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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.

3 Powerful Tools to Design Your Life On Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create a vision for your life

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

What is your dream vision for your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Cultivate Healthy Habits

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

“You have uphill dreams and downhill habits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put some things in place make it more fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Keep your promises to yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your dream?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Choices You Can Make Today That Will Make Your Life Better

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Today is your day to make some decisions! If you struggle with decisions, today is the day to get over the struggle. I’m giving you three decisions that you can make today, that will make your life infinitely better, and heal your body, mind, and soul.

1. Stop Lying

Liars don’t heal. ~Carolyn Myss

Stop lying to yourself about your life. Stop lying to yourself about your job. Stop lying to yourself about your marriage. Stop lying to yourself about your kids. Sometimes we so get into the habit of not living in the truth of who we are, that we basically learn how to live sort of mediocre lives. We basically learn how to live a lie.

When I read that quote, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Learning to live with integrity and learning to live with intention, learning to actually walk the talk, learning to actually do the things you say are important, and learning to live as if they’re actually important, is the way we heal. So often we don’t live that way.

When I was practicing medicine, there was a part of that whole lifestyle that I loved very much. I loved the recognition. I loved the income. I loved being with people. I loved working in an office. I loved dressing up every day to go into an office. I loved science so much. I loved figuring out how things worked. It seemed like it should be the perfect fit for me.

It seemed like it, but I was miserable. You know why I was miserable? Because I missed my kids, and because I would miss so much during the day. At that point, both Stevie and I were working a lot, and there were so many things about it that I didn’t like.

I hated to admit it because I’d just spent 13 years of my life getting a degree. I’d spent a lot of money, and hours upon thousands of hours to do this. There were parts of it I loved doing, yet it was a lie to me in my heart. I knew it, but I didn’t know how to fix it, because how do you fix a giant lie like that?

When I started to untangle myself from it I got a lot of flack. People decided that it was a bad decision, and that I shouldn’t have gone through all that training if I was just going to give it up.

Here’s what I know after all these years, God’s the one who made me love these kids like crazy and couldn’t stand to be without them, he gave me that. Not everybody feels that way. I still work, and I’m still separated from my kids, but I do it in a way that’s honest for me.

Going to an office every day just wasn’t how I am wired emotionally, so I’m not casting judgment on anybody else’s choices at all. I’m so glad we have female doctors that are out there, but what I know for myself is, that’s not how I’m wired, and I wasn’t living the truth of who I am and how I made.

It’s so true in so many areas of our lives.

We are dishonest in relationships.

We blame other people for how we feel.

We think we’re entitled to a certain kind of life.

There are so many ways every day that we’re not living in accordance with what we say we believe, or what we say is important, or what we say is the value that we want to live by.

I do it too, so here’s the thing. We can make ONE really important choice, that then makes a hundred choices for us.

When I was actually practicing medicine, I was the most unhealthy maybe that I’ve ever been, which is kind of an oxymoron. Why? Because I was living completely stressed out, I wasn’t cooking any food at home, I didn’t value sleep, I wasn’t getting regular exercise, all the things that I know actually make you healthy.

I was supposed to be a purveyor of health, and I was doing none of them. So my patients would come in, and I would tell them what they should do, but I was not a practitioner of it.

What I’ve discovered about myself in the last few years is, I’m a healer. That’s how God made me. I’m a healer and I love helping myself heal, and helping other people heal. The way I can do that with the most integrity, and with the most intention, and with truth, is to live it.

So today I got up and I made a tiny little decision to go to the gym. And then I made another tiny little decision to eat a chicken breast and some spinach and tomatoes for lunch. Tonight I’ll make a tiny little decision to go to bed early.

I’ll spend some time today reflecting on God’s word and meditating on a Psalm. I meditate on that because I really am interested in living what I actually think is true.

2. Stop waiting on other people.

You’re not entitled to anything.

Nobody’s to blame for your life.

Stop waiting for somebody else to do something.

Stop waiting for somebody else to change.

Stop waiting for somebody’s opinion of you to change.

Stop waiting for somebody to stop rejecting you.

Stop waiting for somebody to give you permission.

Stop waiting for somebody to do anything.

You don’t need any of that. What you need is for YOU to take responsibility for the life that YOU want to live, fully and intentionally, in wholeness. You need to do that. Nobody needs to do anything else.

We have to stop waiting for other people to do what we think they need to do so we can do what we need to do. No, no, and no. As a matter of fact, some of you put your life on hold because your kids are all messed up, and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do, or because you feel like your marriage is in a weird place, or because you feel like your job is in a weird place.

You know who’s in a weird place? You are. And you know who can fix it? You can. You can fix it. It’s all just deciding that this is exactly the life you’re supposed to have right now, and living it with all your heart, with integrity, with intention, the way you say you think it should be.

3. Stop looking back

Let me tell you something about your past, there’s nothing there. All it is are thoughts you have in your head. Stop living there. Why? Because you’re using the past as evidence for what you can and can’t do right now.

You’re using the past to blame.

You’re using the past to make excuses.

You’re using the past to live in depression.

You’re using the past to live in anxiety.

You’re using the past to live in fear.

The past does not exist except in your head, except in your thoughts. The only way that you can live in the past is to keep thinking the thoughts of the past. Why would you do that to yourself?

