Ep #1: Reclaim Your Time, Reclaim Your Life

Ep 1 Reclaim Your Time, Reclaim Your Life

When somebody makes a change in their life, there is usually a defining moment that causes or compels them to do so. And once they have decided they are going to make a change, they must then decide what they actually want. So, let me ask you, what do you want from your life?

Welcome to Unlock Your Life. If you are ready to learn how to transform your life, achieve your goals and dreams and develop the clarity and confidence necessary to do so, this podcast is for you. For my first episode, I’m introducing myself and sharing some simple tools to help you make a change and create a vibrant life you love in every area.

Join me this week as I encourage you to reflect on what you want in life and share three principles to help you build and achieve your goals and dreams. It’s time for you to reclaim your life, so I’m showing you how to get clear on your desires and use this clarity to have a better, richer, and more fulfilling life.

To celebrate the launch of this show, I am giving away a soft, cushy Unlock Your Life hoody to 5 lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. Click here to learn more about the contest and how to enter – I’ll be announcing the winner on an upcoming episode!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Where I made a major change in my life and what compelled me to do so.
  • How to develop the confidence necessary to achieve your dreams.
  • Why your life is the result of your thinking.
  • The role reflection plays in achieving your goals.
  • Why fear and failure are an important part of achieving something.
  • How to create a life you love.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • To celebrate the launch of this show, I am giving away a soft, cushy Unlock Your Life hoody to 5 lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. Click here to learn more about the contest and how to enter – I’ll be announcing the winner on an upcoming episode!

Full Episode Transcript:

You’re listening to the Unlock Your Life podcast. I’m your host Lori Harris, certified life mastery coach. This is episode one. In this episode, we’re talking about reclaim your time, reclaim your life. It’s time to get what you want. So stay tuned.

Welcome to the Unlock Your Life podcast, a podcast for highly successful visionary women who want more out of life. If you feel that ache of unfulfillment in your soul, you’re in the right place sis. Join life mastery consultant Lori A. Harris as she teaches you how to stop living for others and finally put yourself first. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Hey fam, hey. The goal for this episode is that you lead at the end of the episode knowing three tools you can use to achieve your goals and dreams. That you have greater clarity and even more confidence that you can achieve your hopes and dreams. It’s time to reclaim your life.

You know, in my seven years of coaching I’ve learned that often our dreams are born out of the challenges we’re facing or any pain that we’re currently experiencing. So here we are in the middle of 2021. We’re halfway through the year. Many of us are taking the time to reassess. Have I achieved my goals? Have I even started? This is a good time to reflect back and think about what is it that you really want?

You’re not alone in that reflection. You know we had The Great Depression. We’ve had several great recessions. This period is a time that many people in the news have been referring to The Great Resignation because people have been reflecting back on is this really what I want? Is this career that I have, this job that I have, this place that I spend the majority of my time on any given day. Is it really where I want to be investing my time, energy, and emotions? Is this really what I want? This is a healthy, healthy time for reflection and reconsideration.

Are you one of the people involved in The Great Resignation? Are you contemplating it? So think about it. Reflect over your own life. Has there ever been a time in your life where there was some defining event that caused you to move, to do something different, to make a decision? It could be a birthday that ends in a five or a zero. It could be someone close to you who passes away. It could be the destruction or the deterioration of a relationship.

Usually when one decides to make a change in their life, there’s something that compels them to move, to do something different. For me, years ago there was an organization that I worked for. It was a non-profit, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved being in service. I loved the community that I worked with. I loved serving. I loved that job, and I loved all my friends and the people that I worked with. That organization paired with a larger bigger organization to do an event, and the bigger organization kind of did a goliath move and really came down hard on the smaller organization. That changed me. It hurt me. It hurt me deeply.

So I was at this tiny organization trying to make a difference, trying to make a mark on the world, and I looked, and I saw how they were being mistreated. I didn’t like it. I also didn’t like that feeling of powerlessness. I reflected. I said it’s time for me to go back to school. It’s time for me to make my move. At the time, I had zero resources. When I say zero, I probably had negative resources, but I wanted to make a major change. I wasn’t making much money where I was, and I knew that it was time for me to make a move.

So with this defining event, the first thing I did was just start looking at schools, applying to schools, speaking to different people who worked in academia in the legal profession. I decided yes, it’s time for me to go to law school. Now, this wasn’t really a wise decision given, as I said, I had no money. At the time, I really didn’t know how I was going to pay for it, but I just kept trudging forward, moving forward, doing what I can with what I had.

So I made a decision. I gave up what I had, what seemed to be a level of comfort and stability. I had a great apartment on the westside of Los Angeles. I could afford it. I could have just stayed there kind of coasting the status quo, but I made a major decision, cut ties with the organization, applied to law school, gave up my apartment that I loved very much, and moved to a completely new city. While it wasn’t easy, it was difficult. I did manage to get myself through law school, pay for law school, and leave law school in the three year time period with no student loan debt. I’m really proud of that.

