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The second point is I want you to anticipate and normalize all of the obstacles that are standing between you and that goal. And I want you to plan for them. Know that you're going to want to give up, know that you're going to get bored and want to move on to something new and sparkly. When things get hard, know that your brain will tell you this is a terrible first attempt or a terrible second attempt or you're just not getting it and you don't know what you're doing. And then normalize that. Plan for that. What can you do when your brain starts chattering? So another example if you want to develop an exercise habit, which many people do at this time of year, is ask yourself what kind of exercise? When would I do it? How will I do it? Alone in a class? Walking a dog with a friend? What time of day? Start to visualize and anticipate the obstacles for it. The weather, the challenges, the brain not wanting to do it. Each question that you can answer and each obstacle that you can anticipate will help you get closer to the success of it. So maybe it's cold outside, maybe the only time you have is 5am Maybe your brain just doesn't want to. You're going to develop a plan and then a plan B for each obstacle. So for instance, maybe if you miss your morning walk, you can do 10 minutes of Pilates inside on your app before bedtime. But ask yourself, what is the next best step to take? How can you break that step down even smaller? What are all the steps you can anticipate and plan for the obstacles? After I decided to change my life and spent weeks researching how to I called a friend to come with me to spend one day away from our families to put together a plan. We met at a hotel and spent 24 hours doing a day long process of guided brainstormings, meditations, intention settings and integrations. And when we were done, we had planned out the whole year that became my plan, my roadmap of recovery. And within six weeks of implementing that plan, my life fully started changing. It was so incredible. Year after year I honed the plan and year after year things got better and better and finally friends started taking notice and asked me how I was doing all of these things. And so I started teaching them and Then their friends. And that is how my practice grew into what it is today, where thousands of people have been helped by my visioning program. Ten years later, I still do this practice for myself every January because it feels amazing to have a plan for the year. So take your goals and make a plan. And don't just make a plan for one area of your life, but your whole life. I like to use five different categories, but you decide what you need. Having a plan for your year and writing it down makes you 42% more likely that it will happen. And that makes sense, right when we want to take a trip anywhere, we program the destination into gps. But we aren't taught to program our life's destination into our own mental gps. And this is your invitation to do just that. The plan is your basic outline of how to get from here to there. And if you can make it, include setbacks, failures, and obstacles, and your plan will be even stronger. We assign so much drama to the very normal experience of failing. Let's just knock it off. No one succeeds without failed attempts. I've decided to think of failing as proof that I'm taking action towards what I want. But our brains tend to go a little nuts, and we've been taught that failure is bad. So this leads me to our third step in creating a life that you want. And I'd argue this is the most crucial step, and that is to manage your thoughts and feelings. What does it even mean to manage your thoughts and feelings? Well, a thought is simply a sentence in your brain. We have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day. That's almost one every second. And those thoughts create our entire perception of the world, our whole experience. Everything, absolutely everything, filters through our thoughts. So managing your thoughts includes an ability to observe the sentence in your brain and bring an element of awareness to the ones that are shaping your life. Managing your thoughts means that you have a level of awareness and control as to what you think, that you are open to, questioning old beliefs, choosing new thoughts, letting go of unhelpful or unwanted thoughts, finding nuance, and so forth in an effort to reprogram your thinking. Managing your thoughts is an act of mental strength and awareness to elevate your life from one that functions on autopilot to one in which you become the driver. Our thoughts are the reason most people give up on their journey to successful goal achievement. Most of the obstacles standing in our way, between where we are and where we want to go, most obstacles are in our heads, and there are lots of reasons why. But the main Reason is that our body's biology, our brain's biology, has evolved to keep us safe and small. So those thought obstacles might sound like, can't do this. Who do you think you are? What are you even trying to do? You don't even know how to do that. This is stupid. You're stupid. This is hard. I don't even know how to do this. Or just I don't know is such a common one. Or maybe your brain is saying, you're unqualified. A loser. Not smart enough, not knowledgeable enough, not pretty enough, not good enough, not enough. Your brain will whisper or shout absolutely anything it can to get you to stop doing exactly what you want to be doing to stay in the small and familiar, even if that familiarity is causing you unhappiness. Typically, and I want you to hear this, we will not change until the pain of what could be is less than the pain of what is. We will not change until the pain of what could be. The unknown is less than the pain of the familiar of what is. So managing our thoughts is your ticket out of misery. Because our brain will throw every thought it can to get us to stop venturing into new, growing experiences. And without knowing how to manage our brains, we just believe our thoughts. They are simply on autopilot. So the skill of managing your brain is the most crucial skill in creating a life you like, Period. Learning how to think intentionally is paramount. And that skill starts with awareness. Becoming aware. Just watching your thoughts. You have them right now. What are your thoughts happening right now? Ask yourself this, what am I thinking? Once you gain some awareness, try to resist the urge to