Episode 116: Peace and Progress
Introduction
Welcome to Live Free Creative, the podcast that provides inspiration and ideas for living a creative, adventurous, and intentional lifestyle. I’m your host Miranda Anderson. And I hope that each time you listen, you feel a little bit more free to live your life exactly the way you want to live it.
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the show. You’re listening to Live Free Creative podcast. I’m your host Miranda Anderson, and this is Episode 116: Peace and Progress.
You have got to hear what just happened. I was sitting down to record and I started the intro and then I pause to listen back and just make sure the audio was all okay. And it was super weird sounding. A little bit muffled.
So I checked the mic. I reset the program. I checked my earbuds. I was so confused. What is going on? I do this all the time.
And then I realized after about five minutes of troubleshooting from A to Z, that the microphone was backwards. So that’s a pretty easy fix. I just turned the microphone around and started speaking into the front side of the microphone. And we are back to normal clear audio for your enjoyment.
I’m sure there’s some of you thinking a microphone can’t really be backwards. You just like talk into it. The microphone that I use can record on just the front side. And so I usually have it set recording just to the front and then it’s muted on the back. And I have a sound chamber along the back to try to create the best audio possible.
So when you talk into the back of the muted half of the microphone, the audio isn’t all that great. So luckily I was able to figure it out and now we can get on with the show.
Let’s start off with a couple of quick Peaks Of The Week.
Segment: Peaks Of The Week
If you’re new to this show, Peaks Of The Week is a segment where I just share a couple things that I’ve been loving lately, that have made a difference in my life. They span from different products to services, to ideas, to books, to all of the things that are just bringing me joy that I would talk about with all of my good friends.
And so I share them here with you as well.
Today’s first peak of the week, I’ve talked about briefly on the podcast before, when I did my homeschooling resources episode, because it’s something that I had planned to buy and use for homeschool.
Friends, we are three months in to this international subscription snack box, and it is one of our family’s absolute favorite things. It has been so fun.
So let me give you the inside scoop. The snack box is called Universal Yums, and I will put a direct link right in the show notes (see header above) so you can check it out for yourself.
They have a couple different options. The idea is that they choose a country and then curate a special box of snacks that are specific to that country and send them to your door every single month.
I think it was advertised to me on Instagram initially. And I thought that’s kind of a idea. And because I was preparing for homeschooling, I thought this is a fun way to incorporate something food, like snacks, and a cultural piece of a country, as well as diving into where it is and the geography and some of the history and maybe what language they speak. And some of the things like that.
I loved that Universal Yums advertised they included a brochure with some ideas and facts about the country. This is where I got the idea myself to start calling our families deep dive into the box Facts and Snacks.
We’ve done it now for three months. Our first box was Great Britain. Our second box was Colombia. And our current box is Russia. My kids literally jumped for joy and run inside screaming when the Universal Yums box gets dropped on our doorstep each month.
There’s a couple of different options of snack box size. We have gone with the $25 option and I’ve been shocked. I thought it was going to have like a little handful of snacks. It’s well worth the $25. We actually ended up dividing our box into about three different Snacks and Facts sessions.
And the way we do it is to read some of the facts, go around and each take turns choosing a snack out. Usually we go around and just do one snack each per session. And then we read all the information about it. We find it on the map. We might watch a YouTube video about the language or culture.
If it mentioned something specific, like I remember for Colombia, it talked about the pink dolphins in the Amazon River. And so we looked up a quick video to see if we could find out what the dolphins looked
And it was all just this really hands-on, interesting, and delicious experience. We have absolutely loved it. And so I wanted to share a complete review here so that you can check it out if you’re interested.
Pen Pals
My second peak of the week is pen pals. Did you guys ever have a pen pal growing up? I did a couple of different times in elementary school. I think in third or fourth grade, we got matched up with a child in a different country through some magic. I don’t know how they would have even done that back before the internet, but there was some program our teacher was used.
And so I had a pen pal in Europe for part of the year that year.
And then I think one other time, I had a pen pal through the church–my church like did an exchange with some other youth across the country. And so I had a pen pal for a little brief segment.
Then actually as an adult, maybe about 10 years ago. Right when Milo was a baby. I had a friend, sort of acquaintance friend, reach out about pen pal ship and letter writing. And so we exchanged a few letters and it sort of just fizzled. I think we were both busy being young moms.
