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Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
Feeling Stuck in Midlife: Do This Now
00:18:04
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- [00:02]
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Hi, this is the Love youe Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness Coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let's go, Warriors.
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Oh, hello, my lovely Warriors. It is me, Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach and basically an all around supporter for you. And I hope you're doing well. And every time I click record, I genuinely think, oh, yay, I get to talk to the Warriors. Exactly how I feel right now. Today's episode is really meant to be a quick, like, check in with you love hug. And think of it. Think of it as a loving interruption in the middle of your busy life. A pause, a moment to check in with yourself and a supportive coach. Me. Okay, we are. If you're listening to this live time and actually this helps you no matter when you're listening to this. But if you're listening to this lifetime, we about a quarter of the way through the year, three months in, and I want to be that supportive voice in your ear saying like, hey, there's a lot going on in the world right now that we can't control. Let's slow down for a sec and look at the things that we can control. Like you, sweet listener. How are you taking care of your mental health? How are you supporting yourself so you can take the action in your life that makes a difference in this world and in how you show up in your relationships and everything? How are you feeling about the life you're living? I want you to think back to January when you were thinking about what you wanted to be different this year or how you wanted to feel and act differently. What was your word of the year? Which goals or intentions did you have for yourself? How have you been bringing your word of the year into your weeks, into your days? This is a great time for us to check with that kind voice in our. In our head. What was our word of the year? Oh, my gosh. Wait, wait. I was going to choose the word of the year I forgot. Or like, what word? My goals. Which goals have I been taking action on? Which ones have I conveniently forgotten? Okay, in January, what did you hope your life would feel like? And how close or far away do you feel from that right now with what you can control? This is a great time to stop and reflect. In fact, good for you for stopping and reflecting. The fact that you found yourself with this podcast in your ear tells me something important about you. It tells me that you're someone who's mindful who's conscious, who wants to be and show up as their best self. Someone about who has some intentionality around what they do in their days and how they want their lives to feel. Maybe you don't do the things, but you at least stop and think you want to do the things. And that in itself is huge. That's awareness. That's not just letting life drag you along unconsciously or the latest blip on the news cycle or whatever. That says a lot about you. Okay, does that mean you don't have setbacks? Of course not. Does that mean you don't have days that feel completely awful or that completely fall apart? Absolutely not. I have those days too. And I do this for a living. Okay? The difference between people who report greater life satisfaction and those who don't is not that they don't mess up. It's that they notice sooner when they're off track and they speak kinder to themselves in their head when they're off track. It's literally those two things. You might not be speaking kindly to yourself in your head right now, but you are listening to this podcast, which tells me it might already be about halfway there. Okay? So they notice they're off track and they define. They. They speak kinder to themselves in their head. And what I mean is like they literally define failure or not doing the things they want to do. But more loosely, they understand that in the same way that tiny shifts in one direction can get you off track, tiny shifts back into an aligned direction can bring you back on track pretty easily. In fact, people with greater life satisfaction and peace and calm in their systems approach setbacks with curiosity instead of cruelty, instead of beating themselves up to get back on track, like, oh, there you go. Yeah, they talk themselves up. Instead of beating themselves up, they talk themselves up to get back on track. Thus leading them to not only get back on track sooner, but have greater self compassion, greater confidence in themselves and feel better in their lives. Listeners, longtime listeners of this show and students in the Love youe Life school tend to do just that. They tend to catch themselves sooner. They tend to reach for growth. The growth mindset, not the fixed mindset. They do it with kindness and self empathy, knowing that it matters. And yet, for many years, I wasn't like that. I was harsh with myself, militant, a strict disciplinarian in my head. And not many years, many decades. And what I know is that energy not only doesn't feel good, but it does not create long term change. It doesn't create ease or a feeling of Life satisfaction, real lasting change comes from someplace else. A different feeling state. So let's get back to my original question with this episode. How are you feeling about the life you're living right now? Answer it as if you're talking to me. Okay. A supportive coach. Remember, if you're talking to me, I would not be shaming you, I would not be criticizing you, and I wouldn't be pointing out everything you did wrong that you should have done this way. I would be reminding you that you were human, that change is learned. It's a skill that we build. That compassion works better than punishment, that wasting mental energy, beating yourself up for the past doesn't move you forward. You're actually staying stuck in the past. And I would help you learn how to take those small steps forward. Cut out some of the drama in your head. I would help you look at where you are with curiosity and kindness so you can get started living the life you want. So whether you set goals in January or didn't, the question becomes what can you learn from the life you're living right now? This is one of the core skills I teach in the Love youe Life school and reinforce in one on one coaching, kind reflection in meditation and many practices. They call it the compassionate observer. At the end of a day or a month or a year, instead of asking, what did I do wrong? We ask what went well and what would I like to do differently? It's not just about having blinders on, like, oh yay me, I did eat that apple every. Whatever. It's like. Also it's both. And what went well and what would I like to do differently? So let's do it. Let's zoom back with compassion and look at the last three months. What would you like to shift? What would you like to feel different? What is one small thing you could do today that would help future you? Not next month, not next year, today. What could you do? Because here's the truth. The life you're living today is a result of all the little choices and tiny steps you've taken before. It is what we see in our life is a result of what we've been practicing. Each action we take is a vote towards our future self or away from our best future self. Well, it's always a vote towards our future