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Is your past running your life?

October 7, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

Your past could be running your life and you don’t even know it. I have struggled with this literally my whole life, because I had a pretty traumatic past and I let it define me for 44 years. I didn’t know there was a choice for it not to define me honestly, so I just lived in that story all the time.

I actually got to point where I wore it like a badge of honor, but I also was still being a victim to my past. Those patterns from your past form you into who you are.

By the time you’re 35 your patterns and habits and emotional cues and triggers are so well developed, your life basically runs on autopilot.

It’s almost like you’re living your life almost against your will sometimes. You think, “Why do I do that?” Or, “Why am I stuck in this pattern?”

First of all, it’s really hard to recognize that you’re even stuck in a pattern, and then it’s really hard to get out of the pattern. Your body has become so used to reacting and living the way you do, that even when you consciously want to change it, it’s as if your whole entire body, habits, mind, and emotions are all working against you.

There could be this little part of your brain that wants to be different and wants to change.

You don’t want to be a victim to your past.

You don’t want to continue to live in this pattern.

Then all of your body and habits and your mind and your emotions kick in, and it almost feels like you’re trying to stop an oncoming train. It’s really hard to make a change because you’ve got five percent of you that wants it, but you’ve got 95% of you that is so used to living this way!

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ~ Romans 7:15

It’s really is as if you’re living against your will. I think the first step is to recognize you’re doing it, and to recognize why, and to be kind to yourself. I realized that I had this pattern where I would, on purpose, live in my past so I could feel the same as I did. I never wanted to get too far away from it, because it was almost like I was betraying a part of me that was so entrenched if I did.

I would go visit my dad’s graveyard all the time, or I would find some way to continually live there because I thought that’s just what you do. You don’t really have a choice, right?

What that produced in me was a lot of depression, and some anxiety, and some underlying strange dark moodiness. I just thought,”That’s just who I am.”

Here’s what I’ve noticed the last four or five years. I’ve taught myself how to be a different person and that’s not who I am anymore. I no longer struggle with that pattern. I don’t have the same angst, and dark moody weirdness, when I think about my past or when I think about my dad or when I see a copy of my book.

It feels like a miracle, it really does!

It has taken some time, but so often we feel obligated to continue living there, to continue telling ourselves the stories. Your past might have been awful and those things happened. But they happened one time. You keep abusing yourself with the STORY of your past over and over.

Your body thinks it’s protecting you from something that is happening now, and you get into these weird fight or flight cycles. Eventually those cycles are what you’re used to. They become your pattern. I got addicted to adrenaline because I was addicted to fight or flight!

I just kept recreating in my life the inner turmoil of my past. Everything always had to be chaotic. Even when it wasn’t chaotic I’d have to create chaos. When I realized that was optional it was eye opening for me.

It has been so such a huge blessing in my life to get to the point where I don’t have to create chaos to feel normal. I can honestly just enjoy my life, and enjoy being me, and enjoy my past even!

Again, getting to that place took some time and work, but I just want you to know that it’s possible. It starts with being aware of what you’re doing. Most people are living in their past and they don’t even realize that they’re re-creating these internal scenarios.

When your body is stressed is creates this hormonal internal ‘juice’ that makes your emotional experience really memorable. Our bodies get so used to stress juice, that they will create whatever circumstance necessary in order to get back to that comfortable/uncomfortable place that we’re used to.

It took me a long time to do something different. It took me a long time to accept that I was creating this on purpose. I really want you to think about your own life.

Are you re-creating something internally in your life as just a pattern of habit?

Are you re-creating fear?

Are you re-creating rejection?

Are you re-creating stress?

For me it was adrenaline. I became an adrenaline junkie. I totally burned out about six years ago. I sought help, and that’s actually what led me to oils. I didn’t want to do all the things they were telling me I needed to do to heal my body. I had seen what the end of that road looks like in my medical practice, so I started a journey of natural healing and really working on my thoughts.

