If you’re anything like me, you believe that the only way you can possibly love your life is if some big changes happen. Maybe you even have a long list of everything that would have to change before you could love your life:
- My husband would have to help more around the house
- My children would have to behave/ get along better
- I would need to lose 30/ 60/ 100 pounds
- I would need to stop yelling all the time
- My house would need to be bigger/ cleaner/ nicer/ decorated better
- We would need to have less debt / more income
- My husband would have to be more romantic/ thoughtful
THEN, you think, I would love my life. But the truth is, that’s just a story your brain has sold to you for so long that it feels like fact. But it’s not fact, friend. You could love your messy, chubby, budgeted, crazy life if you had the right tools. AND those tools could help you make the changes that matter most to you from a place of love. Did you know you don’t have to hate your life to change it? I didn’t, but I do now, and I live the proof every day.
If that seems hard to imagine, just stick with me.
There’s Your Life– Then There’s What You Think of Your Life
Did you know that the only reason we ever want ANYTHING, anything at all, is because of how we believe it will make us feel? We want money because we believe then we could feel secure. We want romance because we think that it would make us feel loved. We want well behaved children because we want to feel like we’re good parents. We want to weigh less because we believe that’s the way to feel confident.
The truth is that those feelings don’t come from money, or our husbands, or our kids, or our body size. Nope. They come from our thoughts. That’s why what seems like a ton of money to one person might seem like not nearly enough to someone else. What seems romantic to you might be cheesy or obnoxious to your sister. It’s why your neighbor’s kids can run wild in the grocery store while she doesn’t bat an eyelash, but you want to scream when your daughter asks for cookies for the 12th time. And of course, it’s why you wish you could go back in time and slap your 20 year old self for being so critical of the body you’re dying to have back. It’s NOT the thing. It’s what you THINK about the thing.
So What?
This might sound like semantics to you right now, “So you’re saying my life doesn’t suck, I just think my life sucks? What’s the difference?” The difference is that our thoughts are how we experience our lives, and luckily, you don’t have to be at the affect of those. I mean, you’re not going to wake up tomorrow with a dead, millionaire uncle you never knew about; or married to the lead from a Garry Marshall movie; or children that behave like the ones in that Montessori school ad; or your love handles having molded themselves into curves like Beyonce. BUT. You CAN wake up tomorrow with some new thoughts about the life you do have. Not only can those thoughts help you find joy right where you are, but they can also help you see the places where you CAN create change.
Maybe you really do want to make more money, or fight with your husband less, or adjust how you parent your kids, or lose some extra weight. If so, let’s do that! I believe these tools are the most powerful and effective way to accomplish any of it! But first we have to look at how your current thoughts are keeping you stuck exactly where you are and recognize that they’re totally optional. I can totally help you do that.
