Episode 14 : How to Pivot & live in gratitude, joy & flow of abundance even when everything seems to be going wrong? 

I want to give you guys some practical advice on how to still choose joy, gratitude, and live in the flow of abundance even though it feels like everything else is going wrong or is not going according to the plan. 

Maybe you’re like me and you’re obsessed with personal growth. You love it, you listen to all the podcasts, you’re reading all the books, but here’s the thin…when the rubber meets the road, when the situations aren’t going the way you wanted them to, how you handle those difficult situations is everything. That shows the true inner work that you’re doing. I mean lets be honest, it’s easy to be joyful and grateful when things are going the way we want them to. But I would venture to guess that most of the time there is some kind of hiccup that comes along the way. And we have a choice to pivot. That was probably my most used word in 2020. So many unexpected change of plans last year and every time a new curve ball was thrown at me, whether in my personal life or in my business, I would find myself saying, okay well how can we pivot. And then it would change again. And I’d have to get creative and pivot again. When my 30th birthday came around in September I just had to laugh because literally every single time I tried to pivot and make the best of the situation something else went wrong. But I was still able to be joyful, and we’re gonna dive a little deeper into that on today’s episode. 

Because you can have all of these “aha” moments when you’re reading a book and you can be like “oh that is so good”, or you listen to a podcast and you’re like “oh wow that was amazing”, but if you’re not doing the inner work and you aren’t applying those things that you are learning, then you aren’t truly doing the personal growth. You’re just consuming and being what we like to call a personal growth junkie, but nothing is changing.

I was reading this book, “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, and in there he talks about how knowledge is NOT power. It’s potential power. It’s like the energy in a light switch, but until you turn it on, the power is useless. So until you take ACTION on the things you’ve learned, until you flip on the light switch, all of that knowledge and energy that you have, is useless. 

From the outside looking in, a lot of times it can seem like  “oh everything’s going so great in her life, she just seems to be so positive all the time, she even has a podcast all about mindset so she must not struggle with this,” all this different kind of stuff. But but the truth is, behind the scenes, there’s a lot that is happening that nobody else knows about. I battle the head trash daily but I have learned how to not let the negative things overtake me.

 As you grow and develop a more positive mindset, it doesn’t mean that things won’t go wrong in your life anymore, but you will enjoy your life so much more because no matter what’s going on around you, you can still be grounded and CHOOSE to see the positive. You can CHOOSE to not spiral. Because how many times is it really just one tiny thing that goes wrong, that then sends us into a downhill spiral and then things just keep getting worse and worse. But if at the first sign of negativity, you stop that spiral and choose to interrupt it and uplevel, well then now you haven’t ruined your whole day. You might have only ruined a few minutes. 

And here’s the thing, It doesn’t mean I always choose the correct path right away. Sometimes I’m stubborn and I still choose the wrong thing, but a lot of times, because I’ve been practicing this for the last couple of years and have retrained my brain, I can catch myself quicker before the spiral intensifies.  

And I have always vowed to show up in a very real, vulnerable and honest way in this space, because I feel like it is so so important and not enough people do that. It’s why I’ve been sharing more personal stories with you guys in the last few episodes. Because I want you to see that I’m human, I have struggles just like you guys do, but my struggles aren’t all consuming and they don’t take over my life anymore like they used to. It’s why I’ve been able to reclaim joy in my motherhood, even on the hard days. 

Okay so I’m gonna share with you guys a quick story about my 30th birthday last year. 30 is a big deal and I am big birthday person. Like I live for birthdays. We celebrate a minimum of a week, sometimes we drag it out for a whole month. So naturally I had these grand plans and grand ideas for my 30th birthday and literally NONE of them happened. And every time we tried to pivot to make it better, the plans just fell through. When I pictured this milestone birthday I was not envisioning a pandemic, nor was I envisioning my husband having major knee surgery. But I was determined to make the best out of it. I hired a photographer to take some fun birthday pictures and squeeze in Hunter’s birthday pictures that were about 3 months late. He’s definitely the 3rd child. 

I had ordered these balloons to spell out happy birthday, but half of them were broken and deflated. So I tried to pivot and I said, “That’s okay Phil we’ll just use them to spell thirty,” (mind you my spelling is not always the greatest). And he said, “Babe there’s not two T’s in happy birthday so you can’t spell Thirty,” I said, ya know what It’s just going to say YIRTY. And so for my 30th birthday pictures I am holding balloons that say yirty and I couldn’t love it more because it totally summarizes 2020. But the professional pictures kept falling through because of weather or covid and so finally, the last cancellation was an hour before were supposed to start taking the pictures, we were already dressed up, Hunters smash cake was already made so I decided we would just take them anyway, with our camera. We go outside with the cute balloon set up for hunter in a basket and it’s adorable. But we live on a hill and it was incredibly windy and the pictures didn’t work. So we came inside to do the cake, and about 45 pictures in the memory card was full and we didn’t have another one. And I’m just laughing because if I didn’t laugh I would cry. 

