142. What will change cost you? (Paying the status quo or investing in change)

We all feel this sense of  ‘ideal self’ that we want to be moving towards. It is safe to assume a lot of us desire some change on some level in some area of our lives. But we need to consider what change will cost us.

We can’t ever change if we aren’t willing to make some kind of investment in it. 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

 

Seeing where we need to make an INVESTMENT in the change we want

This episode started out with me wanting to share on INBOX ZERO, but the issue became about the TIME it would take to accomplish inbox zero

This brings up the issue of making an upfront investment in the change we want for later in our life. 

 

We want to make changes

As I have worked to live my life ‘on purpose’ (intentional living), it meant making a lot of change in my life. 

And in almost every coaching session I have, I am working with someone on a change they want to make: change in relationships, in approach, in time management, in how they handle their health, etc. 

But we need to be mindful of how easy we expect it to be. 

DO WE WANT CHANGE? YES

WHEN DO WE WANT IT? WHEN IT IS EASY!

 

Maintaining the status quo gets us more of the same

Our daily lives are being run to maintain what we are already doing. So, we can almost predict what our future will be like based on what our status quo is right now. We will get more of the same. 

 

Changing your life doesn’t have to be a huge overhaul

There is a famous Mel Robbins quote “the cost of your new life is your old one” and that always averted me from change. Sounds too big, no thank you. 

My approach to change has been making small changes over time. And I really believe that making small investments over time can change your whole life (I share all about this right here)

 

What will change cost us? How will we pay for it?

When I talk about investing in change, the cost of change, I am talking about using your AVAILABLE resources. These are the resources we all have available to us in some way: our time, our physical energy, our emotional energy, our space, our money. I talk about managing these resources in the Simplify Your Life Series

Remeber, this is hard because we have to learn the skill of showing up for ourselves. When we invest in changing our life, it becomes ‘you working for you‘. I talk more about this skill in this episode: Do you trust yourself to show up for you

 

When we want an easy life

I wanted an easy life, so I always did the ‘easy things’. Turns out I had that wrong. If I wanted an easy life later, I had to do the hard thing now. I had to make some upfront investments and pay the cost now. 

 

Discomfort either way, which one will you choose

It can be freeing and humbling to realize:

You are uncomfortable where you are, in the status quo

Change will be uncomfortable, and maybe unfamiliar

But the choice of which discomfort you choose is up to you. 

Over these past few episodes, I have been challenging you to get  #uncomfortableonpurpose. I hope you keep tagging me on Instagram to share this and come share it in the Facebook community group. 

Quote by Dean Koontz:

“Change isn’t easy… changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That’s hard… When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.”
 

If you want to sign up for the Making Change Challenge, you can do that right here. 

 

SIMPLE PLEASURE OF THE WEEK

The library apps to get books, audiobooks and magazines. 

The Overdrive App

The Libby App

IG accounts I like for book ideas are @thislibrarianisreading and @read.write.janis

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. 

Books Referenced

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

 

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

0:06
Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here. If you are new here, I hope that you stick around as I talk about ways to simplify your home your heart in your life. Because when we can clear out those distractions, the things that are just taking our mental space, our physical space, our energy, then we can have more of that available for what really matters what we really want in our life. So I was going to do a podcast on inbox zero, that is the kind of theory that you declutter your emails so that your inbox has zero new emails in them. And this is something I learned years ago, way back when I went to an od blogger conference called blissdom, I learned about inbox zero. And so ever since then, I’ve kind of been doing that for myself constantly decluttering my inbox, I recently shared on my Instagram stories, a meme where someone had 1000s of unread emails. And that just gives me such sympathy stress. When, if you’re my friend, if I catch a glimpse of your unread emails, if it is over, like 20, I’m like, Girl, let’s talk about life. How’s it going? What is with your inbox? Let’s delete those let’s archive. So I do have some opinions on Inbox Zero, I’ll put some notes in the Facebook community group, if you want to get some ideas on that. But it did get me thinking, as I was posting what Inbox Zero how someone would even start with that. So let’s say you are someone who has hundreds of emails in their inbox, what I would suggest is for them to just archive them all like anything older than two weeks, it’s probably pretty irrelevant. If you are on Gmail, you can just click archive and these emails, they’re just out of your inbox in this little like holding pin, and you can search for them anytime you need them. I don’t know how other email services work, you might have to just put everything in a folder called archive, and then it’s just there. But I was thinking, if someone has to go through all these old emails and archive them, it does take some time. I know from doing this in the past that you kind of have to go through pages and check everything and then go through the next page and check everything. So it’s probably a good 10 to 15 minutes of your day. And you know what, even before doing that I had it in my mind that it was something that would take all morning. So there’s just the power of timing your tasks, do you learn that

