living with passion

I think we often feel like we should be chasing happiness. We want to be happier and we just want to feel better. We want to escape a little bit from the stress!

I think it’s our human nature to chase happiness wherever it can be found. Unfortunately the easiest places to find it are not the places we want to spend our lives. I want to share with you why I think chasing happiness is making us miserable.

Happiness is a lie.

The pursuit of happiness is making us miserable because, number one, it’s a lie. When I say happiness, I mean those things that we chase to make us feel better temporarily.

Our brain is hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

We do not want to feel pain, and we will basically do anything to find a little bit of pleasure. In your life that might be you scroll through Facebook, sometimes you have a chocolate chip cookie, you go online and shop, or you have things that you shouldn’t have.

Online shopping was always my buffer of choice. It could be even worse than shopping or worse than food, maybe you drink too much or smoke too much.

You’re seeking pleasure.

You’re seeking happiness.

You’re seeking ANYTHING to help you feel better.

Often when we do that, in the end it’s worse, because what we’re choosing is instant gratification. We all have buffers, there’s no shame in it, but recognizing them can be really helpful. Many times when we’re chasing this sort of temporary feel better and temporary happiness, what we’re forsaking in the process is true, deep, abiding, joy and meaning.

When we’re chasing this instant gratification, the thing that we’re trading for it is the actual life we want to live. We almost never get there by food, or money or status or drink or whatever else. We’re chasing cheap happiness, and it’s a lie.

We should only feel good feelings?

I’ve seen what we all do as a culture, and what I’ve done myself when I have been in periods of my life when I feel like I should always feel good, and that I should always be happy. We see other people and we think, “She’s always happy. I wish my life could be like hers.” 

I’m having a pretty good day today. I went to the gym, I slept well, there’s no huge crisis. But yesterday I had a crummy day, I felt terrible.

The day before yesterday, I dropped my baby off to college. I took her from this tiny little secluded town where we live in East Tennessee, and I dropped her off in downtown Pittsburgh. As we were hugging each other before my husband and I left to head back home, she said, “Mom, I’m terrified.” It basically took me until this morning to recover.

If you look at my circumstances, I have everything I could ever wish for in a way, and yet I still have awful feelings, sad days, and days where I’m disappointed. One of the KEYS to life, is allowing yourself to have days like that, allowing yourself to feel what you feel, to buffer it away, to not try to make it better for some TEMPORARY happiness.

Allow bad days to do their work in your life.

They will become the fuel that you use to create the life you want. Buffering away, hiding from, numbing, and running from negative emotion is one of the most toxic things we can do. We need to stop buying the lie, and maybe even some of the pills out there that they say will make you happy all the time.

We get so much further in our lives, when we accept the fact that there’s going to be about half negative and about half positive.

Life is going to be half beautiful and half brutal. It’s going to be so much wonderful and so much heartache, because we’re human

Your life is not that way because your doing anything wrong. We’ve just bought into a very sinister lie, and it sneaks in, and we don’t realize that we’re buying into it.

We choose what is easy

I want you to think about the life of Christ. His best day was also kind of his worst day. It was the day that he gave his life, that he sacrificed everything willingly, in order to bear the burdens of the world. That event gave, not only his life, but every life after it so much meaning.

We often choose a kind of worldly happiness and think everything should go well for us all the time. That’s just not what it is to be human.

If 2020, hasn’t taken away all your gumption and hasn’t beaten you within an inch of your life, there will be something coming that will. How we prop ourselves up against that, and how we infuse ourselves with the sort of courage and strength to get through that, is NOT to seek temporary happiness.

We need to choose true deep meaning, and that almost always comes from heartache, from trial, from suffering, from willingly taking on things that are hard, things that temporarily don’t make us happy, and willingly doing that for ourselves and for our family.

We must choose to willingly bear a heavy load for ourselves and for the people we love.

If you’ve read Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, this is rule number seven. It’s my favorite rule.

