#643 Everything Is Easy

Okay. You know that feeling when you've done something and it was really, really hard and difficult and complicated? Oh, it took forever. And then you look over at someone else that you know and they're like, oh, yeah, that was really easy. It just came together so fast and boom. And you're trying not to be a jerk. You don't want to be jealous or envious, but, like, how could it have been so easy for them? It's so hard for you. We're looking at that in Today's episode number 644 of Flow Dreaming. Flow Dreaming. It's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. So today's episode is for those of us, not all of us, like, not everybody, but those of us in particular who. And we know who we are, but we. We're gonna do something. We do it right. We do it perfect. We do it astronomically tip top. We don't cut corners. We make it solid. It's gotta be right. And we're not those people who are like, hey, how can I get this? How can I knock this out as fast as possible? You know, I gotta. I got this homework due. If I can just, you know, get it out in 10 minutes, I am gonna do. We are not those people. That's you. Good luck with this episode. Now we're the people who tend to make things hard for ourselves and we don't even know we're doing it. We just know we're doing it right and we're doing it well. And there's a difference between doing something right and well and over complicating the heck out of it. And that's who this episode is for. So we're talking today about everything is easy. And this is actually kind of like an update to one of my earlier episodes. By earlier, I mean I think it's from 2017. What? Yeah. No, 2016. 2016. Episode number 490. Easy versus hard. Learn to spot the difference. Well, you know, it's been five years. I probably have a little more, you know, a little more wisdom on this. So I thought, yeah, it's time to. Time to look at this sucker again. Because one of the things I notice as we go about co creating and manifesting and changing our lives is that you can flow for something, create something, envision something, manifest something, sculpt it into being. But if you're loading heaps and heaps of hard on top of it, well, you're going to get hard. That's it. You're just going to get the hard stuff. And you are probably in a heavy state of doubt around the easy stuff. And I'm wondering if that heavy state of doubt around the easy stuff is justified. I want us to re examine that. Is it justified? Because I'm not really sure it is. I really, really am not. Easy is not the same as cutting quarters. Easy is not the same as cheating or doing a half assed job. Easy means I let things move and flow. I let them happen. I ask and I receive. And I don't put up one roadblock after another. Prove this first, do this, make this happen, do that until I get to receive. That is a mind shift. And it's one that honestly, I have to keep reminding myself of over and over. So welcome to Flow Dreaming. Welcome to the five year update of the Everything is Easy topic. Now some of you guys, again, I know I say this often in my shows and my podcasts, but it's true. So much of my material does refer back to me school and or now Flow On. And yes, Everything is Easy is an entire chunk of me school. It's another one of these big teaching areas. But I want to kind of gloss through it a little bit for you now. And another reason for it is that if you've been to Flow dreaming.com recently, if you haven't, please stop on by, you know, come check, come check us out again. If it's been a while, I've opened up a brand new area on the website devoted to nothing but courses and and classes and a lot of these teachings that I've given over the years and smattered throughout the podcast, et cetera, can now be found as these very honed in topical courses on a particular subject. And the one that I have just released this month is called Everything is Easy. And if this show, this episode strikes a bell with you, you need to take these next steps. You need to like start doing the work to make your life not so gosh darn hard all the time. So I want you to go check out that course. If this speaks to you, even better. Check out Flow on because you get Everything is Easy the whole course as part of your Flow on membership. But it's 30% cheaper if you're part of Flow on. So keep that in mind and let's dive in. Okay. All right. So over the years, gosh, I've worked with. I can't even Thousands. Thousands of people, maybe been inside many hundreds, probably thousands of heads. I've never really kept count, but judging how often I work with my clients and my private clients and my students and look into them and look into other people. Something I don't talk too much about, probably should do a few updates on this in the show, too, is the empathic skills, the intuitive skills that I use day in and day out that I love. And what I find is when I go into people's minds, sometimes I can see, like a full personality there. Not sometimes, almost all the