Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda

Come get schooled in feeling flat! See who has the key, learn easy techniques to reclaim your passion, and set the expectation that you will. MM563 - Saying Goodbye to Season 4! Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! Our final episode of Season 4! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Saying Goodbye to Season 4! So what's really crazy is that I sat down to write a journal entry reflecting back on this season of Motivate Me! and all my brain wanted to do was talk about where I'm headed, instead of where I've been. I had to pause my journal entry to write out some goals on a separate sheet of paper because I was too excited and distracted. My goals are for the book I've been wanting to write about traveling the fifty states in ninety days interviewing people about passion. During that journal entry I got the idea to set a goal to have my first draft done by New Year's Day. I broke down the word count and it's totally achievable. As you know, I began to fall flat after completing our trip of traveling the fifty states in ninety days interviewing people about passion. First, I was flat because I wanted to write about the trip but I struggled to find my value, and next, it was the pandemic. It was January 2021 when my family gave me the kind of tough love that makes you work hard to better yourself. And so, I began doing that. I utilized everything I'd learned in my personal study, in my coaching program, and in the almost 450 interviews I'd done over the seasons of Motivate Me! I dug in deep and I was able to get my head and heart back in the game. I was able to reclaim my passion - which brought me back here to you. I'm going to share here the list of techniques that helped me. There's an episode focused on each of these techniques here in Season 4. So if you would like details and examples of how to use them, you can check out the episode. When looking at these steps, know that you can do them in the order I did or in an order of your design. You can do all, or some, of them. The goal is for you to determine what you need and just head in that direction. I will say, if some of these seem out of your comfort zone or something you've never enjoyed, like reading or journaling, please just try it. When was the last time you read or wrote? My suggestions in the episodes of how to read or journal or stretch, etc. may be different from what you remember - or maybe you're different these days? OK, so here's a list of each of the steps I took to reclaim my passion. There are 29 steps total, some are less time consuming than others, so don't be overwhelmed by this list.  After incorporating these into my life, I was a new person. I feel like I sound like a commercial when I say this, but doing this changed me in only two weeks. Like, two weeks later I experienced euphoria! I was happy, I was excited - I had a clear direction! I had reclaimed my passion! 1. I made myself a priority 2. I took part in a fun 30-day challenge to start committing to something daily 3. I started stretching 4. I prepared mental and physical space where I could be a thinker 5. I rested my body and soul 6. I improved my diet 7. I meditated 8. I journaled with the intention to seek answers  9. I gathered creative materials to start to build my creative ideas 10. I read books and was an open-minded reader 11. I collected and organized my creative ideas 12. I opened myself up to feedback from others 13. I emotionally detached myself from the lives of others 14. I refused to feel selfish 15. I unplugged from technology 16. I got my blood pumping 17. I experimented with my craft (which for me is w...

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Create an Action Plan So, when I began the process of creating this podcast, I had some really important things to figure out: what will my show be about? What am I about? How will I use my new professional coaching certification to help people? I had learned the kind of information in my coaching program that you can't just un-know, if you know what I mean? And I wanted to share it with people. I wanted to use it to help people. In Episode 558 of this season, I talk about how to uncover your life purpose. That was my first step in the creation process of this show. I needed to do a deep dive into who I was and discover what I believed my purpose to be before I could move forward. In Episode 558, I walk through that process with you, so you can do the same for yourself. I discovered that my purpose is to empower others. OK, I thought, how can I live in my purpose while using my coaching knowledge? One of the greatest points I learned in my certification process is that we all have the answers we need; we just need to learn how to uncover those answers. And that in order for people to buy-in to change, it has to be their idea. My job as a coach is not to roll into your life to tell you what you need to do; a coach's job is to roll into your life to ask you the right questions that will help you determine what you need to do. Nobody knows you better than you. Nobody knows what's best for you better than you. Especially the people in your life who try to tell you they do. Chances are those people are trying to control you or control the direction you take in life. Sometimes people do this with the best intentions, sometimes not, but either way, this is your decision to make. Getting back to when I started this podcast, it was with the intention to help the masses. I wanted to help people live a life that was more exciting or more meaningful than their current one. And, to me, that meant passion. I wanted to help people discover or rediscover their passion, because I felt so many of us were not living lives we were passion about. We were just existing. Since I knew that people have to make their own discoveries, I devised a Motivate Me! plan. I thought, if I interview guests who are living exciting and meaningful lives, living their passion, then our listeners can learn from them in a non-threatening way. Listeners could then apply what they've learned to their own lives in a way that works for them. One of my favorite examples of this is show guest Chris Nordhaus. Long story short, Chris was blindsided by a divorce. His passion had always been sport cars, and he had an old one in the garage he would tinker with. Chris, ultimately, recovered from his divorce by buying himself a brand new Camaro and joining a Camaro club. The greatest part about his story is how he rebuilt his life through an old, rekindled passion. In a short time, he made friends outside of those that were a part of his marriage, he was taking road trips around the country to places like Sturgis, South Dakota, and he became part of the board of the club. He leaned into his passion and he used his passion to recreate his life. Similarly, when show guest Karen Babb Newhall was going through her divorce, she taught herself how to train Border Collies to herd sheep. When she got good at it, she started a business training other dogs and she has since built a Border Collie rescue on her farm. I think these are fantastic examples of how someone going through a divorce can hear these stories, consider their own passion, and pull from the practices of both of these show guest...