The most important thing was I was going towards a career that would allow me to serve, to serve more people and to do more good. I achieved that. Over three decades I was able to work with a body of people and help work towards freedom. When I discovered coaching, I discovered that I could help even more people work towards freedom in a completely new and different way. That really lights me up and makes me very, very, happy.

So what about you? What would you be willing to give up to love into existence in order to have a better, richer, more fulfilling life? So the most important thing about being able to make a change in one’s life and create a vibrant life that you love in every area of your life, it requires you to work certain steps.

Now when I work with clients, I have a results formula. There are 10 principles within that results formula that will skyrocket anyone’s success when they apply them to their life. Today I’m going to share three of those principles with you that you can apply right now in order to have a life that you absolutely love. This will expand your awareness by studying this results formula.

The first thing you need to know is your thoughts cause your feelings. When you think joyful things, you feel happy. When you think about your big to-do list is a short period of time, you feel stress. Your thoughts actually affect your own physiology.

So when you have these feelings, that’s going to cause you to take action. When you feel confident or energized, you take a different action than when you feel depressed or frustrated. Now, actions cause results. It’s our actions or lack of actions to create our results. We either do something or fail to do something that causes us to have the life that we’re living. So follow me. Your thoughts cause your feelings. Your feelings cause your actions. Your actions cause your results.

Now, a lot of times people don’t like this. They don’t like this information. They don’t like to think about the fact that their life is the result of their own thinking, but it’s absolutely true. Now while you can’t control everything that happens in the world, it’s absolutely true that you do control and influence how you respond to it.

So the first thing is you have to decide. You have to decide on having a dream. So what do you want? What would you really love? Write this down. Think about it. Hold this thought in mind. Clarity is power. What would you love to create with your life? What are you willing to love into existence?

Now, here is a powerful principle that I want you to hear and understand. Clarity is power. Without clarity, a defined blueprint, a defined plan, you can’t have a dream. You can’t build your dream. Just like blueprint when you’re building a house, the same is true for your dream. When you become clear about what you want, you begin to see more opportunities. Circumstances and resources that you would have otherwise missed.

For now, just think about the things that you would love to have. Think about what is it that you want. It can be two words. Something as simple as more money, less stress, lose weight, find love. What are your two words? What do you want?

Here’s principle number two, decide for your dream. Decide. You have to exercise your own power of decision. You have to decide for your dream. You have to make a firm decision. Even in the absence of perfect conditions, anything can happen for you, but it can only happen for you when you decide. It’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of thinking, contemplating, rolling things over in one’s head. But it’s important to decide what you want.

So the first step is to allow yourself to dream. Allow yourself to want. Allow yourself to want it. The second step is to decide. Decide I shall have it. Decide I want this thing, and I’m willing to take the steps that are necessary in order for me to achieve this goal, this dream. If the goal or dream seems way out of reach, if you seem to have absolutely no idea how you would achieve it, if it makes you feel a little bit scared and excited inside, that’s perfect. That’s a really good sign. That’s a sign that this is something that’s important to you, and that you absolutely should pursue. So you must get clarity on what it is that you want, and two, you must decide for your dream.

Then let’s take my dear sweet client Ellie. Ellie was coming out of college, and was feeling a little wobbly, a little insecure, unsure of herself. She had heard all the scuttlebutt from the news and from her friends and from the adults around her in life talking about how hard it was going to be to get a job. She really was committed to having her life look different than it did as she entered college. So when she entered college, she was working as a barista. She did not want to leave college and go back to working as a barista. That was really important to her. She wanted life to look somehow different.

Now, she had a career. She had a profession. She had something she had trained to do in college, which is really fortunate. Quite frankly, many people don’t have that when they get out of college. This young woman did, but she wasn’t sure because this career was something that was involved in the arts. You know the scuttlebutt and the conversation that goes around being an artist. So she started to listen to those people and those voices.

So she decided to play it safe, and she got a job, a real job, a conventional job. She was going to learn a skill. She told herself, “Well, it’s kind of like what I trained to do is kind of like what I want to do. It involves some things I think I can learn from. I can have a good experience. This will be good.” So she started working as a retail buyer because it was something different, and it was tangentially related to the career she had trained for.

As she started, she was given a salary that she knew from the beginning probably wasn’t going to be adequate, wasn’t going to meet her needs. But she gave it a whirl. So she started. She started doing this work, and she was on salary, which meant she didn’t get overtime. Whatever she did, she worked her job. She got her hours. In those hours, needed to get certain tasks done. If those tasks weren’t done, then she needed to keep working until those tasks were done. There wasn’t going to be any extra money for working extra hours. It’s just, “This is what’s required. This is what you’re going to do.”