I realized I was doing this to myself. I kept recreating the internal stressful juice for myself, and I was the one who got to feel it’s effects. No one who hurt me in my past was feeling it, just me.

When you realize you don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, and that you have the option to stop by changing your thoughts, it’s a powerful place to be.

When I would be stressed about my past say 10 years ago, I wasn’t stressed about my past because of my past. My past wasn’t happening. I was stressed about my past because of how I was continuing to think about my it all the time. I was stressed because I was trying to almost recreate the scenario of my past for myself.

There’s some kind of strange comfort that your body finds in doing what’s familiar. Then I realized I don’t have to do that. I can live in the future. I can decide that right now in my life what I want is peace and joy. I want to find passion in my work. I want to serve people. I want to live from a place of unconditional love.

When I began to live from that place, my life literally began to change.

It feels like your thoughts are running on autopilot, and they kind of are, but you have to interrupt them. You get to decide, “Okay we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re not going to keep recreating that for ourselves.”

You get to have the life you want, but the life you’re going to create is what you choose to focus on now.

Are you going to keep focusing on the past, and bringing it back up, and holding onto resentments? Or are you going to decide you want a different future and you don’t want to keep creating the stress juice for yourself?

I promise if I can choose a different future so can you mama!

How to simplify everything in your life with one word

September 30, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 5 Comments

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.

Are you numbing your emotions? 4 ways to get your power back

September 23, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

I love cookies. Like LOVE THEM.

Sometimes, it’s easier to eat cookies than deal with the pile of bills on my desk.

Cookies make procrastinating piles of bills tolerable.

But the piles don’t fix themselves and when I don’t give myself cookies or shopping or scrolling Facebook as an option, it’s way harder to just let that pile of papers accumulate.

And what happens to that pile when I solve it with cookies is that it continues to grow. And a small pile becomes a big monster.

Anyone relate?

Ask yourself what you are tolerating that you wouldn’t tolerate if there weren’t cookies.

If you couldn’t temporarily forget about the piles? If you just had to feel the discomfort of knowing that there are things in the pile you need to deal with?

Dealing with the pile is harder RIGHT NOW but so much easier than it will be to deal with it two weeks from now.

That small pile will keep growing until it seems very overwhelming.

The buffers we use (cookies, shopping, social media, Netflix, and more) seems pretty innocent, until we realize what we are exchanging for them.

So how do you know when you’re numbing your emotions?

one – you lose it over little things

When you notice you lose it over little things, it’s a sign that you’re actually numbing your emotions, you’re pushing them down, you’re resisting them, and then they’re just ready to explode out of you at times when you don’t want that to happen.

two – you’re addicted to doing, not being.

If you have to be doing something all the time, it might be a sign that you are trying to keep yourself from feeling. Any other workaholics out there? I have a tendency to be this way. I have a tendency to just do, do, do because it keeps me from feeling whatever I’m trying to not feel. You’ll eventually burn yourself out because it’s not an authentic way of living.

three – you have less joy.

The third sign that you might not be processing your emotions and you might be numbing yourself out is that you have less joy. When we numb our emotions, we numb them all. We have less pain possibly, but we also have less joy.

We live in a world where numbing is fast becoming a way of life. We numb everything that brings us discomfort—we have anesthetics for physical pain, distractions for emotional suffering, and the false promises of feel-good consumerism.

We believe these bandages will heal the hurt that’s an inherent part of being human. Instead, they’re simply making us more sensitive to our pain.

The only way we truly heal is by learning to feel again. Because when we do, we not only connect back to ourselves, we also connect to our responsibility to the world we live in.

How do we stop numbing and get our power back? Here are four ways I’ve found helpful.

Access what may be causing you to numb yourself & the cost it’s having in your life

I think it’s really important to ask ourselves some questions, because some people totally downplay emotions and say, “Oh, they don’t matter.” They really do matter because your emotions are what fuel your actions. If you’re not willing to process and feel your emotions, you tend to be stifled in your whole life.

What are we running from?

