Brave Enough To Do a Life Re-Design When Life Lets You Down

The BOMBS are the big things that happen that absolutely blow up your life. They happened in the past and they will keep happening... it's impossible to predict.

Literally, it's as if you were walking down a sidewalk and a bomb went off just a few feet away from you.

The shock wave leaves you reeling - "Wait a minute, this is not what I was expecting. My life was not supposed to turn out like this. This was never supposed to happen."

• Bombs can be things like Prince Charming saying he doesn't love you any more or turning on you because his expectations of you are so huge.
• Or it can be Prince charming passing away, leaving you behind because of death.
• It can be when your child passes away. That's a huge bomb.
• Or when your child has some sort of illness, physical illness, a mental illness that requires all of you to be there with them or to be affected by them.
• Things like menopause or retirement or bankruptcy can also be BOMBS.

After the shock wears off...you have to decide what you do - who you will be now.

The loss of the dream life can cause you to lose who you are.
 
And really the word 'loss' is a keyword here. We fall into this place, as Tony Robbins describes,  of "loss, less than and never will have again". 

In this week's podcast, we talk about the decisions you have to make and how to stop letting your brain threaten to keep you trapped in the fallout of whatever BOMB has happened or is happening in your life right now.

The good news? There's a way to come out the other side feeling as if you still have a future worth walking toward. Courage. It just takes courage.

Download here:  FREE e-Book:  How To Find Your Passionately Personal Midlife Mission

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Transcript

(00:01):

Welcome back to Soft and Strong. I love doing this with you. I am talking a lot about being who you are and I realize more and more that I just love to teach. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this with you. And today I am so excited to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart and embodies everywhere that I wanna go with this podcast and with my coaching. I wanna help you to be brave enough to do a life redesign when your life changes course. How many times does our life change course over the whole years that we have on this earth? So many times? You know the big picture that I'm always talking about because this is what helps me to get through life, is to realize that I am a heart, an individual walking on a path, I was born on that path.

(01:20):

When I die, I will leave that path. In between those two points, all this stuff happens, right? You go up the mountains, down the valleys you have, you are excited, you are crushed. There are just so many things that happen along this journey. And my mission in life is really to help you to navigate, to help women just like me, who are beautiful souls, who want to do their best, who wanna be proud of who they are, to navigate all of the hills and valleys and the changes that happen as they walk. Because in the end, when we're at that place where we're leaving the path, we wanna be proud of who we were, right? We wanna feel as if we did the best we could with what we had been. So along all those ups and downs, I like to picture them as bombs and boulders and rocks being thrown at us. Today I want you to really think about the bombs. The bombs are the big things that happen that absolutely blow up your life. They happened in the past and they will happen to you right where you are, or maybe have happened just a while ago. And when

(02:59):

They happen, you have to decide who you're going to be as a result of that. So many times we blame ourselves, but it's not because of who we are that things happen. It's often something that happens as we're walking in our life, literally as if you were walking down a sidewalk and a bomb went off just a few feet away from you, you have to decide what you do with that. Now the bombs in life create this kind of feeling like, wait a minute, this is not what I was expecting. My life was not supposed to turn out like this. This was never supposed to happen. Bombs can be things like Prince Charming saying he doesn't love you anymore or turning on you because his expectations of you are so huge. Or it can be Prince charming passing away, leaving you behind because of death. It can be when your child passes away. That's a huge bomb. Or when your child has some sort of illness, physical illness, a mental illness that requires all of you to be there with them or to be affected by them. Or it could be something like menopause and retirement, something like bankruptcy.

(04:47):

You're just living your life and all of a sudden something blows up and the whole course of your life changes because it's not what you were expecting. Not that you dreamed it would be something you did not have any capacity to even imagine happening. The loss of the dream life can cause you to lose who you are. And really the word loss is a key word here, because we fall into this place of loss less than and never will have again. That's what we think of. And often that is the response. You know, we've talked about the thoughts that happen in response because events are just events. There's no emotion tied to them, no thoughts tied to them until you tie those thoughts to them. So when you think of and focus on when the thought is, I am, I have lost all my love or some of my love or my major love, I have lost support, I have lost money.

(06:11):

And when you take that further and think it's because of this person or this situation that I will always now have less love or less support or less money, I am always going to have less than now. Or when you go to that, the thinking that I will never have love again, never have the support I need, I will always be alone. I will never have money. I will always be poor. When you go to those thoughts that creates you to take, to have feelings and to take actions that lead you into a certain place in your life, and this, this is where your choice is, you always have choices because life is about decisions. You make a million decisions every day from what you're going to eat to whether you're going to get up outta bed, to what you're going to wear, et cetera, et cetera.

