2020 Love Vision Podcast Challenge - Day 5

Hello and welcome to the Love Life Connection podcast, a podcast for successful women who feel like they have it all except love. I'm your host of Veronica Grant, a love and life coach and my only goal with this podcast is to inspire you to believe in yourself and that real love is possible for you even in our swipe right, swipe left world. Hello and welcome to day five of the 2020 Love Vision podcast challenge and congratulations you made it! After you listen to today's episode and do the mini assignment, you have completed this challenge and I hope you have a lot more clarity and guidance as to what your next steps are going to be in your love life. So today is day five and it's all about taking one action step towards love and I'm going to walk you through how to do that. So not to worry. And again, as always, if you haven't listened to you days one, two, three, and four and don't really know what I'm talking about, I highly recommend you start with day one and go from there because everything builds on the step before it. And I think it's just going to make the most sense and you'll get the most out of it. Okay, so today we're going to finally take an action step towards love. Now I like to go real slow when it comes to creating new habits and actions in your love life and honestly just your life in general. That's because I believe that's how habits and things shift sustainably over the long term. I think that if you were to wake up tomorrow morning and just decide you're just going to change everything about all the habits that you do in your life, you might do it for a week, two weeks, maybe a month if you're super lucky and motivated. But at some point you're just going to get sick or you're going to get busy or you're going to get tired or whatever it is, and you're going to say, "Screw it." And you're going to go right back to whatever it was you were doing before. So I like to just add in one, maybe two, habits at a time. Really stick with those for 40 days because that's what research says, how long it takes for a habit to stick. And then once that feels more normal and natural, add a habit or another action that you're going to take on top of that. I know that can feel like a really slow, daunting process, but I like to start with the biggest things that are going to make the biggest difference because a lot of times if we do one big habit differently, then I think that a lot of other smaller things can kind of just ride on the coattails. So for example, let's say you really just want to get 10,000 steps every day. You know that if you moved your body, a lot of things would change for you. You would feel better, you'd be getting more oxytocin and oxygen and all of the feel good stuff into your body more so then your emotions would feel better. You wouldn't be as likely to go down as many rabbit holes, or shit talk yourself, and you'd probably also sleep better, then you'd feel more rested. So you could see how just picking one habit, I'm not saying 10,000 steps has to be the thing, but one habit can actually invite a lot of other things that you might want to shift in your life. And it will happen almost organically just because it's simply riding on the coattails of the big goal that you want to shift. Now, here's how I like to think. When I'm thinking either for myself or with a client on what needs to shift in their life first. So I've talked about this on the show before. I talk about with all my clients. I think of everything in four categories. So what I mean by everything is the things that we can do to change our life, to change our love life, whatever part of life we want to change. And the four categories are the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual. So the physical are things that you say, the things that you do, the things that you don't do. So that can be things like exercising. It can be about eating in a different way. It could be about setting up a morning routine and having some quiet time before you go to work. It could be about deciding to date again. It could be about deciding to not date again. It could be about having a conversation with somebody or saying no or asking for something. All the things that you do in the physical world, that is a physical habit that can shift. Yes, the mental, emotional, spiritual, but we're really focusing on the physical changes in your life. The mental habits are going to be the habits that really focus on the thoughts going through your mind and thoughts are really important to look into because usually our thoughts just become the way we see and see the world and see ourselves. Our thoughts can often influence our emotions and our thoughts typically influence our habits too. And so the belief that your thoughts become your reality, that's not just like airy-fairy bullshit. It's actually really true. Your thoughts do become the things that you do and the things that you do ultimately will become your life. So things that can help shift the mental realm are things like affirmations. It can be self-talk, it can be journaling, depending on your style of journaling, like bullet journaling is definitely very, very mental. It can be things like EFT, or the emotional freedom technique, also known as tapping. It can also be rewriting the story that you tell yourself about you or about love or about relationships or the things that you have or it can't have in your life. The next realm is the emotional and the emotional realm is the emotions where we feel. And this really falls into the category... or I guess the things that fall into this category are things like inner child work. Healing deep core wounds. Feeling your feelings, not being a pity party or having a pity party, but actually feeling your feelings. So that can include meditation. Although meditation can also be included in the mental, just depending on how you approach it and how you look at it. It can also include visualizations, especially if you do the inner child visualizations that I do with my clients. It can also include release writing, which is just writing out how you feel. It's not even your journal, it could just be scribble-scrabble. It could be writing letters to exes or to parents, giving them back old emotional wounding that you don't want to carry around anymore. It can be cord cutting, which is a visualization that you can do to cut cords from past situations or people in your life. Any of that stuff is going to fall into the emotional world. The spiritual realm, that's really your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the universe or any kind of higher spiritual being that you might believe in. So it can be God, it can be a goddess, it can be lots of gods, lots of goddesses. It can be the divine. However you like to think of it. Spiritual realms, it's a little difficult to sometimes come up with tangible actions. But here's some ideas. I think that trust really falls into the spiritual realm. So trusting yourself, trusting the universe, trusting God. So that could include things like prayer every morning or every night. It can also include some mantras. Can be a little bit