393 I’m The Architect Of My Life | January 2018 Sunday Week 5

Smiling Sundays - #393 January 28th The Strong Within Daily Affirmation Podcast I’m The Architect Of My Life “Whatever good things we build end up building us.” ~Jim Rohn Everything in your life is by design. Where there’s chaos, there’s order. It may seem like randomness, but that’s because the patterns have not been spotted yet. And sometimes the patterns haven’t been spotted, because the investigation only happens on a surface level. We are architects of our lives, but we’ve bought into the idea that we’re not in control of our lives. We’ve been taught that things happen, and then we go into reaction mode making the best of what happens. Things do happen, and life doesn’t always happen how we plan it to happen, but if you build your life on a solid foundation, you will find that you fit your happenings into a confined set of strong walls. And I don’t mean confined as in you’re trapped, but I mean that you’re taking control of the outcome to produce more desired effects. Think about what an architect does. I know the first thing that comes to mind is they build buildings, and while that’s partly true…the very first thing they do is draw out the plan and maybe even construct a model. And in our lives, we think that we are architects when actually we’re builders without a plan. And you can form some sort of structure without a plan, but will you create a lasting form from what you’ve put your work into? And when we are life builders instead of life architects, we build a structure that looks good only on the surface. We put walls over our pains, we bury our fears underneath it all, and we hide behind paint afraid that people might see the real us. And so we live a life of fear and untruth. We build our life structure on a weak foundation, and when something negative happens in our lives we complain, we get upset, and we fall apart because we haven’t truly built a solid personal blueprint. A strong life isn’t in the building materials you use to assemble it; it’s in the way you form your foundation. We believe that a strong foundation is derived from the external things we pursue—that good job so we can feel secure with the money we make, someone to marry so we can feel loved, a God to believe in and worship so we can lay our heavy burdens upon Him. And those ideas are all great things to have in your life, but they’re not the core of your foundation. They are parts of your structure. They are parts of you, and maybe even parts of the foundation. But if we make those things our whole foundation, when something goes wrong… we’ll fall apart. When a family member or partner dies our lives feel over because they were our world. When we lose a job we crumble because we think that our security has been stripped from us. And when things don’t go our way, it’s easy to blame God and be upset on how He lets bad things happen to good people. It’s easy to say we’re not in control of our lives or our happiness. But you don’t have to buy into that level of reasoning, you can tell another story, a better story, that you aren’t built by the things in your life, those things are only part of you…not the whole you. And I’m not trying to be callous and say you can’t be upset when a death happens of a loved one, or that you can’t be afraid when you’re unsure what to do next when you lose a job you weren’t expecting to be released from, or that you can’t look at all the heartaches and pains in life that have happened to you. But if you build your structures, if you build your life upon only things outside of yourself…then you will always be on the edge of chaos. You will always be controlled by what is happening in your life rather than knowing you are in control of how you want to feel at all moments. Because while it feels like things in life are just happening, it’s actually a choice. Life is a choice to see it how we want to…as either a tragedy when something bad happens, or something more through it all. And understanding that a strong foundation comes not from what you have built outside of yourself is a hard thing to truly understand. And really where the beginning phases of your personal foundation start come from knowing your values and living them. We as humans have the tendency to know right from wrong naturally. We know how we should act, we know we shouldn’t be upset when tragedy happens as it’s only temporary…but when it happens it’s another thing to truly know it in your bones. To act accordingly and not let the event destroy us. In the book I am finishing up, I talk about getting to know your values. So instead of getting into a long-winded discussion on how to find your values, let me tell you a story of a personal training client of mine. My client and I were talking yesterday, and our inside joke is how she’ll always be cussing me out in her head for making her do more reps when she thinks she’s done. So while she will huff and puff after I tell her to do 5 more, she always is glad I push her to that point. She’s always glad I show her that she was stronger than she originally thought she was. In fact, she’s one of the hardest working clients I have. She enjoys the pain, she wants to feel sore, and she always thanks me for pushing her to her limits…but not during our workouts…that’s when she’s cussing me out in her head. I always wondered why she was so quiet during the workouts, and now I know. Anyways, we