Well, with the beginning of the school year–again, searching for some ideas and activities to help engage the kids–I contacted one of my good friends who lives in Utah. She happens to have a little gaggle of kids that mirrors my own family.
Her oldest is a boy, my same son’s age. Her second is a boy, my second son’s age. And then she has a little girl who’s Plum’s age. She went on and had a fourth child. I bought a puppy instead. But our youngest are also the same age, the puppy and her youngest.
I asked her if she would be interested in having her kids do a pen pal-ery with my kids for the school year, or at least for a little while. And it’s been so fun.
We wrote our first letters about a month ago and a couple of weeks later, they got letters back. And just this week, my kids pulled out the letters and wrote new letters back to return to their kids.
And I think it’s just a really fun practice. It feels really nostalgic. It also is great letter writing practice and great social practice.
So that’s been really fun. And it’s made me think that I’d love to just send more great mail to, to be honest, just send letters and send cards and be a little bit more intentional about the analog relationships that we can have from a distance.
I know we’re really great at digital relationships from a distance and remembering that for hundreds of years before the internet existed, people communicated through letters and through packages across oceans and how magical that is.
There’s kind of an element of patience and an element of thoughtfulness that I think is really fun. So I’m excited to explore maybe for the holidays, maybe just throughout the next few months, a couple of ways that I might be able to better connect analog, even from a distance, through letters and packages and other ideas.
So if you have any ideas, send them over to me. I would love to hear about them and find yourself a pen pal. It’s pretty great.
Those are the Peaks Of The Week.
Main Topic: Peace and Progress
The topic of today’s show is my attempt at answering a question that I hear fairly often from people in my podcast community, from people in my Instagram community, from people in my book community, who’ve read my book and either emailed me or reached out in some other way.
It comes up from time to time. And I just think it’s really important. The principle of peace and progress.
The questions usually go something like this: Hey there, Miranda. I think it’s so great that you’ve decided to be so minimal and find contentment in your life. How do you balance that with still wanting to renovate your house?
Or how do you balance that contentment and satisfaction with still wanting to run a business and make more money?
Or how do you balance that contentment and the peace and fulfillment that you find with still wanting to redo your shed and turn it into a clubhouse if you loved it and you were totally fine with it as a shed, why did you need to change it?
Don’t contentment and change come into conflict?
If you’re happy with something the way that it is, wouldn’t you just never want to do anything else? 🙂
I get it. This is such a valid question. If you are really focused in on the things that I say–and mean–about loving your life right now, today, and already having everything that you need in your life right now in order to be happy, and find that peace, contentment, success, and fulfillment that you’re looking for, I really do believe that we can find that right now in our lives without changing a thing.
So it is a valid question. If you are content looking around your life, looking around your home, looking around your existence, why would you want to change anything? Doesn’t contentment mean that you don’t want to change anything?
And I think that right there is where the misunderstanding comes into play.
In order to guide this episode on peace and progress, I want to share three specific ideas that you can play around within your head, experiment with them, toss them up, see what sticks, see what feels right to you, and what resonates with you, and what impacts you.
We’re not all going to learn about these things the same way. We’re not all going to feel the same way about all of the things that I share. So I’m going to offer just a few different ideas for you to consider and maybe ask yourself:
Could this be true for me? Could I agree with this?
If I agreed with this, would I feel differently?
If I felt differently, would that be positive? Would that improve my experience?
Your Feelings Don’t Change With Your Circumstances
So the first point that I want to make is that the underlying emotions of our life don’t necessarily change with the circumstances of our life.
For some reason, somewhere along the way, we were taught and started to believe that we could feel differently as soon as X happened. I will feel better as soon as my credit card is paid off. I will feel more successful as soon as I get a $10,000 paycheck.I will feel like a great mother if my son brings home a 4.0 report card.
We tend to, as adult humans, hang some of our emotional wellbeing on the circumstances of our life. And if the circumstance isn’t exactly the way that we think that it should be, then we don’t allow ourselves to step into the feelings that we want to have.
I remember growing up in my religious tradition. I grew up and still am active in the LDS faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And one of the things that I remember, from young, learning from a story, or maybe a specific scripture in the Book of Mormon, is that the way that you leave this life, the demeanor with which you leave this life, is the same that you will have in the next life.
And I remember hearing that like in Sunday School or Seminary, something growing up and having it hit me really hard that, if I’m a really angry, sad person when I die, not only like when I die, but just like throughout my life, if that’s the underlying emotional state of my life, that doesn’t instantly change to bliss, happiness, and peace because I die.