Choose what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

Often our culture tells us, “You just need to be happy! Do whatever it takes to be happy!” That lie is not serving us well. When we do that, it leaves us empty, seeking relief wherever it can be found, wondering what our life is all about.

There is something better than happy!

If you resonated with any of that, you are going to love the class I’m teaching next week! On Wednesday, September 2nd, at Noon EST I will be doing a live webinar called:

THE HAPPINESS MYTH: Why Happiness is Overrated & The ONE Thing We REALLY NEED Instead!

I would love to have you join me! You can register here!

We’re going to defeat all these myths about happiness and talk about how to take the steps in your life that will bring true meaning and joy instead. I have been pouring my heart and soul into it and I can’t wait to share it with you!

I’ve been talking a lot the past few weeks about purpose. I took a survey and asked my community what the thing is that they struggle with most? So many of you said,

I just don’t know what I want.

I’m not sure why I feel aimless, why I don’t feel like I have a purpose.

If those statements feel like I’m reading your email, or if you feel like you’re in transition and you don’t know what to do next,  I’m going to share three ways that you can know. 

One of my most favorite and terrible transitions in life was when I gave up my job as a family doctor, and came home to be more available for my family. I even homeschooled my kids. If you could have witnessed that part of my life, it would have been very entertaining!

I didn’t know what people did who stayed home. I felt like I needed to treat staying home like a job that I was striving hard to do better in. It’s hard for me to get away from that mindset because that’s the mindset that I grew up with. I came from nothing, poverty and alcoholism, and my way out of that was to achieve, achieve, achieve!

Achieving eventually ran me into the ground. I don’t recommend it, but it’s just my default. So when I came home, I just set it up like a job. One of my jobs was to learn how to bake bread. I decided that people who stay home should make homemade bread. I bought a bread book, and I bought a special pan, and I started making bread.

I did it with all the gusto I could muster! I had been so used to defining myself by my job that, despite the fact that I was making a beautiful loaf of boule artisan bread most days, I got to a point in my life where I was not fulfilled. I didn’t feel like my life was purposeful or meaningful. Actually all I’d done was gained 10 pounds!

That was the beginning for me of realizing that there was never going to be anything external that was going to give me what I was looking for.

God created you. He gives you all the purpose and value you’re ever going to have, and until you start believing that, you’re going to search for it everywhere else.

You’re going to want your job to give it to you, and jobs are terrible at giving it to you. You’re going to want your family and your marriage and your kids to give it to you. Then your kids are going to go away. You’re going to look for it in all the wrong places.

Stop hating where you are.

The scripture says as a man thinks in his heart so is he. My entire coaching program is based on the principle that if you want to change your life, you first have to change your brain and your thoughts.

Another scripture I love is Romans 8:28 that says be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We won’t be transformed by changing our habits. We won’t be transformed by getting a new job or new circumstances. You are transformed by the renewing of your mind.

It’s really important what you think about all the time.

Some of you spend 99% of your time hating where you are. You think about it all the time. You tell everybody how you hate where you are. The more you think about it, the madder you get. Then you resent where you are, and you resent the spouse you’re with, and you resent the job you have, and then you talk about it some more. You give it too much time and energy.

If you spend 99% of your time and energy thinking about how much you hate your situation you’re going to get to keep it, because that’s what you’re spending all your time and energy thinking on.

The first step in changing where you are, or deciding where you want to be, is to stop hating where you are.

Stop giving so much energy to it. I think about many times in my own life, when I’ve had to learn to appreciate and love where I was before I could make any change. I believe that’s true wherever you are.

Wherever you are right now is exactly where you want to be. How do I know? Because that’s where you are. There’s some part of your brain that likes being there, because you stay there. You have to own that it’s not anybody else’s fault.

It’s not the government’s fault.

It’s not your dad’s fault.

It’s not your mom’s fault.

It’s not your spouse’s fault.

It’s not your kid’s fault.

Where you are, like it or not, is a result of what you think about.