What are we afraid to feel?

What is it that is keeping us at a point where we’re choosing this over what’s actually happening in our lives?

What’s it costing me to do this?

For some of us the cost is pretty mild. Maybe you’re just procrastinating things that you wish you would do. But a lot of times it’s costing us a lot. It’s costing us our relationships. It’s costing us the potential of what we could be in our life. It’s costing us years. It’s costing us time with our kids that we’re never going to get back.

I want so bad to see all of us wake up to our lives. This is the only one we get!

Accept what you’re actually feeling and stop resisting it. Be willing to be uncomfortable.

The thing that you’re resisting with is going to have its own set of problems, and it’s not actually solving anything.

You’re going to get addicted to pain medication. You’re going to get addicted to alcohol. You’re going to get addicted to Facebook. You’re going to get addicted to cookies!

They give you this temporary sense of relief, but the real problem is not going anywhere, and the real problem is going to get a lot bigger than it is now if you don’t deal with it.

When we’re not willing to feel the negative emotions, when we place a buffer between us and the negative emotions, what happens over time is, all we feel is negative emotion. We’re robbing ourselves of joy, because in order to have joy, we have to have the other side of joy too. We have to be willing to have both sides.

Really accept where you are. If you’re in a hard place, be willing to be there, and be willing to feel whatever it is you actually really feel. Even if that’s anger, or if that’s resentment, fear, or any negative emotion. Get curious about what you’re trying to push away, and just let it be with you.

Here’s the magic. When you let it be with you, it doesn’t stay forever.

It comes and goes. You just sit with it and be curious about it and learn something from yourself. Become more aware of it, and then you can pass through it.

Grief is similar. You have grief and you are unwilling to walk through the grief. If you just keep resisting, resisting, resisting, it just keeps trying harder to come to the surface. Whereas if you just let grief or fear or anxiety or anger or whatever the feeling is, just be with you, it passes so much faster.

I think we beat ourselves up, especially as women. We think we always have to be happy. But acting happy is not the same as true joy.

Can we just let ourselves be where we are and not judge ourselves for it? Then we’ll have the capacity again for joy.

I had oral surgery and when I was taking something for pain, it was so easy to think,”Oh, it’s all good. It’s all fine.” Yeah, it’s all fine because it’s numb. But when it’s not numb, what’s the situation? When it’s not numb I can see to it that the problem actually gets fixed.

This numbness that we’re tolerating, that we’re seeking out, is keeping us from assessing where we really are. It’s really motivating to get something fixed when it’s hurting and it’s not numb. When it’s hurting and you numb it out, you’re not motivated to fix it.

What are you tolerating in your life because of this numbing out that you wouldn’t tolerate otherwise?

Acknowledge that your feelings are coming from your thoughts.

Acknowledge that you are the one actually causing this with your thoughts. When we realize that we have so much control over all of this, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, we can get ourselves into a much better place of taking the action we really want to take in our lives. But you’ve got to stop numbing to do that.

Let’s say you lose your job. It’s so easy to blame the circumstance, “Well, I’m just really depressed because I lost my job.” The real reason you’re depressed is because of the way you think about losing your job.

You could lose your job and think, “Oh, this is going to be an amazing opportunity. I’m going to figure this out. It always happens like this. God’s always opening a door, and I can’t see it right now.” Do you see the way that you could tell yourself the story about that job loss that wouldn’t make you dive into unending stress and overwhelm?

The first part of the equation is to feel what you feel. Then decide, “No, this is not the way I really want to think about this. I want to think about this in a way that is productive for me. I want to think about this in a way that motivates me to make some good changes in my life.”

The first side of the coin is to feel it. The second side of the coin is to acknowledge that you’re the one causing the feelings by the way you choose to think about the circumstance. There’s so much power in this process!

Take responsibility for what you’re creating in your life.

Take responsibility for your life. Everything in your life, you’re creating it. If we don’t have to keep numbing all of our feelings, we can get back to our real life!