I think that a lot of movies and things portray the idea that no matter how you felt in your life, as soon as you die and are in heaven, that you’re like peaceful and happy and content and roses. And so my commentary here has nothing to do with what happens after you die or any of those things. It really is not based in a traditional faith process.
That is just one example of how I remember learning the idea that maybe a big circumstantial change doesn’t necessarily mean an emotional change. If you’re discontent now, even when things in your life, circumstances of your life, change, you may still be discontent because maybe that’s just sort of the undertone of your personality right now, or of your character, or of your emotional state.
Maybe your emotional zoning seems to center in discontent.
And maybe if you are fulfilled and satisfied right now, even when your circumstances change, whether they change for the positive or for the negative, maybe that undercurrent that you have of contentment and satisfaction and fulfillment will go with you throughout the circumstances of your life.
Now that makes a lot of sense, right? That your emotional wellbeing or discontent, either way, your emotional core lives and resides with you, and you carry it with you into the different circumstances of your life, rather than you having the ability to step into different emotional states depending on where you happen to be.
Now, we’ll all have examples of the way we think that it does work that way. For example, I’m super stressed at work, but as soon as I go on vacation, then I feel amazing.
Now I want you to stop and really think about that because I know a lot of people that go on vacation and are super stressed on vacation. I’m sure you’ve seen them too. Vacationers and tourists who don’t seem to be very happy about their vacation.
This is an example of carrying your emotional wellbeing with you, rather than stepping from one place to the next based on the circumstance. So this first principle, the underlying emotions of your life don’t necessarily change with the circumstance, that gives you a little bit of an insight into how it’s possible to hold peace and move through different circumstances.
To be content now and still be content when you remodeled the kitchen.
You’re happy with it and fine. And if it could never change, that would be okay. And it’s really great to change. It’s still okay to change. Seeking progress doesn’t have to undermine your contentment.
The Big Lie: Discontent Leads To Motivation For Change
And this leads to the principle number two that I want to share, which is the big lie. The big lie that some of us have bought into is that discontent or disappointment leads to motivation for change.
We think that we have to be so annoyed and frustrated and hate circumstances of our lives in order to want to change them. That’s the reason that we change things, right?
If you like it, why do you change it? If you hate it, that’s why you change it.
Well, friends that is not necessarily the best way, or research shows that it’s not necessarily the most effective way to effect beneficial, positive change in your life.
In fact, joy and creativity breed more motivation and more pursuit of progress than discontent.
Think about it when you are super annoyed and frustrated and bugged with something, and you just like hate it and you just dread it and you just want to change it. Like, please just change it, take it away, make it different.
When it changes you don’t instantly, necessarily feel like, Oh, now everything’s just right.
A lot of times I’ve seen this in my own life as well. If I’m really annoyed about something in my life or I’m able to find a lot of problems with things like discontent, I’m feeling like it’s just not good enough. It’s just not pretty enough. It’s not new enough. It’s not fancy enough.
I can change the circumstance and I’m still able to find all of the things wrong with it that I want to change, that I want to make different, that I want to improve, from a place of negativity, from a place of discontent.
I can change the circumstance. And just like I was talking about in principle number one, carrying that emotional core with you, you can be just as discontent in a beautiful brand new home that you designed yourself as you can in a small little apartment that you’re just making do with.
Confidence and enthusiasm yield more motivation, and you get to feel those positive emotions all along the way, than discontent and dread.
I know especially in the fitness world, there’s a lot of trying to hate yourself into exercising, and hate yourself into dieting, and shame body shame yourself into making changes. Hating your body. Being so annoyed by your body. Nitpicking different parts of your body. Only focusing on what’s wrong with your body. Thinking that if you really just dig down into all the things that you don’t like, that will give you the motivation to change those things.
Friends, it’s not just me. There is research that shows that when you approach your fitness from a place of joy and hope, from a place of love and satisfaction, you are more likely to succeed.
It’s so much easier to be kind to your body as you progress toward a different fitness level. It’s okay to love your body and want it to be healthier. It’s totally okay to appreciate your body and be really excited to fit back into your favorite jeans.
There’s nothing wrong with both. There’s nothing wrong with loving yourself all along the way.
Something that it’s so important for us to embrace: If we want to walk in peace, walk that progress with peace in our hearts, we have to be able to discard the idea of a rival and embrace the idea of progress.
