People like to tell other people how to live. What you should eat, how much you should exercise, how you should spend your money. And most of us know what's good for us — we just don't always do it. Here's how I manage to live a healthy(-ish) life. Most of the time.
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Transcript:
Good morning, friends. So today I want to talk a little bit about what it is to create your own life of intention. And when I say that, I mean you can start over - get a do over - at any point. I have had to do that twice in the last decade.
One was when I decided to leave my marriage because it was not the life I wanted for my daughter, or for me. And the second was when I survived cancer. And I don't think that you need to go through anything really dramatic in order to change the course of your life. I think every day we have an opportunity to wake up and do things differently, and it doesn't require some big dramatic thing happen. It doesn't mean that you need to make some big dramatic move. Sometimes it just means getting clearer on what you do and do not want when it comes to the way people treat you, or your career...That's a really big one, but it doesn't have to be big.
When you get cancer, people tell you how to live. They tell you what to eat. They tell you how much you need to exercise. And then there's all this guilt on top of it. Like, "if you don't do this, you're probably going to die." So no pressure, right? The problem is that we're all human and it's really difficult to live a life of juicing greens and drinking that crap every day when, you know, there's Easter candy in the world. Right? And it's really difficult to be a person who wakes up and exercises every day when you hate it, even if it's what's good for you. Right?
So I don't ever juice green stuff. I've gone through periods of time where I make green smoothies, but this is just not who I am. I am not a green juicing every day person. I do, however, feel better when I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and add greens to everything that I eat. So even if I have pizza, I put greens on it, blah blah blah. You know what I mean? Making healthy choices.
However, I'm also a human.
And as a human, I really like candy and I really like sugar and I really like goldfish crackers, which are like highly processed and probably super bad for me. And periodically I fall off the wagon and I start eating poorly again. And often I don't exercise. I go through these times of healthy choices and times of not so healthy choices. So when I talk about starting over and getting a do over, it doesn't have to be something huge where you're deciding you no longer want to do the career you're doing and you want to do something else.
Sometimes it means waking up in the morning and saying to yourself, "you know what, I am now done. I am back on the wagon." And that's what I did yesterday morning when I woke up. I said to myself, "All right, I am done bingeing on old Cadbury Mini Eggs. I need to really follow my intuition on taking care of my body again, because I always feel better when I do."
So there's setting an actual intention and following through with it. And then there's like that half hearted, like "I really should . . . Blah, blah, blah." Those are not the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I have woken up in the morning over the past month and a half and said to myself, "Okay, I think I'm going to stop now."
Setting an intention is a very different feeling. When I set an intention, I am getting real quiet with myself and just making the decision that *I am not the kind of person that needs to have Cadbury Mini Eggs today.*
And I don't have to force myself to do things that I hate. Like I probably will never be a person that runs a marathon. I just hate it. But I *will* jump on the trampoline. I will be the kind of person who dances — however badly — to my favorite music through headphones in the closet.
Setting an intention is about visualizing what you want your life to look like, and then taking action to make that happen. And a lot of people will do things like create vision boards or, you know, they just try to design what they want their life to look like in a visual way. And I've done that before and it really helps me. So you might try that, too. That means printing out pictures you find on the Internet of what you want your life to look like. And then it becomes a reminder that that's what you're working toward. And I'm not talking about "manifesting things" in the woowoo sense. I'm saying to put a picture on the wall of what you're working toward, just to remind yourself that this is what you're working toward.
That, to me, is part of what setting an intention is - and being bold about what you want and being dedicated to it. So I hope that this helps you in some way, and I hope you have a wonderful day.