Cultivating an Attitude of "Enough" (Episode 80)

Have you ever stepped into a room and felt an instant sense of peace wash over you? That's what can happen when the spaces of your home mirror your values, and it's exactly what we're exploring today. 

We'll discover how gratitude and generosity can impact not just our homes but our hearts.

Main points: 

• Do some thought work BEFORE taking action -  take a careful look at your physical spaces; walk through your home slowly and notice the feelings and thoughts you have of each space - do they reflect your values?
  • Do you enjoy being in that space? Is it “your friend”? Why or why not?
  • Notice what you are most grateful for about each space
• Then move on to your thoughts about the physical items - 
  • What are you grateful for? 
  • What are the” little things” that help you get the most out of your spaces?  It can be as small as a favorite cup, or a certain blanket or chair when the sun hits it just right, etc. 
• What things are no longer needed or useful but are still there?

Are you ready to create a home you love coming home to? Join my FB group and find a community to  cheer you on & share your wins.

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm Life Coach Kelly Tibbetts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Hey friends, welcome back to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. As we are transitioning closer and closer to spring, I thought I'd spend some time with you today talking about a book that I am really enjoying. It's called the Prosperous Heart and it's by Julia Cameron, and she wrote the Artist Way, and if you've spent any time with me, you've probably heard me talk about her book, the Artist Way because it really was one of those books that transformed my life. She said something in there that made me come up with a thought, and the thought I had is that I am creative because I'm made in the image of the creator, and I thought I read that directly from her, and I don't think I did. I think it was just my understanding of why each of us has the ability to be creative and why we were intended to use those gifts. And so, as we get ready to walk into our spring series, which is called Creating a Home you Love Coming Home To.

Speaker 1: 1:24

I want to talk a little bit about the idea behind that program and that is, for our home to be a home we love coming home to, we have to first settle into literally the home of ourselves. I think, as a former pastor, as an educator, one of the most important things I've tried to share is that you are 100% loved, 100% valuable just for breathing in and breathing out. And so creating a home, the true you, the centered soul that I think is the starting place of anything of doing any of the work. And so creating a home you love coming home to yes, I would love for you to walk into your bathroom at night and say this is my favorite place and then go down to your kitchen, prepare a meal and think I just love being able to be in this space, and it really truly has nothing to do with how big it is or how much money we've spent.

Speaker 1: 2:17

So much of us finding joy in life comes down to those very small practice steps, whether it's every time you get a glass of water, you have it in your very favorite cup. That makes you smile to look at it when you go upstairs and you're taking a shower, you have the body lotion that makes you smile because you love the smell of it. One of the things we do in our bathroom is we have eucalyptus in the window and that just makes me happy. Going to Trader Joe's and getting the 399 flowers for my table makes me really happy. None of this has to be extremely expensive.

Speaker 1: 2:47

It's just deciding with intention that you are 100% valuable, 100% loved. What would you like in your life, first for yourself, with the breath work that you do, with the journaling, with the gratitude, with the connections of the people in your life that really align your soul, that you're just so thankful that you get to breathe in and breathe out as a loved human made in the image of God. That home is the first part that we want to talk about creating the home where you just love your values. I learned this from one of my coaches, simone Sol, who talks a lot about the idea of coming home. That's the name of her program and it talks about, in this program, the values that drive your behavior and how we do not need to colonize each other. We can love our values and not change the values of other people. So in my home in this space that I create. It's really important to me, for Kelly, to be kind and loving, to love one another, because God, through Christ, has already forgiven me. It's a verse from Ephesians that I said over and over again.

Speaker 1: 3:49

As my children were growing up. I cared less about whether they were in athletics or what their grades were. The family mission statement was be kind and loving to one another, and that started with me. I needed to fill my own soul with sunshine so that I had love to share and to give, and so that first step for you is to say what values are important to you. Is it fun, is it whimsy? Is it clarity? And there's no wrong answer here. It just takes time for you to settle in, for me to settle in, with creating a home we love coming home to.

