Hey friends, today I wanted to reshare one of the first podcasts that I produced myself when I began producing them a few months ago, and it's on the tools that we're using in the Create a Home you Love Coming Home 2 series, the Notice, decide and Practice tool. Last week we talked a little bit about it and I thought that this re-recording would really help us grow deeper in our understanding of those three tools, so I hope that it serves you. Let me know in my Facebook group or over on Instagram. Coach Kelly Tibbets, I hope that you are using these tools this spring as you do whatever it is that's important to you to create a home you love coming home to. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm Life Coach Kelly Tibbets, 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. Welcome to Coaching with Kelly. I hope our time together helps you to live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. This is my first time in a while doing a podcast without a guest, and I think part of the reason I wanted to is I'm so very excited about how far the program that I've created has come was almost two years ago, in June of 2020, when I held my first group coaching session, and I knew that I had something inside of me that was important, that I wanted to share with people, and I didn't quite know what it was, and so if you're here listening to my podcast today, I hope that that little understanding that Steve Jobs has shared before in the past about we only really understand life as we look backwards. It's next to impossible to decide in advance what is going to happen 100% of the time. So I had no idea in June of 2020 what coaching with Kelly was going to mean, but I've loved that over the last two years, we've really clarified that there's five steps that help you invest in the health that you walk through life in any season, and so in January and February, we had the chance to talk about the first big idea, which is that going low and slow is a very different way of setting goals, but it allows you to create peaceful productivity. And it was so fun to do our group coaching session and we were on Clubhouse sharing about this and just saw so many aha moments and so many people really celebrated the fact that by going low and slow with really intentional decisions, they were able to create the results they wanted.
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Well, now we're back with our second step in the invest in the season process. We're calling it rethink spring cleaning because most of us at the beginning of spring is you know, my husband was actually outside today doing some of that outside spring cleaning of mowing the lawn and raking up some of the yard Most of us, as spring begins, feel that need to kind of pick an area and give it our best energy. But why we really want to talk about rethink spring cleaning is because it's really truly the whole reason for having a life coach. I actually have invested in quite a few coaches I have two currently and the reason that we invest in coaching for our brain is that when we learn to manage our mind, so much of life becomes healthier. So this season, this step two is called manager space equals manager mind. You can use the same tools to create the order that you want in a garage, in a basement, in a closet, in a drawer. You use those same tools to notice your thoughts and to then decide which ones are staying on repeat and which ones are not.
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And so today we're going to be talking about the big idea of the first step in the rethink spring cleaning group coaching program, and it is an idea that I learned at the life coach school, where I was a scholar for 13 months, and it's the fact that in life, we have circumstances. Circumstances are the things outside of our control. They're not our thoughts, they're not our feelings, they're not our actions. It could be something like the weather and it could be somebody that you're in relationship with, thinking something, feeling something, doing something, and all of the circumstances of life are actually neutral until we have a thought about it. So here's the big idea for you this week what are you making it mean?
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So, if you have the ability, you're not driving right now I know when I listen to podcasts I could be driving or doing laundry but if you have the ability to just find a quiet place and take out a notebook, take a few moments and just notice the circumstances in your life right now where you are living, the people you're in relationship with, things they're saying things, they're doing, the amount of money in your bank account, the food that you wanna be eating this week, there are so many circumstances to life. Just take a few moments. My favorite word for that is notice. Just sit down for a moment, take a few breaths and notice. What are you thinking about, what are you feeling, what do you want to do? And as you begin to notice the circumstances of your life, you might start to realize that, because you're human, all of us do this. We attach our thoughts, we attach judgment, we attach meaning to the circumstances of our life. So what does that mean?
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Well, you know, I'm the mom of three adult children, and the reason that I have invested so heavily in coaching is my mind tends to be mismanaged. I tend to go out into the future, think of the worst case scenario and then allow that thought to kind of bubble up inside me, create anxiety, make me, you know, get stuck in my action line, and so I have to work really hard to notice how I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, what I'm doing and what is in my control. What is something that is my thought, my feeling, my action. That's called the part of the serenity prayer where we need courage. Right, that's our agency in life to decide what we're gonna think, know that those thoughts are gonna create the feelings that we walk through life with and that those feelings move us towards or away from the actions that we wanna take in our life. That's the part of life we were given the authority over. And then, outside of that, the circumstances, the results, what other people think, feel and do. For that we need acceptance, serenity, peace, to accept that those things are not within our control.
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So there's just so many circumstances in your life right now, and you know, one of the sayings that lots of coaches use is pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Suffering is when we give our thoughts a space they don't really deserve, keeping unhealthy thoughts on repeat, and those thoughts really bring with them some power to create the feelings inside you of scared, frustrated, annoyed, aggravated. And it doesn't have to be that way. The circumstances of our life are always neutral and we get to decide what we want to make them mean. And if there's one way to live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life, it is to decide in advance. What do I wanna think on repeat, what do I want to do with the thoughts that are in my brain, how do I wanna process the feelings that I've already felt and what actions do I wanna take that can move me closer to the result that I want. So, because this is a rethink spring cleaning group program that I'm offering in April and May, my idea for you today is now that you know that circumstances are outside of your control, but your thoughts are within your control.
