’t done as an adult.

I’ve come a long, long way, but yesterday we were doing this move and I was really scared about it. I just kept thinking the whole time, I’m not going to be able to do this. This is too heavy. I’m not going to be able to do this. I felt afraid.

So, as you do when you feel that way, I got up to the bar and I lifted it up and I got it about half way, and I dropped it. My coach came over to me and said, “Edie, you’re strong enough to do this. The reason you’re not doing it is because of what’s going on in your head. You’re just not committing to it. You’re not going all in.”

The reason stretching ourselves in different areas of life is so good for us is because, on the other side of that, I might get to feel the amazing emotion of, “I did it you guys.” It causes a broadening, that sort of opening up of your heart, and you may get to feel that amazing emotion. That’s possible.

But also, if I take the risk of doing it, I might fail again. So on the other side of that is UGH. We’re scared to feel the ugh, so we won’t do the thing that might let us experience the I did it!

I just decided, okay, I can do this. I borrowed my coach’s belief. He thinks I can do this. He thinks I’m strong enough. I go up to the bar and I’m going to give it all I’ve got. If I can’t do it, fine, it’ll fall where it may.

I did it! That experience has been an emotional high for me for the past couple of days. I did something really hard, and I’ve worked for the last four years to be able to do it. I stepped up to the bar and I did it.

That kind of experience is available to us if we’re willing to get out of our comfort zones and make ourselves uncomfortable. If you want to experience life in the way you’re currently not experiencing it, you’ve got to do things that you currently aren’t doing.

That range of emotion the pursuing of something that’s hard is really what gives us meaning. We can stay in our little narrow range of life and emotion, and thinking, and stay in the same little rut or we can just decide, “I’m going to take a chance. I’m going to do this. I’m willing to feel really bad in order that it might be so cool!”

The first thing you have to do is you have to realize it’s on you. Your emotional experience of life is on you.

That heaviness that I carried around for years, I carried it around because I kept thinking to myself, “Wow, I’ve had a hard life. My past has been difficult. Wow. Things like this always happen to me.” That thinking kept me stuck in this emotional pattern that was not healthy.

Are you stuck in an emotional pattern that’s not good for you where you just assume that you have to think and feel a certain way? You don’t.

You can create what you want to create for yourself in your emotional life.

Think of three emotions that you really love feeling.

I love being excited so I create a lot of excitement for myself in my life! One of the ways I do that is just with my routines. I love my morning routine! I love my evening routine! I get excited when it’s bedtime because I know I’m going to listen to that little meditation app, and I’m going to read a certain thing, and I’m going to take a hot bath. I just have this routine that gets me excited. I create that for myself!

Same thing in the morning. I get really excited to get up in the morning because I love my morning routine. These routines that I create for myself help me generate excitement about my life.

If you have an emotion that you want to feel, ask yourself,

How can I create that for myself?

What can I think that helps me create that emotion?

How can I design my life in a way that helps me create that emotion?

I also love feeling inspired, so I hang around with people that inspire me. I think thoughts that are inspiring. I set my life up in such a way that I can feel inspired by what I think about.

Feeling inspired doesn’t come from thinking about how hard my past was or thinking about how hard life is. That doesn’t help me feel inspired. I have to decide, how do I want to think so that I can feel inspired?

The third emotion that I love feeling is love. It’s my favorite! I am maybe addicted to generating love in every situation. I go into a situation and I think to myself, how can I generate the feeling of love for this person? How can I think about them in such a way that it helps me understand them and be compassionate for them and love them?

How can I generate more love in my parenting?

How can I generate more love in my marriage?

What do I need to think about my spouse in order to generate love?

I generate so much love for myself in my life and it’s so intoxicating. If you want to feel more love, you have to create it for yourself by the way you think about the people in your life, and by the way you think about your life.

You want to love your life more? That’s on you. You can just decide that you’re going to think of all the ways you love your life.

Maybe you need to work on how you think about your job. Maybe you have a terrible attitude about your job and you always feel a certain way when you go into your job. You can stop doing that and create for yourself the emotions that you want to create for your job.