I love this quote by Mary Oliver:

“Tell me what it is that you plan to do with your one wild life.”

What is it costing you to stay numb, and to stay stuck, and how can you be willing to be where you are, feel the pain that you feel, and then acknowledge that you have the ability to change that the way you’re thinking about your life?

I want to really live it and really feel it and really create it for myself and for my family. I want that for you too!

You always find what you’re looking for

September 16, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 2 Comments

As you know, we have been through kind of a strange time as a nation and as a culture, and it has given us a lot to process and work on and think about.

There are the people who process change and hardship and suffering by over performing and people who process by under performing. Both ways end up at the same place.

I’m am an over performer, so I come out of the gates like, “I’m going to learn everything. It’s going to be great. I’m not going to let quarantine get me down.” Then about four weeks later, I’m crying on the floor. And then there are those who underperform. They start their crying on the floor and then they slowly get up and start to function.

One thing that I’ve noticed about myself over the last couple of weeks is I’ve been letting the division get to me. We say to ourselves in our mind that there are these camps of people. The truth of the matter is most of us are somewhere in the middle, but what can appear to happen is this divide, and you can tell who’s on one side and who’s on the other.

You’re supposed to hate all the people on the other side of whatever your camp is, right?

We tend to villainize the people who aren’t in our camp.

I started to see this huge divide and think,”Oh my gosh, we’re so divided. People can’t see the nuance. We’re just so divided. We are pitting people against one or the other.”Then I realized, wait, this is how I see it because this is how I choose to see it.

When I made that revelation for myself, it helped me kind of step back and think,”People are probably not just one way or the other. They’re probably nuanced like I am.”

I don’t feel like I know everything about everything. And they probably don’t either.

It kind of drove the point home that I’ve been learning for the last 10 years, which is

You always find what you’re looking for.

What I mean is if you look at your spouse, and your story in your head about your spouse is that they don’t contribute and they’re not supportive, you will look for evidence for your story and you will find it. You will find LOTS of evidence for your story, which will confirm your story.

Your brain likes to confirm its story and that’s okay, except ask yourself, “Do I like what I’m finding?” Because if I don’t like what I’m finding, I probably need to look a little closer, see a little more nuance, see both sides of the story.

Those of you who have that story about your spouse, you could probably tell another story about them. My spouse is supportive. My spouse goes to work every day and he takes care of our family and he loves us, right? You could tell both stories.

Which story helps you like the way you show up?

If your story is he’s not supportive, he doesn’t help, he doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t support me, then you’re going to show up pretty needy and pretty defensive. But there’s always another side to the story.

If you live from the other side of the story, you’re going to probably give him the benefit of the doubt, and show up with more curiosity and compassion and love. That’s probably where you want to be living your life, I would guess.

The same thing is true when you see somebody on the internet that you don’t agree with.

Can we hold the same space for people?

Can we see that there are two stories?

Can we see that telling ourselves everybody who thinks THAT way is awful and I don’t like THOSE humans, pretty much Xs out about 50% of the humans!?

I found myself going down into this place where I would do that. I would think, “Well, they’re one of THOSE people and I don’t agree with that,” and I would kind of discount them and lump them into this group of people that I don’t really respect or agree with.

Can we hold space for each other?

Can we at least acknowledge that there’s another part to the story, and that person who’s really worried about going out might have a sick child, and it feels so personal, and it feels like everybody that’s recommending that we do something different is against her child.

Can we just be curious about the people who are on the other side?

This is what I have ask of myself, because you will always find what you’re looking for, and if your brain is looking for division and looking for people to be wrong and looking for the negative side of things, you will always find it.

Then you have to ask yourself, do I like living from the place where I think half the world is wrong and awful. I really don’t. I really like holding a bit more curiosity and love and respect for people who don’t see it the way I do. So it’s been a good exercise for me, honestly, because I found myself saying, “Oh, everybody’s crazy. The world’s going crazy.”