You need to have enough respect for yourself and love for yourself that you say, “No more! I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to keep saying those things over and over. I’m not going to keep reliving that memory over and over. I’m not going to keep blaming that person over and over. I’m not going to keep resenting over and over and over.”

What happens when we do that is, we think that we somehow can punish the people that did this to us. You’re punishing you. You’re keeping yourself from your incredible, amazing present life! You only have one chance to do this day. It’ll never quite be like this again.

I thought about this when I was at the gym this morning, there probably will never be exactly that combination of people there again, in that state of being, in that state of generosity, and love, and community, I don’t get to do this again.

Why am I going to go back and live something that’s not even there and forsake what’s actually here right now? So you just decide.

You don’t need years of therapy. I did years of therapy. It didn’t help. I’m not saying that you might not need some therapy sometime, but I’m saying that in order to get over the past, it’s a thought in your head, and you just DECIDE that you’re going to live from your amazing, beautiful, grateful, generous, abundant, loving, present. You can make right now whatever you want!

A little primmer on decisions...

Decisions aren’t hard, YOU JUST DECIDE. You just stop waiting and you decide. Here’s what I’m doing. How can I make today better?

You don’t need anybody’s permission, you don’t need anybody to change, you don’t need the relationship to iron itself out, you don’t need this job to figure itself out, you don’t need any of that.

You’re capable of creating the reality that you want. You ARE creating the reality that you want right now! The question is, will you take responsibility for it and actually do it? Or will you keep blaming? Will you keep feeling entitled? Will you keep comparing? Will you keep judging? You can do either one you want.

I promise you, if you will stop waiting and start living, you can have the life you want today.

 I want you to do some soul searching this week. I want you to think about what decisions you are making, right now, and every day, that are keeping you stuck. You’re making some.

You’re eating the same food that’s keeping you sick and is keeping you stuck. You’re still not getting exercise that you know would make a difference. You’re deciding to still live in resentment. You’re deciding to hold your husband hostage. You’re deciding to have expectations of everybody else so that you can feel better. You’re deciding that you don’t like your job, so you’re miserable, and you make everybody else miserable. You’re deciding to hold a grudge against your best friend because she didn’t invite you somewhere. You’re deciding that you’re angry with one of your kids because they didn’t behave how you thought they knew to.

You’re hindering your present joy on a million things that are outside of your control, when you could just lay hold of it, and have it right now.

That’s the power of the choices that you make every day. You make one amazing, beautiful choice, and it makes a hundred more for you.

I remember when I became a Christian. One, what seemed like little tiny choice, has now made a thousand choices for me. The power of choosing what you want in your life, and doing it on purpose, and letting that choice reverberate and reverberate and reverberate is incredible.

So what little decisions, that turn out to be actually big decisions, can you make today, that will make a thousand choices for you in the future, and will give you the life of service, and love, and generosity that you actually want?

If you’re still feeling stuck, watch this!

How to get your mojo back

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

What has happened to my life?

My house is a mess.

I haven’t been to the gym in months.

My eating is off plan.

I’m not sleeping well.

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

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

Start with the end in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expect failure instead of running from failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can only control you.

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

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

Get some accountability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t wait to get started!

Your Morning Mentor

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Oh hi and good morning long lost friend.

It’s been so long since I even logged into my blog that I had to LOOK UP the password.

And then that was wrong, so I had to hack into my computer’s keychain system and luckily that worked.

I guess that means it’s been far too long.  I know you think I’ve been sitting over here napping and eating bon bons.

But I’ve been just as busy as ever and sometimes life just hands you seasons and you have to walk in them as best you can.  This has been a season for me almost like having a baby.  I had a baby business and she’s growing. She’s a toddler now, about the same age as the real life toddler that is making our lives so full and amazing. (More about him here. Also, if you haven’t watched my Instagram video of him, you HAVE NOT LIVED.  Get over there right now.)

But anyhoo, I’ve missed you and I wanted to spend September with you, here on the blog and more importantly, on my Facebook page, lifeingrace, where I’ll be LIVE STREAMING every weekday in September at 6 am eastern.  It’s a little challenge I set for myself and I’m inviting you along, because maybe you need to get back on track too and make the most of those precious mornings.

We’ll be talking about a host of awesome topics, but this week’s chat will be all about continuing to grow as a person, mama, wife, worker bee, etc.

This all reminds me of when I was in medical school and took up scrapbooking.

Because who doesn’t need a time consuming hobby when you’re working 70 hours a week?

But did you know that I finished more scrap books during medical school than at any other time in my scrapbooking life.  It must have been the horrendous inability to sleep and the momentum that I had from already accomplishing a lot.  Now listen, I’m NOT advocating you do that. But what I’m saying is that sometimes if you create growth and momentum in one area of your life, it spills over into everything.

That’s my hope for morning mentoring—that you will leave the live stream so motivated and inspired that without that much extra effort, you’ll see areas of your life that you want to grow in, becoming all the time more and more of the person God made you to be.  I hope you leave with more energy and passion than ever to be generous with your life and gifts.

So, who’s in? Who’s joining me tomorrow morning?!??!

Bring your coffee and don’t judge my makeup-less face.

(You can actually watch the first one here!)