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3 Quick Steps To Help You Trust Yourself Again So You Can Live The Life You Want After 40

Episode 19 | (0:00)  

Hey there, friend. Today we're going to be talking about three quick steps to help you trust yourself again so you can live the life you want. I'm going to show you three little fun-sized actions — Oh my goodness, they're so simple —  three little actions to help you become more aware of what's going on in your heart so you can start trusting yourself with confidence. Are you ready to dive in? Okay, let's do this!

(1:06)  

Hey there, Easy Ager. How are you doing today? I had a wonderful 20-minute nap, so I'm in a good mood. And just for the record, if you're feeling a little cranky today, I give you permission to go take a nap too. Just 20 minutes. Rest the inside of your eyes for just 20 minutes, and you're going to feel so much better when you get up.

Okay, so before I get started today, I wanted to remind you that if you are not already an Easy Aging® Insider, go to TheEasyAgingShow.com and get on that list. Because being an Easy Aging Insider means that you'll have first access to new episodes coming up. You'll also have access to special offers and free trainings that I will be giving only to Easy Aging Insiders, go to TheEasyAgingShow.com and check it out.

So let me ask you a question: Are you living the life you want?

If you're struggling to answer that question, this episode is for you. Because let me tell you, being unable to answer that question is actually a good thing.

It means that you still have dreams inside of you. It means that there's still something rumbling around in you that hasn't been fulfilled yet. It also means that you can address that something, whatever it is, sooner rather than later, once you become aware of it. And it all gets down to trusting yourself again.

You know, when we were little, we trusted ourselves completely. I mean, we inherently knew what we wanted and we acted without hesitation, no matter how crazy or how inappropriate it seemed, right?

If we were lucky —  blessed, actually — we had a bunch of people around us who were our very best cheerleaders. But if we weren't as fortunate, we kept our dreams to ourselves.

We knew our ideas would be dismissed as "Oh, that's so silly... or ridiculous... or immature."And hearing someone say that would just hurt too much. So we kept our mouth shut. But then as we grew up, things changed.

You know, sometimes we abandoned our dreams because we wanted to fit in. "Oh, that was a crazy dream. What was I thinking?... That was silly." At other times, life circumstances created a detour, and we had to move forward with our careers or parenthood or whatever it was, right?

For many of us, we just put our dreams on a shelf and forgot about them. And as our dreams sat on that shelf and collected dust, we started listening more to the voices outside of us than the voice inside of our hearts. And that was the beginning of the end as far as trusting ourselves...we just stopped trusting ourselves.

So now, as we're hitting a stage of life where we have more time, more maturity and more wisdom, we want to dream again but we're not quite sure how to go about it.

You may feel like it's going to be a huge battle to start learning to trust yourself, to trust your inner voice,  to listen to your heart, to really figure out who you are at this stage in your life and what you really, truly want.

But let me tell you, it may not be as hard as you think. Learning to trust yourself is actually quite simple. Simple, yes. But it does require a little bit of practice.

That's why today, I'm going to give you three little steps. Don't worry, they're little bite-sized actions, little fun-sized actions that are not going to take more than a couple of minutes a day.

And you can start doing these actions.... You can do them for a week. You can do them for a month. You could set your goals for six months but the reality is, once you start trusting yourself, life is going to be a lot lighter. It's going to be a lot easier. It's going to be more manageable.

And that little thing inside, you know that little grrr... Okay, well, maybe it's not a grrr, maybe it's something more like that little gnawing feeling. You know what I'm talking about, right? That gnawing feeling that there's more to life, and you just haven't quite got your finger on what it is that's missing.

When you start learning to trust yourself again, that gnawing feeling is going to start dissipating. And you're gonna go, "Oh, I'm on the right track. Oh, hey, I want to try this. Oh, what about that?", then you start really going after things that intrigue you. Your curiosity is piqued. And it's just like getting back to the time when you were a child. You know, remember the time when you were a child? I don't know, maybe you don't.

But the reality is, children inherently open their hearts up and do what they want. That's where you want to be. You want to trust yourself so thoroughly and so completely that you say, "Hey, I want this and I'm going to go after it." Period. No explanation. No permission needed, okay?

So here are three quick steps to help you trust yourself again so you can live the life you want. The first step, this one's simple. Well, it's simple for many of us, maybe not you. ;)

But the first one is, number one, relax. You see, relaxing is important. Because if you don't relax you can't open yourself up to possibility, and possibility is where all your dreams live.