It does feel like the world’s going crazy, but can we hold space for people and can we just be a little bit curious? Can we step back just a little bit and say, “I can kind of see why that person with that upbringing from that part of the country could see it that way?”

Where in your life are you doing this? Are you doing it in your marriage? Are you doing it with one of your kids? You may have a story in your mind about one of your kids and everything they do just confirms the story that you already have. I would beg you to ask yourself, “What’s the other side of that story?” What if more of the time you lived from the other side of that story?

We’re all doing this in different parts of our lives, in different settings, in our marriage and our families, and in the culture. It just makes us better humans to be willing to HONOR other people and the way they think, even if it’s not the same as us, and to try to find some understanding.

It makes us better humans to listen a little bit more to their side. Ask, “I wonder why they think that,” or “I wonder why they so quickly go to that.”

I’ve really been working on this. This year has been difficult for us in a lot of ways, and we have the choice of how we want to see it.

Even if I looked at last year and all the different things that have happened, I could think,”Oh my gosh, God hates us. This has been hard. Why do bad things happen to us? Why has it been like this?”I could look at it that way, but when I look at it that way, I feel like a victim.

I’m not a victim. I don’t want to feel like a victim.

The other choice I have is,”Wow, look at what has happened FOR me. Look at the chance that I have gotten to see things differently, to really grow, to accept the suffering and challenge, and let it be my teacher and let it change me in the ways that it can.”

What if we looked at it like that?

We have a pandemic in front of us. You can tell yourself a story about that. And you live a certain way, according to that story. Remember though, there’s another side to the story.

I do believe that the pandemic of fear is real, and when we live in fear, do we like the way we show up? It’s okay to do it either way, but I’m just asking us, asking myself, to step back from all of our dogma and say, “Is believing this story helping me show up the way I want to?”

It’s a question that’s worth asking, because if it didn’t matter how you looked at it then we would all see it the same way, and obviously we don’t all see it the same way.

We don’t see the pandemic the same way. We don’t see marriage the same way. We don’t see suffering the same way, right? What that tells me is that the way you see something really becomes your story about it, and you can choose how you see it.

Sometimes we look at a circumstance like a pandemic and go,”Well, there’s no other way to see it, except that this is terrible and we’re all going to die. We should stay in our houses forever.” That’s one way to see it.

We have to ask ourselves,”When I look at it that way, do I like the way I show up? Do I like the person that story makes me into?” It’s really worth asking, “How do I want to see this? How do I want to look at life? How do I want to look at my relationships?”

You might be saying to yourself,”Well, you’re just looking at it with rose colored glasses.”Possibly, but what I always ask myself is,”When I tell myself this story and live from this story, is that the best, highest version of myself? Am I living from love? Am I giving people grace and the benefit of the doubt and all the things that I would want people to give me?”A lot of times I’m not.

It’s been a really good time of learning and growth. That’s what I think is so cool about collective hardship, collective suffering. We talk about this a lot at my gym, voluntary hardship.

Sometimes we sign up for things that are hard and we, in our minds, tell ourselves, “No, this is good for me. It’s good for me to challenge myself. It’s good for me to deny myself. This is going to teach me so much.”

Then we have the involuntary hardship, involuntary suffering. Sometimes we don’t change our mindset about it and decide how we want to think about it, and then we get into this weird victim mode where everything’s happening to me and i’ts all wrong. Woe is me!

I just find that I like the way I show up when I truly believe that God is doing this for me. This is for me, not because I need to be punished or did something wrong. We’re all sinners. We all need to repent. We all need God’s grace, but coming from the aspect of this is for us. He’s doing this for us. This is for our good.

He will turn every situation into good.

Is there any harm in believing that? How does it help us show up when we believe that?

Especially in the divide that I see in my own life, the divide that I see in my own family sometimes, the divide that I see in my own town, in my own Facebook feed, it’s worth considering giving people a little bit of space and being curious about what makes them tick. It’s worth being curious about how we are interpreting things, and how we are seeing things.