Speaker 1: 4:20

So first we're talking about ourselves, the life that you and I are living, the way that we think about life, what kind of home is our soul settled in? And then we're looking at the physical space, and there's just a lot of evidence out there that what we allow ourselves to live in, whether it's in a car or in our office or in our house, reflects a lot of what's going on inside. So we have to do the inside work. We have to do the thought work. Take all the thoughts out in a journal, notice them, process the feelings that have come along with those thoughts, create the small practice steps that move us forward. And we do the same thing with our home. And so being in this book has been so good for me, because it reminds me the opposite of anxiety is this abundant, prosperous heart that there's, of course, more than enough. There's more than enough time for the dreams that are important to me. There's more than enough resources to do the things that are mine to do.

Speaker 1: 5:11

So if you were to walk through your home and just do a simple oversight, like a little bit of an inventory, take a little journal with you and you walk in the front door. I think about the front door to my house. There's a little doormat there that I really like. It's just super cute. It's not quite big enough, but it's. It's there and it's one of the things I think about replacing for the summer. And then I walk through the door and I have a closet and has a lot of winter coats in it and I would really love to pair them down, and then I keep going straight into my kitchen, and again, I love the little flowers that are on my table. I love the salt and pepper shaker. They're from a store that my husband and I walked by at Christmas time and sort of made this spur of the moment, purchase Little more than we normally would spend on such things. They're this beautiful shade of blue. They make me smile every time I see them. Over to one side is my living room, over to the other side is my kitchen, and I could open each drawer or look at each blanket and make decisions. Are these things I want to keep? Am I ready to let them go? And so that's what I offer you, before we even begin the next series together.

Speaker 1: 6:12

First, doing the work for us right, like taking that journal daily and noticing your thoughts, processing your feelings, deciding your dreams and your goals are worth noting, writing them down, choosing one priority at a time. And then let's practice that inner work with our outer work. Let's create homes that we love coming home to. And so, when you think about your home, if it was on a Pinterest board, what colors come to mind? What vibe would you see? I really love the idea of Hugo. I love blankets and books and fairy lights and just this idea of warmth. When I look around my closet, the colors are pretty similar they're blues and greens with little pops of color like red.

Speaker 1: 6:57

I kind of have a vibe for who I am, and the goal in life coaching is not to change things right. It's starting with accepting the things we can't change and then moving over to the courage to change the things we can. What do you want is a good question to ask yourself daily, and one of the quotes from this book is from Eric Butterworth and it says prosperity is not just having things, it's the consciousness that attracts the things. One of my favorite thought leaders is Kathy Heller and she often talks about the energy that attracts things. It's not what we want, it's who we are, so few from a place of love without judgment, we're just noticing today. What do you notice about you? Are your thoughts abundant and prosperous, or do they tend to be more on the other side of the feelings wheel and more worried and anxious? And as humans we're going to move back and forth, we're not going to be stuck. But what attracts that higher vibration, that feel good energy? How is it showing up in your life, is it showing up in your thoughts? Is it showing up in your feelings? Is it showing up in your actions? What would you like for this year ahead? And so I think a great place to start to do this work is to decide that this is the year that things that are important to me are going to be written down, they're going to be named, I'm going to notice them, and then I'm going to work along a path of staying in that aligned energy that's going to attract things to me rather than repel them, and so if you've never done any work around this before, that might feel really uncomfortable to think. But a great place to start is at the beginning of this path of attracting who we are right is to notice with gratitude. So, if it's safe to do so, put your hand on your heart, take a few breaths, get back into that aligned energy. If you were to number one to 10 right now, what things are you grateful for in the home that you currently live? And if it's one room, if it's an entire house, can you start there with gratitude?

