777. Your Life Is Not a Spectator Sport!

Chris and I have really gotten so intentional about making sure that we are active participants in our life right down to every single day. Deciding to choose how we want to feel about things, choose how we want to feel about challenges, choose how we want to feel about our day to day life.

Welcome to the Earn your Happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, founder of Light Pink, best selling author, three time fitness world champion, and I'm a crazy, multi passionate entrepreneur. My journey has taken me everywhere from being a broke waitress, barista, retails associate and personal trainer with massive anxiety and no belief in myself to later becoming a multimillionaire in love with my life. In 2007, my husband and I lost everything. We found ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at rock bottom. We had no ideas and I had no education to fall back on. This is when I found personal development and learned everything I could about business. Not by choice, but because I realized no one was coming to save me. The conversations on this podcast are going to let you know that you're not alone and that we all feel like we don't know what we're doing. We're going to give you the tools to help you face your fears, take action, start your business, and grow those massive dreams that are keeping you up at night. It's time to create a life that you can't hide from and put so much on the line that your higher self is forced to come out. You're going to stop waiting for someone to approve of you and you're going to anoint yourself. Because I'm obsessed about building businesses that give women a platform, I want to feature you. So if you text the word podcast to 310-496-8363, you can get your questions answered on our Q and A segment along with a shout out. And if you rate, review and subscribe to this podcast, we're choosing someone every month to get coached and featured on our show. It just might be you. So let's get started.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Earn your happy podcast. It's time for another quickie because there's always time to fit in inspiration and today I am fitting this podcast in while Chris and I are on our mini anniversary trip. It was our 16th anniversary a couple days ago and we actually had some busy work days that we had to finish up and instead of trying to fit it in and celebrate on the actual day, we decided why stress out? Why not finish these projects that we are doing and that we need to finish and that we feel the urgency of finishing and instead plan our anniversary on a different day so that we can actually be present and enjoy it. And I think that that ties in perfectly to what we're talking about today. And that is, how do you actually enjoy your life? In order to enjoy your life, you have to be an active participant in it. Your life is not a spectator sport. If you want something to change, if you want something to happen, you have to be the person who is planning it. You have to be the person who is driving the ship. Instead of looking at the captain of the ship and yelling at him and being upset that they're driving the ship in a direction or it's going in a direction and you're watching, watching it go in a direction that you do not want. I have lived this way before and trust me, it's definitely a place of blaming, complaining and justifying. All of your conversations are about what is wrong or what's wrong in the world or what's wrong with your life or what you don't like, what you don't have. And it's conversations that really feel low energy. They make you tired, they drain you, they make you feel ungrateful, they make you feel upset, they make you feel like you got the short end of the stick. And in order to change that, you have to be an active participant. But that also means that you have to be clear on what it is that you want. So I'm going to use an example. We are in Wisconsin and we've been celebrating a lot of different things within our family. Because it's my mother in law's birthday, it's my brother in law's birthday, and it's our anniversary. We tend to celebrate them all in the month of August when we come and visit every single summer. Because we've made that a priority, which is one of the first things that we've done is made it a priority to come back and see my family, to see Chris's family, to see my grandparents. I'm so grateful that we've done that. So with that said, sometimes when we're here and you guys know, with family, sometimes the conversation, if you're with them every single day, it's kind of like a natural thing once in a while for the conversation to go to a negative place. And a while back, Chris and I decided that if we want to keep the conversation more engaging or more upbeat or more positive, that we're gonna have to make sure we're not only observing what we are saying and how we're directing the conversation, but Sometimes we might wanna actually actively take charge of the conversation and change it. And I'm gonna use the example of when we go out and we celebrate events and we celebrate family events or birthdays or anniversaries, sometimes we would leave and feel like, wow, I don't know, it just felt like another dinner. It didn't feel as special as maybe we wanted it to feel. So we took some time and said, how could we sit down and make these big life events feel special if it's someone's birthday, for example? So for the last probably four or five years on birthdays, what we've done, and we've done this on holidays as well, is we've decided to make sure that we go around the table and each person either gets to share a favorite memory of that person or a favorite trait of that person. And we usually take anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes each person to go around the table and share our favorite memory or trait or thing about that person. And we do this during cocktails and it usually ends up trickling throughout the whole meal. And it's a really special way that that person feels celebrated. The conversation feels so incredibly beautiful and celebratory and meaningful. And you really get to think about the things that you love about that person and what you're grateful for and the things that you've really loved about them throughout the year. And it's the most beautif to acknowledge someone. And we all leave feeling like that person really got celebrated. We also got to take this active part in celebrating them and being this active participant in our life to enjoy it more. And you know, Chris and I have really gotten so intentional about making sure that we are active participants in our life right down to every single day. Deciding to choose how we want to feel about things, choose how we want to feel about challenges, choose how we want to feel about our day to day life. Because it truly is the little things and it's the challenges that we are attempting to be actively grateful for and acknowledge them, that these are the times that we get to grow. These are the moments that we actually get invited in our life to level up through these challenges, through these difficulties, through these difficult conversations.