How do you know when you are in “flow state”? What is “relaxed awareness” and what's its connection to the creative process? Learn about all of this, as well as how to conjure up your flow and how it is connected to serving others. MM561- Find Your Flow State Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Find Your Flow State Wow. Flow State. Have you ever been so engrossed in what you're doing that you've lost track of time? Have you ever been so involved in something that you've forgotten to eat? Has sleep ever become unimportant to you, and all you wanted was uninterrupted time with whatever it is you were working on? Maybe you were making a painting or a quilt or a webinar or remodeling a room? You may think that achieving flow state is a freak thing that only happens to the chosen, but I believe there are actionable steps you can take to encourage flow state. If you don't know my story or what inspired this season of Motivate Me!, I suggest going back and listening to the first episode: Episode 532. Part of my story is that I'd been divorced from flow state for a few years, but then in an event that I discuss in Episode 532, I was inspired to aggressively seek myself again. To get my head and heart back in the game. Finding my flow is what brought me back to you. I became excited again. I started creating again. I wanted to help others again. And this is what I want for you. Before we move forward, let's get a clear definition of what “flow state” is. Stick with me here, because gaining this new understanding was an enlightening experience for me, and I'm hoping it will be the same for you. Many of the guided meditations I do are preceded with spiritual teachings, something I really enjoy. One of my favorite meditations is by Mindvalley and its titled, “A Relaxing Guided Meditation to Boost Creativity.” (You can find it on YouTube.) It's here that I heard a definition of “flow state” that resonated with me. The meditation guide said that to be in “flow” simply means to be in a state of relaxed awareness. OK. But, what does “relaxed awareness” mean? If “relaxed” means to “know without doubt,” and “awareness” means “knowing that you are not and never will be alone.” That “you are aware of the help and guidance of a higher power.” Then “relaxed awareness” means that you know without doubt that you are not alone, and you are aware that you're being guided by a higher power. This is a pretty deep definition. But, as a writer, I have to tell you that I've experienced this. Writers are always looking to find solutions when writing stories. How best to show their audience without directly telling them? How best to move the plot forward? How best to describe characters indirectly without just listing details? It's much more interesting to find out that a character has an addiction when the writer describes the bottle of pills that fell out of her purse, rather than simply stating it. I have sat back in my chair while writing or jumped in the shower or taken a walk to get distance from my work, so the answer would “come to me.” It may not be not right away, but the answer always comes… sometimes even in my sleep. I have always believed that these answers come from a higher power, and I know I'm not alone in this. So the idea of relaxed awareness and its definition in the meditation track struck me because it's an understanding I have, and have had, for some time. Relaxed awareness is faith in the creative process, simply put. Have you ever felt an energy shift when you're working on something? An excitement and a knowing that everything will work out the way it's meant to?