You can do this in every area of your life and it’s so empowering!

You have to practice.

You know why I’m so good at generating love? Because I think about it all the time. I practice it.

How can you take responsibility for yourself and for the life that you’re creating, and for the emotions that you’re generating for yourself? Just decide and then practice!

I want to feel more excitement.

I want to feel inspired.

I want to feel more love.

What do I need to think in order to do that?

I teach so much about this in my coaching program, Life Mentoring School! I love watching my students make magic by deciding what emotions they want to create and what kind of life they want to make for themselves and their family.

It’s such an awesome place so it you’re not on our waiting list, go jump on it here!

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!

Stevie took me to out west for my birthday this year, and we went hiking in Zion National Park. It’s an amazing place. You totally should go.

We have been in the process of adopting Thomas, our little eight-year-old Tom Sawyer, and just the day-to-day of it can sometimes feel overwhelming. He’s dealing with a lot of issues and we’re trying to help him process through that, plus everything else in normal life. I felt like Stevie and I needed to get away.

I wanted to do this one certain hike. If you look up Zion National Park, you probably will see the shot of Observation Point. That was the hike I wanted to do, but in order to do that hike, you have to drive all the way through the park, exit out the other side of the park, and then enter, from the East side.

We had rented a car, and when we got out of the park, we started to notice the roads were not very good. We drove a little further and it was starting to be covered in snow. We were in a four-wheel drive, so we thought we’d be all right.

By the time we did the hike, it was amazing by the way and I highly recommend it, it had warmed up quite a bit. A lot of the snow that was on the road was now melted and muddy and slushy.

We got stuck in the worst little mud hole. It was deep, deep rut! Stevie would try to go really fast and couldn’t get out. He would try going a different route and couldn’t get out.

Of course, any of you other wives out there like to tell your husbands how they should navigate in the mountains, in the muddy snow? That’s what I was doing!

I bet we tried 20 different times to get out before were successful. You know how when you’re in a deep rut like that, your tires just keep finding the same groove? It felt like no matter what angle we took, we just found the same groove.

But I’m always looking for object lessons in my life, so I was thinking to myself, this whole trip has been kind of a way for us to get out of a rut. You know how sometimes you get in a rut in your marriage, and you say the same things to each other at the same time of day, and you’re in the same mood. You just need to get out of the confines of your normal life.

What happened to us on that trip is we just saw each other differently. I didn’t realize he was so cute! You’re in a new setting, in new surroundings, and you just start to see your whole life differently. You start to see your relationship differently. It was really amazing.

We have to take ownership for where we are.

We have to own it. It’s so easy to blame. We could say it’s because we’re adopting a child that we got disconnected and in a rut, or it’s because we have a big busy family. It’s so easy to make excuses.

The only way you can get yourself out of a rut is to take ownership for it and say, “Here’s where we are.” Not in a way where you’re beating yourself up, but just in a productive way, where you take ownership.

Once you take ownership of something, you can change it.

If you’re blaming some other person or some other circumstances for your it, you have to wait for them to change in order to get out of your rut. Taking responsibility is really important.

A rut is a well worn path. The same thing that can happen on muddy roads in the mountains, happens in our brains all the time. We form ruts in our brains and they become our default thinking.

Change your thoughts.

You have to recognize that you’re stuck. You feel stuck because you’re back to a thinking pattern that’s not great. You’re in a negative thinking pattern. Your brain has thought this way for so long that it’s really easy for your brain to just keep thinking those same thoughts.

Ruts are really ruts in your thoughts.

It’s really a rut in your brain that’s so easy for us to slip back into. I know that sounds too simple. When we feel stuck and we’re back in this familiar, annoying, negative cycle, we have to decide.

I have the choice to think this way or not.

I have this choice to think this way about my marriage.

I have a choice to think this way about my own life.

I have a choice to think this way about my job.