(07:24):

Life is full of decisions in small ways and huge ways. So what I wanted you to think about whether you're in the middle of loss right now, a bomb going off on your life, or whether you need to just think about what will I do when that inevitably happens? Because it probably happened before and you can think back to a time when that happened and what you did then. But in many ways, we need to be constantly preparing ourselves. And that means we're always deciding not only who we are today, but who we are going to be in the future. No matter what happens when we fall into that place of loss and we think we're trapped and there's nowhere out, no place to go to get us out of there as if we're in a cage. That is the definition of real suffering. Suffering is something that I, it breaks my heart to see suffering.

(08:38):

I've been there. I've been in a place where I lost everything. When I decided to leave my marriage, I lost my home and all of the love I'd put into my home, I and the, the security of that, I lost my community and all the people I was familiar with. I lost in my own eyes and certainly partly in the eyes of my kids. I lost respect. I lost their confidence in me. I lost so much. Now, I could have chosen to stay there, but what I'm about to share with you is what I did in the middle of that loss so that I could become the person that I still wanted to be in life so that I could use that situation to grow rather than to sync deeply into despair and resignation about this is just how my life is going to be from here on in.

(09:45):

So we have a choice. I had a choice. You have a choice. You can live in that suffering or you can choose to do a life redesign, a reset, a refresh. But in many ways it's a redesign. We are brilliantly resilient. That's how God made us to be able to assess a situation and respond to it with everything courageous that we have inside of us. We cannot control the fact that the people who are walking with us on our path turned out to not be the way or do the things we wanted them to be or to do. You are the only person that you can control. You are an individual and that is a wonderful thing in so many ways because it gives us something to do. When we can't control other people, we can build ourselves. You are still here. You are still present, you are still in this place in life on your path right here today. You are you with all of your amazing heart, and you get to choose what you're going to do. So if you choose to adapt, this is what I want you to do. If you choose to take the courageous route to reinvent your life, to redesign your life, because it looks different now in this place where the bomb has gone off and changed its course.

(11:35):

I love the quote that here, everywhere and, and I looked it up. Apparently nobody knows who to attribute it to. It's been attributed to everybody from Dolly Parton to who all, all of the greats. But it says, we cannot direct the wind, but we can't adjust the sails. Adjusting your sails in the middle of a windstorm when you're out on the ocean and the waves are high and you feel as if you might go under and you're not sure what to do next. Takes every ounce of courage that you have in you. But when you think of it, who do you wanna be?

(12:23):

Think about it. The one main thought that we often come up with is, I can't do this. I can't get through this. I am not going to make it. But what if you change that thought to I can. I will find a way to get through this. It changes everything, doesn't it? It changes that feeling that you have deep inside about whatever it is that you're going through. It also changes the feeling about who you are as a person. I can, I will, I'll find a way. I don't know about you, but for me, a framework always helps. I have a three step framework for you that I call the I. Yes, you can do this framework, and yes, you can do this no matter your age. I often reference it as even beyond 50. Yes, you can. You can go with the flow of your life and you can even when your life takes a tremendous change, of course you can do this. So I'm gonna tell you these three steps, they are say it, see it and be it.

(13:54):

The the first step is to say out loud exactly what we were just talking about. I can do this. I will find a way. So what you need to do is then look closely at what you want. Who do you want to be? What kind of character do you wanna have going forward in response to whatever situation is happening right now or in the future? What are the words that you want to have in your mind? They might be words like, I wanna be strong, I wanna be courageous, I wanna be encouraging, I wanna be believing, I wanna be resourceful. Always finding an option, always looking at the options and choosing which one I will use <affirmative>.

(14:52):

And secondly, when you talk about saying it out loud, what is it that you want your life to look like? Where will you head if you are out there in that storm, drifting on those waves, being tossed around by the wind and you are adjusting your sails? Where are you adjusting your to head? What is that piece of land that you are dreaming of in your mind that you wanna get to? It might be a specific picture of the life that you wanna live, where you are living now in peace, where you are living in courage, where you are proud of yourself, where you are doing something that is making a difference because of what you've been through, where you are living a particular kind of life in a dream, a place that you need to go. For me, when I went through my divorce, what I believed was that there was love, a good love out there somewhere, and I was going to experience it before I died. I wrote that down so many times and I said that to people when we were talking about divorce, when we were talking about the response to divorce. I would say that out loud, I am going to find a good love. I believe that there is a good love. I found that piece of land, I found that destination because I kept that in the front of my mind. So say it out loud, who you want to be and what you want from your life. Secondly, see it.