In this episode you will come to understand the meaning of collaboration, and you'll learn it's importance to our creative lives! You will explore the different ways you can work together with others, and you'll receive four easy ideas on how to seek out collaborative partners. MM560 - Embrace Collaboration Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Embrace Collaboration First let's discuss what collaboration is, then we'll explore why it's important in our creative lives, the different ways in which we can collaborate, and where we can seek to find it. I can only speak for myself and my husband when I say that we have had a history of being stingy with our creative and entrepreneurial plans and ideas. Have you been this way? We were always very guarded about sharing our ideas with other people and completely closed to combining forces with anyone. We have had business ideas in the past, product ideas, book ideas, website community ideas, this podcast, and more. Now trust me when I say, I believe we need to be very smart about how we do this. We need to make guidelines and boundaries, some in our own minds, some verbally with others, and some things need to be established legally on paper. My goal in what I would like to speak with you about today is really just the opening up of your mind to the idea of collaboration. To collaborate with others simply means to work together on a goal or project. When I think of the term collaboration, the arts are the first to come to mind, especially musicians. My nephew is a musician and producer out in Los Angeles and nothing is more free or open than the jam sessions he has with his peers. He's living in a house with five other artists, and he has a white board set up in the house with a schedule for their collaboration times. They have writing sessions, brainstorming sessions on music and the business end, they have jam sessions. All they want to do is push and support each other and make great music. It's pretty spectacular. They're living their dream and striving to make it in their industry.   Think about all the famous musical collaborations of our time. We wouldn't have had David Bowie and Mick Jagger's, “Dancing in the Street,” or The Beatles and Eric Clapton's “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” - or so many other amazing songs - without collaboration. Now here's the thing about working with other people: We can only approach projects with our personal perspective that stems from our personal experiences and skills. Let's say I want to start a craft business. I want to get a table at the local market and sell my crafts. OK, great. I can make a really great candle. The quality and color and scent is awesome! But I'm limited. I'm limited in my abilities to take my candle idea any bigger than presenting them in some type of glass container - as pretty as I may be able to make them look, I don't have the tools or knowledge to do more. But I have a friend who says, “Oh, wow. Your candles are great, I could cut and stain wood and make iron candle holders for them, would you be interested in combining forces?” The idea of working together may make you nervous. But you think about it and you decide to combine forces. Next thing you know, another friend loves what you're doing, and this friend is computer savvy, something you are definitely not, and not something your other friend has no time for. This person offers to set up an Etsy account and says they'll handle posting pictures of the products, they'll handle the processing of the orders, the packing, and the shipping. Wow. You just started a whole store,

Uncover what is preventing you from taking big action, learn the value of small steps, differentiate between the journey and the outcome, and determine what is in you to do! MM559- Take a Big Action Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Take a Big Action So here we are in Season 4 of Motivate Me! working our way back from being flat together, getting our heads and hearts back in the game of life. Some of us have been deeply impacted by the chaos of these times. My head has been swimming, too. So many of us have been sick, so many of us have long lasting effects from being sick. So many of us have lost loved ones or jobs or just the motivation to engage in life. So many of us are living in fear, worried about falling ill or worried about getting the vaccine, or not to get the vaccine, or worried about if other people have gotten the vaccine, or not. And if you were already traveling through something and not feeling like yourself before all this, like me, then all of this just dragged you under deeper. Here is my general rule of thought in all things “life” - I believe that I'm here on this planet to experience all of life, to feel all that life has to offer: the love, the fear, the change, the challenges, the joy, the confusion… all of it. And I may not always know the direction I should be heading in my life, but I do know that even that not knowing, that the wait-time, the pauses in my life that I may feel stuck in, it is all meaningful, it is all powerful, and it is all meant for me. So, while I look around and cannot believe the state of our world and country right now, even though it scares the crap out of me and I fear for what the world will be like for my new grandson, I know that sitting idle and wasting the time I have here is not what I am meant to do. And I know that it is my responsibility to pull myself out of this because that action is part of what I am meant to experience. So, if you're with me on this, if you're ready to take charge of what you can control, because let's face it there's a lot out of our control right now, then I suggest you visit each of the episodes we've shared with you so far this season because each of the small steps I've taken have gotten me to this episode: Take a Big Action. In Episode 532, the first of this season, I share with you the details of how I'd fallen flat, about who and what inspired me to get my head and heart back in the game. All of this is what lead me back to you, because my passion, my calling, my person wants and knows that my purpose is to help you get your head and heart back in the game. And, Motivate Me! Friends, I am telling you, you can bounce back so quickly and it will feel incredible! I don't want to sound like a fortune cookie, but I mean it when I always say that we are only a decision away from changing our lives. Whether you want to create art, lose weight, get in a relationship, travel, learn a new skill. It's ridiculous how quickly we can change our lives. How quickly we can expand our person through new experiences and new people. If you're home and unhappy, make the decision to change: add something new to your life or get rid of something old. I am pretty sure you know exactly what you need to do. Start small with this change. I did. And then keep doing what you're doing. Enjoy what you're doing. And when you feel the excitement come to you, ride that wave, and don't be afraid to go big. This is what happened to me. I started doing all the steps I've included in this season. I was aggressively seeking myself, I had allowed myself the opportunity to become anything,