When we believe that the destination is the checkpoint at which we get to feel different, then we miss out on all of the wonderful feelings that we could have on our way to the destination.
When we allow ourselves to feel content, and feel fulfilled, and be super in love with our life, even as we’re making improvements, even as we’re getting educated, even as we’re growing in our sense of design and taste and decide that we want to be more creative inside our homes, or that we want to paint things, or change things, or redesign a room, or do an addition, or do some sort of upgrade or remodel.
Those things don’t have to happen because you don’t like your house. They can happen because you love your house and you can see what incredible potential there is with some additional changes and some progress. And the whole thing can be fun. And the whole thing can be a movement of peaceful progress, rather than feeling like you can’t like it until it’s done the way that you think that it should be.
And here’s the other really fun piece about this. We never can control all of the pieces on the way to the destination. And so what you allow yourself when you embrace progress and holding onto that peace along the way, you allow yourself the possibility that if things don’t change as fast as you thought that they would, or if they don’t change exactly the way that you thought that they would, that you still get to enjoy it.
You still get to look around your life and think we’re on the right track. We’re doing the right things.
Home-Related Examples
I want to share a couple quick home-related examples, because I think often when people ask me this question about if you’re so content, why do you keep remodeling?
I think that there’s something really fun in some stories.
So first of all, I want to share that when we lived in Washington, DC, we had two little boys and I was pregnant with plum. We were living in about 800 square feet, two bedroom, two bathroom, little apartment.
And I loved that apartment. I moved in, it was all white walls and I painted all the walls. We had the green hallway and we had a blue wall in the kitchen. And the boys rooms had stripes. Our room was brown, which is kind of weird, but it was lovely at the time matched our duvet cover.
I had so much fun just doing these small little tweaks to this space. We were on the tightest budget. I would save up to buy a can of paint so that I could paint a wall. And it was all for fun. It was just to enjoy it. It was like play and creativity.
We didn’t even own the space. If you followed me for a long time on social media, you know that I have done lots of improvements on places that we did not own for the fun, because I enjoy the process.
So when we moved to Texas and we decided to build our own house, we got to pick out everything. We moved some things around and we looked at the plan and we made all of these choices.
And I remember as we were building this house, it felt like a dream house and was just everything that I had ever wanted. And I remember walking through the halls of our house right before we moved in. I was extremely pregnant with Plum at that point. And I remember this specific moment as I was walking down the hall and I thought, I am never going to need to change a single thing about this home because it’s everything that I want. It’s everything that I want.
And of course we moved in and we started to get settled. And because I love design and I love creativity and I love progress. And I love changing. I love change I guess. I of course wanted to change things. I wanted to put wallpaper up in the bathroom and I wanted to paint a wall.
I wanted to switch furniture around. And I wanted to figure out which furniture worked best for our lifestyle.
And there was one point I remember being kind of frustrated with myself and thinking, why can’t I ever just stop? Why can’t I just enjoy it the way that it is?
It wasn’t until later that I realized that part of my personality is that I like changing my household. I like the creativity. I like the challenge. I’m a DIY-er. So I like the project.
If I am not doing DIY and changing, painting, big building, designing at my own house, I’ll go to other people’s houses and do it. I’ve helped friends. I flew home to help my sister paint her new house.
It’s one of the things that I love. Recognizing that was so helpful because I realized that my need for change at home doesn’t come from a place of discontent. It comes from a place of creativity and of enjoyment. As long as I remember to be really grateful throughout the process, and not wait for the end result to be happy, but allow myself because I’m doing it just for fun to enjoy the process itself.
Now, when we moved to Richmond, we fixed up our rental and then we bought our fixer upper and we did six and a half months of renovation. Moved in. And within two months had had a catastrophic flood that essentially destroyed 80% of our renovation.
So we moved out for six months and we renovated it all again. And a little bit more.
I have had so many people ask, How were you able to stay positive and optimistic during such a catastrophic flood and so many changes and so much upheaval at home?
Of course, as I’ve thought about this, it wasn’t all roses. I did have moments where I felt frustrated or overwhelmed or sad about the process and things that we had lost. And it was a little complicated, and it was a lot of time not having a home base that we were really settled in.
I think, however, that I have developed an ability to enjoy the process. And so I wasn’t waiting for the house to be done to feel excited about my life. I was able to find the things about my life that I enjoyed and feel like we were just back in renovation again.
So, okay, we know how to do renovation. Well, we know how to enjoy the process of renovation. We know how to get excited about the changes. We know how to have fun going to Home Depot and walking around and choosing tile and all of those things.