Those thoughts give you feelings, and you take action from those feelings, and those actions becomes your life. You have chosen this in some way. Here’s the good news. If you accept responsibility that where you are is, in some way serving you, and is in some way where you have chosen to be, then you have agency over it.

Now you can decide that you’re going to stop giving it so much energy. You can decide that you’re going to stop thinking about how much you hate being where you are.

Stop giving it so much air time.

You get to decide what you think on. The scripture says whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report, think on these things. Notice it doesn’t say do these things. It says THINK on these things. If you meditate on these things, that will become who you are.

The opposite of that is also true. If you don’t like where you are, it’s a result of what you’ve been focusing on and thinking about. Stop giving so much energy and emotion to hating it.

Start deciding where you want to go.

About 10 years ago I got to that point, that most of us get to in our marriage, where everything was driving me crazy. I started to sort of brainstorm everything I didn’t like about how Stevie did things and about how things were between us.

 I want you to realize when you get to that point in your job or your relationship, you get to decide what that means. It doesn’t have to mean, “Oh my gosh, this is terrible. It’s all over.” It can mean, “Oh my goodness, this is going to be an amazing opportunity for me to grow.”

I started deciding how I wanted to think and feel about my husband. I decided on purpose.

I love him.

I love these things about him.

I want to be connected to him.

I want to create an amazing life together.

I just started deciding what I wanted in my relationship, and how I wanted to think and about him.

This is so powerful, because you can do this with anything! It’s so powerful when you do it in a relationship, and it’s so powerful when you do it for your own life. You just decide. Nobody has to give you permission. The other person doesn’t even have to give you permission.

Deciding sometimes feels like a fraud because it doesn’t feel true yet. I decided ahead of time how I wanted to think and feel about my spouse, and I practiced thinking and feeling that for about six months.

At the end of those six months, I don’t know if he changed, or if it was just the way I decided to change how I looked at it, but things changed! The exact same thing is true for your life.

When you don’t know what you want to do, when you don’t know what your purpose is, when you feel aimless, just decide.

Trust that down deep, you do know what you want. You want a life that’s fulfilling and purposeful, so think about that instead of how much you hate your life.

Don’t think, “I feel aimless. I don’t have any meaning. My life has no purpose. I don’t know who I am without these kids here.”

Decide what you want to think instead, and practice thinking it. It’s just like faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. We don’t see any evidence, necessarily, that the Kingdom of God is here on earth, or that Heaven will be our home. You place your faith in something you can’t see.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.~ Wayne Dyer

When you decide ahead of time with intention how you want to think about your life, and you practice that belief, it’s a very powerful thing.

Start living from that place.

What does someone who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are living in their full purpose, that they have answered the calling of God on their life, and that they are living exactly the life they were created to live, show up in the world?

What do they talk about?

What do they think about?

How do they relate to other people?

What’s their general conversation like?

Start showing up that way to your own life!

You will witness the power that lies within you to create whatever life you want to create.

You decide how you want to show up in your marriage. You decide how you want to show up to your family. You decide how you want to show up to your business. How would a person who was like this or believed this, show up? You start showing up that way.

What you’ll notice in six months or a year or two years or five years, is that you became the person that you thought yourself into.

You have to decide this is the way you think and feel about your life, and then you can show up to the world that way and watch the magic that happens. It seriously is amazing!

If you’ve been telling yourself that you don’t know what you want, that’s a lie. You do know what you want. You just have to decide what it is.

When you decide on purpose, and you begin to believe the things that you actually want, and you live from the place you want to be, pretty soon it becomes your reality.

Get your free Live Your Purpose Guide here!

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Everyone talks about having clear goals, but you have no ideas what your goals should even be. People tell you to follow your dreams, but you just want to want something. What if I told you it doesn’t have to be that hard?

I know exactly what it’s like to feel a little lost and unsure about my goals in life.

In fact, when I first gave up my medical practice in 2007, I felt paralyzed by the possibilities in front of me. For so long, I had defined my meaning and purpose by my job and here I was at home for the first time, trying to find my way through dishes and meals and laundry and soccer games.