You get to decide, so be willing to at least entertain the idea that this is a rut of thinking. You’re in a thinking rut, and it will be a lot easier for you to change it when you acknowledge you have agency over this. This is something you can change.

For you, what is that negative pattern? I’m never going to do the thing that I said I was going to do.

I’m always going to have this self doubt.

I’m always going to be self-sufficient.

I’m always going to struggle with money.

I’m always going to struggle with my weight.

If you find yourself there right now, the amazing thing is that when you change your thoughts you change your feelings. A lot of times when we feel stuck, it’s because we are stuck in our emotions. We won’t allow ourselves to feel what we feel and let the emotions run through us, and so we feel stuck.

When we decide to think differently, we can change the way we feel. It’s within our power to change our feelings just by changing our thoughts. That to me, is magical.

Let’s say you’re in a rut of not exercising and then struggling with energy all day. Then you get into this pattern where then you don’t eat as well. Am I reading anybody’s email? You just get in this pattern. That is a pattern that’s caused by that pattern of thinking. When you change that pattern of thinking, you will have more energy because you will create it for yourself. And so I love this powerful way that we can just change our thoughts and feelings, and then all of the sudden, we’re already beginning to come out of it.

Change your actions.

As the saying goes, doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result, is the definition of insanity. We do this all the time.

We do this in our relationships. We wonder why we feel stagnant or stuck in our relationships, but then we just do the same things day in and day out. We think the same things, we show up in the same way. Then we wonder why we don’t get different results.

If we want to get different results, we can change our actions. A lot of times, changing your thoughts, which will change your feelings, will often motivate better actions. I dare you to just go ahead and change your actions first. Just decide what you want to do and do it. Decide that it’s going to be different than the thing that keeps you in the rut or keeps you stuck.

Change your environment.

This is why I loved this trip so much. This trip was a different environment and a different way of seeing things. Who are we as a couple in this environment? Maybe it’s different than the roles that we often assume at home by default.

Changing your environment can really make a difference.

Maybe you go out for a date night. Maybe you make a habit of hiking together. Maybe, if it’s for your business, you change the way you’re doing it. You change the space that you work in.

Change your state.

Really decide that you don’t want to stay stuck in these patterns. Have you ever had this feeling that you’re just living the same day over and over again? You know why you do that? Because you have the same thoughts over and over and over, which create the same feelings over and over. Then we feel like, “Oh my gosh, this is terrible. I feel stuck. I feel stagnant.”

This is all within our control.

I want to challenge you in all kinds of different ways to ask yourself, how you can change this up? How can you strive for something, like some kind of new goal, or some kind of new thing that you want to try? How can I change my state?

By changing what you’re doing and by changing who you’re around, you will change your state.

Maybe you need somebody fresh in your life. Maybe you need a new friend. Maybe you need to join a program. Hire a coach.

We just closed life mentoring school, but if you’ve never had somebody that you were accountable to, somebody who was your mentor, I highly recommend it. (Click here to get on the waiting list!)

I do it all the time. I just hired somebody to help me with my webinar stuff, and I’m so excited about it! I was feeling really stuck with how I was going to do it, kind of in the same pattern of thinking, “I’ll never get this off the ground. Oh my gosh, this is taking forever. This feels so hard.” I decided to get some help with it, and now I’m really excited about it again.

How can you change the state that you’re in by changing all of these other things and deciding you don’t have to live the same day over and over and over again?

When we’re really living into our gifts, and living into the purpose for which God made us, we don’t get stuck as often. We have this goal, this thing that we’re trying to make better, this thing that we’re working on, and it keeps us from just going into that rut that it’s so easy for us to go into.

We don’t go into those ruts because we have this vision of what our life could be!

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.

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!

The more I learn, the more I read, and the more that I challenge myself to actually do hard things, the more I realize the amazing benefit and meaning that we get from choosing things that are hard or challenging.

Life is hard anyway.

It’s going to be hard either way so choose your hard.

What I’m advocating is that you choose your hard on purpose so that later it can be easier.

What we like to do, and our culture is full of really amazing, fun, tasty ways to do this, is we choose easy now and then we end up with hard later.

