I just had the most magical weekend taking a deep dive into my dreams, my obstacles, the ways I lie (and so do most other people!) and the personality traits that I love and the ones I’d prefer to lose. Eye-opening to say the least!
And since I know that a lot of the things I uncovered about myself while doing the two day Design Your Life program will probably hit pretty close to home for some of you so I wanted to share with you some of my biggest Ah-Ha moments as well as some of the juicy tips and tools I found super helpful! Plus — I totally got our fabulous leader (and my coach) Laurie Gerber, to record THREE videos for you guys on some of my favorite, most game-changing concepts!
I walked into the weekend totally excited to sit down and receive, receive, receive — I’m a total junkie for allowing myself to be in the mentee seat every once in a while since most of my days are spent coaching and teaching. It’s so important, in my opinion, to have a coach or advisor to see your blind spots and push you to new levels and I am no exception and have found working with Laurie personally to be quite a joy and incredibly helpful so I was excited to see what the weekend would hold for me. On Saturday morning as I was driving over I also reflected how fun it is to be going to this type of personal development workshop from a pretty good, solid place. I think a lot of times when we finally invest in ourselves we wait till we are at that total hot mess, my life is falling apart moment — I know I used to — but this time, to go when things are going pretty good (but I know they could also go even better and don’t get me wrong I totalllllly have stuff to work on! haha) was a special treat!
Some of my favorite take aways from the weekend:
1. Personal Integrity is the key to happiness.
Watch this video I recorded with Laurie here to get the full definition of Personal Integrity and why it’s so important.
Whenever you are feeling uninspired, bored or just plain old down, it’s a great time to ask yourself where your personal integrity chain is broken. Are your dreams (heart) aligned with your game plan (mind) and are you following through on the day to day actions that you are committed to in your game plan for that particular area of your life? I know for me it’s usually the daily actions. I am such an A+ dreamer, in fact, sometimes more larger than life than is helpful when creating an action plan for the next six months so we kind of lassoed by dreams down into what is realistic but still ambitious for the next year so that I could create a very real and doable on the day to day action plan. This is huge for me because — and we will get to it when we talk about lying — I have a very hard time honoring my priorities when it comes to what I do with work time. Leave a comment on the video and let me know where you tend to break the chain!
2. “You are either fighting for your dreams or you are fighting for your excuses.” – Laurie Gerber
Ugh, this is a mantra I want posted all over my computer, cellphone and home — what are you fighting for? Sometimes we don’t even realize it but we talk more about why we CAN’t have our dreams than get into the aligned action to achieve them or align ourselves with them. One of the things we did this weekend was after we wrote out our dreams, we wrote out all our obstacles. I was shocked to see how each perceived “obstacle” was really me giving energy to an excuse instead of my energy into courageous action. In the video below, Laurie and I get into what I refer to as “effective dreaming” — its the way you get crystal clear on your dreams in all the different areas of your life so that you can effectively use them as your “guiding lights” for your every day actions.
3. You can’t be a liar and expect to be happy, get your dreams or feel proud of yourself.
What? You? A liar? Never! haha Oh, how similarly I thought!! What I uncovered this weekend was just how insidious lies can be in our lives and how they are stopping us from fulling going after or getting our dreams — not to mention, it’s pretty hard to feel good about yourself when you are lying all the time.
We lie in many different ways, we out right lie – “I can’t go to the party tonight, my kids are sick.” when your kids are perfectly fine but you just don’t feel like going to the party, we lie by leaving out information — “I had a great day at work today” when we are intentionally leaving out the fact that we got a promotion as to not have our family member ask too may questions, and the lie that I found out myself to be the most guilty of –we lie when we are not honoring our ultimate truth.
For me this ah-ha was around the way I manage my time. I am very clear about my goals, and the professional ones are very ambitious and require significant time and focus yet, I was being a big ole liar when people would email me asking to “post about this” or “partner up for that” and I agreed to do it when it wasn’t actually aligned with my dreams or time priorities, I would lie when girlfriends would ask me to hang out and what I really wanted to do was buckle down and finish a work project but instead of having that difficult conversation and honoring my truth, I would just say yes and go along with it. These lies were literally zapping time and energy away from my dreams — all because I was being a lying chicken when it came to confrontation.
It’s amazing when you put your excuses, bad habits or lying into the context of directly coming in between you and your dreams how much easier it is to call them out and stop doing them!
4. Make daily (and weekly) promises that are aligned with your dreams and then consequences if you don’t keep them.
“Feeling bad is a substitute for actually doing the right thing and owning that you had a choice!” – Laurie Gerber
Promise and consequences are my favorite part of Handel Method because it actually gets you into the power seat of realizing you ALWAYS have a choice. Another example they always give is called “the million dollar test” — if someone offered you a million dollars to do X every week for a year, could you do it? You bet you could! So maybe you are saying to yourself, “I just don’t know how to lose weight, get in a regular gym routine, start my own business, etc” — ask yourself if I offered you a million dollars to figure it out — could you? I bet you could!! You are the author of your life and you always have a choice of what to make a priority.
So how does it work? Well after you get clear on your dreams, think about what deliverables you’d want accomplished in the next 6 months in that direction, then you need to find some daily tasks that would put you in the energy of accomplishing those goals. For example, one of my promises is that everyday before I do anything else on my computer, I pitch 3 agents, managers or production companies (towards my cooking show goal) and if I fail to do this, my consequence is that I have to scrub the floor of one room in my home. Yesterday, I forgot and jumped right into a client call so my kitchen floor is looking pretty darn fabulous right now and you betcha I sent those emails first thing today! Your consequences don’t have to be super painful, it should just be annoying like scrubbing my kitchen floor, it wasn’t super fun but I’m grateful for the clean floor today!
5. You are actually the master of your thoughts and YOU get to make thoughts that don’t serve you ILLEGAL!
Okay, this has been GAME-CHANGING in my life so I had to do a video to have Laurie explain this in more detail and tell you guys about how I have used thought logging to completely eliminate thoughts like “I’m so exhausted” that are totally energy vampires.
Alright my loves, I hope you enjoyed my brain dump of some of my favorite take aways from this weekend, comment on the videos and let me know what you think, if you’ve had any ah-ha’s yourself and if you are curious about attending one of the Design Your Life Weekends yourself, you can see upcoming dates here, obviously tell Laurie I sent you. And if you are curious about Handel Method and don’t want to wait till the next weekend opens up, they have an amazing online course called Inner.U that I’ve personally done myself that walks you through all these different tools and more, it helps you write your dreams, get clear on an action plan, make promises and much more. You can read all about it here and use my code CASSIE75 to get $75 dollars off right now! It’s a great treat for yourself before the New Year!
Happy dreaming and doing!
xo,
C