With the Heart of a Warrior

"I'm good with life as long as it never changes and doesn't give me any surprises."

Don't you wish you could have this level of control? Sometimes we think that, if we did, we would feel safe and certain.

Wait a minute! Is that really how we want to live our lives? We're talking about that question in this podcast.

Is safe and careful over-rated? Even boring?

You're going to find out the secret to feeling ALIVE here. The secret that is the basis for growing a Warrior Heart.

And all Midlife Women On A Mission need a Warrior Heart.

Come in for a listen. 

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

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Transcript

(00:00):

Welcome back, my lovely ladies to the podcast soft and strong. We are going to be talking about such a good topic today. I'm so glad you're here. So here's a story. Two women turn 70 years old. One sees, her life as coming to an end to her seven decades of living means that her body must be breaking down and she'd better start winding up her affairs.

(00:32):

The other woman decides that what a person is capable of at any age depends upon her belief and she sets a higher standard for herself. She decides that mountain climbing might be a good sport to begin. At the age of 70, for the next 25 years, she devotes herself to this new adventure in mastery, scaling some of the highest peaks in the world. Until get this, in her nineties, she becomes the oldest woman to ascend Mount Fuji.

(01:15):

Can you imagine? That woman was Hulda Crooks. I found this story as I was re-reading parts of Tony Robbins book Awaken the Giant Within. Oh, such a great book.

(01:29):

To stay safe or let some unsafe in - that my lovely, Beautiful Warriors is the question. If you remember from the podcast last week, we were talking about the five components of self-esteem recommended for elementary school children in the classroom. Thanks to Robert Reasoner, a renowned educator and trainer. Let's take the children part right out of this and think of you and me. I don't know about you, but these building blocks to self-esteem all apply to me some more than others, and I know because you are human being with skin on, at least I hope. So, listening to this, and I know that this also applies to you, let's, I'm just gonna list the five needs first, okay?

(02:32):

Number one is I need security to feel certain and safe. Number two is I need significance to know and value who I am. Number three is I need to belong and feel loved. Number four is I need purpose to contribute something I want to achieve. And number five is I need to feel competent, to believe I'm good at what do and will keep getting better. All of these needs when being met at a 10, imagine that meeting every single one of these needs at a 10 in our lives creates a sense of being unstoppable.

(03:18):

Now, I would say that Hilda Crooks had most likely been building her belief in herself way before she decided to climb mountains. <laugh>. I may be going out on a ledge here, see what I did there? Mountain ledge. Anyway, but I would dare to say that most women in those 40 to 70 years that we're talking about would not all of a sudden decide to become mountain climbers once they reached 70.

(03:49):

Can you imagine her conversation with herself on her 70th birthday? I'm bored. I don't know what I'm going to do to feel challenged over the next 20 years. A very truthful statement, by the way, I've always wanted to try mountain climbing. I think I'll give it a go <laugh>.

(04:11):

Actually, for her, it wasn't a big stretch because she started climbing in her fifties when her doctor husband advised her that, uh, to, to give it a try because it would help her after she had had a a bout with pneumonia. But when all the other older ladies were hanging up their climbing shoes, staying where it was safe and predictable, she decided to ramp it up. I can't imagine how exhilarating her life felt. How awesome it was for her to look forward to every day when she was reaching for that next peak. Her day began, as she tells it in one of the books she was interviewed for, her day began with running a mile and exercising both her body and her mind. She climbed get this 98 of those peaks some more than once, many times more between the ages of 65 and 91.

(05:26):

Well, as you can tell by my enthusiasm, I think Halda is a great example of someone who didn't let her brain talk her out of making an adventure of her life, she is one of my heroes. Now, her way of feeling safe and certain was to have confidence in herself, and she proved it to herself by looking something big right in the eye and going for it. Even though it represented

(05:57):

A lot of challenge, a lot of fear, I dare say, which is just another way of saying uncertainty. You know what this does? It keeps your life spicy, to say the least. Self-esteem or believing in yourself comes from the inside. It's YOU feeling certain that you can get through anything life throws at you. That's why I call you Beautiful Warriors. The definition that I've created of a Beautiful Warrior, is having a deep, unstoppable belief in who I am. Hulda was a Beautiful Warrior. Her eagerness to climb mountains became an influence, a legacy to help encourage others, which was her mission.

(06:53):

So what about you? Do you feel that warrior stirring inside when you hear stories like this? Here's the thing, we midlife women are really good at staying safe and secure. Had you noticed, if you were to, for example, say to yourself, "I'm going to be calm, a mountain climber like Hulda", - whoa, our brains, your brain would come up with all kinds of stories as to why that is a bad idea.

(07:28):

Am I wrong? It would say things like, "You hate climbing". "Your knees would never survive". "Are you crazy? Do you know how scary that would be? How much work it would take"? Our brain's job is to keep us safe. You can't blame the brain, BUT, if you want to live a life from a Warrior Heart, get this now, you have to be the boss of your brain and so the boss of your fear.

(08:05):

Now, it doesn't have to be mountain climbing. You can choose what you'd love to tackle. Anything falls into this category. The only thing is, if you don't, if you stay right where you are and you live to be 101 like Halda Crooks did, it's a lot of time to fill <laugh>, a lot of time to get sick, depressed, angry and dull, and that's what will happen.