time. It's the being. It's the way that they do things, the way that they think, the way that they see things through. It's just. It's kind of just such a fascinating place to be in privilege, to be able to literally look through other people's eyes and wear their moccasins or whatever the saying is. And something that this has shown me over time. And I guess this is kind of unique because if you're able to look inside hundreds or thousands of people's minds, it's like a direct connection, right? It's sort of like a sociologist or a psychologist who takes notes on people. You know, I take notes and I learn about them and they tell me things, but that's already been filtered through the way that the person wants you to perceive them and what they care to share, et cetera. But when you're going right into their minds, it's like you feel the fabric of who they are. You feel what they are, how they're made, how they're put together, how their joints are soldered on or glued or, you know, cemented together. It's very hard to describe, but it's a. It's a very deeper understanding of a. An approach, because that's what I'm getting at. An approach. And, and these. These approaches, for me, especially in my first 10, 20 years doing this, the. The. The approaches were startling. Often I'd be like, I never. I never felt that before. How could. How could that possibly work? How could they think that? How could they do. How could they see life like that? How could they go forward with those assumptions? How could they be in that. Their approach? And then gradually, after, you know, you've been in enough people and seen enough inside them, the approaches start to have a lot of similarities. And. And then I start to say, oh, I've seen this one. I've had a variation on this. I've tasted this before. A variation on this. It's sort of like all the different flavors of vanilla ice cream. Okay, there's some Madagascar vanilla or, you know, like some vanillas are really vanilla and some are just kind of vanilla and some are, they're all different. But you kind of start to start to feel the similarities. And this is where this one kind of idea started to bubble up very strong in me. Some people take things and complicate them and they're, this is not a bad thing. This is me, frankly. I have a tendency to complicate things because I want to make sure it works. I want to test everything. I want to go and do the AB testing and, and know that it, you know, this is going to fly. And I've checked it and I've checked it again and, and then we've, you know, we've changed this and we have to make it a little bit better and then we have to check on and on and on, on. It's important, especially if you don't want to put out, you know, shoddy stuff. But over complicating can lead you into a whirlpool in your head. And, you know, it's, it's. I see this often in people whose minds travel in circles. They go round and round around, same thoughts around and round and round. The thoughts end up sticking and staying and get stuck in them. And they actually can never move forward because they're circling. They're that little jet circling in the sky, you know, can't land. So I look at this and I think, where is the point between being detailed and clear and on top of things versus needlessly over complicating? And this is where you can kind of jump over to a whole other industry. Right? Silicon Valley, folks. Yes. Software programming, new product development. There's something called the minimum viable product, the mvp. What is the least you have to achieve to get your objective done? And this is really important. And I've learned this lesson well the hard way. The minimum viable product is the one that you're really trying to make, the one that people want. The core, the essence, the thing, the problem, essentially you're trying to solve. That's what you have to put together. All the other things that go on it, the bells, the whistles, the things that people say, well, I wish it could do this or I want it to do that, or in my particular circumstance, be cool if. And sometimes you have your own thoughts like Well, I want it to do this and that, blah, blah, blah. And this minimum viable product starts to have all these little sticky pieces and stuff added onto it again. In software development, they call it Scope. Oh my gosh, the scope is changing. They call it Scope creep. Or they used to, I hope. I don't know, maybe they still do. Scope creep. You guys let me know. But it means that you have the minimum viable product, but then you keep adding stuff on, like cool stuff, cool stuff, good stuff, more stuff. And it gets to be bigger and bigger and pretty soon you don't even know if this thing's going to work or not. You haven't even offered it to people yet. But it's this giant monster and you've invested, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in it when you could have invested quite a bit less just to test it. You've heard of this too, proof of concept. But you're in Scope creep and