Welcome back to part 2 of the December series, Why You Shouldn’t Wait For January to Change.
In today’s episode we’re taking all the mystery and guesswork out of creating change. You’ll finally learn once and for all how to begin seeing change in your life starting today – right now! The good news is that it is all up to you. So much is within your control. You always have a CHOICE!
You get to decide how you show up every day. Once we begin to take ownership of our days, then we can make decisions that steer ourselves into the direction we want to go.
Don’t allow your circumstances, your past, or your mistakes to rule over your life anymore. Put a stake in the ground and decide that today is the day you do something different. Today is the day you start creating change.
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the podcast so that other moms can find messages of hope and light just like this one!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
(0:00):
Hey friend, welcome back to another episode of the podcast! I’m so excited that you’re here. Welcome to part two of this four-part series that I’m sharing with you over the month of December. We’re talking about why you should not wait until January to change your life and how you can create change right now, right where you are in the middle of December.
(0:22):
We don’t have to wait for a new year. We don’t have to wait for a new. We can start right now. So if you missed part one, you might want to pause and go back to that. I can link it below, tap into that episode to listen to it. It is so good. It’s full of encouragement, full of hope, and it really gives you the basics and foundation for what we’re going to be talking about in the next three episodes.
(0:43):
So you gotta kind of have the foundation before you can move on. And if not, then that might be part of the reason why none of the change you’ve decided, or wanted to create, sticks. So I share a lot of hard, honest truth, all out of a place of love coming from a place of someone who’s been there, done that.
(1:00):
Someone who still struggles with it, I get it. And that is why I’m sharing it with you on the podcast. So go check out episode 25, which is part one of this four person. If you’re ready to get started, we’re going into part two, some more truth. Headed your way, a little more chill this week. I slowed it down a little bit, chilled out a little bit.
(1:19):
I’m not going to preach to you. I’m not gonna preach at you. It’s going to be a little bit more laid back, but full of truth, full of good nuggets for you to take with you throughout the rest of your week. So reheat your coffee, put in your AirPods, grab your headphones, whatever you’re doing. Let’s dive in.
(1:34):
Let’s start to create change in our life right now. We’re not waiting for January. We’re not waiting for a new year. We’re going to do. Let’s go.
(1:43):
So there’s no secret to creating. There’s no big, super top secret reason why she lost 50 pounds or why she became a morning person after she hated mornings for years, there’s no secret to her change, whatever person it is that you’re looking at, whatever kind of change you’re wanting in your life.
(2:08):
There’s no secret to creating the change, but here’s the secret. It is a decision. You make the choice, you determine to do something differently. This is something that I wish I would have understood earlier, but I didn’t, I wasn’t ready. You know, there’s, I don’t, I don’t know how many times they say you have to hear the same thing, a certain amount of time.
(2:31):
You have to see something a certain amount of times before it actually sinks in before you actually get it. So hope this is the last and final time that you needed to hear that before you actually get it in the light bulb goes off and you say, “oh my gosh,” like the secret is that I have the power.
(2:46):
That’s the secret. The secret is there is no secret. I just do it. Literally creating change in your life is taking baby steps over and over and over and over until you become more confident. You start to see small changes in your life starts to change. It starts to look different. Your life will change when you choose to change it.
(3:09):
We have to take ownership. We have to take responsibility. We have to stop placing blame. We have to stop waiting for somebody to come and do it for us. Nobody’s coming to save you. It’s nobody else’s fault. It is on you. It is your responsibility. And when I started to take ownership of that and I started owning my days, I started owning my attitude and owning my time.
(3:34):
Then I decided what I did with my time. I decided where my thoughts went. I decided what I focused. But you have to make that decision. There has to be a starting point. There has to be clear time where you say “no more as of this day, I’m no longer going to allow my circumstances, my past my mistakes, other people’s opinions, anything else to dictate my life and how I show up. I’m going to determine that I get to decide how I show up in the world, how I spend my time, how I spend my day.
(4:08):
What my attitude is like.” But it’s so much easier to not do that. It is so much easier to just live in the chaos, the sea of chaos, the sea of overwhelm, and just be floating around out there with everybody else and just tossed about with the waves of chaos in life. That’s so easy. It’s so easy to be on a raft out there.
(4:28):
You’re just drifting around in the chaos. That’s easy. It’s hard to come up here on the land and start walking with purpose and intent. I don’t know where that whole illustration came from from, with the ocean, but hopefully it made sense. It’s harder to decide that you’re going to do something differently because change is not easy.
(4:47):
If change was easy, then everybody would be walking around with the exact mentality, looking the exact way with the exact amount of weight and the exact, this, and exact that, whatever it is for you, then everybody would be doing that thing. But it’s not easy. It requires you to take a different path than what the world is doing than what most people in society are doing than what most a moms and motherhood are doing.
(5:11):
But I know that there are those of you out there. And if you’re listening to this, I’m assuming that you’re one of them. There are moms who want to do things differently. You’ve made the choice that you want to be different. You see motherhood differently. You want to show up differently and you’ve decided to do that.
(5:27):
You’ve decided to create change. You’re the only person that can do it. When you think about it as this like empowering thing, it’s really so freeing. Like you, you can literally just do something differently. If what you put into your mouth makes you feel bad. If what you watch on TV makes you feel bad.
(5:46):
If scrolling social media for a certain amount of time makes you feel bad, don’t do it. It’s literally that simple. We over-complicate things because we just, we are keeping ourselves stuck. That’s just the truth. And I can speak to this because I’ve been there and I’m speaking from a place of love, a place of experience.
(6:04):
I have been there. I have been there. I have kept myself stuck. I’ve got the t-shirt to prove it. Like I’ve got the mugs, I’ve done all the things. I know what it’s like to literally keep yourself stuck in familiarity because it feels familiar. And because it’s comfortable in your brain doesn’t know any different, like you don’t know any other way to live when you’ve lived patterns and habits for so long.
(6:26):
You don’t know how else to live. But the thing that has literally changed my life is making my quiet time, making time with God a priority. And it sounds cheesy. It sounds like a Sunday school thing to say, but it is true. It’s the truth. And when you ground yourself and center yourself, like I talked about in part one.
(6:44):
So if you miss that, you need to go back and listen to part one, but when you’re grounded in your identity and who Christ is, and that is Christ centered, and you can remind yourself of truth each day. That is how you move forward and you get unstuck because he gives us a new way of living. It doesn’t look like the world.
(7:02):
It doesn’t look like survive til nine, and then it’s wine. And this wine, mommy, wine, old culture, that hot mess, mom express and all this crap, honestly, that society pushes on us and shoves down our throats that we subscribe to. I didn’t sign up for this one. I became a mom. I didn’t sign up for that. And so he gives us a new way.
(7:27):
He allows us to rewrite the story in live a new narrative and there is so much freedom in Christ. But the thing is, like I shared on part one, is that Satan doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to forget that he wants you to be so consumed. So overwhelmed. So in survival mode, just barely getting by that you’re not thriving. That you’re not living.
(7:45):
In the center of who Christ says that you are, he doesn’t want you to live from that place of truth. And so, yeah, I know what it’s like to live there. I know what it’s like to be so overwhelmed and Satan had me so tangled up in so many laws for so long. And the only thing I can do is just pray that God redeems my days, that he redeems the time and know that he’s faithful to do that.
(8:05):
But yeah, Satan has a hold on mamas. He has a hold on our motherhood and that’s something that I’m passionate about putting a stop to and helping moms to realize, especially Christian mamas, because motherhood is a gift. Our kids are a blessing. It is a joy. It is a privilege. Is it as an honor, my kids are not draining.
(8:25):
I’m not living for bedtime. I’m making the most of every moment. Not because of them, not because of my husband, not because of our house, our situation, circumstances… But because of who I am in Christ, and that’s a really scary thing to say, because at any moment, this could all be taken away. Like it, it could. I could just be me and, and I have to be okay with, if that were the case.
(8:49):
Like what if I had this full on Job-like life experience and it was just me, everything else was stripped away. That’s what you have to be okay with that. That’s what you have to learn to live from that place. And it’s not this scary, like what if I lose everything and, you know, everything just disappears.
(9:06):
And it was just me. I’m just saying that there’s confidence in knowing who you are in Christ and living in the center of that. Every single day. And that impacts the way that you live your life. You won’t stay stuck anymore. Whenever you can truly live from a Christ-centered identity, because it is impossible for the two to co-exist in my flesh fault, that inner spiritual battle for months, it was not comfortable.
(9:33):
I thought Satan was testing me. I thought the devil was just after me. But it turns out that it’s really just Christ transforming me and molding me to make me more like him because the two can’t co-exist, I can’t have hate in my heart and be, holy. There are things that you have to let go of when you start to step into the presence of God every single day.
(9:52):
And you show up consistently to the word and you’re asking him to show you stuff and reveal stuff to you and change your heart. That’s not going to be easy friend. That’s not going to feel good. It doesn’t feel good when it talks in the Bible about being refined by fire. That’s not pleasant, changing and transforming is not pleasant.
(10:10):
We have to get this idea out of our minds, that this is just going to be easy, that I can just change my life. And it’s just going to be so easy because everybody on Instagram is doing it. And she has a morning routine now and she just magically did this. No, this took years of trying and failing and trying and failing.
(10:26):
And I’m telling you that it wasn’t until I centered myself and rooted myself and grounded myself into who I was and God’s. And who he says that I am, that everything changed. I’m talking about only a couple months. I mean, he’s like changed the way I see myself and the world. And yeah, it was something that I started at the beginning of the year to make more consistent because I knew it needed to be a priority in my life, but I really started digging in a couple months back and it’s just totally changed my life.
(10:56):
And that’s what I want for every mom, every Christian woman to experience, because there’s so much freedom there. And Satan doesn’t want you to have any part of it. He doesn’t want you to taste that. He doesn’t want you to see it. He doesn’t want you to know it, but we get so bogged down in life and the day in and day out in the daily grind in the mundane.
(11:14):
And I’m just a stay at home. Mom. I’m just a working mom. I’m always, I’m just a mom, I’m just doing this, this, this. I’m always needed. I’m always this. I’m always that. He doesn’t. He wants you. Satan wants you to be there. He wants you focused on that. He doesn’t want you to be focused on the truth of who you are in Christ, because if you were then your focus, your attitude, your perspective, everything would be different.
(11:37):
There’s no way you’d be able to continue living the same way every single day, you’d be being transformed. Like it says from glory to glory, you’re going to continue to be a better version and a better version because we’re becoming like Christ. When we spend that time with him, when our identity shifts and we are becoming more like Christ.
(11:55):
I’m going to step off the soapbox. Now I’m going to step off the preaching, the preaching soapbox that I tend to get on these days, but I’m so passionate about it because I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to be stuck. And I know a notice, like to say for Satan to have a hold on you in your mind and your marriage and the way you look at your kids, and I’m not going to stand for that anymore.
(12:15):
I’m going to stand up and I’m going to speak out and I’m going to speak truth into your life because you need to hear it. You need it. True change is going to come. When you begin to partner with the Holy Spirit every single day, and you ask God to change your life. That’s what it comes down to. And then, yeah, there’s a whole lot of practical things that I can share with you because I know that there’s only so much I can do.
(12:36):
There’s only so much Cason can do. There’s only so much that I’m capable of because then my flesh runs out. I eventually, my strength and me trying to do it on my own, eventually will fail me. Trust me on this, because I also tried to do it this way. I also tried to just will it, if I can just will it into existence.
(12:55):
Say enough affirmations, which don’t get me wrong… I love my affirmations now. And I root them in truth and I wrote them and the Bible and I have verses to back it up and I love it. I speak those over my life every single day, but there’s me doing it in my own strength will only get me so far and it’s going to seem like it’s working for a little while and then you’re going to come to the end of yourself and you’re going to be frustrated all over again.
(13:17):
If you’re a Christ follower, then you know that the presence of God, the Holy Spirit is the only thing that is the only thing that has the power to transforming your life. So why do we run from him? Why do we make those things, prayer, reading our Bible as a last resort. That should be the first thing that we run too.
(13:33):
It should be our go-to. It should be just something we’re doing every single day. But again, Satan has a hold on us in our minds and our motherhood’s and our marriages and our days and our jobs and everything that we’re doing. And he doesn’t want you to see the value in small, tiny baby steps. And that’s what I’m here to share with these practical things that you can do, because it is both. It’s, like I say, it’s both this spiritual and this practical.
(13:55):
It has to be both because you have free will. But you also have the holy spirit who is able to change your life and transforming and make you more like him. Alright. I’m for real stepping off of the soap box. Now, preacher Cason is, is stepping down. We over-complicate it. We are like, I don’t know. She just is so hard and I don’t know where to start.
(14:17):
I don’t know what to do. That’s not always the case. That’s not always true. There is something you can do. You’re just underestimating the power of a small baby step. You’re underestimating the power of 1% better. There’s something you can do today to get you to that place. You want to be whatever you’re in pursuit of. The title of the podcast is Her Pursuit.
(14:37):
What are you pursuing in your life? How can you show up with purpose and intent every single day? The only way to get to where you want to be is to make choices every single day, that move you in that direction. That move you in the direction that you want to go. This is not rocket science, but we over-complicate it because we honestly, our brain will keep us stuck.
(14:58):
When we can get caught up in the story and the narrative of “this is so hard. I don’t know where to start. It’s so complicated. It’s so difficult. I don’t know what to do. It’s really…” And when you can see it for what it is and when you can call yourself out on it is so much easier to break the cycle and interrupt that spiral and say, “no, I can start small.
(15:16):
I can start with what feels manageable and I can do what I can and I’m going to be consistent with it. And I’m going to build on that.” And that’s going to create change. We get so frustrated with ourselves when we continue in the same habits in these same patterns, like we get frustrated when we see the same results.
(15:33):
If you keep doing the same thing, you’re going to get the same results. There’s nothing magical about it. It’s really not sexy. It’s not attractive. It’s not fun. Most days it gets a really hard. It’s the every day daily choices, the tiny, tiny choices that will make or break that will add up over time.
(15:57):
Like one good choice doesn’t automatically give you the life. It’s all of the small choices over time. It’s the consistency. It is the discipline. The self-control again, things that are not really attractive. They’re not shiny. It’s not cool. Like it’s really not fun. Most of the time it takes work. It takes discipline. So I know that’s not fun.
(16:22):
Like I’m sure like one person is still listening at this point because it’s just, it’s not, it’s not cool. Like it’s not. It’s not easy. And I think a lot of times in culture and society, we’ve been conditioned to kind of be attracted to what looks good. What looks easy? What looks enticing? What gives us the fastest, easiest reward?
(16:45):
And this is very much a delayed gratification in a way, when to reach a goal, to set a goal and to work toward that goal, you do get small, tiny wins, but sometimes that’s not enough to get that dopamine hit and feel like you really did something that day. So it is harder to work towards something and to really pursue a goal.
(17:06):
Regardless of, if it’s within your business or personally, it’s just not easy. Maybe you are just that person who just really wants to see change, but you don’t know where to start or you feel like you’ve just always stayed stuck in your excuses. Just try to maybe take something from today, take something that I’ve said, and just keep that as your focus, maybe it was like a quote or something that you heard.
(17:30):
There’s nothing magic about change, or you hold the power to, you know, your choices and your decisions. Remember that? Tell yourself that over and over and over. It takes repetition. It takes consistency. It takes time. And like I said, that’s not very attractive, not by the world standards or what society and culture tells us, you know, life should look like. We need it to be like immediate.
(17:52):
We need the result to be immediate. We want it as fast as possible and as easy as simply the least amount of effort. And anything worth having like lasting change does not happen that way. It does not. So we’re going to be talking about this. We’re going to be discussing it in the community group. If you’re not already over there, you can join us, Her Pursuit online community on Facebook.
(18:11):
I’ve also linked to below in the show notes. If you found something within this episode to be helpful, screenshot it tag me on Instagram. I’d love to see your stories. I always repost them. I reshare them. Send this episode to a friend to pet them up. Give them a little pep talk as always. Thank you for being here and thank you for listening.