judge your thoughts. But rather, let's get curious. Maybe you can ask, how does it serve me to think this way? Because there is always a benefit, even to the most negative thoughts we think. And understanding it brings compassion and makes it easier to change your thoughts. So once you've identified the thoughts that don't deliver the results you want, you can choose an equally believable thought that does. So, for example, let's imagine that your friend never texts you back, and this really bugs you. You might think they're so rude. That's your thought. They're so rude. Or maybe you think they don't value this friendship like I do. Those sound like true thoughts, and maybe they are for you. But here's a question to help you shift your thinking. Ask yourself, what else could be true? And here's where you start to manage your mind. What else could be true? Here's a couple ideas. Maybe your friend is super busy. Maybe they have ADHD and is terrible about returning texts. Maybe your friend hasn't seen your text yet. Or maybe they saw it and they thought they responded. It's possible your friend isn't a big texter and that they were thinking about their response and then they forgot or they wanted to call you. Or maybe they they're going through something and they can't turn their attention to your text right now. Maybe your friend is feeling cold towards you right now and it's okay to let them have some space or ask if everything's okay. By the way, this is a thought unless they tell you that this is true. So just know that that's also a thought. But as you can see, there's lots of other thoughts that could be true. Lots of other thoughts that are available that you could choose and they could be just as true as your original thoughts. Now here's why this matters so much. Each of those thoughts connects to a feeling. Feelings serve as our biological response system. They are part of our ability to survive, to communicate, to make decisions, to connect with others, to take care of ourselves, to regulate our well being. They warn us against danger and they inspire us to take action. Everyone has them. Our feelings come and go all day long, but they are tied to our thoughts or as reactions to our environment. But at its core, a feeling is simply a vibration in your body, usually described with one word. Some feelings are warm and easy, some feelings are tight and heavy. There are thousands of different feelings available to us in any given life, but for the most part, they're just vibrations reacting to our thoughts. So let me illustrate that thinking of the example when your friend doesn't text back. If your thought is they don't value this friendship, how would that thought feel for me? It feels like rejection, right? They don't value this friendship feels like the vibration of rejection. But if instead you could choose one of the other thoughts that are possible to think. My friend is just terrible about returning texts. How does that thought feel to me? That feels more accepting. So in this example, two different but equally true thoughts stemming from the same circumstance of your friend not texting you back creates two completely different feelings. Do you see that? Are you with me? And that is the management of thoughts and feelings. In one scenario you feel rejected. In the other scenario you're feeling accepting. This is possible for any thought you think, any scenario you encounter. This is how you manage your thoughts and feelings to pursue the life you like. You start by asking what am I thinking? You can do the Work to understand how do I benefit from this thinking? And then you want to ask what else could be true? And let your mind just be open to that. See how other thoughts feel and then take action accordingly. Now when I teach this to people, they think, awesome, I can just manipulate my life to be happy all the time. And I want to be clear that the purpose of managing your thoughts and feelings is not to be happy all the time. It is not to be positive all the time. That would be super weird and inappropriate to how humans are meant to live. Imagine being happy as a reaction to a tragedy or chaos. It's just, it's not appropriate. All lives contain hardship and ease, joy and pain, happiness and challenge, as they should. And learning how to manage our thoughts and feelings allows us to respond appropriately. We need that balance. We couldn't experience the highs without the lows. The point of all of this is to be intentional and aware of all the emotional experiences we can have and to respond and manage our thoughts, feelings and actions accordingly. Let's use these tools to become the most evolved versions of ourselves. To stop our own unnecessary suffering, but to allow and process the pain that all lives experience and the joy that all lives experience. We become emotionally mature when we are able to recognize, express and handle our own emotions, when we become self aware, when we're able to remain calm and not react to everything and everyone, when we can consider others, get out of judgment, stop feeling like a victim and take responsibility for our lives. And that's the goal, isn't it? We owe it to ourselves and to the world. The other critical reason to learn how to manage your thoughts and feelings is because your feelings either stop you or inspire you to take the action of pursuing the life you want. Fear, shame, disappointment, anxiety, anger, embarrassment, confusion, and so many other feelings feel uncomfortable and our brains hate that. So when we start to feel them, we tend to avoid that discomfort and seek pleasure instead. Right, when you're applying for a new job and you're feeling vulnerable and anxious, what do you tend to do? Procrastinate, Avoid, go for some snacks, watch tv, scroll, Instagram, do something easier, maybe even keep yourself busy in a different way. Right? Your uncomfortable feeling is fueling your inaction. Often the things we run to in order to process a feeling or to avoid processing a feeling, the over scrolling, the overeating, the over drinking, the over netflixing, shopping, working creates the life that we don't like. And that's all to avoid feeling an uncomfortable emotion. Equally, feelings can be fueling your action too. If you were feeling determined or excited or confident or competitive or hopeful or optimistic, you might rush to apply for that job, right? So understanding and processing our feelings is crucial. Our feelings cause us to take action or avoid taking action.