Episode #17 5 Challenges for 30 Days
Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
What stories do you habitually tell yourself? What stories can you reframe to create better habits and ways of being? Today I’m going to give you 5 challenges for the next 30 days! Easy, but life altering if you let them in.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
Think about something you do habitually. Something that might have been hard to learn at first, but after practice, you can do it without even thinking about it. Your brain has set up a pattern and you will do it the same way every time. We set up patterns of behavior by repeatedly doing them until the body and brain go on autopilot and can do them without much thought. Since we become what we repeatedly do, and we do what we repeatedly think about it makes a great deal of sense that we purposefully create thoughts and habits that will help us become who we want to be. Habits that create the story and life we want for ourselves and our loved ones. Habits that strengthen, build and empower us. Often these habits are very linked to the stories we have going on in our minds.
The challenge I am throwing out to you today is to take the five simple things I’ll share and implement them into your life for just 30 days. No year-long resolution, no, just try these for 30 days and see what new habits you might form and how those transform your life and your way of seeing and thinking about things. So, let’s get started…first, eat chocolate cake everyday…just kidding.
1. Address and acknowledge the lesson in inconvenient situations – look at the stories.– There are lots of ways to look at life. We acknowledge all the time that our stories are filled with challenges – people we clash with, lost love, situations and people who require the very depths of our patience, health and body issues, disappointments, lost jobs, no job, that lump of coal you got for Christmas, the state of the world, the definning of shark. Of course there are also the moments of beauty and miracles, but this challenge is about the habit of how we deal with the disappointments and challenges. One of the ways we can approach life is with the idea that everything is a life lesson. Everyone you meet, everything you encounter, they’re all part of the learning experience. So, here’s the challenge: Acknowledge the lesson, especially when things don’t go your way. If you don’t get a job you wanted or a relationship doesn’t work, it only means the right thing for you– is still out there waiting, and the lesson you just learned is a step toward it. It’s easy to start making up stories about ourselves and others when things don’t happen the way we want: I’m not good enough; that person had it out for me; my boss doesn’t really like me; my friends always let me down, they must not respect me. None of these are helpful stories, even if they seem real. Remember that you get to choose your perspective of any situation: Attitude determines experience. When you try to find the lesson and glean a little something from the experience, and focus on that, there is less room for the one-liners to eat away and create a bad headspace for us. Every day we choose our state of mind. Try to find the lesson that comes with each challenge. Find the take-away – the thing you will ponder on, learn from, and focus on whenever you revisit that experience. It will change your...