The process itself is the purpose. Discard the arrival, enjoy the process.
Don’t wait until something is finished to allow yourself to feel the way that you think you want to feel. The truth is that we never really arrive in life. There will always be something else.
And that’s just the way that life is. We are just programmed for progress. We are going to get older. We are going to learn as we grow. No matter what we do, we are going to be moving ahead in our lives. At least as far as the calendar is concerned. And our whole being yearns for improvement. We are learning beings.
We talk about learning technology sometimes, like the algorithm on Instagram will start to categorize what you pay attention to and what you interact with, and then give you more of that.
Think of how much we categorize, interact with, assimilate all day long every day. We are built to do things a little bit better all the time. We’re built to learn and not make the same mistake over and over and over and over again, because we will start to learn how we want to do things a little differently. That that’s just the way that we’re built.
Being able to capitalize on that and allow ourselves to feel contentment all along the way, knowing that things are going to continue to change. No matter what we do, those circumstances are a lot of times out of our control, that can bring so much peace, that learning how to allow yourself to feel it all along the way.
Progress Doesn’t Always Mean More
So I want to share one last principle, and this is that progress doesn’t always mean more. I talk a little bit about this in a different episode called More Is Better…And Other Lies We Believe.
This is really is a misconception. We often think of progress or getting better as having more stuff, having more money, having more power, having more status, having more followers, having more time maybe, having more children maybe, maybe we think of more as the goal more as the destination.
In my life, I have learned very poignantly that progress often means less. When we decided to move from a bigger house to a smaller house, because it was more aligned with our personal values, that was progress.
Downsizing never felt like going backwards to me. It has always felt like moving forward more fully into the life that I want to live. Progress can mean internal progress. That you’re learning, that you’re growing, that you’re developing more patience, that you’re acting on less anger, that you’re able to maintain relationships in a more positive way.
There are so many different aspects to what we think of as progress that we often discard because they’re not outward and they’re not flashy.
So when I say that you have peace and progress, I’m not always saying that you find contentment in your home and everyone should renovate their homes, or everyone should get a new home, or everyone should get on a fitness plan.
I’m saying that you can be peaceful, and find that peace, and also enjoy any type of change that you want. And that’s really what it comes down to.
When you stop thinking you need to change in order to be more successful, you’re able to make changes simply because you enjoy them. Because you want to, because it’s fun to be creative. It’s fun to try something new. It’s fun to make improvements. You don’t have to do them in order to feel worthy, and you can do them just because you want to.
I saw a great quote online today when I was doing a little bit of digging and research and kind of wrapping my mind around how I wanted to present this. And there was a quote that I read on a web page, by a musician named David Eby. He talks about passive contentment and active contentment. And I loved this idea.
For sure there are people who come to a place of, I’m just fine the way that I am, things are just fine the way that they are, I’m content. I’m not going to do anything more. Everything’s just fine. And they settle in and they sort of squat in their life without progress–in the name of contentment. Passive contentment, like I’m content and so I’m just not going to do anything more.
And then there’s what he calls active contentment. I love this quote. He says: “Active contentment takes our inner peace out into the battlefield of life.”
Isn’t that amazing: active contentment takes our inner peace out into the battlefield of life.
Active contentment is what we take with us as we progress, as we meet challenges head on, as we develop and change and add things if we want and enjoy all that life has to offer. The good, the bad, the amazing, the terrible. We carry our active contentment with us into the battlefield of life. I loved that visualization, and I hope that that’s helpful for you too.
A Road Trip
As you’re wrapping your mind around how to be peaceful all along the process, the final story I want to leave with you is just an account of a road trip that I did many years ago with my three kids.
At the time we lived in Austin, Texas. Plum was about six months old and Milo then would have been four or five, Eliot was two or three-ish. And I had just gotten a new minivan, new-old minivan. It was used minivan, but I was so excited about it. My previous car had literally died on the side of the road. Like I had to call a truck to come pick it up. And the tow truck was a junk car place owner. And he offered me $250 if he could keep the car and smash it for the metal.
And so I took $250 and Dave came and picked me up and I didn’t have a car.
So we bought this used minivan.
I now had three kids. I’m a minivan person. I love it. I should do it as a Peak Of The Week sometime and tell you all the things that I love about having a minivan.
That is very tangential to the story.