self. Is it the future self that we want? Is it the future that we want? So with compassion and kindness, just sort of like ponder, like, what have I been practicing that's leading me towards that best self? And with that same curiosity and like Lightness, like, what have I been practicing that's leading me away from her? This is literally what the voice sounds like in my head. Like, let me ponder the small actions we take. Give us the results in our life. Like if since the new year, you've been eating out one extra meal a week, one a week, your body and your wallet will show you that result in three months. Is that a difference you want? Maybe, maybe not. Be curious if since the new year, you've started walking for 10 minutes after one of your meals. One of the things that I talk about in my other podcasts, or you know, maybe you are including produce and protein at one of your daily meals when before you weren't doing that. You will notice in three months to walk in for 10 minutes after a meal. Starting today, you will notice by whatever three months from today is. In the same way, if you stop going to the gym, say you used to go three times a week and now you go twice a week. Or say you went once a week and now you go no times a week. You will notice in three months if you start going to the gym, you will notice in three months if you stop doing your regular brain dumps. The things that you do for your mental health, getting your brain out on paper, writing it down, you will notice. If you start doing brain dumps where you haven't before, you will notice. And on and on and on. Each action we take is about, towards or away from our future best self. Go you for being brave enough to click play on this episode and listen. We usually are not brave because of what we do to ourselves in our head. After we consider like, oh yeah, what have I been doing towards or away from myself? And this is how it all starts. Listening into a podcast like this and then choosing with compassion, like, yeah, maybe I'll do this a little differently right before I go. Let me give you even some more detail and some more areas you could look at with that kindness to yourself. Which area of your life is calling you to take different, many actions in sort of in general in my life, like if you're in the Love youe Life school, we have sort of a wheel of life. It's like, let me think, which area might I want to take some different actions in my relationship with myself, like how I talk to myself in my head, my relationship with my friends, the relationship with my partner or with my kids or siblings or parents. What about my mental health? With all that's going on in the world, what are you doing to take care of your mental Wellness instead of maybe waiting for illness and then fixing it. How about your physical space? The things around you, actual physical things like clutter. Also the people you surround yourself with, often the news you like, what are you doing on your phone and the people in your life and what do your closets look like, all that stuff, that stuff impacts you. Dear one, who I care about, how about how are you treating your body? Is it getting the movement it needs, the fuel it requires, the sleep it craves? If you were your friend, would you be really proud of her, of how she's taking care of herself? This is a good time to remind you I offer a free life audit@smbwell.com lifeaudit where you can get sort of a quick scorecard on some of this stuff. Also, this is the thing. I help people follow through with their tiny shifts every day in the Love youe Life school and one on one coaching. So you could see if my calendar has space on it. Or maybe you just want to book one session to look at this. We can look at the wheel of life. We can make some decisions. Anything is possible, Warrior. You just have to stop life long enough to do something different. To do something different. And this is where we get tripped up. We look at the lives we're living. We might answer some of these questions. We might just listen to the podcast and, and then listen to that critical voice in our head. And then what do we do? We start too big. We think, okay, I'll add protein and produce and walk after meals and sleep more and clean my closet and oh right, like stop having my phone by my bed and oh wait, I'm going to also be the perfect wife, coworker and mom too. And then when that collaps is my dear one, we think the problem is us. And that breaks my heart. It is not you. You're not the problem. Thinking you're the problem is the problem. Instead of understanding the things that behavior and habit change experts like me know is that the problem is not you. It's two other things. One, we start too big. And two, we. We have a fixed mindset, AKA mean mindset around failure and feedback. So I'll say it again for the people in the back. You're not broken. You're just starting too big. And then when you stop doing the too big thing, it's how you think about you stopping that holds you up. It's the size of the starting point and it's how you think about the things you're doing or not doing. I help people in my membership and coaching with this. And I want you to know that you can start today. Once this podcast is over, I challenge you to push, stop, pause for a beat before you rush on to the next thing. I know you're busy, but pause and you can think of how. Can you chisel your actions back to the smallest daily actions that you'll actually do in one of those areas that came up for you. 1. And it's going to seem too small to you, but I prom like, I promise you, whatever the one thing is, you make it smaller. Hey, can you skip one meal out a week? Can you walk for five minutes today? Can you meditate for one minute? Can you stop watching the news just right before bed? Can you drink a glass of water before your morning coffee or energy drink? This is actually how habit change works. This is how you wake up three months from now and feel very differently about yourself. Starting small and thinking supportively of yourself isn't a weakness. It's how the greatest leaders continue forward and change becomes sustainable. And my dear, wonderful one, you're not as far from the life you want as you think, no matter how overwhelming it feels to you right now. That's one of the challenges. That's why I'm like, come, let me talk to you. People feel so overwhelmed. And what do we do when we feel overwhelmed? We go back to our old way and we don't try the new things. And what I know is small shifts matter. Small shifts matter. They make the difference. Just as an aside, I'm flying to the United States from Australia this week. If my pilot is one degree off his course, I will not be landing in dc. I'll land in a completely different state. How the heck will I get to my son's wedding? Okay, our small actions matter, too. That's 1%, 1 degree different. Your small actions matter. You start walking today after lunch, you're gonna notice in three months. They are a vote for or they're a vote for or against your future self. They matter. You matter. And you're not as far away as you think you are. So just get started. I love you. I believe you. And I see the life you're capable of building. One step at a time. Let's go. Dear one, thanks for listening.
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Thank you for listening to the Love youe Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on itunes. Also, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get em, warriors.