Join Sara on "Random Thoughts" as she explores the power of planning during winter. Discover how this season offers a unique opportunity to reflect, set intentions, and plant the seeds of your dreams. Tune in and embrace the opportunity of Planting Seeds of Intentions" as we journey towards growth and transformation together.
Join Sara on "Random Thoughts" as she explores the power of planning during winter. Discover how this season offers a unique opportunity to reflect, set intentions, and plant the seeds of your dreams. Tune in and embrace the opportunity of Planting Seeds of Intentions" as we journey towards growth and transformation together.
Welcome back I'm your host, Sarah Alsbrook. And this podcast is about the art of editing your life season by season. This process is messy. Beautiful. And what I'm all about, it brings life to your soul sets you up for success. So you can thrive and truly enjoy the life. You're intentionally building. I've decided to put out an entire season of podcast sharing the process that I've used over the past several years to step away from overwhelm, living out what I should be doing. And lean into intentionally enjoying my life this process was borrowed by farmers who have been tending to their plot of land faithfully year after year the process I practice follows the seasons. It's simple, practical, and guide you. Step-by-step into living out your best life. Each season, I highlight four opportunities that you can put into practice. Currently, we are talking about the season winter. And the four main opportunities that I practice our audit clear and edit. Curate and repair and plan. Audit. This is a beautiful opportunity that allows us to take a drone's view of our life. Where are we spending our time? Where's our attention going and answering questions. Like how do we feel about all of it? It's a wild thing to see how fuller lives are and to weigh in and how we're feeling about it. This feedback is pure gold. It makes you extremely grateful. And honestly, in the beginning, Equally overwhelmed, but no worries. The entire goal of this. Is for real feedback feedback that you'll use to continue mapping out the next season of your life Clear and edit. Now that you have current feedback, you get to make some big girl decisions. You have full permission. What do you want to keep in your life and continue to invest your time and energy into. And what do you want to have a necessary ending with you get to pick. What doesn't bring you joy or is it serving you in this current season? You get to edit out kerry and repair. This is the time to sit back for a hot minute and take it all in. You've done some heavy lifting and now you get to celebrate what you've chosen to keep in your life. You've removed the overwhelm and the distractions, and now you get just, just sit with it and see the things that are meaningful and that bring you joy and are deeply satisfying. As you sit in the space, you'll realize some things need a little extra repair attending to. And some extra love and care. Do that. Enjoy your time as you reset, restore. Plan. On today's episode, I'm going to talk about this opportunity planning as a time where we get to lean in and truly listen to our heart inspiration and dream of what's next over the past few weeks, I've shared about the first three opportunities. I believe winter offers. So please feel free to go back and listen. Now that you've processed all the data from taking inventory of your life. You've made decisions about what you wanted to edit out. Celebrated and repaired what you chose to keep it's time to dream up what you want to add as you build the life of your dreams. You have full permission to dream. Tune into what your heart is saying. Pay attention to where inspiration is showing up. And grabbing your attention during this process of editing your life. You've begun to build trust with yourself. I truly believe that you now know what resonates and what doesn't you now have taken the permission of making your own decisions. About your life and you run with it. Dang, take a minute to celebrate how far you've come in this journey. Once I realized I was in charge of my own garden. And that I could choose how I wanted to live out my days. That was a beautiful gift that I will never take for granted. I honor that gift daily, weekly, monthly, yearly by guarding this opportunity by practicing it and leaning into it. Season after season, it's easy to hear all the sheds that are projected onto us. And so that is really what I protect against years ago. I actually did a shit challenge with myself for an entire year. Anytime my mind heard the word should I took the opportunity to decline the offer. I know it, honestly, I think it hurts some of my friend's feelings along the way, but I was training my heart. To do what I felt led to and what I wanted to do instead of feeling an external pressure to perform or to show up out of obligation or on someone else's expectations. Even though that may have not been their intention, I just had to take this time it taught me so much as I tuned into why I felt the messaging of should. Why was that messaging showing up? It taught me where I wanted my energy to go. And how, when I was listening to a, should I actually was giving away my energy. We only have so much energy capacity, brain space. HeartSpace all the things. When you realize that, and you recognize the cost when you overextend. When you listen to a should, when you do it out of a should space you begin to shift things and are much more conscious of your choices. Okay. Now let's get to it. Imagine you get to move forward as a true gardener. You've just spent a lot of time and energy weeding your garden out, and now you get to add something fun that brings you life, lights you up and inspires you. First, I want you to take out a piece of paper and get some craft supplies, maybe some watercolors, some pencils, wasabi tape, whatever you've got. This is going to be a fun little project. I want you to visualize. All the things that you have kept in your garden, you can actually paint a garden. If you want. You can do a pie chart if you want, however you want to do it. Once you have that done, you get to sit with it. There's beautiful image of your life. How do you feel as is? I know it's incredible. I'm honestly so happy for you. I'm so happy for myself. It's a wild thing to see all the love and the community, your connections. All the blessings that you have. On paper. It is unbelievable. This always leaves