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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think of all the things we miss.

Love

Joy

Peace

Longsuffering

Gentleness

Goodness

Self-control

Faith

Meekness

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

1. Pay attention to your thoughts.  

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

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

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

2. Pay attention to who you’re with.

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

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

How are they doing?

What are they feeling?

Make eye contact.

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

3. Pay attention to your body.

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

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

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

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

Decide what are you feeling.

Why are you feeling that?

What thoughts are causing that feeling?

Is that something I want to feel?

Process through it.

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

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

4. Pay attention to your breath.

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

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

Take a few really deep breaths.

Deep breath in through the nose.

Deep breath out through the nose.

Again, deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

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

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

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

The capacity to experience joy is right now.

The capacity to experience peace is now.

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

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

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

I want to be present for myself.

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

Really being present with ourselves is a powerful thing.

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

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

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

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

How to talk to your kids and why it matters.

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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.

How to master your emotions and stop being triggered

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do I really want?

What do I really want this year?

What’s most important to me?

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

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

1. Decide what really matters and write it down

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

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

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

The rocks are the really important things in you life.

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

What is my main priority?

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

What are the things that really, really matter?

Am I living my life as if they matter?

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

What are your big rocks?

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

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

How can you add those to your life first?

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

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

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

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

2. Decide who matters most

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Decide when you will focus

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re going to get restless.

You’re going to want to be distracted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you know you need to write a book.

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

Maybe you’re working on your finances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Powerful Tools to Design Your Life On Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create a vision for your life

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

What is your dream vision for your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Cultivate Healthy Habits

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

“You have uphill dreams and downhill habits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put some things in place make it more fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Keep your promises to yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your dream?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get your mojo back

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

What has happened to my life?

My house is a mess.

I haven’t been to the gym in months.

My eating is off plan.

I’m not sleeping well.

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

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

Start with the end in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect failure instead of running from failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can only control you.

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

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

Get some accountability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t wait to get started!