I felt so lost. I’ve had that happen many times since, when circumstances change and my life feels a little aimless. If you find yourself struggling about goals and purpose, I bet you’re telling yourself these three lies.

You don’t know what your purpose is.

The first lie you’re believing about your purpose is that you don’t know what it is. You think you don’t know what it is, or even what you want it to be. We have gotten to the point where we don’t really even trust ourselves. We don’t have the inner sense that we really do know.

Of course you know. Let me remind you that God made you for a purpose. You don’t have to actually do anything for that to be true. He made you with meaning, and value, and for a purpose, and he loves you. That is enough.

I know you think, “Well, I know all that, but that doesn’t really answer the question!”

Stop searching for your purpose.

Stop believing that you don’t really have a purpose.

Stop being confused about what your purpose is.

Once you stop that, and you start believing that he loves you, and he made you for a reason, it changes things. You stop looking for your purpose everywhere else.

Living your purpose is an inside job.

Nobody else can give it to you. No job can give it to you, in fact jobs are terrible at giving it to you. Your family is terrible at giving it to you. You already have it! I want you to begin really believing everything about the meaning and purpose of your life was already given to you by God when he created you.

You can’t be more purposeful, or be more meaningful, or have more purpose than God already gave you. Your tank is full!

The reason you don’t believe that is, you have a misguided understanding of what purpose actually is, and what it actually means, just like I did.

God did all the work. He created you and you’re fearfully and wonderfully made. He created you so unique, and he loves you. His purposes are alive and well in you. Just because you don’t recognize that, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Most of us aren’t living as if we believe it. We’re not living as if we recognize what he already has given us. Purpose is this amazing, incredible, beautiful gift, and we don’t even know it’s there so we don’t acknowledge it, we don’t access it, we’re not thankful for it, and we don’t utilize it.

We have to wake up to the fact that purpose is within us and we’re already living it out. From that place, we can begin to explore all the other things that are true about calling, and vocation, and how God made us special, and how he has certain gifts he wants us to use. 

When you become aware of what he’s already given you, magic starts to happen! You’re not striving and grasping, trying to do something to be more purposeful.

He’s already given you all the value, and all the meaning, and all the purpose you will ever have. Isn’t that such good news? You don’t have to find it, you just have to start living it!

When you live as if you are valued and loved and adored, full of purpose and meaning, and that what you’re already doing matters, it changes everything. You don’t live unsure and full of doubt like you do when you believe you don’t know what your purpose is.

My purpose is not as important as hers.

Comparing yourself with others is the most toxic thing you can do. Not only does comparison often cause us to despise the gift of God in someone else, it causes us to despise it in ourselves. To think that we’re less than, to think that whatever we’re doing is not as important, to think that whatever we’re doing doesn’t matter or have meaning, or that it doesn’t have purpose is a lie.

That lie will keep you from actually living as if you have an amazing gift that God has given you, one that you can share with the world. It will keep you stuck.

It often leads us to this weird place of judgment, where we’re so critical and so negative of everyone else. The thing that will kill your sense of meaning and sense of purpose faster than anything, is comparing yourself to somebody else, and assuming that whatever she’s doing is better than what you’re doing. It isn’t better.

We all go through different stages. I remember the time in my life when I was homeschooling my girls. I have a medical degree, and I felt like God had gifted me in that area, and I had to fight the tendency to think, “How I’m using my gifts isn’t as important as the doctor down the street who is still working in her job, or the teacher who actually knows what she’s doing when homeschooling.”

I had to fight the temptation to say that period of time wasn’t purposeful or valuable. It was the most valuable. It didn’t look very important from the outside. As a matter of fact, a lot of people said, “Why are you wasting your gifts?”

You have to fight for yourself, and for whatever phase of life you’re in. Realize that it’s usually in those seemingly unimportant times when so many of the qualities God wants to be cultivated in your heart are cultivated.

