Hello and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
So I said that with great enthusiasm, but
I'm actually coming to you today in a
place of real, kind of raw honesty.
I have never been in my time blogging,
um, and all through my coaching life, one of
these people who tries to claim that they're happy
and excited all of the time and that they
always have the answers and that they have everything
figured out, because I certainly don't.
And some days it feels like that more than others.
And for the last few days, I've
been in kind of a slump.
So I wanted to share with you this process that I did.
One because it kind of shows a value of one
of my pets pet practices, but the other, it's kind
of a follow up to last week and that knowing
your seasons, the seasons of your life and seasons of
your body and just the cycles that we go through.
So as I sat down this morning to journal, to sort
through what kind of mood I was in; I'm not angry,
I have a few worries,
If I'm honest, I'm not upset with anyone.
There hasn't been anything
bad that's happened recently.
On paper, one could argue that life is really good.
And I think that's when we most get down on
ourselves or get frustrated because we look on paper, as
I call it, or we look and we say, look,
I have more than a roof over my head, right?
I have a beautiful home.
More than one.
I have a job that I absolutely love.
I have clients that I love.
I have a family that supports me.
I have all of these things, and I have my health,
but I still get up some days and don't feel fabulous.
And I try to figure out what it is, what it's about.
Why is there kind of a cloud hanging over me?
Excuse me.
And I find it's easier to do that journaling because
if I don't get thoughts out on paper or if
I don't talk them through, I just circulate the same
thoughts over and over and over again.
When I write in my journal, as I put a
thought down, as it becomes a real thing on a
piece of paper, I can look at it, and as
soon as it's out, I'm like, no, that's not right.
If I were to sit down
and write, I'm just so frustrated.
Be like, well, no, it's not frustration I'm feeling.
And you can do some of this verbally.
You can go through your mind and you can say, okay,
am I mad at anybody or did somebody do something?
Did I read something that upset me today?
What is causing this?
What external or internal forces are
causing the way that I'm feeling?
So I sit down with my journal,
and I'm having trouble getting stuff out.
And when in doubt, just write.
Just write.
And if it's garbage, it's garbage.
But if you get out five ideas and discover
that's not what it is, you're one step closer
to figuring out what the heck is going on.
Because when you figure it out,
you can decide, is it true?
Are the thoughts that I'm thinking actually true?
Or is there some strange
influence that's coloring them?
You can question them, you can work on
them, and you can decide, because the goal
isn't to be happy all of the time.
The goal is to be aware of your feelings and to
own your feelings, just like we want to own our health.
So there may be days when I am down, when I
do feel sad about something that's happened, when I want to
take the time to grieve that or mourn that.
And that's okay.
If that's being done on an intentional way, you create
the space, you take the time, you do that
work, as we say in the business.
But on a day like today, when I can't figure out what
the heck is going on in my brain, that's kind of taken
a life of its own, the journaling really tends to help.
So as I was kind of struggling with this
and going back and forth and trying out a
bunch of thoughts, I got the idea that I
would kind of flip back through my journal.
And because of the cycles of nature, because of the
cycles of business and so many other aspects of our
life, I went back to a year ago in my
journal, and I was writing the very same things.
And part of me was relieved,
like, okay, I guess this happens.
This is part of the cycle that I go through.
Part of me was like, oh, I still don't have this fixed.
No, I don't.
And that's okay.
But what I learned from reading through that, just the
simple thing is that, yes, that happened, and it went
away, and I got through it, because the whole rest
of the time after that, I didn't feel like this.
Or if I did, it was sporadic.
But those feelings were transient.
They didn't persist.
They weren't who I am.
They were simply things that I was thinking
and feeling at this moment in time and
also at that moment in time.
So as I read through and I looked at some
of the things that naturally cycle this time of year,
I find that, guess what, I seem to
have this sort of February slump.
Now, I wasn't expecting it.
Maybe in my notes from last year, it was cold weather.
I couldn't get outside.
It was very difficult to spend time doing things.
That's a different situation this year.
So the first thing I'm going to do
to remedy this is get some fresh air,
get outside, get the sunlight on my face.
But somehow being able to look back at
that, seeing that, yes, I had that experience,
already been there, done that, and it passed.
Because as I look through subsequent entries
from days on, they're very different.
Now, there was a couple of details that I picked
up on that I'm going to examine again today.
And one of the comments from last year was, gosh,
when I don't have a goal, the wheels come off.
And I looked and I said, okay,
what are my goals right now?
Do I have any very active
things that I'm working towards?
Well, I do.
I do have some projects.
I do have some bigger things that I'm working towards.
But right now I realized I haven't broken down and
had bite size goals, things that I can accomplish today
or this week or by the end of the month.
And for me, that gives me
a very strong sense of purpose.
So I learned from last year's entries that clarity is
really a key for me, that if I don't have
the goals and I look back and I know what
happened, I set great goals at the beginning of the
year and I accomplished most of them.
And I've gotten through most of them and
I didn't go through that process again.
And I changed tasks and specific goals and objectives
got kind of cleared away and taken the place
of projects which I haven't defined clearly enough.
I haven't gotten the clarity on these projects so I can take
the action, so I can feel the accomplishment, so I can have
the sense of purpose, so I can know exactly what I want
to do when I sit down at this desk or exactly what
I want to do when I take a day off.
So clarity is the key.
And that may be something that you've heard many times
over, but I welcome you to a couple of things.
One, when you feel kind of stuck, when you're
not sure, go back and look in your journals.
Look and see if you can find evidence that
you've been through this before, that you've come out
the other side and are there any clues?
And what helped shake it loose.
And that wisdom is from yourself.
And that's the best source of wisdom, because
you know it's going to be on target.
You know it's going to be
something that you can learn from.
It'll either still resonate or you'll recognize how far you've
come or what changes you've made in your life.
Now, you know, journaling is a pet practice of mine.
If you have any questions about it, if you want
some help with it, by all means, reach out.
But take some time.
Figure out.
Figure out why you're in a mood.
If it's not correlating with what's going on in
your life, use the tools you have available.
Talk to somebody, talk it through.
Write it down, journal it, and find clarity
so that you can live with and experience
the feelings that you want to experience.
So I hope this has been helpful.
It's my little plug for clarity.
It's my letting you know I'm in it with you out there.
I don't have all the answers, and I
get a real good reminder of that sometimes.
And I wanted to share that with you, too,
because I know it can be discouraging sometimes.
So in the meantime, until next week,
go out there and own it.