Speaker 1: 9:06

I go back and think about when I was in college and I had a little dorm room and I was at Christian University. There weren't a lot of resources there and I was in the most rundown of the girls' dorms, and so I was so excited to be at college that freshman year I didn't even really have a lot of negative thoughts about my little room. But when I would go visit my friends who were in the newer dorms, sometimes I would be a little bit jealous. And then one day we went to New York City, a bunch of us from this college, to do a missions trip at the Bowery Mission, and as we were leaving it was snowing out and we had served dinner to homeless people. And as we were leaving some of them couldn't stay that night. There wasn't enough places for them and they stood outside and they thanked us for bringing joy to their lives and bringing food to their hungry bodies.

Speaker 1: 9:55

And I just remember sitting there on the bus for the first time, I think, in my whole life, truly thankful for the warmth of the bus, and I had always been someone who grip and feeling we just didn't have very many resources. We were very, very poor. We got food from food banks and from local churches. People gave us their hand-me-down clothes. I had never had an abundant mentality, or really an attitude of gratitude, before that night, and I remember that night I literally got on my knees to pray and I was so thankful for the heat in my dorm room, for the blanket on my bed, for the pillow, for the fact that I had a whole room. And that attitude of gratitude is what I want to live my entire life with, and so that's what I'm encouraging all of us to start with today, before we move into the spring season. How could we begin from a place of gratitude and attract to us from that energy of goodness and joy? And so going room to room and just noticing, how many stories have we heard of people who save the good China, or they save the special dress, right, there's all these works of fiction out there about people who save the fancy dress and then they died and they were buried in it. But I think we can make an actual example of this from our own life.

Speaker 1: 11:06

How many of the good things do we store aside and never use them? Versus, let's find the glass that makes you happy and make sure you use it a lot. Let's find the outfit that you love, and if there are five that you don't really want to wear. Let them go. We talked about this in a podcast before. A lot of the reason we keep the clothes in our closet that no longer serve us is because we like how they look. We don't actually enjoy how they feel. So if you want to start by making your closet your friend, you try on all your clothes. You don't use a mirror, you just close your eyes and you feel it. If it doesn't feel like something you want to wear, let's give it away. Let's make sure that somebody else who might enjoy it gets the chance to have it.

Speaker 1: 11:42

So go room to room and first start with gratitude. What do you notice they love? Let's just take notice of that. And then, along the path, let's start being generous. What can we give away? Partly by stopping spending are we going to have the resources to give away and partly just letting things go that are no longer serving us.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Catherine Ponder, in this book by Julia Cameron, says the law of receiving is this give and then make a way to receive. Let's let go of the things that are no longer serving us. One of the reasons we keep things longer than we need to is we have thoughts like oh no, what will I do if? What will I do if I give away that extra set of dishes and then next Thanksgiving, 25 people come? Well, let's be honest about this. How often do those things happen? Is there the possibility that a friend would let you borrow something? Is it possible that you would end up at a store and be able to buy something for less than 20 or $30? Like, noticing why we're keeping the things that no longer serve us is so important.

Speaker 1: 12:43

So much of life comes down to this Notice what's serving you, what's not serving you, what you love, what you no longer love, deciding to focus on one thing at a time and I'm deciding this spring to focus on the idea of living this abundant life with a prosperous heart, of just being intentional, of starting from gratitude, of sending out intentions of love and thankfulness and gratitude, and then walking through my home and letting go of the things that don't serve me. So my home reflects the kind of energy I want, which is I want a home I love coming home to. I want to start with my own soul. I don't want to live a life where I'm constantly anxious because there's all kinds of feelings in my body and I haven't given them any attention. Let's start with just a few minutes a day of a journal and some gratitude and some noticing. It actually can change so much of our life.

Speaker 1: 13:32

The whole reason Julia Cameron wrote this book is this thought the prosperous heart is enough. The prosperous heart is more than enough. It's abundant. We might not have all the things we wish, right, that's probably the reality of being a human. We might not have all the things we wish, but we probably have enough. Even when I had that little dorm room in college, I had more than enough, and I'm so, so thankful for that. So why don't we start this spring with a little gift for ourselves? What energy would you like to be in? Do you want to be in prosperous and abundant and aligned, in vibrant energy?

