Welcome to episode #216 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. If you feel like you have been stuck in a rut and you are wanting something to change, this is for you. We are back in the back to school, schedules and work rush. When this all collides, the schedules can seem so overwhelming that we don’t know when and how we will get all of this done. We just know that we will. 

One of the biggest things that will change the game for you in the remainder of the year is to figure out how you want to handle all of this change. With routines coming back into place, this is the perfect opportunity to try something new. Today’s podcast on how there’s no better time to start something new will give you ideas of what you can do, things to try, and how that will create this massive ripple effect in giving you more space and time back in your life.

We are all creatures of habit. I know that it is super easy for all of us to hop back into our same exact routines that we’ve always used, and just move forward at lightning speed. 

When you are in this place of knowing that you have so much to do and so little time to do it between all the different priorities in your life and the upcoming demands with work, it will feel like life is racing and we can barely catch up. Many of these demands are also things we’ve wanted in our life. Maybe we got the promotion or the job. Maybe we got the thing that we wanted in our kids routines. Maybe we are just busier because there are more possibilities and opportunities or we have more resources to use and choices to make. No matter if it comes from a welcome or unwelcome source, all this creates noise in our life and in the rush to add more and more we forget to subtract.

This subtraction process isn’t just one of taking everything away that brings you joy. What we’re talking about is asking ourselves how much life would change if we truly made bigger changes to the way we spend our time, the way we think, the food that we eat, the places that we go and the people with whom we interact. 

You can tell so much about a person when you look at their schedule. How we spend our time is how we create our lives.

The days add up to the weeks that add up to the months that add up to the quarters and then years. When we repeat the same things that don’t serve us over and over, this is how time keeps moving and we feel like nothing has changed about our problems. We still are stressed or have Sunday Scaries. We still feel strapped financially. We still feel like we’re overworking without enough time to truly decompress. 

There are things that we may need to handle differently and this is why we want to try something new.

I also get that it’s scary to try something new because it’s not always going to save us time or create more money or energy in the short run. This is the same reason why we don’t delegate to people when we are leaders. Or we don’t give our partners a chance to do something and then we resent them for not doing it. We have to see this all as a longer game. 

This means that in the short run, this new thing that you’re doing may not seem clear to you exactly how it’s benefiting you right now. Yet, this new thing that you’re pursuing is more about learning than it is about the short term results. This is why when you are doing your day-to-day routine, scheduling things and creating plans for your teams, yourself or home life, you want to include some aspect of testing. 

You want to be running new things in parallel to the things that are solid and work well. 

So how do we do this? 

How do we actually come up with new ideas and strategies that don’t feel like they’re completely random or coming from nowhere but are going to help us? 

We are more than willing to try new things when we know that they will work. 

What we do is focus on the skills of true prioritization and decision-making. 

This is part of the program in my spiritual achiever coaching course. We work through a planning process that helps you understand what it is that you want over the course of this next year and as we start to reverse engineer what it is that you want and how it will break down into your year, quarters, months, weeks and days. When we do this, you start to automatically create a version of your life that includes this new version of you or this new idea or way of working and living. 

For example, many of my clients want to do bigger trips with their families. They want to have a really great home life yet they don’t want it to come at the expense of their work life. What this means is that they have to find time and space for this trip. They want to feel that their finances are in order. They want to do a really great job at work and plan ahead for this trip. 

All of these concerns come up as they are thinking about trying something new like taking bigger trips. They have to overcome their own fears and work on new things in making these moves and to actually book that trip or schedule that vacation with their families. 

Which is why when you try something new, it’s not just about booking the trip or scheduling the activity. If it was, everyone would have already tried many new things and become the kind of person that they wanted instantaneously. 

Instead there are actually many things that will go through your mind that we work through. The inevitable self-doubt is one of them. The failures that come along with action. The negative spiral where we prove ourselves to be right and say, “see it didn’t work” because it doesn’t work exactly the way you thought it would. The course corrections that need to be made when you make a plan but then new projects crop up and you’re suddenly over-scheduled, again.

In our coaching, instead of letting the overwhelm or failure derail us we develop the muscle of a mindset that stays the course and also adjusts. We come up with solutions, we try new things and we innovate. That innovation is the critical part that we miss out on when we stop when things get hard. This is why trying new things is not just nice to have. It is mandatory and there is no better time than now to have the benefit of that new thing you’re going to experience or learn through.

Trying and starting new things is accepting that change is a part of our life. It is accepting that you have something more inside you to give, to learn, to grow, and then to develop. You are not at the end of your life today. Even if you were, you still have an infinite amount of potential to become a version of yourself that you truly believe is available to you or experience the world with more awe, richness and depth. 

Whether it is exploring the world, deepening your spirituality, finding more stability and peace in your life, or creating massive impact in the world, you have more in you than you realize. 

Often we hold back on trying new things when we think that the cost of change is not worth the benefit that we will receive and this is why we work through a prioritization process. It’s easy to change and start random things in your life, but you want to know what will be true drivers of joy, success or fulfillment. 

We create success parameters and personal strategy maps that align to who you are and are unique to your individual lifestyle goals and your career needs. No one has the same exact past or experience as you do, which is why we don’t want to do whatever everyone else does for the sake of trying something new. 

We are in a moment now where we know the way we are working or the way we are living is not going to be sustainable forever. Especially if you are in a time in your life where you have work and family demands that seem to be hitting a peak and maxing out your capacity. 

Even if you don’t feel maxed out, we know that different ways of working are needed because we have different schedules, roles or demands on our time.

