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How to get out of your RUT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have to take ownership for where we are.

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

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

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

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

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

Change your thoughts.

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

Ruts are really ruts in your thoughts.

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

I have the choice to think this way or not.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m always going to have this self doubt.

I’m always going to be self-sufficient.

I’m always going to struggle with money.

I’m always going to struggle with my weight.

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

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

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

Change your actions.

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

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

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

Change your environment.

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

Changing your environment can really make a difference.

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

Change your state.

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

This is all within our control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to show up for yourself and why you should

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

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

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

You take care of you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want you to take care of yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are the one who knows most what you need.

Don’t expect other people to anticipate your needs.

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

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

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

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.

How to simplify everything in your life with one word

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When I went in this morning to give Stevie a kiss goodbye, I was already thinking, How can I show up with love today? How can I show up in a way that makes him know how much I love and appreciate him? How does Stevie feel loved?” I had five seconds before I had to have Thomas out the door, but lingered . “Good morning, I love you,” sealed with a smooch!

Just that little bit, one second in the morning, could change your whole day. Imagine what accumulating a bunch of days, a bunch of months in a row, or a whole year would do! Imagine your capacity to love!

It’s so easy to think of everyone and everything that needs to change in order for things to be right in our world.

My husband needs to be more attentive, my children need to listen, my coworkers need to be kinder, my mother-in-law needs to stop offending us.

But the truth is, the only thing that needs to change is you, and me. That’s the ONLY thing we can change!

How can I love unconditionally, even in hard situations? How can I see the truth in the criticism and still show up with LOVE?

How can I increase MY ABILITY to love and be loved, by just deciding that that’s what I’m going to do?

I know it’s possible and I know that no one else needs to change. Just you and me.

The question I’m perpetually asking myself is how can I see things differently, better, more clearly.

YOU’RE THE ONE MAMA!

It only takes one emotionally strong and committed human to change everything. Are you strengthening your love muscle, towards your spouse? Towards your children? Towards the ONE person in your life that you are still letting offend you? Take your power back!

There is no greater power on earth than LOVE!

Where can you UP YOUR LOVE GAME?

Love is the one word that will simplify everything in your life, the one word that makes everything better. Love is a skill that we get better at with practice. When you start practicing, you become conscious of it, and you become so aware of how many ways you’re not loving. You realize how much you’re comparing or judging, and how much your expectations of someone is causing you to resent them.

The paradox of this is, when you practice unconditional love, you are the one who gets to feel it!

The more you practice it, not only do you notice that everything in your life gets better and everything in your life is simpler. There’s no drama and there’s no resentment. When you slip into a place of unconditional love, dare I say, it takes away all of the problems!

What I’ve learned the last few years, as I’ve consciously been practicing is; how to realize when I’m not in unconditional love, and how to train myself to go back there. What I notice is that my capacity for love is so much greater than it used to be. My capacity to be kind and patient with everybody is so much greater, but so is my capacity to love myself. My capacity to have patience with myself, and to forgive myself is so much greater.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last year with Thomas. He had a lot of behavior issues, and it was always really easy to slip into anger or think, Things should be different, or his behavior should be different. Instead, I try to practice staying really centered. “What would love do in this situation?”

How does love show up?

When I started practicing this with him, and in every situation asking, How can I show him 100% how loved he is, it changed everything. I have watched so much of his bad behavior just melt away, because unconditional love is pretty irresistible!

The same thing happens with people in your life. The same thing is true for our marriages. Ask yourself in every single situation

How does love show up here?

How does love respond here?

How does love act?

How does love think in this situation?

I feel like everything opens up when we drop our expectations of what everybody else should be doing, and instead focus on the only thing we ever can change, which is us.

How can I really practice unconditional love for myself, for my life, for my work, my marriage, my children, the people that I see in my everyday life?

If you really become aware of it, what you’ll notice when you first start paying attention is that you’re not practicing unconditional love most of the time.

Most of the time you’re comparing yourself to other people. You’re trying to figure out if it’s fair, or if somebody hurt your feelings. You’re really not in a place of unconditional love 95% of the time. This is how it was for me when I first started practicing this and I would have considered myself a very loving and patient person. Then I started paying attention and I noticed how often I wasn’t!

I started practicing!

What would it look like in this very situation to drop the judgment, to drop any weird expectations of other people, to drop my own agenda? What would it look like if I just decided, I’m going to show up with the life changing question, How can I show up with love today?

I really want you to think about this with the people in your life who you’ve had a hard time with. I want you to re-think that whole relationship.

If I’m having a bad day because someone said something or treated me a certain way, I give away all of my power to that person. They can totally set the tone for the whole day for us, because we’ve given away all our power. What if we just decide instead of being influenced by all of that, we are going to feel and give love as our default!