2:31
it doesn’t actually take that long, after all, so I was just thinking about the mom on the go, she’s got this full inbox of unread emails. And she’s got to make time to like sit at her desktop, or kind of be on her phone when she probably doesn’t want to be on her phone anymore. Like she wants to, but she doesn’t, right. And it just takes energy and time to get to Inbox Zero, it takes an investment now for that benefit later. And if we don’t really want to do the investment, we’re just going to brush off the benefits will live with Inbox Zero, it’s not that bad, right? We’ll just live with it, we can figure it out. This could be a pattern that shows up in our lives where we’re like, I could make the investment or I and have that benefit. Or I could just live with how things are and not worry about it. So I want to talk about investing the cost of change. Because this comes up all the time in my own life over the years as I’ve tried to make changes, made changes. And in coaching sessions. And if you are like me, then over the years, you’ve seen areas of your life where you want change. Most every coaching session that I do, I’m hearing someone wants to make a change. They want to change in their relationship to their job, to their kids to their partner, they want to change their relationship to food, they want to change the relationship to exercise, how they manage their time, their money, their home, pretty much any area of your life. Because with most areas of our life, we kind of have this mental idea of what we should be doing. And every day we’re reminded of it because we feel the tension of not doing it. And I’ll talk about that in a later podcast episode. That’s called cognitive dissonance. But why aren’t we doing it? We can hear the chant in the background of our day. Do we want change? Yes. When do we want it? When it’s easy speaking as someone who has been there, that is how it felt to approach teams for me. So I’ve shared this over the years, that in my quest for life on purpose, living proactively being really intentional, that I found myself researching the ends of Pinterest, the ends of the internet, looking for that hack. That trick that would trick me into being my ideal self being that morning person who exercises like there’s a bypass up there that makes it easy, because I had spent most of my life doing what was easy. And as we’ve talked about in the past episodes, taking the easy way out can lead down on hard road, right? I recently read a very popular finance book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Well, I read the chapter summaries, but they were very thorough. So I feel like I have a general sense of what the book is about. And in my opinion, the book is about how we use our money, we need to use it not just to pay for what we want, but to invest in creating more of what we want. The book was interesting because he shares how his dad and his friend’s dad who was like a mentor to him, taught him two very different views about money. And their whole mindset around their money created their distinct different realities with money. So we had his poor dad who had a great job, PhD, but always struggled with money. And then he had a rich dad who had a great education, and grew, his companies took lots of risks to create a lot of wealth. And then I was reading, okay, I know I’m jumping around, but stick with me here. Then I was reading the four winds by Kristin Hannah, she’s a really great author, one of my favorite books by her the nightingale. And this was a story about those who fled from the interior of the states to the west coast during the Great Depression. And they couldn’t stay where they were, their lands were dust, from drought from wind, they couldn’t grow anything, they couldn’t survive. So they heard there’s farming out in California, and California experienced this massive influx of people into that state. And there were makeshift camps. And people were living in these, like really desolate situations, fighting for jobs being paid very little.