were in between sets, and she told me about how she would complain all the time before and after her workouts. She didn't want to go to the gym as she asked me in a rhetorical way… “who loves working out? It isn’t fun. But they know what they want, and they commit to it.” She enjoyed reaching the goals we’d set for her, but it was always an elusive pursuit because when we’d reach one goal, she would still be comparing her 20-year-old self to her current self. How she didn’t have to work as hard back then and how she always looked fantastic. Which caused this cognitive dissonance in her—this perpetual feeling of being unsettled. And to finish off her story to me, she said that she began asking herself, “Why am I complaining? This is what I want. Why am I making this harder on myself? I want the growth; I want to be pushed, I want to be sore, I want to go out of my way and do the workout.” And so she’s found a peace in her life by not fighting herself. And if you think about the things we want in our lives, we fight ourselves the whole time. We fight how it’s too hard, and we wished it was easier. And when we’re always fighting ourselves, we slow our progress down…or maybe even stop it altogether. Now I’m not saying we can’t be upset, but a lot of the things we’re upset about are the things we want. And by continually doing this to ourselves we are always in chaos, so when minor inconveniences happen it shakes up our lives. And if the minor things are bothering us so much, when big things happen we’re destroyed. We incessantly complain about the things we have no control over instead of finding the beauty in the moment. We complain that the weather is too hot or too cold never being ok with how it is. We complain that it sucks going to our job and we wish we didn’t have to go. We complain about our relationships and usually it’s never to the people who can do anything about it. And we complain about our goals, the things we want to do, wishing everything was easier…and it could be if you allowed it to be. If you stopped fighting yourself the whole way. And so we focus on the superficial walls of our life’s structure instead of looking at the smaller habits that help us live within our values. We get so caught up trying to decorate the walls with a paint to cover up our pains and inconveniences, that we don’t see the destruction we are doing to our internal foundation. The reason I’m always talking about choosing to see events better instead of finding the faults within them…is not because I want you to ignore what’s going on..but it’s that I want you to begin becoming a different person. It’s my hope that you can turn a negative into a positive. It’s my hope that you can become something more. That you don’t just build, but that you plan a better structure. That you become a great architect designing your life in a manner that helps you understand that your happiness or sadness is determined by how you’ve developed your foundation. A foundation that’s focused on your personal values, not from the stamina of the external things or people within your life. Those external things are the bonuses within your life. Today’s Personal Commitment:If you are the architect of your life, how have you been building your life? Have you been going with the flow just allowing external events to decide how you feel and what controls you, or are you constructing a personal blueprint that you govern your life by? So think about what your personal blueprint would look like, and then ask yourself how you can live within it? The only way to succeed, at least from my personal experience, is to become aware during your mistakes. It’s to catch yourself in the act when you feel that something is off in regards to your standard operating procedures in life. And that’s the real test, not just staying true to the plan when things are good, but practicing the plan when things are bad. The true test of strength is not in how strong we are in our good times, but how committed we are to staying strong in those bad times. So design your plan, and know that life will challenge you more than your worst enemy. Life will challenge you by making you prove how committed you are to living in your values. Life will keep asking every moment is this the best path that will keep you strong? Is this the path that you’ll be strengthened on? For when we get to know our values and become them…then even the hardest events, yes they might make us stumble for a moment…but they will never stop us…because we’ve built from within rather than only building superficial walls that look nice but never really kept us safe and strong. Through intuition, our bodies and minds always have a way of notifying us if we’re out of alignment within the life plan we’ve constructed. So get better at hearing those subtle cues reminding you if you’re still building on a strong foundation, or if you’ve taken a detour and began building on quicksand.  I’m The Architect Of My Life   Thanks for listening.  I'm sending great energy your way as we become Strong Within together, Personal Development Life Coach- Chris O'Hearn Contact info- email: [email protected]  phone:865-219-3247     Music by: - Zest by basematic (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. - I Have Often Told You Stories (guitar instrumental) by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Location: Knoxville, Tennessee USA but available worldwide