What happens when your intentional living plan doesn’t work for you? It happens! In this episode we look behind the plan for intentional living to discern what may be going on when your plan doesn’t work.
The short answer is to look at what’s going on with your sense of control and autonomy and your willingness to empower yourself by taking responsibility for everything in your life. You might be running rackets that are getting in your way!
Key Term – Rackets – a fixed way of thinking and a consistent complaint that emanates from a sense that you lack control or autonomy or your reluctance to take responsibility for what’s going on in your life. Example: “I work with a bunch of immature people. I just wait for them to grow up or have the consequences of what they’re doing fall on them.” The racket allows him to sidestep responsibility for interacting in a way that could improve the situation. Rackets are a disempowering narrative that are often rooted in the past: “I can’t do that because I’m bad at math. I’m a terrible dancer; that’s why no one asks me to dance.”
Key Term – Distinction – An invitation to elevate your thinking about a subject. You’ve been thinking about something one way; a distinction invites you to divide the subject matter and see things differently.
Key Idea – You can’t ruin your life. You are exactly where you belong right now, doing what you are meant to be doing.
The value of Mastermind – being in a space where someone else can ask you: “Is that really true, or are you choosing to believe that it’s true?”
The value of journaling in a stream of consciousness way – it allows you to separate yourself from your thoughts so that you can look back and ask, “Is that true, or am I choosing to believe that it’s true?”
Key Idea – The Narrative or Default Network versus The Sensory Network – In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock explains that as a default, your brain occupies itself with The Narrative Network, which is a busy, noisy feed that encompasses what’s happening, what happened, what will happen to you, your significant other, your cousins, etc. It’s exhausting! Rock suggests giving yourself a break frequently to switch to your sensory network – being present to what your senses are supplying. Is there a breeze? Is there a fragrance in the air? What does the sunshine feel like? You’ll refresh yourself!
Word Swap Exercise – Consider swapping “and” for “but”. For example, “I want to get married, but all the good partners are taken.” Change that to “I want to get married and all the good ones are taken.” This may cause you to consider whether your search is too narrow, you’re looking in the wrong places, you’ve ruled out some possibilities that you should not have…..