Do we like ourselves when we interpret things that way, and when we show up the way we are showing up? Because we always find what we are looking for.

How to stop procrastinating and what it’s costing you

September 9, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 6 Comments

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I love the topic of productivity, and I love comparing myself to several years ago. I’ve been able to totally transform my ability to be productive and I’m going to share a few of those secrets, in the hopes that you can shift this in yourself. It will help you get everything done that you want to get done!

I have always been kind of an energetic crazy go getter. I’m an enneagram three. I came into the world raring to go! I’ve also had periods in my life, I think about when I was in medical school specifically, where I would put things off and then work like crazy to get it done at the last minute!

Are any of you like that? You’re going to get the thing done, but what you’re going to do first is make yourself pretty miserable for a week, or two weeks, or three weeks. Then you’re going to crash course, be productive, and get the thing done, but slide in just in the nick of time.

Now I get more done, in less time, than I ever have. I have more time for rest, and for doing all the things I really want to do, like cook and spend time with my family and work out, but I produce more!

Productivity means we produce things.

Productive doesn’t mean that you’re busy all the time, because we all like to say we’re busy. When I think about productivity I think, “What is that I’m producing?” I don’t just work on cooking, I produce a meal at the end that my family can eat.

Often we like to say we’re working on something instead of, this is what I’m going to produce. What I’ve realized about my own productivity is, I produce a lot more than I ever have, but I also have a lot more downtime than I’ve ever had.

Do you feel like you’re a professional procrastinator? A lot of us feel this way, and we think we’re just delaying things, and we’ll get them done later. What I want to show you is, what you’re delaying is not just a set of tasks.

What you’re delaying is the person you’re going to become when you do that thing.

When you decide on something you really want to do, and you set your goal, your higher brain, the part of your brain that plans and executes, and has goals and dreams, is the part of your brain that wants those things.

There’s another part of your brain that just wants things to be easy. It says, “Don’t do that right now. Let’s just watch a movie. Don’t do that right now. Let’s just scroll Facebook. Don’t do that right now. Let’s go watch the comments on this post that’s exploding”

We’re often sacrificing what we want ultimately for what we want now.

That sacrifice is costing us the version of ourselves we would be if we actually got the degree, or wrote the book, or started the blog, or learned to cook. When I stopped using procrastination as an excuse, I started reverse engineering my procrastination.

Here’s the thing that’s true about people who procrastinate: we tend to get things done, we just get it done at the end, in a very short period of time! This means we’re capable of getting a lot done in a really short period of time, right?

What I’ve learned to eliminate is the three weeks before where you feel guilty, and miserable, and shameful, and worried, and you’re fretting because you’re not doing the thing that you’re supposed to be doing. What if you could save yourself all those feelings, and reverse engineer your procrastination to get all that work done in a short period of time, at the FIRST of the three weeks?

When we procrastinate and we spend a lot of time worrying about what we should be doing, we feel EXHAUSTED. Procrastination is often the reason we’re tired all the time. Our thoughts are exhausting us, and if we could change it around and reverse engineer our procrastination to get a bunch of stuff done in a short period of time, we would save ourselves the toxic thoughts and the exhaustion.

The first step is to recognize why you’re procrastinating. Your brain is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The reason you don’t want to sit down and write the blog post, or write the book, or learn to cook, is because it’s hard.

The things you really want in life are probably kind of hard.

You want to get fit and start a fitness program and go to the gym,and it’s not going to be easy. You’re brain is going to tell you to watch Netflix and start tomorrow. Here’s the beauty. When you train yourself not to do that, almost nothing in this world more amazing than the feeling of having accomplished something hard.

When I turned my taxes in a couple of weeks ago, I can’t even tell you the joy and the lightness I felt because that huge task is done. There are very few things that are more gratifying than really getting something done. It’s energizing!

Recognizing that you’re not procrastinating because you’re a bad person, or because you don’t have self discipline, is so important. What usually happens is, we recognize we’re procrastinating, and then we talk terrible to ourselves about it.