The shift and change we want to make in trying new things is to realize that trying something new is our lifeline forward. Trying something new is not the scary dead end. Trying something new is a process. It is a habit. It is the way forward. 

When we embrace this when we start to understand that this process of trying new things is a practice we realize that we are building a skill. 

You are building a skill of adapting to respond appropriately to the situation. We need this skill because there are constant requests for you to hurry up and figure something out at work that has never been done before. 

There are other requests from you at home to handle mental or emotional or physical demands of your time that you never had to deal with in your personal life before. You will have moments of personal crisis where something big is happening in your life and you need the space and the time and the mental capacity to work through them. 

This is why we want to have a practice of trying new things. 

This is why you are now listening to this podcast thinking about what’s next for you. I want to invite you to see that what’s next is a choice. As you start to move through life each day, you have a choice. When you decide to try something new, you are committing to the skill of more acceptance and peace, seeing that trying new things means that you’re growing through the inevitable changes. You are committing to being a student of life and to the actual needs that arise every single day. 

When you don’t decide to try new things, you aren’t building the muscle of trying new things and as a result, we will likely stay in the valley of despair longer. This valley of despair occurs in every single process of change at the inevitable moment where things get hard and where things don’t actually work the way we want them to be working. We get stressed wishing things were better and resisting why life is happening like this.

The way out of the valley of despair is to innovate. To try something new means innovating and moving forward. It may seem hard to believe at the time, but that one more attempt to try something new will create a situation where this challenge ends up working for you. 

Instead of staying in the valley of despair where you feel that you are repeating the same struggles whether it is at home or at work with the same conversations, workload stresses and the same results, you can choose a different way.

Trying new things creates more skill at navigating change, helping yourself and other people through transitions and being a change agent and an actual leader that believes in the underlying capacity for people to learn to adapt, including your own. 

This is a really powerful shift in how you show up in the way you present yourself and the energy that you embody in your day-to-day life and at work. I encourage you to take a moment now and think about something that is really bothering you or that you’re struggling with whether it is the current job you’re in or the demands from work and life that are pushing up against you right now. 

Ask yourself, “how could I try something new?” What comes up as the answer to that? What support would be available to you? What new ideas would come in and what would you end up doing as a result? 

Some of the things that I have tried that were new over the course of my life have changed my identity in so many different ways each and every single time. 

From the time that I started doing sports in middle school – it expanded my views of strength and resilience. I saw strength and capabilities outside of my intellect. It shifted my sense of leadership. I realized I was a leader on the field. 

You will be terrible more often when trying something new then you will be good. I tried some new things and sometimes things didn’t work out. I was terrible and I sucked pretty much at everything when I started and I got better. I also realized not everything was my thing. 

Part of trying new things allowed me to see that certain experiences come with some pain, but I was still able to learn from them. Whether that was a relationship, your first or second careers or physical pursuits – one thing can lead to another. The first thing isn’t always the final result and that’s ok too.

Whether that was my first relationship where I realized so much about who I was in a relationship and who I wanted to be in a relationship with, and how that impacted my next relationship which ended up being my current husband and partner. I know that if I didn’t try that first thing of going and saying OK, I’m committing myself to this relationship, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn and to grow to understand who I really was. 

Or when I tried a career in business and that led to supply chain, and then that eventually led to management consulting. Then that led into consumer products and strategy work which led into training and coaching – my calling. All those things at the onset were new. 

I encourage you to notice that even in your own life, you have so many examples and stories of ways you’ve made changes, ways that you’ve experienced heartbreak or pain or loss or challenge because you were trying new things. 

Just because you have a few decades under your belt now it does not mean it comes to an end. You are just at the beginning of this new day, this moment that you are in right now listening to this podcast. Even here at this moment is the chance to begin again. My encouragement for you is to really consider how you are always in the perfect place to start over again and to try something new if what you’re doing hasn’t worked. 

This is one of the ways that you will grow inside Spiritual Achiever coaching. If you want to learn how to design your life and days so that you truly break new ground in the ways that you’ve been living, thinking and working – this is the experience for you. 

If you’d like to become a Spiritual Achiever, I invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies: STAND OUT AND LEAD.

You can 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 at www.mayempson.com/contact.  We’ll see you inside.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Discover your Leadership Strengths and Branding Workshop: Increase your awareness of what makes YOU different from others and how to become even better at your genius zone.
4. Your Best Year workshop: Create your one year plan and design this next year, no matter what time of the year it is.
5. Your Next 5 Years one-day virtual retreat: Vision what’s possible 5 years from now and break out of your old routines so you can step into new habits, behaviors and routines.
6. Tickets to all in-person Spiritual Achiever retreats (discounted rates): Highly immersive and intimate gatherings where we spend time in nature, experience energy work, eat and move well – all while making big decisions and committing to what’s next for us.
7. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.

The next step?

Schedule a consultation to get clarity on how coaching can help you on your journey.

Once you’re accepted into the program, you’ll receive a calendar invite for a 2-hour deep dive 1:1 session to map out your personal goals and your own year-long journey.

You’ll have immediate access to the Spiritual Achiever process and philosophy – how to achieve your biggest goals and reinvent your life.

You’ll have immediate access to 5 modules of Career Revelation Academy – to love your career even more and launch that next chapter of your career in 30 days.

You’ll have the calendar invites for the upcoming group calls and retreats.

If this speaks to you, I can’t wait to talk to you live: Schedule a consultation.

Reach out at www.mayempson.com/contact for more information on my Spiritual Achiever coaching program. You’ll figure out what’s next and actually go and do it. 

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