In episode four, I suggested that you stop thinking things have to look a certain way in order to be valuable, in order to be acceptable to other people, in order to be worthwhile. Letting go of the idea that things have to look a certain way really helps you learn how to trust yourself faster, because you release all those limitations and all those parameters you've put around your thinking.

So when you let go of this "pseudo rule" that you've set for yourself, you can then enhance your ability to be open and receptive to new ideas and to new ways of doing things and to new ways of thinking.

Because when you're tense, you are not going to be able to open yourself up to new ideas or pretty much to new anything, okay? Relaxing can be anything that works for you. It can be anything from taking a walk, to chatting with your best friend, to listening to your favorite music...do whatever you need to do to let yourself unwind.

For me, it's getting a really good workout and then taking a hot bath with Epsom salts and watching my favorite movie or TV series on Hulu or Amazon Prime, something like that. But do whatever it takes to help you relax so you can move into the second step, which is remember.

In this step, you're going to be thinking about what were your dreams in your 20s and 30s, or even your teenage years. What hopes and dreams lived in your heart but had to be put aside because of circumstances or life choices or being told you had unrealistic expectations? What dreams did you leave on the sidelines over the years?

So once you're relaxed, and you remember a dream that you had a few years ago or back in your 20s or 30s, it's time to do step three, which is receive. Receive is pretty simple. All you do is turn off the phone, turn off the TV and any other distractions, and you block out two minutes to just sit with your thoughts.

Does that sound boring? On the contrary, my friend, this could be the most interesting part of your day. And two minutes may not sound like very much but they can create a unique way to think about yourself, to think about your situation and your life and what you want at this point in your life.

One of the keys to doing this successfully is not judging your thoughts. Just hang out with them. Don't be saying things like "Oh, that was so silly" or "Oh my gosh, I could never do that again." Just don't pay attention to that. Just let those go, get those thoughts out of your mind. And then just receive new thoughts and new ideas without judgment. You may be surprised at what you come up with.

Let me give you an example of how this works, how you can learn to trust yourself again, and how it may have some surprising results.

In the remember phase. I initially thought, "You know, I loved playing on the high school tennis team." I loved everything about it. I love the game of tennis. I love being part of a team. I loved the people. I loved the traveling to different schools so we could play against them. I just loved every aspect of that. So I thought, "Oh, this is great. I'll just go play tennis again."

And while my head and my body were saying yes, my knees were unequivocably saying, "No, no, we are not going to be cooperating for this particular activity." So I had to put playing tennis aside because my knees were just not going to be part of the equation.

Then I had heard about this game called pickleball. It has a ball, a racket and a court. I thought, "Oh, I'll just play that for a while and that'll take the place of tennis."

So I go in there, met some lovely people, and I played pickleball maybe half a dozen times. And while I didn't mind pickleball, I realized I didn't love pickleball. You know, it was it was fine. It was it was okay. But I wasn't dying over it.

So I went back to the receive phase of this exercise, and I sat with the idea for a while. I just sat and thought, "Why don't I like pickleball?" After I sat with that for a while, the thought came to me that the reason I enjoyed the high school tennis team so much was the people.

I mean, I love the game, I would still love to play tennis again. But honestly, it was the people who made it special. It was the people who made it remarkable for me. And we spent a lot of time together, and I felt like these people weren't just my teammates, they were also my friends.

The results kind of surprised me because I thought, "Oh, pickleball will just take the place of tennis." But in this case, it wasn't the what I was looking for, it was the who. So by sitting with this thought for a few minutes, I got complete clarity on what exactly I was looking for, and I decided not to pursue pickleball because I wasn't in love with it.

I decided instead to focus on the who, on the people, on finding friends and activities that would fill that gap that was obviously missing inside of me at that point.

And as you sit for two minutes to receive and just listen to your thoughts you, too, may find out it was the people who made the experience so amazing.

Then again, you may find out that you still want what you wanted in your 20s and 30s. Or maybe you want a little variation of that dream. Or maybe you discover that those dreams are now a part of your past and you're ready for a new dream.

By sitting with relax, remember and receive, you are going to be on your way to understanding what's next for you. And you will start trusting yourself again. When you do this exercise often enough, the trust is simply going to start flowing. You're going to have more confidence in what you're thinking, and you're going to be able to take action with ease.

So that's it for today. The three Rs: relax, remember and receive. Once again, don't forget to sign up at TheEasyAgingShow.com to become an Easy Aging® Insider. And until next time, peace, love and blessings to you and yours. Take care. Bye bye! 

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