more spiritual in nature rather than just mental in nature. Just depending on what the mantra is. That can be very spiritual. I also think forgiveness in the way that I teach it, can be spiritual. So forgiveness in terms of having a conversation with someone and saying, “I forgive you for doing dah, dah, dah.” I'm going to say that's more on the physical realm, but forgiveness and the spiritual world is more about connecting with someone who has hurt you in the past. They may or may not be aware that they've hurt you in the past and it's just about giving that back to them. So that whatever beliefs you created about yourself or the world, men, love, women relationships, whatever it is, it's just back to them. You're not allowing whatever they did or said or didn't do or didn't say to affect how you feel about yourself. So that's more of a spiritual forgiveness and you're not actually having a conversation. You're really just connecting with them in your mind, through meditation, or through writing and journaling. So that would be an example of more of a spiritual form of forgiveness. Now, this list and the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual realms are definitely not exhaustive. But I do want you to come up with one action step that you can take based on what you discovered about yourself and your love life over the past four days. What is one thing that you can do physically that will help you to achieve your goals? What is one thing mentally, what does one thing emotionally, and what is one thing spiritually? Now, you don't necessarily have to apply all of these four action steps. All right now, again, that can be a lot. I definitely recommend to start with either the emotional or the physical because sometimes we need to initially begin with the emotional, that will begin to get us unblocked so that then we can more easily move into the physical and mental realms and sometimes the emotional just feels... we're so disconnected from it that it would just be impossible to connect with any of our old emotional wounding. In which case starting in the physical would probably be better because that might then help you to actually connect with the emotions because the emotions do live in the physical body. I recommend not starting with the mental first because that can often just sound a little pep talky. So if you decide for your mental thing that you want to start with some affirmations every day, affirmations are great, but when done alone, it can feel a little cheesy and honestly cause some cognitive dissonance because if you're saying, "I'm awesome," or "I love you," "I love myself," and you're just not there at all, then it can just feel a little forced, not really the best thing to start with. A couple of other things that I want you to keep in mind as you're developing your action steps you're going to take is I want you to think about trying to crowd out. So I want you to add an action rather than try to take an action away. It's actually a lot easier and the idea is to crowd out. So if you're doing all of these things, then you're going to have less time and energy and space to do the old things. And I also want you to be really specific on a specific action and not just an idea. So perhaps one of your action steps, maybe you originally said, I'm going to be nice to myself or I'm not going to talk shit to myself. And those are great things to do. I applaud that, I support that. Obviously I want everyone to be nice to themselves and to not talk shit to themselves. But the problem with that is it's just a little vague. It just, I don't know how you did it or you can't even really measure that you did it yourself. So instead maybe your action step is whenever I go down a rabbit hole of worry, I'm going to put one hand on my heart and one hand on my belly and take three deep breaths instead. Just to help you to relax and calm the mind or your emotions or whatever is running rampant. Or instead of talking shit to myself or whenever I find myself talking shit to myself, as soon as I realize it, I'm going to pull back and I'm going to say, "Veronica, you got this, you can do it. I believe in you and you were so loved." That's just an example. It can be whatever you want. Now I want you to get creative. Obviously everything I've listed here, it's not an exhaustive list. So I want you to do what feels really good and resonate for you. And of course, if you want some ideas, I encourage you to come over to Instagram. I'm at @veronicaegrant. Send me a message, or comment on my photos. I'd love to support you. And you can also send me an email over at veronicagrant.com/contact if you are not on Instagram. All right, that is a wrap for this podcast challenge. I really hope you loved it and you got a lot out of it and again, if you'd like a copy of the workbook that goes along with this podcast challenge, head over to veronicagrant.com/podcastchallenge. And if you've been thinking that I might help you get out of your dating patterns and truly transform your relationships as I've done in my own life and the lives of oh so many of my clients and help you craft a life that serves you, I'd love to work with you. My clients have left toxic relationships, started to actually enjoy dating and meeting people, met their partners, gotten married and even had some babies. You can also expect to grow in your career, spirituality, sense of self, and more because guess what? You are the common denominator in your own life. So if you're ready for massive transformation and are no longer available to stay stuck, I'd love to help you get out of this pattern. Head over to veronicagrant.com/coaching to learn more and take the next step, which is to schedule an introductory call with me. During our call together, we'll get to know each other and see if working together is the next right step for you. Again, that's veronicagrant.com/coaching. All right, that is it for this challenge. I will see you next week where I am bringing back a brand new podcast coaching episode. So until then... Thanks for listening to the love life connection podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode at veronicagrant.com/podcast and that's also the place you can sign up to be coached by me here on the show. And if you love this podcast, please leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. It helps more incredible women like you find this show and find real love. Until next time, remember. Wherever you are is exactly where you need to be. You're not broken and you don't need to be fixed. Just because you've never had the relationship you want before, it doesn't mean you can't have it now.   After you listen to this episode, here are your next steps: Don’t forget to download your workbook for this challenge.  Learn more about how your past can impact your love life and how to break old patterns in my virtual retreat, Shift Your Dating Patterns In A Weekend, March 7-8, 2020.  Ready to explore what working with me is like?  Learn more here. Interested in being coached on the Love Live Connection? Learn more here. Are we connected on Instagram? 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