What I have been learning is that the more we choose to suffer now, be willing to choose hard in the beginning, so that later on you can reap the benefits of that hard work.

For example, health changes are so hard to make. I’ve been doing CrossFit now for four years. Four years going very faithfully, working hard. I’m learning so much about nutrition, changing the way I eat, working on sleep. Sometimes there are blisters! Not easy!

The alternative is we just do whatever we want. We don’t worry about it. We eat what we want. We don’t move. We stay up all night. We don’t prioritize sleep. Then we have all the health ramifications of that choice in 10 years.

It’s going to be hard then. So choose hard now.

What feels like hard to make choices, better choices, to learn what our body needs and to move how our body needs to move, etc., choosing those sacrifices now, is a lot better than waiting on the hard and the sacrifice of ill health later.

You’re going to sacrifice either way.

You’re either going to sacrifice your health, or you’re going to sacrifice your comfort right now. Choose to have it hard now, and be willing to do the hard thing now, so that you don’t get all the consequences of choosing the easy way later.

This is true in your work life and in your relationships.

Choose to work hard and sacrifice now, get your education or whatever you need to do, so that later on you can set yourself up for being in the place you really want to be. Otherwise, you just do whatever you want now, and you’re sacrificing your dreams. You’re sacrificing your goals.

You are going to sacrifice. It’s going to be hard. The question is, are you going to get what you want at the end of the hard or not?

It’s so tempting to choose the easy way out. We all fall prey to doing this sometimes because it’s easier, and because we can. Then there are consequences to pay.

Even something as simple as parking farther out in the lot. I’ve just trained myself now to park far out and walk a few extra steps. I remember a time in my life where I always wanted to get the closest spot. I didn’t want to have to walk forever. But I trained myself to park farther to walk farther, choosing something that’s a little harder now for a benefit later.

There’s a million ways you can do this in your everyday life.

How can you choose something that’s just a little harder now for what you really want ultimately. Can you sacrifice what you want instantly for what you want ultimately?

1. See it as part of a bigger picture.

I remember when I first started working on my past, it felt so daunting, so hard. I came into adulthood with some victim mentality, resentment, and some beliefs about myself, and about the past, that were not helping me. I was making my life way harder than it needed to be. When I started writing my book and writing things down, it felt especially daunting.

What I began to see is if I stepped back and I looked at the big picture of things, I could see it differently. When you’re looking at something and you’re right up on it, it’s hard for you to get perspective. I kind of stepped back and looked, and what I found really surprised me.

I found that my brain had been focusing on everything that was negative, but there were so many amazing things. There were blessings everywhere I turned in my childhood. There were people who loved on me. There were experiences that I wouldn’t trade for the world. There were ways to look at it that brought me so much joy and laughter when I finally allowed myself to see it in a different way.

A lot of times we hold on to this story that we’re telling ourselves about this hard thing. We’re really tied to the story. I was so tied to the story that my childhood was hard, and that I was fatherless, and I didn’t get what I needed.

When I let my grip up on that story, and I was willing to see it in a different way, I realized I was given such an amazing blessing in my childhood. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I had an amazing, priceless, very difficult childhood, that caused me to grow into the person I am.

If you’re willing to see whatever you’re going through as part of a bigger picture, when the way you see it changes, the way you feel about it will change.

Loosen up your grip on the story you’re telling yourself about this thing. Be willing to reinvent your story.

I teach my clients in life mentoring school to go on a treasure hunt in their past. I want you to go on a treasure hunt in that hard thing, that thing in your life that you feel is so difficult and challenging. If you open up your heart and mind to it, you will see everything there that is beneficial, everything that has been good for you, that has changed you and made you into the person that you are today.

2. Set your intention to grow from the challenge.

Just decide that this is going to be for your benefit and growth. Just decide it. I love reminding myself God is for me.

He loves me.

He’s for me.

Everything in my life he does, and he allows, because he loves me and he’s for me.