Love is now my default, and feeling and giving love is the way I’m going to operate.

Here’s what will happen, difficult people won’t seem difficult anymore. You’ll see them differently. You’ll understand a little bit why they do what they do. I think it’s why the scripture says you must love your enemies. There’s something that your enemy says that has a little kernel of truth in it. Can we receive that in love, and still show up with love, and not lash back at them?

This practice has changed my life more than anything else. In every single situation. Especially in the hard situations, in the situations where I used to get offended really easily, or make me angry, or hurt my feelings.

I decided, I’m going to take the most powerful stance in the universe. I’m going to take the stance of unconditional love in this situation!

You can give that person the benefit of the doubt, and you can probably see a little bit of why they show up the way they do. Then you can practice how you want to show up!

What relationships in your life do you most need to practice this in? Is it your marriage? Is it your relationship with your children? Is it your relationship with your mom, your dad, your mother-in-law?

Pick the hardest relationship you can think of. How can you decide that you’re going to change the quality of that relationship, without them even knowing it? You’re just going to decide, I want to feel love, so I’m going to show up with love in this relationship. There’s nothing more powerful in the world, and it doesn’t make you weak. Try it!

You have never been in a place of more calm, peace, and power, than when you are operating in unconditional love.

5 Reasons You’re Not Fulfilled in Your Marriage

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Okay mama, grab some coffee and let’s chat about the elephant in the room.

You’re unhappy, unfulfilled, or just in general not satisfied with the current state of your marriage. You’ve been married a good while and though there’s nothing catastrophically wrong, you’re just not happy with where things are. And you’re 98% sure that he needs to change. Make that 100%. He’s not really there for you. He doesn’t listen. He’s emotionally detached. And a bunch of other things. But since this is the most important relationship of your life, maybe it’s worth it to step back and see if there’s something we’re missing. Maybe it’s time to self-examine and self-reflect and see what’s lingering just under the surface. I did this about ten years ago and it has made all the difference.

-1-Unfulfilled in your own life

I think the first reason I was feeling unfulfilled in my marriage is because I was unfulfilled in myself. At the time, I had just quit my job as a family physician and I was lost. So, I took up some bad habits to temporarily make myself feel better. But those temporary dopamine hits that make us forget about the pain or doubt or insecurity or resentment that we’re feeling don’t last. And so, we need another and another. I found myself in debt and though my kids had EVERY cute swimsuit there was to be had, I was still miserable inside. When I began to take responsibility for myself and decide that I wanted more, I began to see that my unfulfillment in life was making me secretly blame my husband.

-2-Unrealistic Expectations

Stevie surprised me for our ten year anniversary with a trip to Atlantis. Everything from how he told me about the surprise to how he treated me while we were gone was magical. But all fairy tales end and a few days later we were back home and I was getting my feelings hurt over something insignificant and the anniversary was over. On that trip, I read The Notebook. (And also UGLY CRIED in the Nassau airport to the degree I have never ugly cried in my life. Stevie was probably mortified.)

As much as I love the book and movie version of The Notebook, life long love doesn’t look like that for very long, if ever. If we’re getting our cues from pop culture, we’re going to be sorely disappointed in marriage.

And then there’s the expectation we get from seeing our friends and family who are married and we begin to wonder why our marriage doesn’t look like that. Then we hear some sermon or podcast about how we should be holding hands and having devotions every day together.

And the list of expectations doesn’t end.

I finally found peace in my marriage when I quit expecting it to be EVERYTHING and just let it be what it was—normal, amazing, exhausting, beautiful, stressful, demanding, life-giving, and everything in between. If we decide to live our lives awake to what’s there and stop buffering the bad away with food and shopping, etc, we usually find that it’s a mix of good and bad. That’s what makes it life and that’s what makes us human. When we expect it to always be blissful, and when it’s not, make that mean that something’s wrong, we make it way harder than it should be. Marriage is hard and amazing. Let it be both.

(When Stevie and I have a fight or misunderstanding, I audibly remind myself that this is the part where it’s hard. It helps me allow the negative feelings, instead of pushing them away.)

-3-Unwritten rules

We all have them, but we don’t often speak about them. If he does this and says this and acts this way, then all is well. My coach calls it the manual. We have a secret manual for the people in our lives and we expect them to follow it, even when we haven’t actually written it all out and given them a printed copy.

What’s your manual for your spouse? What are all those unwritten rules and standards that you are holding him to? And what would it be like to just drop the manual, to stop wanting and wishing and expecting him to be different and just accept him for exactly who he is?

We carry so much resentment towards our husbands because they are not obeying our secret rules and we fail to realize that the resentment we carry poisons US, not them. I feel the resentment and anger in MY OWN BODY, so it is worth it to question the resentment and consciously decide if I want to be holding onto it.