You’re so lazy.

You’re never going to get this done.

You always just put things off.

You’re just the kind of person who isn’t disciplined.

When we talk to ourselves that way and we have all those negative thoughts about ourselves, it makes us feel awful. Then we make ourselves feel better by not doing something hard and by choosing the easy path. We procrastinate more!

Recognize this vicious cycle, and realize this is just what our brains do. They want to get out of the hard thing and they want to do the easy thing. Then you can say, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there, but no, we’re going to do this thing.”

I spent an hour on Sunday night putting everything on my to do list in my calendar. One of the things I put in my calendar is to record the teaching for this month’s topic in my coaching program, which is on productivity.

When it came to today at 10:30 on my calendar, and I’m supposed to be recording a video about productivity, guess what I don’t want to do? I don’t want to do it! I want to do something easier. I want to catch up on the news. I want to watch a YouTube video. I want to chitty chat. Isn’t that what our brains do?!

I’ve trained myself to know that if I will take the 10 or 15 minutes that it’s going to take to record the video, I’m going to feel like a million bucks. I’m going to be able to check it off my list, and it’s going to energize me. That energy is what I’m going to use to continue being productive throughout the day.

When I get to this afternoon when it’s time for me to hang out, or go down to the dock, or watch Netflix, or whatever it is I want to do, I don’t feel guilty about doing that because I know I got all my work done. And now I can really enjoy my rest time.

What we often do instead is, we don’t focus and get our work done, then we feel guilty the whole time we’re not doing it. Then we don’t really enjoy our rest because we feel guilty that we didn’t get our stuff done.

We live in this really weird, messy middle.

Instead of focus, productivity, and true rest, we have guilt and worry, and we are exhausted. Recognize this vicious cycle and don’t make it mean that you’re lazy, or that you don’t have self discipline. Just say, “There goes my brain trying to get out of work again. Interesting. No, get to work, brain. Here’s what your job is for the next 20 minutes.”

Recognize the cycle and re-decide what it means. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It doesn’t mean you’re not self disciplined. It means you have a human brain.

Your human brain wants to do things that are easy that don’t require much energy.

If you spend your life doing only things that are easy, you’re going to have a life that doesn’t look like the life you actually want. Decide the life you actually want ahead of time, and put those things in your calendar. Then when it comes time to do it, you just train yourself to do it.

Now you’re going to reverse engineer your procrastination. A couple of weeks ago, I was going out of town on a Thursday, and I wanted to be able to get two weeks worth of work done in three days. I was planning all of this on Sunday night, and this was going to mean that my work was done really early.

It would’ve been easy to say, “I’ll just wait until Wednesday. I’ll just work like crazy on Wednesday.” Here’s what I did. I started putting things in my calendar, everything I needed to get done before I left to go out of town. I loaded it really heavy on Monday and Tuesday, so by the time I got through Tuesday afternoon I had 90% of it done and a whole day left!

That’s what I mean by reverse engineering your procrastination. Take the time that you have, whatever your deadline is on something, and reverse it. Use that power to get 90% of it done in the first part of the week, in the first part of the day, or in the first part of the month. Then you have some margin for the unexpected.

I hope that helps you make some changes so you can start getting the things you want done, instead of just being reactive and letting the part of your brain that’s like a two year throw a fit and get its way. It just wants to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it.

That’s the reason why people will say, “These are my priorities. Here’s what I really prioritize in my life,” but when you look at how they actually spend their time, it’s not the same. I want you to get to the point where you can say, “This is what I prioritize,” and when you look at your actual calendar, and the way you spend your actual time, it reflects the priorities you have!

You can do it! I promise you can. You don’t have to be a workaholic either. You can do it and still have plenty of rest time, and plenty of free time, and be as spontaneous as you want to be in those hours that are free. That’s because In the hours that you’re focused, and you want to accomplish something, you really do accomplish it!

3 Ways Chasing Happiness is Making You Miserable

August 25, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 4 Comments

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!