I want to begin to see it that way too. I want to set my intention that no matter what happens in my life, I’m going to grow and develop from it. I want it to make me stronger and more resilient.

You’ll notice the more you begin to see challenge and hardship and sacrifice and suffering through these eyes, the easier it gets. I promise you. Doing this intentionally for the past several years, I find that not very many things feel that hard now.

I’ve trained myself to see hard things as just another way to grow, another way to change, another way to become more resilient, to become stronger, to become the person I was actually created to be.

When you start seeing things like this, it’s almost as if, instead of resisting the hard thing, you just start to welcome it. You embrace it.

Bring it because I’m going to grow from this!

This is going to change me!

This is going to make me stronger!

This is going to make me more resilient!

I’ve found this the most challenging in the last couple of years with Thomas, because he can be a very high spirited little mustang to deal with. When we first brought him into our home, I would find myself at odds with him a lot of the time. I would think to myself, “I know I’m better than this. I know surely I can outsmart him, and I can figure out a way to motivate him and encourage him. This is so hard!”

A couple of mornings ago he had a full on meltdown, said he wasn’t going to school, laid right there by the door, and hollered and kicked. In times past he and I would have gone back and forth about it. “You’ve to get in the car!” “No, I’m not!” 

But I’ve changed my attitude about him. I’ve started looking for ways that he’s funny and adventurous and challenging. I’ve started asking myself, “Can you rise to the challenge?”

I decided to have a kind of playful attitude. He was melting down, and I just got into the car and drove down the driveway, like I was driving off. He watched me for a few seconds and the he started to chase me. I started going a little faster and then he started laughing! We raced to the end of the road and he got all of his frustration out and we had a great rest of the morning.

You can continue to see this relationship, this job, this struggle that you have, as a struggle, and you can just war against it, or you can ask yourself, “How can it change and grow me? How can I see it differently? How can I approach it differently? How can I not be angry in the morning and just decide that it’s all okay?!”

I don’t know if I’m winning any parenting awards, but what I want to tell you is let the hard things do their work on us. This is our curriculum. Thomas is currently my curriculum. I think it’s sometimes way more about how it’s changing and growing me, than how it’s changing and growing him.

3. Seek like minded people to be in community with you when you’re doing hard things.

This is true for all the times, but especially when you’re in hard seasons.

It’s so much easier together. It’s so much easier when we remind ourselves that there are other people in this with us. I’t easier when there are other people going through hard things, and even way worse things, but we can be there for each other and support each other and speak words of life over each other.

I just love that concept of being willing to show up for each other. Sometimes I feel like we’re so busy critiquing each other, and comparing ourselves to each other, and judging each other, and resenting each other, that we forget everybody’s fighting a hard battle and we need each other.

If you don’t feel like you have the community that you need for your hard thing you’re going through right now, you know how you create it? You show up for other people. You be there for them. You be willing to take the first step. You be willing to create the connection. You be willing to create the community.

At the gym this morning we did a really hard workout, and after we finished, our coach started doing the workout by himself. Now the only reason I made it through it was because I had a partner, and we were pushing each other and doing it togther.

I suggested we all do the last round with him, and all the people who were still there, put their bags down, and did another round to cheer our coach on.

Everything feels easier, and everything feels lighter when we do it together.

I know that life is crazy and hard and we’ve had a crazy year. You’re probaby feeling like, yeah, this has been a hard season. But we make it harder on ourselves when we add on top of that resentment, and making ourselves feel like a victim, and blaming other people, and all the things that we heap on top of it.

Instead of doing that, would we be willing to see it differently? Would we be willing to let it be our curriculum, to let it soften us, to let it change us, and mold us and make us into who we could be?

Would we be willing to seek out community, to be there for other people in their hardship and really support them? Would we willing to be there for each other, to do hard things with each other, to bear one another’s burdens, to rejoice with those who rejoice, but to weep also with those who weep.

I hope you will make it easier on yourself with these three little tips. I hope you’ll reach out to somebody today. There’s somebody in your life today that’s really struggling who could use your touch, your word of encouragement, you cheering them on, you jumping in to do the last round with them.

