How to change your life in a BIG WAY?
When you’re ready to make big changes in your life, it’s best to set out with a plan.
Think of it like living through a construction project in your home – you can’t do the entire house at one time while you’re living there – at least not without losing your sanity or your marriage. I almost named this blog post Life Change For Dummies, as a direct reflection of how silly we feel sometimes when we relive the same challenges over and over, or when we are often too stubborn to learn, grow and evolve.
To change your life, you have to pace yourself.
Take it one room at a time, one piece at a time – otherwise it may not last. If you take it one element at a time, it’s a project where you can succeed and not only survive, but thrive and enjoy the process. Maybe it’s your health, or the way that you express your gratitude, or the way that you express your love, or maybe it’s the way you manage your priorities.
No matter where you start, you have to start by taking full responsibility and focusing on the things you really can impact. I’m telling you now, it all begins with you. It’s always who we choose to be – 100% – in any given moment. That really is ALL that we can control. Every action we take is a reflection of who we choose to be.
If we want to change any part of our life, it always begins within ourselves.
When I went through cancer the first time, it was a big awakening, primarily because in a very significant way, it guided me to my writing. Trust me, at that point in my life, things were great in so many ways, but there was a big part of me that wasn’t fulfilled – in the following of my truth, the fulfillment of my reason or being. So I started writing and writing and writing – writing in a way that is almost hard to explain.
I was running a couple of businesses, and I was extremely busy. I had a family and was working long hours, but there were just certain times that I had to write when everything had to stop. Often, at midnight, I had to write, or in the middle of a busy work day, or at the least opportune times in my schedule. But I would do it – I would write, and write, and write… And I did that for five years.
It wasn’t that I desired to be an “author.” What I needed was to share the insights that I understood about humanity, those that I felt had the potential to help others access their true happiness and a sense of fulfillment regardless of their externals circumstances.
At that time, I didn’t have any intention of what I would do with all of that work. I wasn’t clear on what the purpose was for the piles of insights and concepts toward finding our inherent happiness. But I knew I could figure out what to do with it later – that now, in the five years I was writing, it made me happy. I didn’t know where the work would GO or what it would do, but being incredibly passionate, I didn’t ease on my truth.
Listening to your truth is a hard thing to learn.
Sometimes the Universe sets you up to fail just so that you can succeed, helping you get to the place you want to be. I can’t tell you how many people I have talked to that have lost their jobs or homes, and yet at some point in the process they found greater happiness. Why? Because they never would have quit their job, they never would have sold their house. But through these challenges, they were given the opportunity to step more fully onto their REAL path. They did what they believed wast heir REAL reason was for being. They found a sense of happiness and fulfillment in a new job or opportunity that was prosperous in a way much more that they could ever have earned financially.
It can be VERY tough, emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.
And it was the same for me. My second bout with cancer was a much bigger awakening. This was the experience that became the defining factor for my life. It was very clear to me in that moment that I was either going to die, or I was going to live and actually follow my truth in every way, not just when it was convenient.
And I would be happy. I knew, inside of myself, there were some things that I just wasn’t happy about. There were some choices I was making at the time that were not in alignment with who I wanted to be in life. I knew unequivocally that the only thing that we have control over is who we choose to be and the actions that we choose to take. So no more excuses.
Cancer was the huge awakening.
Through cancer, I reconstructed, deconstructed, decomposed, and recreated every part of my life. In every way, for five years, I recreated my entire life – changing almost everything. The way I slept, the way I ate, the way I exercised, the way I worked, where I worked, how I worked, and how I really acted out and lived the priorities in my life. When I came through my second cancer, I wasn’t the same person – emotionally, mentally, or physically. Pre-cancer, I had tremendous energy – I could sleep for 5 hours and work for 12 and still have energy to work out and spend quality time with my family. After cancer, I didn’t have the energy. I would have to sleep for seven solid hours, and at some point of the day, I would just run out of seam.
Very quickly I had to re-prioritize my entire life.
But it’s something that we all should do anyway. What we do normally is live our day as a reflection of yesterday. We go to work, focus on our large task list, and spend our time checking things off – done, done, this one for tomorrow, this one is done. Before we know it, its the end of the day and the things that matter most didn’t get our primary attention because we don’t put the things that matter most on our task list. We don’t put our children or our spouse on our task list – that’s not where they go. We fill in what matters most in between the pre-scheduled tasks of our day. Because I really believed that my family and my spirituality were the most important aspects of my life, I started to put them first and add everything else in-between.
It doesn’t happen overnight.
It happened over the course of time. It happened by making a lot of changes little by little by little. A lot of us are paralyzed in our life, even though we know what we should do. We know we shouldn’t be smoking, we know we should eat right and we should exercise. There’s a lot of things that we should do, but we don’t do them.
So what’s the deciding factor? What’s the distinction that’s going to get us to move from where we are to where we want to be? There’s no pill that you are going to take that’s automatically going to catapult you forward. Something has to shift. And for me, it was facing death. It was the CONSCIOUS knowing that I didn’t know how much time I had left. Yes, its a concept we’ve all heard a million times – ‘life is short’, ‘live in the moment’, ‘the power of now’ – of course you’ve heard it a million times.
But maybe, just for today, the one thing we CAN do is stand back, assess what we want to be different and start to take full responsibility. EVERY step you take after that is one step closer to a consciously created life, to what you truly desire.
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Hello.
Thank you for the poignant reminder. This is something I’ve been living with.. making changes, then pushing back to ‘normal’ primarily due to my mother’s pressure.
The instinct to honor elders is often exploited by some parents.
Yet as you say, these challenges help you find your truth, the importance of doing what you know you have to do. And the cost of not following your truth only underlines it further..
I’ve just gone back to my own truth after a spell of doing ‘what’s expected’. Never again will I care about any view but my Creator’s. God willing!
Thank you. I am a survivor too – a car wreck. I decided to be a positive survivor and on wanted my children to learn from my experience. So I chose to be strong. I am a different woman today and my children see the positive change.