you're making things difficult and you're over complicating and you're adding more on and you want it to be the best thing ever in the whole world. And everybody will love it so much more. You'll please so much more people. But what ends up happening is the whole thing is complicated. Before it ever gets out of the gate, before it ever lands in anyone's lap, before a single person can say I love it. This is amazing. So I'm using this as an example because this is something we tend to do in our lives when we are thinking about our careers, our choices, even our vacations. Anything, plan something. Does it get harder as you go along or does it get easier? Bingo right there. That's your basic question. Now I'm going to pause for a second because I ended up turning this entire discussion into a class. It's called Everything is Easy. It's in the brand new courses and classes area of my website@flowdreaming.com and this is where I walk you through more even than I'm saying here. This is like the lead up, you know, this is like getting you thinking and churning like, oh yeah, is this a thing or what? You know, for me, does it speak to me? I don't know. So if it does, I really encourage you to go there because I have all the way out of this there. But I'm going to touch on a little bit here for you because I want to see if this is important to you. So if you're a person for whom Scope creep happens all the time in your life, it means that the project that you thought you were going to spend $1,000 on, you know, the new side gig or the website or. I don't know, the vacation is now a $4,000 project, and it's still nowhere close to being complete or booked or whatever it may be. And it's going and it just won't stop. It's just getting. And you think, why can't this just be easy, right? And scale doesn't really matter here. I mean, the scale can be huge. It can be my whole career. Complicated, difficult, can't get it where I want it to go. Keep pouring more into it, keep getting more certificates and things that say, I can do this and yet nothing changes. Or the scale can be very small, can be tiny, can be just like. I wanted to plan a birthday party. There was either invite a couple friends over or rent the game truck and, you know, the ice cream cake and get all the gift bags and the. Right. You see what I'm saying? Make it easy, make it hard. What actually is your objective? Like, what do you want from the thing that you're making? So this question for me cuts to the heart of this idea. Everything is easy. Okay? Everything is easy. Everything is easy does not mean everything is lazy. No, no, no, no. It means the more hard work I throw into it, the bigger the results because there is no friction and no resistance getting in my way. So what do you want from it? Hey, let's say it's the birthday party. I want my kid to have a really happy day, and I want to feel not stressed out. And I want all the other kids to have a good, happy time. I want this to be a good memory. Wow. Okay. That's a good feeling and an easy feeling. That feeling didn't feel complicated or hard or tough or any of that. So what's the minimum viable product for that? What does my child need? What do I need to make that kind of day possibly happen? And this is where it starts. Well, maybe a cake and a few friends over, maybe a few parents that I like. But then the creep comes on. Well, yeah, but are they going to have fun? Is that enough? Maybe I should hire someone. Maybe I should get some maybe this and maybe that and da da da da da da da. And before you know it, things are getting hard, they're getting complicated, and you may still end up with the best birthday party ever. I have had some very complicated parties. I'm remembering a ninja party in particular, where the entire backyard was set up with these. These traps and these ropes and all kinds of things for the neighborhood kids. Oh, my God. Great party. Did it need to be so complicated? Probably not. So getting back to everything is easy. What we're really looking at is when we tend to start overdoing it. It's because something has popped up in our hearts and our heads that said, this is too easy. I don't trust it. This is too simple. No one will like it. This is to bang on nail on the head. And I don't know if that's gonna be good enough. What else? And we start hedging our bets, right? We start pushing and piling other stuff on. Maybe I put a little more on here, a little more on there. Maybe it's gonna be better this way. Maybe if I make it more complicated. And we start Harding stuff up. Yes, I turned hard into a verb. We're Harding stuff up. We're making it harder and harder. And some of us do this without even knowing that we're doing it. It's in our nature. It's just in our nature. And for those of us like that, I say, look, we have to pull back. You will be crazy surprised how quick, how fast you can go, how much stuff will happen, how quicker, much more quickly. It'll happen for you when you let go into everything is easy. And