Show Notes:

Meaningless suffering. “Pain is inevitable. If we are going to be a part of the human race, we are going to experience loss and have things not go our way — but we extend pain outside of the current moment into suffering. Suffering is often self-imposed work of the ego. We take the facts of a situation and see insults where there aren’t any, and we take the events of the past and project them into the future. I think many of us joined a religion of suffering when we were young.”

What do I know for sure? “This question helps me break the trance that I’m in with my ego. Our stress comes from our story, not our reality. Whenever I’m feeling stressed, I self-reflect and ask myself this question. When I see things for how they really are, they help me untap who I really am.”

What could I do right now to help? “Sometimes that looks like me being quiet and maintaining boundaries, but it’s always staying non-judgemental and loving and really watching my boundaries.”

If I were my best self, what would I do? “That question is how I elevate myself above all the right and wrong and the blame. It helps me unhook and wonder who I am by nature and how I want to walk through the world.”

Practice makes perfect. “If you want to live content in an imperfect world, you need to get really masterful at moving into not just the lowest common denominator and moving through the world in the most unskilled way — you have to consciously toggle up and use all of your intelligence and all of your knowing, and that comes with practice.”

The search for gratitude. “You have to undo yourself before you can redo yourself. You have to unpack and unlearn the ego’s view of the world, see reality, and then you can move into gratitude. We naturally see the negative, but you have to consciously see the positive, too.”

Enlightenment. “My gratitude list became a rating of what happened in my day instead of an appreciation of what happened in my day. I then moved from counting my blessings to counting everything in my day as a blessing.”

Trust the process. “I changed the way I practice daily gratitude. It’s not about bargaining with the universe for more good. It’s sitting in a peaceful place knowing that it’s here to evolve me, transform me, teach me, or bless me. In the end, it’s all good.”

Don’t judge books by covers. “We are so quick to name things that happen externally: good, bad, evil, idiot. If you want to improve your state of happiness, stop naming things too soon. Stay curious for external things one minute longer.”

A different perspective. “‘Given’ is one of those words that helps me take what the ego is about to use as an excuse and put it back into my reality to accept it and not go into wishful thinking or victimhood. It just puts it back in play.”

Self-soothing vs. self-care. “Self-soothing is about numbing or procrastinating. It’s about taking a break before going back to the real world. Self-care is forming daily habits and dedications that keep your energy supply high, restored, and renewed — not just soothed and numbed, as people do with self-soothing. So many of us run ourselves into the ground, then soothe ourselves and never really restore, and get caught up in that cycle.”

The difference between generosity and over-giving. “If you start noticing when you over-give and why, it’ll point you to where you need to evolve next. What I’ve started doing is taking a time out and telling myself to get back to that person in a few minutes with a new, thought-out solution to that problem.”

What does being a game changer mean to you? “Right now in my life, being a game changer means being an elder, and as an elder, talking without ego vulnerably about the human condition. By telling other people that they are enough, they’re doing enough, and that success isn’t only defined by what we accumulate in life. To be an elder, you have to be both a mentor and an intern at the same time. You have to be learning and not just be willing to impact the world, but be impacted by the world.”

EPISODE RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Life’s Messy, Live Happy: Things Don’t Have to Be Perfect for You to Be Content by Cy Wakeman
Ego
Crisp
Portland, OR