Don’t despise those periods of downtime, or those periods of transition, or those periods when you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, when you feel like what you’re doing is less than.

My purpose is OUT THERE somewhere.

The third lie we all believe is that our purpose is tied up in something external. We think it’s tied to the job we do, the kind of house we live in, to our marriage, or to our kids. The problem with tying it to external things is they’re always changing.

If you have your purpose tied up in your house, what about when your house burns down like mine did 10 years ago? If you have it tied up in your marriage, what about when that falls apart? If you have it tied up in your kids, what about when your kids go astray?

Then you lose your way because you were tying your purpose to something external. It’s not external. There’s no job, no marriage, no child that’s going to give you meaning and purpose. It’s not fair to place the responsibility there either.

You have to accept that God has already given you all the meaning, and purpose, and value you ever will have. Your job is to become aware of it, to cultivate it, and to live as if that’s all true.

Something magic will happen in your heart, and you will step into what you’ve been squandering! You just have to become aware of it and begin living from there.

I hope you will really begin to live as if that’s all true, because it is. It will change how you show up for yourself. It will change how you show up in your life. It will change how you show up for the people in your life. It will give you so much freedom!

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I have a free download available that goes more in depth about your purpose. It’s called the What’s Your Purpose Guide, and you can grab that freebie here!

My journey with self-discipline has been a rocky road. I like to do whatever’s fun. I find that people that have my type of personality do not say no to much. If you want to make a stop at Krispy Kreme, yes! You want to take the boat and go cliff jumping? Yes! I’m all in.

I tend to be a person who just goes a hundred miles an hour at whatever I can do, and I love that in a way. I feel like it makes me fun and I love being that person! Who wants to be the person who says, “I don’t eat sugar?” I never want to be that person, so self discipline for me has been a journey.

I also do have a part of my personality that’s very driven. I have a lot of goals! There’s a part of me that really wants to be self disciplined and there’s part of my personality that just wants to stop at Krispy Kreme when the HOT sign is on!

During the lockdown, my goal was to learn how to make sourdough like a boss, and I did. I made a lot of sourdough bread! It’s one of the most amazing processes I’ve ever learned. I became a student. I studied for hours. I made bad loaves of bread. I made more bread. It was so good. There’s that part of me that says, “I’m going to use this time so wisely.” Then there’s the other part of me eating sourdough bread, gaining seven pounds!

I turned 50 this year. I still have it in my heart that I’m going to get to my strongest, healthiest body. I still believe this is possible, and I’m able to still believe because I’ve learned that I’m not going to get there by being mean to myself.

I think the reason a lot of us give up is because we tried to discipline ourselves by beating ourselves up and we’re tired of treating ourselves like that every time we fall off the wagon. What if we looked at our falling off the wagon as an opportunity to learn something? What if we looked at it and said, “I’m a lot closer than I was before!”

You can’t bully yourself into being more disciplined.

You’ll do it for a little while and then you won’t do it. I find that baby steps and a gentler approach, and really training your mind to see things differently, works much better.

This is important because we have this God given desire in us to be our best for ourselves and our family. Often, instead of using the desire to actually do the thing or be that person or accomplish the goal, we use the desire for donuts, or for scrolling social media, or for maybe drinking too much, or shopping online.

We only have a certain amount of desire and we squander it for basically nothing.

As soon as I see myself letting myself go, I’m gentle with myself. I say, “Of course you ate sourdough bread every day because look what you’ve been through. Look at all the ways the world has changed and look at what’s going on. Of course you did!” I kind of give myself a little bit of an, “It’s all right, mama.” Then I make a plan.

We just keep trying. The point is not giving up!

Remind yourself of what you really want, instead of what you want right now. This is so important. I’m not perfect at it by any stretch, I just keep trying and failing sometimes, and trying again, and trying a different approach.

Use your experience to learn more about yourself instead of using your experience to beat yourself up.

 Who do you want to be?