easy works. That's the main thing. We have no trust that easy works. Oh, easy can't work. It won't last. It won't stay. It'll break. It'll be flimsy. It'll. No, I want you to think about easy as different than that. Easy is, you know, having a plumber come over and insert one beautiful, solid, strong pipe from async to B sink versus the plumber, who says, well, I could insert the pipe, but maybe we ought to insert two pipes and then run another one up the ceiling. And then just. Just in case you ever need that in the free. And you're like, yeah, yeah. And then things start to slow down and get sloggy, and they get difficult. So that is one aspect of everything is easy. It's the presumption or the push or the energy that you go into your projects with and where you end up at the end and noticing when you start to derail into the difficult. Now, why do we even derail into the difficult in the first place? What is that? Why do things get difficult? Well, this is a whole conversation now. We're opening up about lack thinking. And I have done many, many shows, many episodes about lack thinking. Probably time to update some of those as well. But in the world of lack thinking, easy things don't last. Easy things don't work. Difficult things do. The more resistance we encounter, the more we feel like, yeah, I bit through that. I chewed through it. You. I got in. It was, mmm. We've been conditioned over our lives to think the harder something is, the better it is. Like, just stop and let that sink in. Harder something is, the better it is. Harder something is, the more payoff you get. Harder and more difficult the thing that you go through. Oh, they're beautiful at the end. It's sort of like a very Western religious concept. Those who have the worst, most difficult, hardest lives, they're the closest to God at the end, right? They've. They weathered the most yet. You know, we look at our own practical experience, and often the people who've weathered the most hard, difficult lives are not close to God at all. They're tired, they're negative, they're mean, they're cranky, they're disillusioned. The bargain that they made did not work the bargain in their head. If I deal with all this shit my whole life, oh, have to put a disclaimer here in the beginning now. If I deal with all this shit in the beginning of my life, you bet I'm gonna get a payoff. And yet they don't feel it, and they just feel tired and haggard. That that's what happens when Lack informs you. The lack is whatever I do is never enough. It's not enough. Make it harder. Make it harder. I'm going to hit resistance. The more resistance, the better. Good people hit resistance. The more resistance I hit, the more better, stronger, the more I've earned it. The more I'm a good person, the more justified I am in getting it. That person over there who got it so easy. Yeah. Nah, they didn't earn it. They didn't deserve it. Ugh. Terrible person. Can't even believe they're so rich and happy and well liked and loved. Ridiculous. I'm being sarcastic here. Can you hear it? I'm wanting you to think about some of these precepts in your mind that we build up around what is hard. What is easy. What does it mean? And what does it mean when you say to yourself, everything is easy? It's a mind shift. It's a mind blown shift. Everything is easy. What is that really? You're like, no, it's not. What if it is? What if it is? What if it could be? Well, then it should be. Yeah, great. Why don't you start operating from that idea from that perspective, from that energetic space, everything is easy. Everything is easy. It's easy. It's easy. It's easy. Well, no, no, no, no. You say, well, then I get things that aren't easy, and it proves me wrong right away. And then I have to, like, let go of that. Why not just go back to everything is easy? Why shift back into the hard and say, okay, everything is hard? Because then you know for sure everything is going to be hard, right? Because that's now what you're definitely, definitely making. But if you shift back into everything is easy, maybe you'll actually shift back into easy. Oh, starting to get it. Starting to feel it, right. Trust me, I've had my own experiences of this a lot recently. I've had four contractors out here in the last month trying to chase down a leak in my house. And I keep saying, everything is easy, and they want to make it complicated. And I'm saying, nope, everything is easy. Who's going to be the easy one? Who's going to find it? Who's just going to solve this? Everything is easy. You see, I feel like I am the counterweight sometimes against things that want to proliferate, become more difficult, become complicated in ways that don't need to be. If you imagine that at any given point there's all these little paths, imagine you're in the wizard of Oz and you're standing there with Dorothy and you're looking at the Scarecrow, but instead of just this way or that way, there's like 300 ways. There is always a path that is going to be easier than the path next to