Your first thought may be that showing up for yourself is selfish. I’m going to prove to you that it’s not selfish. In fact, showing up for yourself is the way we take good care of ourselves so we can take good care of other people.

We are in a season where maybe you just set some goals for yourself. Maybe you decided you wanted to create a new habit or two. Maybe you looked at your life and decided you wanted to see some changes.

We get a little ways along the path of doing that, and we do just fine, but then we lose steam. We have second thoughts. We have some failures. We make those failures mean that maybe we were never supposed to do that thing in the first place. Then we stop showing up for ourselves.

You take care of you.

What I mean by showing up for yourself is that I want you to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life. I want you to realize you have agency over the life you’re creating and for the habits you create or don’t create.

I want you to begin to realize that it’s all you, sister.

The reason this is so important is because if you don’t prioritize showing up for yourself, you will become needy for other people to show up for you.

I hear this all the time. I’ve been asked so many times, why doesn’t such and such support me in my new business? Why didn’t such and such support me on my birthday? We come up with all of these reasons why we think other people should be doing things for us.

The responsibility for somebody to show up for your business is yours. You show up for your business. Nobody else needs to believe then your business but you. And if you begin taking responsibility and agency for it, and cultivating that in yourself, you’ll have enough belief for everybody.

I remember when I first started my business online. I now do life coaching, and I do health coaching with essential oils and supplements. The first time I ever introduced other people to the magic which is essential oils I got lot of negative feedback.

I felt so sorry for myself. “Why can’t people just support me and my business? Why are people mean? I need their support!”

I realized really quickly, thank goodness, that actually I don’t.

I support me. I believe in what I’m doing. I know how they’ve helped me in my life. I’ve studied the literature. I don’t need other people to do that.

If we don’t show up for ourselves, we expect somebody else to show up for us. If I don’t have my own back, then I expect everybody else to have my back. It’s okay if they don’t say nice things actually. I have enough belief for all of us.

I used to have all these issues with my birthday. I felt like everybody always forgot and I needed people to remember! I needed support. I’ve realized that the responsibility lies with me to create the experience for myself that I want on my birthday.

I stopped blaming other people for my crappy birthdays, and I started creating my own magic for my birthday. I love my birthday now. You know why? Because I take responsibility for it. I show up for my birthday. I make sure I have a cake that I want. I make sure if I want to go on a trip, I go on a trip.

Normally what I do on my birthday is host a big event and teach people all kinds of good stuff about how to create the life they want. That sounds like fun for my birthday. I don’t blame other people anymore.

I don’t expect other people to show up for me in a way that I’m not willing to show up for myself.

The reason it’s so important to learn how to train yourself to show up for yourself, is because if you don’t, there will be a void there. Nobody will be showing up for you, right? And then you’ll expect that it should be your husband, or it should be your best friend, or it should be your children, or it should be somebody. No, the person who needs to show up for you is you.

The amazing thing about learning to live this way is it gives you so much freedom then to really, really appreciate it if other people do show up. It puts you in a state of gratitude instead of a state of entitlement of what other people should be doing for you.

It’s our responsibility to take care of ourselves. You’re the one who knows better than anybody what you really want for your birthday, right? Create your own magic. Show up for yourself and stop expecting that other people should do that.

There are a lot of times other people will show up for you, and they’ll emotionally support you, and they’ll have your back. But I want you to find the freedom that comes from doing that for yourself, because the more you are equipped to do that for yourself, the more you’ll be able to do it for other people.

If I go to the gym, you know who brings water for me? I do right? I know exactly how I like my water. I take a big old Yeti, and I fill it up with ice, and I put water in it, and I put my little iodine drops in it. I know how I like my water. I don’t expect anybody else to bring my water to the gym. I don’t get to the gym and say, “Why did nobody bring me water?”

And the cool thing is, I take such a big jug of water to the gym that if somebody else needed water, I could guzzle mine down and still have some leftover to share. But it’s my responsibility.