The story is I had decided to take my new old minivan on a long road trip. Dave wasn’t going to be able to join us for the whole journey because of his requirements at work. So I thought, well, that’s fine. I’ll just go by myself. So I packed up and I put my four year old and my two year old and my six month old into the minivan. And I set off on this adventure.
My plans would take us through Texas, which is like driving through four states basically, up through New Mexico. And then up through Nevada. We would go all the way up from Las Vegas to Reno at the very tippy top of Nevada, and then cut over to Quincy, California, which is where my mom’s parents lived at the time.
From Quincy, we would stay there for a couple of days in Quincy with my grandparents, and then come down and meet my whole family for a family reunion in Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park in Northern California.
And then we would drive down the coast of California, come all the way back down around through Southern Arizona, touchdown back in Texas. Go through West Texas. One of my favorite places in the whole country is in West Texas, go to Big Bend National Park. Drive through Marfa, the Chenati Foundation, head back to Austin.
Now remember, this is me and my three young children, including a nursing baby, by ourselves on the road for however many thousand miles, it was going to be a grand adventure.
One of the things that set us up for success was, from the beginning I knew that we would be stopping often along the way. We would need to stop every couple hours to nurse. We were going to be hungry. We were going to be tired. We were going to need to run out some energy on the side of the road.
I knew that we couldn’t barrel our way through to any specific destination along the path. We had plenty of time. We had our route sort of planned, but there would be detours along the way. And I prepared ourselves to simply be at peace with the process.
As we journeyed, we certainly stopped every couple hours. We were hungry and we would stop and eat. We would get out of the car and run around. We ran around on the side of many highways. Safely, of course, off of exits.
There are a couple of really incredible memories that we created on this trip because of our ability to carry our peace with us and not be in a hurry and not feel like good and happy and satisfied was at the end of the journey. But we were able to carry all of those feelings with us all along the way.
One fun event happened as we were driving through the mountains of Arizona, and we saw a big, giant billboard with a bunch of animals on it, the advertising Bearizona. And we thought, I remember the five-year-old and I chatted about Bearizona, now that sounds fun, doesn’t it?
We pulled off the exit and we went through this drive through adventure park and saw dozens of species of incredible wild animals, including these really cool, all white, very rare albino bison.
There were bear out, wandering around around the car.
You could park and then go see where the cubs were. It was like a bear rescue center or something. It was so fun. And it was just on the side of the highway. It was just something that we saw and thought, Hey, we’ve got time for that. That’s a fun change to our route. Let’s go explore. Let’s go find it out.
This is what contentment feels like to me. Contentment is knowing that we’re headed somewhere, knowing just as humans that we have a need for progression, a need for advancement, a need for development.
So we know that we know that we are going to want more in our lives from our lives. We’re built for that.
The difference is that those of us who seek contentment, recognize the ability to pause at any point along the journey to enjoy the view. We’re not waiting for the destination to find the beauty and value in our lives.
We can stop at any moment and look around and enjoy the view and see how beautiful and blessed and wonderful it is. How abundant and magical and unexpected.
Contentment is carrying our peace with us as we progress through our lives.
We’re all on a million mile road trip, and there isn’t any true, clear destination. There’s lots of little destinations along the way, and people to see and people to meet and things to do, and detours follow.
Maybe there’s road construction at some point. And you’re going to have to get off and go into unknown, unplanned territory. And at any point along the way, with a content heart, you can stop, pull off and look around, pause and enjoy the view and recognize it for its beauty.
Fiends, this is what it means to have peace and progress. This is the mindset and perspective with which you can approach changing and moving ahead and transforming your life at the same time that you are absolutely content, actively content, right in the middle of it.
Recap
I want to quickly share my three big points again, and I invite you to spend a little bit of time reflecting on this for yourself and recognizing what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What do you think will bring the contentment that you’re hoping for? And can you instead pause right now and look around and find it today?
- Principle number one is that the underlying emotions of your life don’t change with the circumstances of your life.
- Principle number two is the lie. Discontent and disappointment don’t necessarily mean more motivation. You can find motivation from a place of joy, creativity, confidence, and enthusiasm. And it feels a lot better to find it from that place.
- Principle number three is that progress doesn’t always equal more. Progress sometimes means choosing less or choosing something that’s more aligned with your personal values.
Conclusion
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I absolutely appreciate every single time that you share, that you listen, that you leave a review, or that you tune in.
Thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a fantastic Halloween weekend and I will chat with you again next week. Bye-Bye.
