7 Things You Can Do Now to Increase Your Satisfaction

Earlier this week I read a blog post by the Purpose Fairy entitled 15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy. This a fairly exhaustive collection of stuff that gets in our way, with some ideas on how to start letting go of it and make a positive shift.

However, I’ve noticed with my own experience and with my clients that you can’t just let something go or give something up. No matter how hard we try, the vacuum that is left in the gaping hole of what we left behind will try to drag us back, and this is usually pretty irresistible to most of us. It’s true in nature as well. Air and water will both flow with great ease (in the absence of anything to stop it) toward a hole where there isn’t any of it and try to fill up that space. In order to REALLY make a lasting difference it is not enough to simply give something up. We MUST replace it with something else. We have to plug up that hole. AND, even more importantly for greater success, that something else has to be really ATTRACTIVE. The something else must have at least as much appeal as the something you gave up. It has to be as seductive. And if it has even MORE appeal, you will be energetically entranced by your idea of it and be more willing to easily move toward it.

Let’s Create Something Juicy!

I was recently a participant in a workshop led by Katie Hendricks on Conscious Loving and Living. Katie is a big fan of “juiciness” because that aptly describes the quality of attractiveness that gets us excited or “juiced up” about something. When we create a vision with sufficient detail and emotional connection to what we truly desire, that creates a kind of “juicy” anticipation which can energize us through the times when we will feel challenged or tempted to give up.

So let’s get going! I’ve created a list of seven things you can do now to get juicier. Give one or more of these a try and let me know which worked best for you.

1. Eagerly seek out and embrace the mystery of not knowing. We like to think we know a lot about a lot of things, and there are certainly things we do know. However, our conviction that we know (and that we are right about what we know) often gets in our way of discovering the new way of looking at or doing or experiencing something that might just be what we’ve been waiting for to break through an old pattern.
2. Delight in the flexibility and ease hidden in acceptance. When we learn to accept what is with love and empathy, we experience ease and flexibility that is not available to us when we are constantly justifying why things should be this way or arguing with someone because we can’t get a satisfying answer to why they aren’t that way. Trying to exert control over things we have no real control over makes us rigid and, let’s face it, creates a lot of busy work that just doesn’t pay off in the long run.
3. Celebrate the freedom of taking 100% responsibility for your life and allowing others to do the same. When we own our lives — all the efforts and all the results — and we allow others to own theirs, we release ourselves from the burden of trying to make everything work out for everyone else AND we release everyone else from the burden of having to make our lives work out for us. With all that freedom, we can focus on what we truly want and our energy can be directed to efforts that will yield positive results.
4. Love yourself with abandon. When we fall in love with someone else, we are willing to overlook their flaws. We can’t wait to spend time with them. We go out of our way to do little things that we know will delight them. Even as the relationship matures, we show our love in a variety of ways: words of praise or affection, quality time, gifts, acts of service, physical touch, and others. When was the last time you treated yourself as sweetly and thoughtfully as you would a lover or a child? Our relationship with self is a perfect place to practice love with abandon. After all, we spend more time with our selves than with anyone else.
5. Infuse your mind with the excitement of thinking BIG! Possibilities are what shape reality. Our minds are limitless, and they create positive possibilities or negative. When we get excited about thinking BIG we expand our capacity to create bountiful positive possibilities. We break past our current state of being, in our thoughts, and we see a vision of a future that inspires us. And perhaps scares us just a little. Excitement and fear sometimes have similar feelings in our bodies. So we can focus on the fluttery feeling and let it stop us or make us smaller because it feels scary, or we can use the energy that our bodies are producing to ignite us to excited, energized BIG action.
6. Radiate your gloriously beautiful authentic self. Be willing to shed the layers accumulated through years of careful adherence to rules that no longer serve you. Not only will you feel lighter and have more energy, but your energy will be clearer, more attractive, and easier for others to connect to. You’ll find you can communicate your ideas with greater ease. Your experience of being will be more joyful. You may even find that you really like who you discover underneath all that stuff you’ve been carrying around.
7. Lovingly gift yourself the luxury of experiencing all the stages of change with understanding and patience. Change can be good, it is true. And it is also true that there is a natural cycle that we all experience as we process the change itself, even if we caused the change to take place. Rather than hurry through that process to get to the other side, rushing to the positive planned result, embrace the experience of each stage with empathy and kindness. The stages are part of the change, and they each deserve to be honored. The experience of pain and loss is no better nor worse in terms of intrinsic value than the experience of joy and celebration. When we learn to embrace each experience with love, we learn to appreciate more of what we already have. We can enjoy where we are now AND where we are going.

Ready to replace something that’s holding you back with something a lot juicier? Remember: when you hear yourself thinking or saying: “I want to stop _____” or “I’d like to let go of ________”, that’s the time to begin creating your super attractive, active positive statement that has real meaning for you. Something you can commit to taking action on, that you can already get excited about, and where you can create an enticing vision of success that inspires and delights you. If you’d like additonal support in creating your super juicy vision, contact me!