Speaker 1: 14:09

Well, I think the path begins in generosity. We move forward and we start to live a life where we're paying attention, we're noticing what we want, so we give first, right. It's just. One of the best ways that we can bring abundance into our life is to give, and it doesn't have to be big. I think our human brain loves the left and right argument is this or that, but generosity. This year might look like I want to send birthday cards out. I want to be intentional and I'm going to go get a card. Or I'm going to make a card and I'm going to make sure I know when the birthday is. Or I'm going to send a $5 card for a coffee. I was on a podcast recently and somebody sent me a $10 gift card for a coffee. I got two coffees from Starbucks for just having a wonderful conversation with her and it was so generous and, as you can still hear in my voice, I was so touched by that.

Speaker 1: 14:59

So don't allow your brain to say generosity has to be bigger than what you have. It can start with a dollar. It can start with putting something into a tip jar. It can start with a gift card. It can start with just being generous with the books you read and finding somebody that you want to give it to with maybe a homemade bookmark. Start with generosity. Then we move over to gratitude what do we already have, what can we be thankful for, what can we share with others? And then deciding on repeat what do we want? Do we want abundant lives? Do we want to live lives that are vibrant and prosperous and aligned? Well, we get there with the action steps we're taking.

Speaker 1: 15:37

So just notice this week. Where is your energy going? And that's one of the biggest reasons that spring cleaning serves all of us is sometimes the only thing between us and the kind of life that is vibrant and prosperous is just an overabundance of stuff. It wears us down, it doesn't welcome us into our room, it sort of yells at us. One of my friends, when we did this the first time, she came up with this beautiful thought I want my closet to be my friend. So many of us do not have closets that are our friends. They're full of clothes that haven't fit in five years and they cost a lot of money. So we don't want to get rid of them, and we're kind of mean to ourselves every time we look at those jeans like how could you eat those cookies and not fit in me? That's not vibrant or prosperous or abundant.

Speaker 1: 16:20

All of those aligned energies start at love, so let's finish our time together with hand on our heart. Love, you are loved. That's who you are. 100% loved, 100% valuable. Nothing you think or say or do ever changes that. And so what would you like to do? Make it so small that it's easy. Maybe you're deciding. You know what? I know that I have six pairs of socks in my sock drawer that all have holes in them and it's time for me to let them go. Why did I come up with that example? Because I have those. I love bombas. They're great socks, but they wear out for me in the heel and I keep not throwing them out because they were expensive and I keep thinking I might fix them.

Speaker 1: 16:59

So I'm going to finish this podcast. I'm going to take a picture to show you all. I'm going to throw out the socks with the holes in them. That's not part of living an abundant life. What would you like to do? It's your small step that's going to move you forward. I promise you that, if you join me over the next six weeks as we take these small steps to creating a home, you love coming home to that energy that is taken away because we lose things or we feel overwhelmed. As we begin to live more aligned, abundant lives, that energy is going to return and you're going to be able to make decisions that serve you, and so make those small choices today.

Speaker 1: 17:33

What kind of energy do you want to walk in? What do you want to let go of? What do you want? Right? That might be the whole thing I'm noticing.

Speaker 1: 17:41

I would really love some pretty pink bowls from Pottery Barn. I saw them a few weeks ago, decided not to buy them. Then thought about it, made the decision. I'm going to go get them. What would you like? Is it roses on your table? Is it some eucalyptus for your bathroom? Is it a new towel? Is it just some really nice hand lotion? Gift yourself with it this week. Be kind and loving to yourself. You're so worth it. And join me again over the next few weeks as we together create homes we love coming home to. I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move your life into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life, and if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, kelly Tibbetts Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbettscom. I look forward to connecting again soon.