And it wasn’t just the 30th birthday, it was all the cancelled plans from the whole year that really started getting to me in September. Every year we get to go on a free trip to Hawaii with my wellness company and that was cancelled. I never got to have my big diamond party with my team for reaching the top of the company which was a huge milestone to do before my 30th birthday. I was missing friends and all our gatherings and so when my birthday came, I was done. I was done with the cancelled plans. I was done with 2020 and I just wanted to be normal. 

But here’s what I learned, and I think this is a really valuable lesson for those of us who are on this personal growth journey

When things don’t go the way that you want them to go, allow yourself to feel those feelings free of judgement. So many times we judge ourselves for feeling a certain way. Things start not going the way we want them to and so naturally we start to get upset and then we’re like, “Oh no I need to be positive and I shouldn’t be feeling these things,” and then we judge ourselves for feeling sad, or frustrated or disappointed or whatever those emotions are that you’re feeling and we don’t ever fully let it come out. 

When you do that, you don’t let yourself heal, and you don’t let yourself ever fully process what’s going on. Then it leaves you with these unsettled feelings and uneasiness and you can’t figure out why or what’s going on. But you just know something feels off. And it’s because you judged your emotions and you didn’t let them out. Everything is energy, and if you don’t let those emotions out they will stay trapped in your body. 

You might find yourself saying things like .. 

“I’m supposed to be so positive, why am I feeling this way?” And you judge yourself for feeling a certain way. And I want you to know it’s okay to feel whatever way you are feeling. Whether you are upset, or frustrated or angry or annoyed or whatever it is, you are allowed to feel those things. We are emotional creatures. Even Jesus cried, and he had righteous anger, and he loved big which meant he also had feelings of rejection and sadness. But it’s what you do with those emotions that makes all the difference. 

There’s 2 different ways people typically handle this: 

1. They Don’t let those emotions come up and they just ignore it and don’t deal with it, and judge themselves for feeling a certain way. 
2. Or, they let all of the emotions come out, fully process it and then sit there and dwell in it and have a pity party for themselves. 

The latter is not what I’m telling you guys to do, but what I’m saying is that it’s very very healthy to let those emotions come out FREE of judgement so you can fully process what’s going on. Let yourself feel them, cry if you need to. It’s why crying is healing and therapeutic. 

By doing that, by allowing yourself to fully process all of the emotions, you can heal. 

But don’t just sit there. I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck. We get stuck in the pity party, we get stuck in the processing, we get stuck because we’re just sitting there moping around and we’re like woah is me, all these things aren’t going the way I wanted them to go, and it’s like okay, so….what are you going to do about it?? How are you going to pivot?? Because ultimately it’s a choice! And I titled this how can you have gratitude, joy, abundance and flow when everything seems to be going wrong? It’s by choosing to live in those things – It is a choice how you are going to show up. You might not be able to dictate all of the other circumstances and all of the other things that are happening around you and it might just be one thing after another but here’s the thing – 

YOU get to decide how you show up, and YOU get to decide the attitude that you’re going to have, and YOU get to decide, Am I going to let this steal my joy? Am I going to let this take away my gratitude, my happiness and all of these other things? Am I just going to sit in this? Am I just going to mope around?

Or am I going to DO something about it. 

For me, the one night I just broke down and I told Phil, “I am just going to let myself be sad about all the things that have gone wrong and all the plans that have been cancelled and I’m going to allow myself to feel the full spectrum of emotions and hold nothing back. Don’t try to fix anything tonight just listen. And then tomorrow I’m going to pivot and keep going!”

And that was so freeing and healing for me and it helped me stop the spiral because I was honest with how I was feeling. But I set a limit on how long I would sit in that because I knew I could wallow in self pity for a long time, but I chose to pivot. Friends you don’t have to spiral because things are going wrong. You can still enjoy your life even on the hard days!!! 

Because at the end of the day, it’s your decision to choose gratitude. It’s  your decision to choose to live and operate in that flow of abundance. 

And I do have to give a special shout out to my hubby because he really pulled through for my birthday and put together the most amazing video and had my friends all record quick clips, and words of affirmation is my love language so I was in a puddle of tears when he showed me. But here’s the thing, I was already operating out of joy, gratitude and the flow of abundance BEFORE he showed me that video on birthday. And so I was already in a great place to be able to receive more and enjoy it more because of my attitude. Something my husband always says is, “Let your attitude depict your day, don’t let your day depict your attitude.”

So friends, go out this week and choose joy. When things don’t go the way you want them to, allow yourself to feel all the emotions free of judgment but then don’t stay stuck there because you have a choice. You always have a choice! So choose joy, choose gratitude and choose to operate in the flow of abundance.