6:30
They were literally scrounging to get by. And I was reading these two books in tandem. So as I was reading this book, I asked myself, how could someone possibly get ahead in this situation? If we take a page from Rich Dad, Poor Dad? What would an investment look like in someone’s future here? Like, they’re just trying to pay their bills and eat and have shelter? How could they invest? What would that look like? Should they if they ever came into some money? Should they buy land and charge people to stay on it? Like become a landlord? Should they buy some food processing equipment and start making a product they can sell? Should they get some special training and get a new job? And and I asked myself that because there was a character who came into some money. And I thought, even more than that, how would this character justify it? Like, how do they put their faith in that? How do they take that risk? How do they manage their daily existence while investing in this future? I know this is an extreme example. And I know that there’s way more factors involved, from personal to social to cultural, that change needs to be supported on all these levels. But it does make me think about our daily lives, our status quo, the daily life, we’re maintaining the day in, and the date out. In this book, the four winds, the daily grind, that they’re going through a finding work, finding food, paying the rent, what is the future for that person, we can predict it is more of the same, we get more of the same, because we keep doing the same thing. So just bringing that back into us. We’re maintaining a status quo, what will our status quo get us and for some of us, we’ve done a lot of work, our status quo was built on purpose. And I think over the past, I don’t know, few years, since my youngest started kindergarten, I’ve spent two years really trying to create a status quo that I wanted. And I’ve shared before in different areas, like on Instagram, and in the email that this year, I feel like I’m giving that up, I’m giving up my status quo, I’m making a change, I’m going to school, I’m working in an extra job, I’m investing in a different future for myself. And that is costing me something. But it’s getting me to where I want to go. And I used to live so afraid of the cost. I think of that popular quote by Mel Robbins, the cost of your new life is the old one. And if I hear that, I’m like, Oh, that sounds too big. I’m out. No, thank you. And so for me, change had to look like making really small changes, slowly changing things over time, slowly changing how I eat, or how I talk to the people I love or how I think about them, or how I spend my time or slowly decluttering my house, I had to do all this overtime. And these small investments were paying off. And when you think of investment, like your brain might go to this lump sum of money you’ve come into, and you’re putting it in someone else’s hands, like in the stocks or in a company. That’s that feels risky, right? Like it’s out of your hands. But now we’re talking about investing in you where you work for you and this, this is a new skill to learn as well. We often work hard for others, but not so much for ourselves. If you want to dig into that more, there’s Episode 105 Do you trust yourself to show up for you? But let’s talk about what we’re actually investing. What do you have available, you have resources available to you and when I did the simplify your life series way back, I talked about these resources you have and here they are. They are your time, your money, your physical space, your physical energy. In your emotional energy, those are our five resources. Those are what we have right in front of us to figure out how we want to use them. If you want more of that, that simplify your life series, it’s I think four parts with worksheets stopped by the show notes, I’ll link that in there for you. Over the years of wrestling with my complacent ways, I came to see that I wanted an easy life. So I was doing the easy things turned out, I had it wrong. If I wanted the easy life, I had to do the hard thing. Now. If I wanted stronger friendships, I needed to show up and be a friend. Now. If I wanted better health, I had to show up for my body. Now, if I wanted to build a business that I love, I had to start building it brick by brick. Now, if I want to have all of the burden of 260 emails out of my life, I had to start archiving them. Now, if I wanted a home that felt easier to manage, I had to start decluttering. Now, I had to do the upfront work, I had to invest in the things I wanted long term, I had to disrupt my status quo, I had to give up my current life as I was living it in order to move into a new one. And it didn’t mean I had to overhaul my life, I really want to assure you that you don’t have to overhaul your whole life. And if you’re listening, and you’re like, yeah, that’s being an adult. Welcome to adulthood. And you’re wondering why it took me 30 something years to figure out, what can I say I thought I was doing fine until I realized I wanted something different. And I remember being in my 20s. And I don’t know if you guys felt like this, but around 26 ish. I felt like things started to click for me. Like I had these bigger realizations, they say that’s when your brain actually completely finishes developing. So I was in my 20s, and I was playing tennis with my dad. He’s a tennis player. And you’ve heard me say before, it’s a family joke, how unathletic that I was, but my dad would still throw the football to me and my sister for fun. Which isn’t it interesting that our parents did what they thought was fun to bond with us. But we are doing with our kids think it’s fun to bond with them. So here we are throwing the football with my dad was a child. And I was never good, but he was encouraging. And I was, you know, I would still walk away feeling defeated, because I couldn’t really catch the ball