(16:39):

You need to find the feeling of what that life feels like where you want to go. Because for one thing, it gives you a relief from all the worry and the stress that you're going through from your current condition. You need to find the good feelings. Something that will give you a change from the fear, a change from feeling as if you don't know what to do. The confusion, you need to set all that aside and exchange them for the good feelings that are clear and concise. The feeling you feel down deep in your stomach or in your heart. So when you describe how your new life will look, that's what happens is that immediately was you. You have those thoughts, a feeling will attach to it. You will go to a feeling, and what you wanna do is find the thoughts, the description that lead you to that feeling.

(17:39):

You wanna see you as if you were already there. You wanna see you living in the way that you dream of being able to live again, being confident, being decisive, being accepting, being in a place where you are growing again, where you are compassionate and caring and loving. Yes, you can do this even if you think that you can never get there again or you don't really want to get there again, because that sounds too frightening, which is ironically a place we often go to. You can do this. So describe, step out. Use your imagination. Write a description of how you want that place to live, as if you're uh, to, to look as if you're already living there. See you in the picture of the redesign. You adjusted to what has changed you doing good things that have resulted from what you've walked through. Now, you being radiant and happy, you being mature and in love with your life. That's what I saw was me living in a good relationship, being loved in all the ways I needed to love. Sometimes you have to take small steps in order to get there. Taking the big leap into that dream seems so impossible. But now this the last step here to be. It helps you to begin to take the steps toward becoming the woman you need to be in order to live in that picture of the life you're going towards.

(19:37):

So in order to determine how you want to be, maybe it's just a small, small step, like going from a place of, um, being in shock to calming down. Maybe you need to just picture that smallest step. Maybe instead of being in a place where you are, uh, reeling from your divorce, you need to look at you. Imagine yourself just coming down to earth, leveling out and just taking control and making the decisions you need to make. Maybe that's the first small step that you need to take. But overall, when you think of becoming this woman, it's all about asking yourself questions, being curious, letting yourself really think through the serious questions. Not questions like, oh, how am I going to get through this? How am I going to survive? No, those are not good purposeful questions. Those are questions that result in panic. What you need to do is just become calm. Step into a place where you are courageous and you ask yourself things like, who do you need to be in order to live the life that you're imagining? What do you need to learn? What are you believing right now that's keeping you from becoming that person, from living that life? How do you need to know yourself better? What if you are all ready? I love this question. What if you are ready, this person and you just need to release her? You just need to step into that side of you.

(21:52):

Say it, see it, be it. This is what will pull you through. Any transition your life is taking you through now and forever, in the future. As hard as it is, we can't go back and change the past, not even yesterday. We can't go back and change what happened or control other people and who they are. Though we'd love to, we can't. And that's tough. That's hard. We can only focus on what we can control. We can only focus on us. You can only control you. You can only keep an eye on the future and keep learning to be brave enough in the present to walk through it, through this, walk the steps and the years ahead.

(23:00):

Now, if this is daunting for you, and it can be because that's why people give up and live in that place where they are always focused on the thought. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. When you focus on that thought, you know the feelings that happen deep inside of you. You know the actions that you would take as a result of that thought and that feeling. If this is where you're going, then I wanna just offer this to you. I'm here to help. I've been through this and I know how tough it is. Coaching helped me so much. So I just wanna say, let's talk. Reach out to me because

(23:44):

I, I can help you with this. I can walk you through it and walk beside you as you go through it to get you back to a life that you love. Maybe for the first time, it's so worth the effort. So my beautiful ladies, my beautiful warriors, do not give up. Instead, look at your life and the bomb that's gone off and the result, the fallout that's left, and then make a decision that you are gonna do a life redesign. That it's time that you need to because it's the only thing that's going to get you on to the next phase that's gonna grow you into the future in a way that you can be proud of. Alright, I will talk to you on the next podcast.

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Hey Beautiful Warrior! No matter what life throws at you...what age or stage you're in, the most important thing is to remember who you are. When you know how you see the world and how you want to be in it, you can get through anything.  

It's time for a Life Re-Design - hit the Reset Button. Get to know yourself again so that you can move on stronger than ever.  I'm here to help walk you through the process. www.bernicemcdonald.com