4 lessons life is teaching me lately
Life keeps on teaching... whether I want it to or not!
Happy Sunday, Soothers. I'm here today with four concepts and lessons that have been showing up for me, and as I teach and coach, too. Maybe they'll help you reframe some situations in your life as well.
Simple doesn't mean easy. Some of the most important concepts that can really make wonderful change in your life are ridiculously simple, but that doesn't mean they're easy to learn or implement. Several concepts I teach are things like learning to observe your thoughts; consciously choosing which thoughts to think; learning how to sit with and process your emotions; not making your emotional state reliant on the actions or decisions of others; and partnering with impostor syndrome (I did an IGTV on that here). Honestly, these aren't rocket science. They can be explained as concepts in just a few bullet points. But applying them regularly? Living them as a practice? Not easy. I think we self-shame a lot when we begin to engage in a "simple" practice but we find it extremely difficult to fully embody. Give yourself grace, and ask yourself: are you beating yourself up anywhere in your life because you've mistaken simple for easy?
Acceptance is not the same as agreement. Accepting the realities of your life during, say COVID-19, or its possibly different form now, doesn't mean you agree with them, or like them, or are okay with them (and the same goes for the circumstances of the world around us). In personal growth, a lot of us also have a hard time accepting who we currently are, because we wish to change how we're seeing the world or our behaviors, and we mistake acceptance with settling, or being okay with a position we're in that we don't like. Not at all. Acceptance is merely like, Step Zero in actually changing something, whether it's a situation around you, or something about you. You can't change what you don't first accept and acknowledge.
Common knowledge isn't common practice. Sometimes coaching clients get frustrated when I ask about hydration levels, sleep, basic movement practices. They want big change and they assume that means big actions; plus, they already "know" they should be drinking more water. But common knowledge is lightyears away from something becoming a common practice. We can convince ourselves that because we intellectually understand a basic practice, that means we don't need to practice or embody it, or that we've somehow already mastered it because we logically get why it's important. In short, if you're not drinking enough water (common knowledge) you're not going to be able to make uncommon changes in your life before you master the common knowledge as common practice.
Beliefs and expectations are different. Expectations of ourselves or others usually feel heavy and are conditional on a specific and uncontrollable outcome. Belief is light and continues whatever happens in the external world. I'm working on shifting more from expectations to belief.
What lessons are you learning lately? Reply to this email and share. I'd love to hear.