a lot. And it just cemented my views that I lacked this ability. So like, a decade later, I’m playing tennis with him for whatever reason, I don’t even know it, like rarely happened. But I think that I was really at a time where I also wanted to become more athletic, I wanted to run I wanted to move my body like I suddenly was feeling this draw to be more active, and I didn’t really know what to do with it, and we’re playing tennis, and the balls like just whizzing around the court around me and it hit me. It just hit me. I need to hustle for that ball. I need to chase that ball. All of these years playing sports and PE or just playing like football with my dad or whatever. I just kind of waited for it to be easy and come to me. But it was like I finally understood I gotta move those feet. I gotta move my feet. It feels really silly saying this out loud. Like I’m feeling really vulnerable, sharing the story. But I think our life can be a lot like that. Sometimes it just hits us. I need to hustle. I need to do something hard and tell it’s easy. I need to invest in my life so that I can create the one I want. The one that isn’t just the cycle the perpetuation of the status quo. So over these podcast episodes, we’ve been talking about discomfort, and I’ve been challenging you to do something uncomfortable on purpose, and share that with me using the hashtag uncomfortable on purpose, or coming into the Facebook group and sharing it there with us. And I really think it comes down to this core understanding and seeing it true in your life. That discomfort, there’s discomfort in staying where we are. And there’s discomfort in making a change either way, so choose one. There’s a quote that I just came across by Dean Koontz, change isn’t easy. Changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That’s hard. When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it, even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know the misery is comfortable. So we are often choosing the familiar discomfort that we know we know this discomfort, we’re getting comfortable in it, we’re in the status quo with it. But I just want to kind of push you a little bit to do something a little bit more uncomfortable on purpose. And when we talk about change, if you feel like change is something you want more of in your life. There is the making change challenge. It’s a couple of years old, but it is still downloaded a lot used a lot and I encourage you to stop by and grab it if you want it. You can find it on the web. cite under free resources, or I’ll link it in the show notes as well. It is a free audio series. For sections that you can listen to all like a podcast, each section is less than 14 minutes. And there’s worksheets for each section that can help you apply it to your life. In it, I talk about growth mindset, locus of control goals and habits and motivation. So stop by the shownotes if you want that. And let’s wrap up with a simple pleasure. To me simple pleasures are really about enjoying life, like really coming in to the moment being mindful, even mindful of what your senses are experiencing sight and smell and touch and movement and what you can hear. And I like to share these little things I find pleasure and to help you stop in your day, and take pleasure in something simple that is available to you. So I’ve talked about candles and clean sheets and FECA and great face oils. And this week, I want to talk about reading and I want to talk about the library. Yep, so I don’t know what it’s like in the States. But in Canada, our public libraries have an app you can use to borrow books, overdrive app, and the Libby app, they have saved me so much money, because I just I don’t know why I’ve always collected books over the years with good intention. Some of them I never read. But I just really like the idea that I can get the book, download it, have it available to me, and then I decide if I’m going to really dig into it. But I’ve read so much over the years. These apps also have audio books. And there’s some magazine apps that the library offers as well. And the kids love it too. Because you can get kids books, you can get kids audiobooks, and one of the ways I like to use it is I will find a book that someone’s recommended. And I just go open the app and I take that book for later.

16:41
I have a couple instagramers that I like to follow for their book ideas. I’m going to link them in the show notes. One is my friend Katie and she’s at the lead this librarian is reading and she has some really great reviews about books that are really going to open up your views on social justice on social issues and really take you deeper and she does it in such a humble way. I really love reading what she has to write. And a friend of mine Janice read dot write dot Janice j A n i s, and she just reads a whole ton of fiction. And she’s a writer and I just love getting like a fun book recommendation from her. So that’s my simple pleasure of the week. I would love to hear yours I just asked in the Facebook group this past week. What is your simple pleasure this week and I love reading through those. So come by the Facebook group, make sure to enter the Enter questions or tag me on Instagram at simpler on purpose.ca alright friends have a great week. As always, I love it when you are able and you take a minute to leave a review for the podcast reviews or like street cred in the podcast world and the internet robots love to see them. So if you want to take a second and just scroll down, hit leave a review I would greatly appreciate it and I love reading them too. I love to read where you guys are from. I bless I love your handles. I love the names that you have. And I just really love the feedback that you have to me It helps me keep shaping this podcast is something that is serving you guys. Alright friends, have a great week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai