AARRGGHH! The jarring sound of the alarm going off in the morning. Wouldn't it feel great if you could just turn off all of the alarms in your life? Both literally and figuratively?
All may you can. Let's talk about it.
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AARRGGHH! The jarring sound of the alarm going off in the morning. Wouldn't it feel great if you could just turn off all of the alarms in your life? Both literally and figuratively?
All may you can. Let's talk about it.
Please like and subscribe here and also visit my links page to see all of the other places we can connect https://www.joyfulicity.com/links
Oh, the annoying sound of the alarm clock disturbing your peaceful slumber every morning. Wouldn't it be wonderful to just turn it off? Maybe you can. Welcome to the joy Felicity podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. So I did a thing yesterday, that is kind of a small thing. But actually, it's a huge thing. And I want to share it with you. And the reasons why I did it. I turned my alarm clock off. And I don't just mean like turning it off in the morning as it's going off. I mean, I actually went into my settings, and turned it off, so it won't go off in the morning, like it always does at six o'clock. That's a big, big deal for me, because for as long as I can remember, I've worked a lot of different jobs. And I've had to be up extremely early, and have had this sort of paranoia about not being able to get up in time to get my kids off to school. And just one thing or another for the last couple of decades, really, I have set that alarm clock pretty regularly. The thing is, over time, as I've gotten into my 50s, which I think is pretty common for a lot of people, my whole body clock has shifted to where most days, I get up before the alarm clock goes off anyway, somewhere between five and six o'clock. But still, just because I had so much urgency in my life, I kept it set just in case, because I was too afraid that if I did oversleep, that I would miss something super important. So that little act of turning that off yesterday symbolized a lot of life change. For me, that's taken place in the last couple years in the last few months in the last few weeks in particular. And I want to share with you why I was able to feel comfortable doing that at this point. It didn't just happen. I looked around at my life a few years ago, and realized that I could not keep going the way that I was. I was a very busy realtor, a single mother to a large family was seven out of nine and my kids living at home at the time. And I was working, I think three or four different side jobs to bring in extra money on top of my real estate business. single parenting is not for the faint of heart, folks. So my heart goes out to all of you other single parents out there, or any parents really that are also struggling to be providers in their home and be an at home present parent, it's it's a tough thing to to juggle. And so my alarm was going off every morning very early, and I hit the ground running and was hard at it until late at night. And I even had a night job where I spent the night at people's homes dog sitting. So really, I had almost no time off seven days a week for several years. And I realized a few years ago that I literally could not keep doing that I couldn't keep doing it physically, I was watching people my age start to battle a lot of health problems, and even pass away people that I knew well. And that really shook me up to realize that I couldn't treat my body like I couldn't back in college in your 50s You can't get away with that stuff anymore. And I needed to start taking better care of myself physically. And emotionally as well. That kind of stress level was taking its toll on my relationships and just on my overall happiness in my life. So I said about to start making some changes. And when you're dug in deep to things, those changes can take a long time sometimes to unwind. And one by one, I worked myself out of a lot of those side jobs by paying off different debts and, and things and refinancing my house and all the things that I had to do. But I was very deliberate about it. My goal was to one day, turn off that alarm to slow down. And three years later, that day was yesterday that I finally got to do that I've made this move down here to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida from Nashville. And as part of that move, I am in a much different financial situation, which I'm probably going to talk about on my next podcast, actually. But that has changed things a lot for me by downsizing and some different things that go along with moving down here. My life has changed, but it took it took three years of effort working up to the point where that was possible to make happen. So again, I want to emphasize that sometimes change is slow going. And it's hard and it's difficult, and it feels like it's gonna take forever. And then all of a sudden one day you arrive and you get there and your goal is achieved. And it feels almost like it happened overnight. And it can look to people online as if you just sort of snapped your fingers and arrived. But that's rarely how it actually goes down behind the scenes. It usually takes a lot of of effort to make those things happen. So this move was a huge part of slowing things down for me. I'm making some massive cuts. Were changes I had been debating on those. And yesterday also, I made a final decision about something that I'm going to talk about, again on another podcast, but I am going to be changing my entire career path at 55. That's crazy, right? But is it though, if it means that from now on, I don't have to set my alarm, there will be some days when I have to, if I'm catching a flight somewhere, or my kids have a particular event, I will probably need to set that alarm occasionally. But my goal now is to work with my body rhythm, which again, naturally wakes me up fairly early. So turning that alarm clock off doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to sleep until noon, I'm not wired that way emotionally, or physically, I will probably still get up between five and six. But there's a symbolic thing there going on, for me that rather than impose a schedule on my body, I'm going to let my body rhythm dictate a lot of things in my life now, because that will go a long way to unwinding the rest of the stress that's still packed inside my body. Because I'm not all the way there yet, I had gotten wound extremely tight during those years of craziness. And now it's taking a long time. And I do believe it's a bit of a lifetime endeavor, actually, to find that peaceful center in your life. But this move to the beach, the primary goal that I have had, is to refocus my life in a different direction. It's not just the physical alarm. The reason I'm saying all of that is because sometimes there's a lot of alarms in our life that we have to turn off. So I had to turn off the financial alarm first. And I took some time. And it took quite deliberate, conscious planning. But now I have I'm not saying I'm independently wealthy at this point. But I'm more in a place where I don't have to be frantic, I don't have to work multiple side jobs. In addition to my career, I can be more deliberate in the types of things I do to earn money. So I guess you could say I'm sort of about to semi retire, but I'm not ready to fully retire. But I will be able to be more conscious in the things that I choose to do to earn money. And that, to me, is the ultimate freedom, turning off the money alarm to where that fear of running out of money is dictating things to me, that aren't the way I want my life to be. And that's the key right there. It's not really about what you do. It's about why you do it. It's not about what time I'm waking up in the morning, so much as why I'm feeling compelled to wake up in the morning, allowing my body and my mind and my spirit to weigh in more now in my life going forward than external forces do. Because I felt like I was fitting my life into the demands and expectations of my life. Rather than asking my life to fit into my heart, and my spirit, and my relationship needs and all of those things. That's really how it should be, in my opinion. But sometimes it takes time to get there. If that's not how you've been living thus far. My advice to my children and to younger people is to try to structure your life that way from the beginning. Because there's a million ways to make money. There's a million ways to live your life. And they all can be good. Maybe not all, but most can be good. It's about finding the ones that are good for you. And if you don't, if you just simply allow life to happen to you, and try to fit yourself into it. There will be many, many years of frustration and angst ahead of you. And it will be much harder for you in your 50s to back back out of those things than if you just start from the beginning, valuing the things that matter most and asking your career to fit into that. And that sounds very simplistic as I say it, I realize there's a bunch of people that will say to me, but that's ridiculous. I have to make this amount of money. And I really will question that and I'm gonna talk about this more on my next podcast when I talk about my road to being debt free. But it's absolutely important for you to value you, for you to value your relationships enough that everything else has to fall into line around that value your relationship with God and spirit value those things that are fundamental to what makes life worth living. And let the rest be dictated by that right Other than the other way around, or you'll be constantly playing catch up constantly feeling stressed out, constantly hearing the alarm in your head, that's telling you that something's wrong. That alarm that goes off that says, my relationships are being damaged, because I'm not here to support them. I'm not close to God, I'm not close to spirit, my body is falling apart, I don't have time to exercise. These are massive alarms going off in our heads all the time. And we've got to turn them off. If you don't take care of your body, the rest of his kind of pointless, isn't it because you just won't live long enough to truly enjoy any of the rewards of anything else you're doing. So you've got to take care of your body, you've got to take care of your mind, your mental health, because your quality of life matters. Ultimately, again, just like your body without that, what's the point of the rest of it? What's the point of this flashy impressive career, if you're miserable every day of your life pursuing it. If you're a stressed out mass, and have no time to eat dinner with your family, I'm preaching to the choir here, honestly, because this was me not all that long ago. And I'm not shaming anybody for getting yourself into this mess, it happens as life moves forward, we get kind of sucked in a little bit at a time, to the external expectations of others, and the external expectations of society. And it's just kind of how it goes. And it takes like I've been saying a very deliberate desire to focus on other things, to shout above the noise of the rest of the world. Because when you make other choices, the world isn't going to get it. Most people aren't going to get it. And they're going to actually sometimes tell you that what you're doing is irresponsible, and bad. And maybe you're not being a good Christian, or good mother or good person. Or maybe you're being lazy, all of those kinds of things, because you chose to turn off the alarm. And not get up earlier than your body wants to to chase after success in air quotes. Because success to you mean something different. So when you do all these things, you will have to be emotionally prepared. And that's the other alarm that I've had to turn off. And I'm still working on this one, that alarm of what will other people think we sometimes choose our entire life path, how we dress, what jobs we pursue, what relationships we pursue, even based on what other people will think and how that external appearance will look to others, either online or in person, they can be the people close to us, we even worry about what absolute strangers think of us that don't know us at all. And that will pass through our lives for mere seconds, we will make massive life decisions to impress those people. And that's messed up. And I've been challenging that in my mind a lot in recent years. The online thing, too, is very powerful. Almost all of us in some form or another have a kind of an online presence these days. And we become sometimes so bound to maintaining it, to chasing after the likes and the approval of people that we don't even know you know, some of those accounts. Most of those accounts maybe are even fake accounts. They aren't even who they say they are. So to be making life choices to be impressive to strangers is it's something really to think about as to how often we're doing that. And even making life choices to impress people close to us is something we need to unpack. Because if people truly love us, they want us to be genuine and happy. If they're trying to impose lifestyles on us that are not making us that we have to really ask ourselves, if they actually love us at all. And maybe find a different tribe of people that truly does that we are happy with because happiness is important. There's many many alarms that are going off inside of our heads all the time that keep us running around in circles, like a hamster on a wheel. It's time to start looking and how do we know what what is an alarm? Because this isn't about whether or not you work hard. I am a huge fan of hard work. I'm a very hardworking person by nature. This is more about whether that hard work is being prompted by things that matter. Or by things that don't. You can work very hard without being stressed out. And there's a big big difference between chasing after things and working really hard with anxiety at the core are working really hard with passion and love and excitement at the core completely different things. And we come to believe, because society teaches us sometimes our parents teach us that that stressed out energy equals successful energy, it equals commitment and dedication and work ethic. And so if we decide to slow our lives down, somehow we're being less than motivated. Maybe we're a little bit lazy, or maybe we don't care about other people, because we say no to certain invitations that come our way. Protecting your own piece is not lazy. And I want to repeat that again. Because that's how important it is. Protecting your own peace is not laziness. It's critical. It's your responsibility as a human. Because think about this, the peace or the anxiety that you have burning inside of you, or residing inside of you is what you carry into the world. And it spills over on everybody else that you meet. So protecting that peace within you will make you a better parent will make you a better friend, will make you a better worker will make you better at almost anything you want to do. But it's so hard for us to truly believe that deep down inside, because we're so conditioned to the rules of the rat race, and to what society sees as a successful person's behavior. My friend, Marianne had a phrase running around with your hair on fire. And I used to laugh about that. And she would talk about that with certain people that they they sweep into rooms running in like their hair's on fire, and they have all of this anxious energy, and they'll infect the whole room with it. The other thing that they'll do is they want you to jump on board and start sounding the alarm right along with them as if their urgency should be your urgency. And if you don't, they will accuse you of either not caring, or not being particularly dedicated. So you have to turn down that alarm of other people's expectations. Because they will always be there, there will be tons of people in your life running in with their hair on fire, that want you to be racing to try to put out the fire that often doesn't even exist except for in their own minds. And you can try to explain that rationally and justify your position, but they aren't going to listen to you. So there's not a lot of point in that. So finding that peaceful center where you can exist in the way that you want to live, without needing them to understand without needing them to approve. All of that is super important. You don't need to explain this to anybody. I am right now on this podcast, because I'm a podcaster. It's what I do, I talk about stuff. And as I impact things in my life that are helpful to me, I like to share that with other people. But this has been a difficult thing for me to learn that just because somebody else thinks something should be a certain way doesn't mean that I have to believe the same. And that I have to then conform my behavior to their expectations. That's been a massive alarm in my head for many, many years. So money is a big alarm relationship demands are a big alarm. There's a lot of big alarms. Take a look at those alarms. Because as you start to turn off one at a time, you'll find your entire body, mind and spirit, unwinding one step at a time and you'll find more energy toward turning off the rest of the alarms will start to build within you as you start to see how good it feels and you will have some kickback, you will have internal kickback as you even begin to start questioning yourself. Am I just being selfish? Looking out for just me? I want to say this loud and clear. No, this is not selfish. It's the most important journey that you can ever walk at the end of your life. What do you want to be looking back on? Because the life you're living now is the view you're going to see as you're looking back in the future. We all have a fairly limited time here on this earth. recently with the death of Matthew Perry from friends. A lot of people are recognizing their own mortality a little bit more fully. He didn't live a very happy life. Unfortunately for him in spite of the wealth and the fame and the looks and all of that. He battled alcohol and drug addiction and a lot of things that made his life very difficult. But those are usually symptoms of internal alarm bells that are running rampant and people are desperately seeking ways to quiet now. him and run from them. So if we can learn how to do that more organically, all the better. And my heart goes out to his family and friends for watching him go through that because I have been there with family and loved ones of my own watching them battle addictions. And it's incredibly painful. But as I said, it's almost always a symptom, not the cause. It causes all kinds of other spillover problems. But it generally comes as a symptom of internal alarm bells that they desperately want to turn off, but don't know how. So let's take a proactive approach in our lives, and one by one start to recognize when you feel that, that wrenching in your gut, those anxiety feelings, your heart starts to race, you feel how you feel your mind going in circles, everything just feels wrong, you feel like snapping at somebody, all of those things are indications of an alarm going off. Because think about your alarm clock in the morning, when that goes off. It jars you out of sleep very unpleasantly, generally speaking. And it doesn't feel natural. And usually when you wake up to an alarm in that fashion, there's that little sense of dread about the day ahead, because you didn't wake up natural and refreshed. Same is true with the other alarms in our life, when they're going off all the time. It's hard to ever settle in and just feel happy. So again, I know you're gonna say, you know, there's going to be people that say, Well, lucky you that you get to do that. Now, it's because of a lengthy series of choices that I made over several years that I was able to turn that alarm off yesterday. It's because of a series of smaller alarms, and some really large alarms that I've been slowly but surely deliberately turning off in my life. If we want to live a life of joy, it stands to reason that we need to create a life of peace. And because peaceful places are where joy resides. So protect that peace. That's the message that the universe is sending to me most often, recently. Protect your peace. It doesn't mean you don't work. It means Choose wisely what you work at. It doesn't mean you don't serve and help. It means make careful choices about where you serve, and where you hope and who you allow to be close to you, and how many people are in your circle and who they are. Protect your peace. Make peace, a bigger priority in your life than it is currently. And joy will also increase in your life more than ever before. Make an experiment with turning off the alarm, you'll probably be surprised that you still get up at about the same time anyway. And if not, and you simply are wired differently in your internal body clock. Maybe take a look at the activities that you're doing and how you can adjust those activities around your natural body rhythm. Take a look at your relationships are their alarm bells going off when you think about them? Maybe it's time to really give some thought to how to adjust your life to start quieting those alarm bells make that a priority. I think it's worth every bit of effort that you'll give to it to find that peace. Have a great day everybody. Thank you for joining me today on the joy Felicity podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share and come follow me on all major social media sites at Joy Felicity or on my website, Joy felicity.com. You can follow the link in the description for this episode to all of the places that we can connect. Have a great day everybody and remember, dare to dream. Plan to play live to learn