Figure out for yourself what it is you want to do or change and step into it. Start talking about who you are instead of what you’re doing.

I really wanted to get in shape. I had been running by myself and it was hard on my body and it was wearing out my joints and I wanted to do something different, so I joined a Crossfit gym. When I first joined, I felt like I couldn’t do the things that these other people could do. I remember when I made the mindset shift from, “I’m trying to exercise more.” to “I do CrossFit.” Do you see the difference? Do you see how you just step into it?

That subtle, but really important shift could help you with whatever you’re trying to do. I want you to think for yourself, in your life, what is it you’re trying to stop or start? Now step into being the person that does those things.

Set yourself up for success

One of the things that really helped me when I was first starting is that they would post the workout the night before. I got into the habit of checking the workout, because then in my mind, I know what we’re going to do and I kind of gear up for it.

Then I set myself up for success by planning what I wear, and what time I’ll get up so I can work for a couple of hours, then I’ll head to the gym. It just became a part of my routine. You might set up some reminders on your phone until you develop good habits.

Set yourself up to become the person you’re trying to become.

 What would the person who just lost 10 pounds and is feeding themselves in a healthy way and getting good exercise do? What would they eat? How would they think about what they’re doing?

Here’s an even better question. How would they think about messing up? What do they make it mean? Would they make it mean, “I’ve blown it. So forget it all!” No, the person we want to become would think, “I can’t wait to reset and keep going. I’m really excited about it.”

How you talk to yourself about messing up, how you talk about the thing you’re trying to do in general, and how you set yourself up for success makes a huge difference. Think of how you could set something up, like a small reward, for the new thing that you want to start and the self discipline you want to impose on yourself.

I have all of the energy in the morning. I get up really early and I get so much accomplished, but after eight o’clock at night, I am so done. I can barely function. Just getting the last of the kitchen stuff done is sometimes more than I can even process.

What I have set up is, after I get the kitchen done, then I go take a hot bath. Just that little bit of reward helps me more often than not do what I want to do instead of saying who cares.

Self-discipline gets a bad rap. Self-discipline is taking good care of yourself so that you can take good care of others.

It shouldn’t have a negative connotation and it often does. How can I take really good care of myself, eat what my smart brain tells me I should eat, sleep, get good rest, have enriching relationships?

Changing our mindset about what it means, instead of feeling like it means restriction, is freeing! It doesn’t mean we can’t have what we want. It means we’re getting what we really want instead of what we want right now.

Embrace the discomfort

I think the Marines say embrace the suck. Here’s the thing. It’s going to be hard. You’re not going to want to eat this afternoon what you told yourself you wanted to eat. As much as CrossFit and exercising every day is a huge part of my life, sometimes it’s not easy to get myself there. As much as I love what I do, when it comes time for me to show up for my actual work, I’d rather scroll.

Anticipate that it’s going to be hard.

It’s going to be uncomfortable. You need to know you are not going to want to do it, and do it anyway. Where in your life do you need more of this and how can you build more self discipline into your life without being mean to yourself? How can you reframe it? How can you decide that just because you didn’t keep it up two years ago when you tried it doesn’t mean you’re not going to do it now.

What I always used to tell my patients who were trying to quit smoking is that people who quit smoking quit 11 or 12 times before they really quit. So when you’re on your 10th time trying to start an exercise program, you’re just one or two times away from actually doing it. Don’t give up now!

Self-discipline is really important because it gives us the life we really want, instead of the temporary self-indulgent false pleasure that we want right now. None of us are perfect at this. I for sure, always want to be the person in the backseat going stop at Krispy Kreme, and It’s fine to have Krispy Kreme. It’s just not fine to make it a lifestyle and say, “I blew it and now it doesn’t matter what I do.”

Of course it matters because you’ve got to take good care of yourself so that you can take care of the people who love you and who you love most!

I hope this helps you with some ways to incorporate a little more self discipline into your life. It’s a good thing. It’s a good way to take care of yourself. It’s a good way to take care of the people you love.