So the company had negotiated for themselves a really good deal, but not so great for Ellie. So Ellie’s working in a job that she doesn’t really like, and she’s working in a city that she doesn’t know anyone in. It’s really hard to make friends because she’s kind of tired when she gets off of work, and she doesn’t really have that skill set down of how to get started in a new city. So she finds herself in a place where she doesn’t really want to be doing work she doesn’t really want to do and earning money that’s not adequate.

So at some point she gets herself into a coaching program. The first step for her is to decide, “Well, what would I love?” Well, at $23,000 a year, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for her to be talking about what she would love, but she went ahead and did it. So she said, “I would love to own my own house. I would love to be working in my industry that I trained for.”

So working the steps and working with coaching she was able to achieve that goal in a relatively short period of time. She went from making $23,000 a year to buying a home in Los Angeles that fulfilled all of her dreams. This home had exactly what she was looking for. It had a front door and a back door. It had a front yard and a back porch. This is the things she loved. This is what she was looking for.

Even though the scuttlebutt, those people around her, told her, “You’re too young. You’re not going to be able to buy a house. Why are you buying a house anyway? You shouldn’t be buying a house.” She would say, “Because I want to put down roots. I want to build something.” It’s like, “This is not the time for you to be building anything. This is not the time for you to be putting down roots.” Ellie said to herself, “This is what I want. This is what would really light me up.”

So in a relatively short period of time, she found herself working in her industry, making good money in her industry, developing beautiful rich friendships in her industry, and within a very short period of time she found herself being a homeowner. Not of a fixer upper, not in a neighborhood she doesn’t want to be in, but in a neighborhood she wanted to be with a front door and a back door, a front porch, and a back porch.

Now none of this could have happened for Ellie if she stayed stuck in “I don’t know how. Or I don’t have enough money. Or, or, or.” It’s important for us to one, allow yourself to have a dream; and two, decide for the dream. So when you look at yourself and you think about your two words, what two words did you write down? Did you write ‘more money’? Did you write ‘more time’? Did you write ‘lose weight’? What did you write? Now that you’ve decided for a dream, it’s time for our next step.

The next step is make friends with your fear. What am I talking about making friends with your fear? Doing something that you really want, and you don’t know how to do it and don’t know what resources you’re going to require to do it is going to cause fears to rise up in you. So make friends with your fear. That’s what’s required to change your life. You’re going to have to make friends with your fear.

That’s another thing that’s going to happen. You’re going to have thoughts. Thoughts are going to come up for you. “How am I going to do that? I’ve never done that before. Who do you think you are? You don’t have what it takes.” The voice of fear is going to try to keep you from failing. It’s trying to protect you from experiencing hurt.

So the other part of that, the other side of that coin is to confront the fear of failure. Talk to yourself and say, “Okay, so what if I fail?” All of us have had some failure in life. As babies, we’re learning how to walk. We fail over and over and over again. We fall and we get back up. We fall and we get back up. We learn how to communicate in the language of the household that we’re raised in. When we come to the household, to the family, we have no words. But we don’t give up. We continue, even as babies.

Something happens to us as adults as we go along the way. We don’t want to fall down. We don’t want to make mistakes. We misinterpret failures or missteps as, “Oh, I guess I’m not supposed to have this.” But the truth is fear and failure go hand in hand. They’re an important part of achieving something that you’ve never had before, doing something that you’ve never done before. Fear and failure are part of the process.

If we learn to manage our fear, learn to walk with our fear, and to tolerate failure and interpret it in a different way to say, “Oh, this failure is telling me not this way. Try another way.” If we tell ourselves something different then we can succeed. So those are three of our ten steps to building a dream. I hope that they were helpful to you, and I hope that you will take the time to employ them. Apply them to your life. Apply them to a dream.

So what did we talk about? First, you have to design your dream. You have to decide what would I love? What would I love to have so much that I’m willing to love it into existence? Number two, I’m going to employ the power of decision. I’m going to decide for my dream, just like Ellie did in getting a new house. Principle number three, we’re going to get friendly with our fear. We’re going to make friends with our fear. We’re not going to be derailed by failure, by missteps. We’ll take failure as a clue. Don’t do it that way, try another way.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast. To celebrate the launch of my show, I’m giving away a soft cushy Unlock Your Life hoodie. I’m going to be giving away five to five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review this show. It doesn’t have to be a five star review, although I really hope you love this show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that gives you tons of value. Visit loriaharris.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how you can enter. I’ll be announcing the winners in future episodes. So keep listening.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast. If you want more information on show you can transform your life and do it quickly, visit loriaharris.com. See it on the next episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast.

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