AND? We don’t like it when people have secret rules for us.

We want to be accepted for who we are. But that is the very thing we have trouble giving other people. What if we dropped ALL THE DRAMA and just decided to love? I’ve tried it over and over and over again as I practice being the kind of spouse I want to be and here’s what I can tell you—love is always the best option and YOU GET TO FEEL IT IN YOUR OWN BODY. When you decide to love without condition, you get to experience unconditional love and that, my friends, is what makes the world go ’round.

-4-Unmet Emotional Needs

This one is probably the most important because we’ve been taught that we have emotional needs and that something or someone else is in charge of meeting those needs. If we continue to believe that, we will always be at the mercy of someone else—held hostage emotionally until they give us what we think we need.

What if we met our own emotional needs? What if we began to function as emotional rock stars and paid attention to what we need and gave that to ourselves. We want him to show us love, but are we showing love to ourselves in the way we care for ourselves and talk to ourselves. We want him to BE THERE for us and have our back, but do we have our own back? Are we showing up for ourselves in a meaningful way? We want him to love us just as we are, but WE don’t love ourselves just as we are.

I promise that when I started taking responsibility for my own feelings and emotions, my life changed. No one can hurt my feelings. I hurt my own feelings by letting someone else hijack my thoughts and emotions. And sometimes I want to feel hurt, but at least I acknowledge that I’m choosing it.

Imagine going into a relationship with someone who was confident in themselves, who was not emotionally dependent on others, who took good care of themselves AND good care of those around them? That is what we all want, and the quickest way to get it is to BE IT.

Stop waiting for someone else to change. YOU ARE IT, mama. And who else, but you? You’re amazing and you are fully capable of meeting your own needs. Then, you can head into your relationship fully whole, fully well, without depending on someone else for what you can only give yourself.

-5-Unexamined Story

I think we forget that we are part of a grandest story ever told.

God is writing a story to the world of love and sacrifice and he is using YOUR MARRIAGE to do it. This is so much bigger than you, so much more than your bills and your stress and your squabbles. This is life and death. This is Christ sacrificing for his bride and this is his bride loving him with her whole heart.

There’s also the story that you tell others and yourself about your marriage. Does your story sound something like, “He’s so selfish and he never does anything for me or the kids,” or “I wish for once he appreciated all I do around here.” That used to be my marriage story.

Then I decided that I’m in charge of the story and there’s JUST AS MUCH good to tell as bad. So, I rewrote the story. If you give me half a chance, I’ll tell you all the things I admire about Stevie. I’ll tell you I’ve never met anyone else quite like him. I’ll tell you how he has sacrificed everything for us. Is it true? Yes. And it’s a much better story than the one I have told in the past. And how do you think I show up in my marriage when I’ve been telling that story all day? Powerful, isn’t it, how we can change everything by deciding what story we want to tell about our marriage?

Now, I know some of you are going to get defensive and you’re going to tell me all kinds of things about your spouse or your situation that make it different. And I’m not saying that you should even stay married. Maybe you should have left a long time ago. Maybe there’s abuse and infidelity and all kinds of stuff. But what I’m saying is that if this marriage is here to stay, you might as well be its biggest fan. You might as well give it the intention and prayer and work it deserves.

And you can do that without your spouse ever changing one thing. Want to be more fulfilled in your marriage? That has ALWAYS been your job alone. You being fulfilled is a result of YOUR thoughts and YOUR emotions and only you can think and feel those. It’s always been you. I can’t think of anyone better.

Being unfulfilled is a story you’ve been telling yourself.

Maybe it’s time you told a better story.

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How to hold still and stay in the murky mess of Marriage

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A couple years ago our family was chatting about marriage around the dinner table. When is the right time? How much money should you have saved away? Should you be done with college first? Should you have been in a stable job for a number of months?
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I still remember Stevie’s quick reply to all the questioning. “Well, you just need to decide when you want the real suffering to start, that’s all.”
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I DIE. It’s so true though.
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I hope it’s a lesson my kids have seen Stevie and me live out, even when it’s been less than perfect.
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I’ve learned a lot in twenty years. And I’ve learned that this relationship has been given to us primarily as an instrument of our sanctification, and only secondarily as a way for us to find contentment and fulfillment. The very fact that it feels hard doesn’t mean you’re failing, it may mean God is using marriage to remake you into who He created you to be.
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Hold still. Stay in the murky mess of it and watch for the miracle. More likely than not, it’ll be the miracle in your own heart that will surprise you the most.
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P.S. If you want to read a book about REAL marriage, I 100% recommend @melanieshankle “The Antelope in the Living Room”. Trust me, you need her words in your life.