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What thought would you like to choose today? What is something that's important to you? Even if it's not urgent at all, it's important to you. Maybe you want to come down in the morning and make a cup of tea and you want that area of your kitchen to be so organized that you just open the drawer, there's the tea, there are the tea cups. It's just simple and clear and uncluttered, and that's what you'd like. Maybe there's no urgency to that at all, but it's important to you. So you get to notice that you'd like to have something organized in a space in your home. You get to decide in advance what you want. I get to decide what I want to change, what I want to add, what I want to take away this spring, and I have the authority you have the authority to decide how to prioritize whatever it is that you've created a list to do.
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So take a few moments now. What are the things that are important to you From that list. The best gift you can give yourself is to decide one priority at a time. Priority actually means one. I know that you're probably like me and you've been part of teams where you might plan out into the future a little bit, and there are seven priorities. The struggle with that is it's impossible to make seven things have equal value, right, and so deciding today here's the first thing of the seven things that I'm going to give my best energy to. How can we decide to make all the circumstances neutral? So think for a moment.
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If you're like me and over the winter the garage that you have has become a little disorganized, or your basement, or your bedroom, or your desk at work, you have two choices. You can find a neutral sentence to describe it, or you can allow your brain to offer you things like I'm so lazy, that's why I don't clean my garage, nobody will help me. Or this is the season. I'm deciding to give my best energy to this one chosen priority that matters to me, and when we choose one space and we can decide in advance, that's what's getting our best energy. I think you'll be as surprised as I was how it's almost like making a snowball roll down the hill, doing that one thing and doing it well, and completing it. It gives you the energy for the next step, right, it gives you the energy for the next priority. So what I love about my Coaching Circle is we create these beautiful workbooks that give you some of the questions in advance that you might need, you know, in order to decide the priorities in your life decide where to go first, to decide what's going second and third. So here are a few thoughts that might help you as you're deciding which priority to choose.
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Do you like the space where you spend the most time? Do you like the space where you begin your day? Do you like the space where you end your day? Can you find the things that are important to you in a way that works for you? Can you easily put your things away? I heard a really interesting thing about closets, where the things that we don't wear tend to stay on the hangars. Right, we're not wearing them, and the things that we do wear on a regular basis might get thrown into the closet, might get tossed somewhere. What would it look like to decide that the clothes in your closet are all there because you enjoy them. You like how they fit you, you like how you look in them. And the other thing is, maybe it's time to put them in a box and put them aside, so that you have the space to put things away easily. Putting things away easily is so key for us as we keep our systems. So we're gonna walk through what the Life Coach School calls the model.
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Dr Karen Lyme-Leaf speaks a lot about the power of our thoughts, our feelings and our actions. So if you've chosen one area maybe your desk, maybe your bathroom, maybe a kitchen drawer the neutral thought that will serve you is to say my space has things in it, my desk has things on it, my closet has things in it. I have decided right, that's gonna be your thought, that this space matters to me, and that's why I'm going to make sure that the systems are in place to organize it. And when we decide in advance, it gives us the ability to choose some feelings that will serve us. Using a feeling like committed, intentional, will give us the energy to move forward. A feeling like confused and overwhelmed can really keep us from moving forward. And then, finally, those feelings will drive our actions, and what we want our actions to be are very small steps.
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All the people that I coach, I offer them this idea choose in advance three to five days this week to do the little, small practices that move your result forward. The reason I say three to five is it's so important for us not to be adding into our lives until we've taken the time to pull out the things that are not serving us, and you can't do everything at once. So your life is already running in the way that it is running. You have probably a few too many things in your life currently, so to add in something every single day, seven days a week, is going to help you to get to that confused, overwhelmed place of feelings that keep you from doing anything. But maybe for this week, choose three to five different days where you're going to pick two to three small baby steps that would move you in the direction you want to go. So maybe when you walk into your closet, you know the season of winter is ending, it's time for spring. You don't even know where to put your new clothes. It just feels overwhelming.
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Start with a thought this space is important to me. I'm committed to spending two blocks of 10 minutes for the next three to five days and I'm going to pull five to 10 things out. I'm going to decide if I'm keeping them or giving them away, and then I'm going to put back only the things that make me feel happy to wear them. These little small steps are really the key to managing any project. So if you'd like to get this three-step process of notice, decide and practice, you can head over to my website, kellytiphetscom backslash2022, and I'm going to have this handout for you.
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Step one notice what is important to you. Take everything out, decide if it's serving you. Decide if you want to keep it. Know that when you make a decision like I'm going to give this away and there was a price attached to it or somebody gave it to you and even though you don't really love it, you feel a little bit connected to it because it was given to you. That's a feeling that you're feeling, a little bit of sadness, a little bit of regret. If you just put your hands on your heart, close your eyes, take a few breaths, you're going to be able to feel that feeling. It will get bigger and bigger, like an ocean wave, but it will move through you and you'll be able to make the decision to keep it or give it or recycle it.
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And then, finally, we want to practice saying goodbye to things. When life is overwhelming, it's because there's too much. Maybe you have too many activities this week, maybe you have too many things in your home, maybe you just don't give yourself enough white space. Practicing saying goodbye is so, so key to creating the space and the life that serves you. 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.