I want you to start thinking about your life like that.

I want you to start thinking about your relationships like that.

I want you to take care of yourself.

I want you to take good care of yourself so that you’re equipped and filled up and ready to take care of other people.

When you show up for yourself, you create rhythms and routines that will benefit you when times get hard and chaotic.

When you get in the habit of doing this, you will create amazing habits, and rhythms, and routines that serve you well.

I spent night before last taking care of my little eight year old who got a stomach virus in the middle of the night. I loved taking care of him, but it was a weird day. When I got up this morning I felt really exhausted. It would have been so easy this morning to start the day off in the wrong way and in the wrong mood.

But I have a daily ritual. I have a daily routine, and especially a morning routine, that is very nourishing to me. After I went through my morning routine this morning, I was so much calmer and ready to take on the day no matter what.

If you don’t have nourishing routines and rhythms for yourself, you’ll start thinking, “Why isn’t somebody else helping me? Why is it always me? Why is this happening?” Then you’ll end up not taking care of you. You’ll end up taking care of other people, doing what you need to do for the sick child, but you’ll do it with resentment. You’ll do it halfway, you’ll do it with a bad attitude, or you’ll do it and feel sorry for yourself.

I want you to create rhythms for yourself. You take responsibility for the kind of day you want to create, for the kind of person you want to be, so that when things are hard or off-balance or chaotic or not in your normal way you would do things, it gives you that comfort.

I’ve recently really revolutionized my own nighttime routine. I’ve done it as a way of taking care of myself. I’ve done it as a way of showing up for myself instead of expecting that other people will do things for me, or being resentful that they don’t, or feeling sorry for myself that nobody’s taking care of me.

You will enjoy life so much more, because you will learn to depend on you. You will cultivate an amazing relationship with yourself.

Obviously I’m a person who believes so much in connection and community. I love having relationships with other people. It’s really one of my favorite things, but I want you to learn how to cultivate relationship with yourself first. I want you to learn how to show up for yourself first.

I remember when I was first starting my workout program at CrossFit, it was really hard to get in the routine of a new workout. It was hard to make time for it. It’s funny because I would look at my husband and he is like clockwork. Every day he comes home from work, gets on his running clothes, and he goes out and gets his exercise. He comes back and does pushups.

He so faithful to it. No matter what happens, he doesn’t vary from his routine. And don’t you find it sometimes harder harder as women for us to do that because we feel like we’ve got to be more flexible. And I realized there’s something about that that I really appreciate. He takes care of him.

What I’ve realized about my routine is that sometimes it inconveniences other people. Sometimes he has to pick up the slack for me in the mornings. Maybe I have to pick up the slack for him in the afternoons, and that’s okay.

I want you to get in the habit of cultivating a relationship with yourself where you show up for yourself.

If you made a lunch date with a friend, you wouldn’t just willy nilly not show up, right? You would have enough respect for them that you would show up for the date, or at the very least you would call him and let them know what happened. But we cancel stuff for ourselves all the time! We look at our own appointments with ourselves with no regard, with no respect.

I want you to learn how to cultivate this relationship with yourself, where you can trust yourself, where you know that you’re committed to taking care of yourself because you don’t expect other people to do it. I want you to do it with a good attitude, not with resentment.

You don’t want to feel sorry for yourself, but you are committed to that relationship with yourself so that you take good care of yourself, so that you are then equipped to take good care of other people.

You are the one who knows most what you need.

Don’t expect other people to anticipate your needs.

“Well, I wish he just knew what I needed. I wish he just could see into some crystal ball and know what he should have gotten me for this anniversary,” or “I wish my kids just knew that mom need.” No, you know what you need. You take care of you. Nobody is equipped to do it like you are.

When you learn how to do show up for yourself, guess what? You get so much better at doing the same thing for people in your life. You have so much more room. You have such a better attitude about it.

You don’t have this entitlement, or resentment, or bitterness, that other people aren’t showing up for you the way you want. You know why? Because you show up for you. And that is amazing.

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.