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I'm really choosing how we want to come at the day, choosing what we want to do each day, choosing how we want to Be on the weekends. What do we want within our life? Chris and I decided that we want lake life to be a large part of our life. And let me tell you, that takes intention. It takes intention setting dates to be on the lake. It took a lot of intention to get a boat. It takes intention of who do we want around us when we're doing this? How do we want to be on the boat? Do we want to do sports? Do we want to do wakeboarding? What does that look like? What do we want to learn? Oh, my God. We have to watch YouTube videos in order to figure all of this stuff out. And while that might sound like, oh, that must be nice, and it is. It's the best thing ever, but it takes actively participating in what you want your life to look like. And it all started with a thought, and it all started with a dream, and it literally started with, how do we want to spend our summers? Where do do we want to spend our summers? Who do we want to spend our summers with? How are we going to get there? Can we do this? What does this look like? How do we want the conversations to look if it goes to a negative place, what do we do? Do we start engaging in different conversation, asking different questions? And I'll tell you that every dinner that we've been out to with family, we've actively participated in making sure that the narrative stays positive. But even when we walk into a restaurant, we start to talk about or when we're driving there, what questions do we want to ask? Or I'm going to ask some good questions tonight that I want to know about our par. That I want to know about how they were growing up. Ooh, this is what I'm going to ask, because this is how I want the conversation to feel and where I want it to go. And this has been game changing. This has been game changing for us because once in a while, you guys know you're with family sometimes, like I said, it can go to a negative place. Or maybe you could easily start bickering a little bit about something, and instead, if you don't want that to happen, you have to think about what you're gonna do if these things come up. So I hope that this has maybe just spurred some questions in your mind about how you can start changing some things that maybe you're not loving in your life and that it's not a spectator sport. You can't show up to these things and just let it happen. It has to be something that is intentional all throughout your entire day. Your entire life. And it is not easy. It's not easy to sit there and change a conversation, especially if it's negative. It's not easy to always plan way ahead on exactly what you want to do. But you'll find that you're becoming a spectator if you don't do these things. You'll find that you're starting to wonder why things didn't go the way that you want, or that you have extreme expectation, hangover. And a lot of times it's because maybe you don't have a plan or you didn't have an intention for the weekend. And sometimes the intention is to let go of your expectation and to go with the flow. And that's a beautiful thing, too. And that can allow you to be in that state of whatever comes up. I'm just gonna observe it and I'm gonna enjoy, and that's what this weekend is gonna be for me. So I hope that you guys have taken something away from this to maybe turn the tides of something that isn't going the way that you want, that you've been noticing, that you've been a spectator in your life. And maybe it's something that you're blaming, complaining, and justifying, and instead you really want to take the reins and see how you can change the tide for your life and your family. So, you guys, I'm so grateful for you. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye, everyone.

Sam.