(08:42):

If you let yourself fall into the need to feel certain all the time, to not do things because they scare you, the only way you can feel certain in this life is to control everything and everyone around you, right? Can you do that? Have you ever tried to control the weather? <laugh> ever tried to control one of your adult kids or your spouse or your coworker who keeps looking down her nose at you? You can't create feeling certain by controlling your environment. You have to do it by controlling yourself from the inside. What you think, what you feel, and how you take action is based on two things.

(09:42):

I get it. We fall into this cycle of belief around these two things in our lives, how we see ourselves and how we see others. We see ourselves as the victims who just seem to attract disaster into our lives and others as not loving, not caring about us being selfish and all about themselves. When that's your view of the worldr your thoughts might go to places like, "If he would be more loving, then I could open up and be happier."

(10:20):

You can just feel the feelings that come out with that statement, right? What actions would result? You would close down even more because he's probably not going to do that. The pattern is probably set. Whatever thought you let your brain dwell on produces that result. You say, "If he will do this, then I could do this", but he will never do that, so you will never be...

(10:52):

You will get the exact result you're talking about. We need to feel certain that others will love us, respect us, and have our best interests at heart, right? I wanna encourage you, my Beautiful Warrior, to throw that thinking out. You can't control the wind. You can't control love. You can't control life.

(11:18):

The only thing you can control and be certain about is who you are and how you will respond in every situation. That's where certainty comes from. Hulda Crooks didn't make the decisions she made to do the brave things she did at 70. She didn't make those decisions at 70. She made those decisions decades before. So how can you grow a Warrior Heart? You are unstoppable. You know, just saying, because you need to hear it.

(12:04):

Here's how to release that unstoppable part of you. Three things. First, take responsibility for the thought You're thinking. Stop right now and do a brain dump. That's when you just get all the thoughts. You're thinking out onto a page. Now, don't judge yourself or hold back. It's just you and yourself here, right? Write, write. Don't stop until all the thoughts are out there on the page. Now look at them.

(12:39):

ow many of those thoughts are negative, unhappy, scared, blaming, unsure about how things are and how things are going to turn out. This is what you do. Just take responsibility for them. Don't deny them. Don't push them away. Just be okay with them. Neutral as if you're just an observer looking at the thoughts that are in your brain.

(13:17):

Secondly, focus on the outcome of those thoughts. Ask yourself still from a neutral point of view as if you are someone else talking to you, coaching yourself in a sense.

(13:34):

If you keep thinking this way, where will you end up? What kind of thoughts do you think that Hulda Crooks had to think in order to keep her body moving and her perseverance strong? What did she have to believe about herself in order to have the determination to climb Mount Fuji when she did at 91? How many of the thoughts that you wrote down were about how you can do anything? You set your mind to how many of your everyday thoughts center around a vision of who you want to be and where you want your life to go?

(14:25):

This leads us to the last point here, but a big one. The life-changing one. Number three, create a vision. Find a mission. The climbing for Hulda was not necessarily the goal. Hulda knew who she wanted to be, how she wanted to be remembered, the legacy she wanted leave, so everything in her life supported who she wanted to become.

(14:58):

Who you want to become is your mission. That's not so hard when you really start to think about it. It's not so hard to define. It's just who you want to become. Once you establish that you work at creating a life that trains you to become it, the mission that you latch onto, the one that's in your heart that you can believe in, has to be compelling, inspiring. It needs to pull you towards it. You don't wanna have to push yourself towards it, but it needs to be something that is so inspiring for you that that it pulls you to do the things you need to do to make it happen.

(15:53):

It has to be the reason then that you say yes to things in your life and the reason that you say no to other things. Certainty, safety comes from knowing who you are and knowing that you are constantly growing toward becoming more of it. Imagine how it would feel to stand on that mountain peak like Hulda did. They actually renamed a mountain peak she climbed so many times after her. What if you spent so much time doing what you loved, that it inspired people to name that activity after you?

(16:40):

I can't imagine that but imagine what that meant. So many people were affected by what she did. She led those people into a place where they wanted to remember who she was and what she did. Who do you want to be when you 're 70? That decision starts now at whatever age you are.

(17:15):

Make it your mission to become that person no matter what life throws at you. Imagine what your life would look like at 91 if, beginning right now, you started to build the source of certainty and safety from the inside out. If it was no longer dependent on your circumstances. Imagine if you had a deep unstoppable belief that you could handle anything. It wouldn't matter what happened.

(17:53):

You would know that you could get through it. Imagine if you felt this way, if sickness came knocking at your door, if someone didn't live up to your expectations, or if you suddenly lost a good chunk of your finances. What if you could respond with, "I'm a Warrior. I have a deep, unstoppable belief in who I am. I can get through this!" Certainty. This component of self-esteem, believing in yourself requires you to feel certain that you can get through anything life throws at you. It's having a deep, unstoppable belief in yourself.

(18:47):

So here's what I want you to do. I want you to decide on your mission for this midlife season of your life. As I said, it's not hard. It's natural to you. It's in your heart. Who do you wanna be? What kind of impact do you wanna have on this world while you are alive?

(19:13):

I call it you're Passionately Personal Mission Statement. If you are having trouble defining it, if you want some help to think it through, sign up for a free consult and I will be happy to help you with that. Or you can download the e-book to walk you through. The link is in the show notes. It takes you step by step. You answer only three simple questions to get your brain going, to put it into a framework, and then once you have that, you start training that Warrior Heart.

(19:53):

Maybe that will lead you to doing some fun, adventurous, a little bit dangerous, even outrageous things, brave things, exhilarating things. Next podcast, we're gonna talk about the second component of that unstoppable belief in yourself. Significance, ah, biggie to know and value who I am. I will see you back here next week.