me speechless. Sometimes I still feel like it's a little full. And so sometimes when I look at this, I'll edit something out. I'll say, you know what? Maybe I don't need to have those opportunities. Maybe I could ask someone else to help me with that. So I can have a little bit more room to move forward. Once you have that space. I want you to switch your lens. We have been in a place of a grateful heart. Now I want you to switch to a lens up planting lens. Let's look for opportunities to plant something new, something that will bring us life and it will inspire us and it'll help us to expand and grow. Once you look at it from this lens, there's two different phases. The first one is what pops out to you intuitively. Do you see space that you want to instantly plant something that you've been wanting to do for awhile now, but you literally did not have the time you did not have the capacity. Is it a new friendship? Is that a hobby? Is it a creative outlet? Years ago, my husband shared this story with me about Legos. And how a brick has the studs. And they're the connectors. And so say you have a brick of six connectors, but they're all filled. So now you meet these new friends and you want to be friends, but you don't have any room in your life. You have no capacity. You have no time. You have no energy. You want to, but all of your studs are filled. But if you remove a couple of things and you create more room. For friendship or whatever you can, you have new connectors now. So now that you have a few studs that are open, what do you want? Is there a friendship? Is there somebody that you've connected with over the last few months that you're like, oh, I'd love to get together for coffee. They've asked me to do this fun thing. Yes. I want to take that creative class with them. This is just such a fun way to look at it. You literally get to pay attention to things that kind of inspired you over the last few months, but you didn't have time, but now you have the time. So what is it that's coming up? And secondly, next part of the space after the things that have already come up, intuitively you knew, and you're excited and you filled up those spaces. The second phase is you can look at your garden and see what's lacking or out of balance. Sometimes we have a lot of work opportunities and we fill the rest of our space. And time with family and friends. And we really, honestly, if we ask ourselves. What we need is just margin. We need nothing on the calendar. That is what is lacking. You look at your garden and you're like, wow, it is full. I'm happy. I'm content. I don't want to add anything else. Or you could look and say, I have lots of community and family time and work and all these things. But there's a no play. There's nothing unexpected. There's no hobby. There's no club. There's no. Date night. Girls' night game night, that's, what's lacking. This is not a rushed thing. You have all of winter to decide what seed you want to plant. What you want in your life? You can just leave some extra space for funsies. You can leave margin. I honestly love leaving margin just until I decide. I'm not sure I'm looking for a hobby. I'm looking and paying attention to what is leading me creatively. And what's calling to me and what friendships. Are resonating with me and what I'd like to do more of, I just kind of like to leave a little bit of margin until I decide, and that is totally okay. I know that this is a planning opportunity. But for me, one of the things I plan is. Untouched margin. This, literally this margin in my life, this extra nothingness. Is for the unexpected fund, the friendship opportunity, the rest. I saved this time. And I do not book it. I loved hat. Be able to say yes to something. I love the unplanned layers that happen in life. Like an evening walk or an afternoon nap, or even that last minute trip with your people, just because the stars aligned. That is, that is the whole idea of this is you get to plan. how you want to use your time, how you want to be available, what you want to say yes. To what you want to say no to you get to pick. Planning and planting is just such a beautiful season to be in that you get to look at your life. It is full, you have layers and layers and layers of love and connection. This is just you tuning into more of what you want in the future. What do you want to grow? What do you want more of? Do you want more? Love more creativity, This whole idea of editing your life is just to pay attention, gardeners, pay attention to what seeds they're planting. They are strategic. They're thoughtful. They know what they wanted more of last season. Dang it. I wish I had more corn. I wish I had extra so that I could share. With our neighbors, we wanted to have more gatherings together. Dang it. You know what that one week that one plant was really tricky on me. You know what? It just took up so much anxiety and space. I don't think I want to mess with that this season, this season, I am really going to focus on. Salads or pumpkins or whatever. It's literally like, they're just paying attention and they're ebbing and flowing every year. It's changing. Like I look at farmers and they have so much land and they get to pick whatever they want to grow. They have the equipment, they have this beautiful life. They have the family that lives in the farmhouse and they have the barn and they have all these things all ready. And now they're picking and choosing they're using their energy. To grow and to build. They're strategic. They're thoughtful. They're paying attention. You get to view it just like that. There isn't any pressure. Yeah, you might waste some time, some energy, but every season you will get to re-edit and re-examine, and. Shoes different. So what do you want this next season to look like? What didn't you like last season? And what do you want to change for next season? What would you like more of, or less of you get to pick? And so this planting and planting season is so fun and I hope that you're enjoying it. Wow. Okay. Well that officially wraps up the four opportunities of winter. After sharing these i feel so grateful for this process for the work that has done in my heart and life over the years. It wasn't easy, but what a beautiful gift to my heart and to my life. And so I just wanted to thank you. Thank you for coming along on this journey with me, as I shared. As always reach out and let me know what resonated with you, how this process is looking in your life and know that i'm here cheering you on always