it, and a path that will be easier than that one, and a path that will be easier than that one path easier than that one. Until you get to the one that's easiest and easiest doesn't mean that it doesn't go anywhere. I'm talking all the paths lead to the same destination. I want the one without friction. I want the one with no resistance. I want the one where I can run, sing, sail, glide, skate, you know, anything along this path. And I get there and it feels great, and it feels good, and it's easy. That's the energy I constantly want to inject in my life. And I guess the big why is, why not? Why not? I want to feel like I get more done. I want to feel like I don't spin off so often in these little, you know, little side tributaries of life that just kind of are little detours. And I love detours. If I'm touring some fabulous Italian town with lots of little buildings and windy roads. Yes, I can detour all day, but it still has gotta be easy. Still want it to feel easy, easy, pleasant, enjoyable, not hard, not resistant, not turn back, go away, this is bad. Ick, ick. So for me, you see, this all boils down to the idea of flow. And flow is things flow or things are blocked. And we know how things feel when they're blocked. They feel hard, they feel tiring, they feel upsetting. We get confused, we doubt ourselves when things are in flow, they're moving, they're free, they're willing to see and sing into their next thing, a way of being. That's what I want over and over. So I'm always remembering. Don't go into lack, try to stay away from complication. What's the minimum viable product here? What does the path of ease feel like to me and for me, do I need more ease in this situation? Is injecting ease into this. The one thing that might just clip this short and get this done with and boom, help me move on to the next area where I'll start to get those feelings of joy and love and happiness and return that I'm looking for. Because you know what? Ease brings return, good returns to you. That's what we're often looking for. I put out energy so much every day. I want to feel a good return for that energy as often as I can. And resistance is frankly not what gives me that return, gives me stinky return. So I want you to be thinking about this, feeling this, going deep into this. And then I want you to consider also, you know, following up on it. If this speaks to you, I do have beautiful, beautiful playlists, ways that you can follow up on this, that you can utilize the practice of flow dreaming to recondition yourself, to change yourself. You don't have to keep carrying this over complication. You do not have to. So I will wrap by referring to you once again, the Everything is easy course, where we go even deeper into this idea and especially into extracting, getting rid of this over complication, this resistance to everything we do, everything we do in our lives. Let it go, let it go. See what happens when you start injecting tons of ease in. In addition to the course, by the way, which does come with its own special flow dream, My Easy Abundant Day, you'll also find a playlist that I think would be wonderful for you and that is called My Flowing Easy Life. So I'm going to leave you with those two referrals for more thought More thinking on this if you want to know what is Flow dreaming? What is the technique? I don't do flow dreams every single time in the podcast any longer, but you can find plenty of them in my archives. You can also download the free kit@flowdreaming.com and it comes with a beautiful Flow dream to get you started and teach you about this marvelous technique. Not meditation, not hypnosis, none of those things. Its own beautiful little animal. So go grab that and you guys, I'll see you all next week when we get together again for our journey in flow. And our journey in Flow dreaming, My friends. Flow on is a breath brand new membership and its goal is to keep you in flow, in alignment and in a state of beautiful growth and emergence. Emergence into the next you. Sometimes this is going to mean some healing or renewing your energy from depression or burnout. Or maybe you're going to be pushing into new areas of growth and rampant success. Well, Flow on is your monthly spiritual backpack. It's a brand new program. I haven't done anything like it since. Well, it's been so many years when I used to have a Flow Dream of the Month club. Think of this as its new 21st century iteration and Flow on has everything that you need. It's a monthly masterclass, a monthly Flow dream, even some live interaction. And best of all, you can come and go as you please. There's no long term commitments, so please check it out@flowdreaming.com if you're lucky enough and it's enrolling, do grab a spot. It will not be open and available at all times all year, but if it's open, please jump in. I know you won't be disappointed and I look forward to traveling with you on this beautiful journey of flow and giving you so many tools, all the tools that I've ever created.