Welcome friends to Episode #147 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. When you’re starting to see the fruits of your labor come to fruition and you have the life you wanted for yourself, what do you do next? Often, we wonder if this is as good as it gets or if we should just be expecting the eventual downfall after a big win. I have a third option for you. Increasing your tolerance for joy and stillness so that you can anchor into your success long enough that it becomes who you are, not just who you want to be. Long-term success comes from patience. Patience comes from tolerating more of the emotions that you may struggle holding. Since joy and stillness is a precursor for expansion of our businesses, careers, health and lives – this will be the topic for today’s podcast. How to increase your tolerance for joy and stillness.

As a coach who works with high achievers and those who are challenging themselves to do and be more with their lives, there always comes a time when we see success and momentum. I take them through a process to identify who they are, what they want to do and they start doing those things. 

Yet, with that success and momentum comes the question of how long can they hold that feeling of success. Really consider the last time you experienced a win. How long did it take for you to come off that high and just move on to the next thing? 

What I have found to be true, is that our ability to increase our capacity to handle life’s ups and downs means that we can hold emotions like joy and uncertainty for equally long periods of time. We allow ourselves to have stillness and not-doing as much as we create periods of action and doing.

What you might have found is that you think you need to “come back to reality” after a win when you need to consider, “what if this is my new reality?”

This is a really important distinction I want to make because if you “come back to reality”, you are assuming and creating a reality where what you experienced was temporary and therefore not to be trusted. If you make moves to be more financially secure and make more money in your careers and business, you may start to see that you still make decisions as if you were the person who didn’t have that amount of money or income. You continue to view the world through the lens of the original, early encounters that you had with money as a child. You think of the economy or the world through that lens, instead of today’s lens.

If you were to continue to “come back to reality” you aren’t opening up your mind to the present moment of economic conditions, market forces, opportunities and the risk/reward plus hard work ratio that got you to where you are today. If you were to “come back to reality” you would assume that you are in a short term relationship with your current life – not a long-term committed one. You don’t invest as the earner you are and you don’t invest as the earner you want to be.

Using the mindset of “what if this is my new reality” is actually a lot more pragmatic and risk-averse for keeping your success. If you can accept the level of joy you have right now, you now have created a new energetic baseline. You’ve been able to hold for a longer and longer period of time a vibration or frequency of patterns of thinking, feelings and behaviors that are aligned with what you have. Instead of reaching for something more, you’re already at the more.

This is what I consider to be a critical money and wealth management practice. The ability to manage your emotions. The ability to hold joy. The ability to be still for long enough periods of time that you don’t get bored and try to regress back to the patterns of thinking, feelings and behaviors that were your old reality. Many of us are walking around with patterns and themes from years ago that haven’t been questioned or expressed. We need to update the code if we’re in the current world and not just because what you have inside you already doesn’t work anymore, it’s because you need to intentionally decide what you want to keep and what you don’t.

Many people want to immediately move on to their next endeavor after they’ve completed one, but they haven’t paused to evaluate what worked, what didn’t and what they would do differently. This isn’t just about a project. This is also about stages in your life. When you’re in your 20’s you’re looking for the best people to help shape your thinking and grow your capacity to learn and execute. As you move into your 30’s you start to think about creating more things for yourself and of your own. As you hit your 40’s you want to start thinking about doing what you’re really good at and becoming best-in-class. 

As you keep going through life, there is a need to find more joy through each of these different ways of thinking and working. This is your work – to make things that don’t feel fun, fun again. Courage doesn’t always feel fun, yet it may be required for you to start doing your own business or leading in bigger ways. Discipline also doesn’t always feel fun, but you find fun in the desire to love yourself or the life you want that leads to discipline. If you cannot find more joy and hold more joy, you will find yourself desiring to shrink instead of expand. When you start having problems in a business or career or personal life, we often try to shrink because problems don’t feel good – we move away from the pain. But if we could find pleasure in solving problems across all areas of our lives, we will want to expand even more. More of life means scaling our life in good ways, not just painful ones.

The same thing goes for stillness. Often, our ability to do a lot comes from our inability to be still. I don’t mean stillness, that is you sitting on the couch watching TV. It’s the stillness of being able to be with yourself and your mind. To notice your thoughts, your feelings, behaviors and actions that are leading to where you are today. These patterns are so rich with information and wisdom. Whenever I lead retreats, a big part of the practice is stillness. I know that stillness is the prelude to big ideas, decisions and breakthroughs. When you sit long enough with an idea, plan or decision – something has to change. You learn what you cannot ignore and what you can ignore. This is the emotional mastery that leads to incredible results in terms of health and wealth. When I think back to the wealth I’ve created in my life and the health results – they have always come through emotional mastery. By creating a well-thought-through plan and executing it. It wasn’t through a lot of energy or high emotion. It was actually the most productive and relaxing kind of thinking. Instead of questioning or wondering frantically about what I don’t know, I created space to allow all of the resources I have to come forth and focus on what I do know and what I already have.

If you’re at a place where you feel like joy and stillness are fleeting moments for you, that’s ok. You can join my Spiritual Achiever coaching program and learn how to not just figure out who you are, what you want and go do the thing – but how to have it for the long term. How to build long-term financial stability and wealth. How to build long-term relationships. How to build long-term health and ways of living. How to build long-term models of thinking and working that are aligned with the way you want to live your life and contribute to the world. You will put these things into practice by creating visions that you then execute. Instead of waiting for joy to come to you, we create it in the work you already have today – as you figure out what you want to create for tomorrow. Instead of waiting for things to “settle down” we create stillness and routines that allow you to think and do deep work, not just react to the flurry of demands and fire-drills of the day.

Schedule a consultation for Spiritual Achiever coaching at www.mayempson.com/contact. You will achieve your biggest goals without burning out. We will create goals across Spirituality, Achievement – your work/career, Earth Energy – your mind/body practices, and Harmony – your relationships.

It is the powerful group and private coaching hybrid experience for achievers who want to expand their vision of what’s possible. 12 months of support, individualized guidance and community. Retreats, energetic portals, and shifting into altered states of consciousness again and again until your life is your vision board.

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If you’re ready to Own Your Best Life, I want to invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies. You can access the training at https://may-empson.mykajabi.com/stand-out-and-lead.

You can then apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call HERE. We’ll see you inside.

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.