Have you been plagued with the question, “What is my life purpose”? Get your answers here in six easy steps! And bonus, find out what differentiates you from others who have the same purpose. MM558- Uncover Your Life Purpose Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Uncover Your Life Purpose I am really excited to talk to you about today's topic, Life Purpose. Life purpose is kind of a controversial topic. People have their own ideas about what exactly life purpose means, if it's a real thing, or not; if it matters if you “achieve” it over your lifetime, or not. To me, the best part about the idea of a life purpose is that a) You get to a place in your own life and mind where your thinking is heightened enough to start questioning the idea “Why am I here?” And b) You go on your own journey of discovery, seeking knowledge about it. And that journey is a long one. It's not about getting one person's opinion and believing it, it's about getting tid bits of information over time and piecing them together in a way that makes sense for you. Because similar to your life purpose, your discoveries and ideas about it are personal to you. Understanding what life purpose is and discovering your own is an intimate process. I don't know in which stage of this process you're in currently, but if you're like me, you hit a place or will hit a place in your search for purpose where you feel like all you've done is random and purposeless. That either you've bounced around and done many things and none seem connected and you don't feel like you've arrived anywhere, or you feel like you've arrived somewhere, but it's not the right where. I want to share an activity with you that I created to help me figure out my direction and my purpose. I had completed a coaching program and was starting my podcast - but I needed to figure out what my podcast would be about? How could I help the most people with the amazing information and tools I had learned? Who did I want to help? What mattered most to me? What am I about? So here are the six steps I took to figure all of this out. (I suggest pausing this episode as we move along and doing these steps with me, but feel free to revisit and revise your answers over the next few weeks. It took me three weeks of revisiting this process to find the answer I was looking for. And before doing this, I just could not see any of what I found here.) Step One: I'd like you to make a list of all the jobs you've had in your life. For me, that included: working at a pizzeria, at a MacDonald's, at a Macy's, at a nuclear power plant, for an accountant, teaching high school English, running a karaoke business, being a Girl Scout Troop Leader, and more. So, Step 1, just list all the jobs you've had. (Feel free to pause here.) Step Two: Look at your list of all the jobs you've had and circle the ones you enjoyed most. The ones that made you feel a certain kind of way. (When I was doing this, I remember looking at my list and feeling almost a sense of shame in how disconnected all my jobs seemed. I had gone to school to be a nail technician; I had gotten my real estate license… I look back now and see that I didn't even put those on my list!) So, circle the jobs you enjoyed most. Step Three: Of the jobs you circled, write a WHY sentence for each. Why did you circle them? Why are they important to you? What about them made you feel a certain kind of way? Here are the three jobs I enjoyed most from my long list, and here are my WHYs: Karaoke Host - I enjoyed my job as a karaoke host because I could help people make friends and find belonging,

Get ready to identify your fears, find out the key ingredient to facing them, and take actionable steps to move through them. We got this and we can do it together! MM557 - Battle Fear - Nix Excuses Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Battle Fear - Nix Excuses My goal today is to give you actionable steps that will help you identify your fears, control them, and dispel them, so you can get out of your head and into achieving your goals. Today's episode is chock full of information. For the time being, kick back and listen in. After you do, you can head over to motivatemepodcast.com where all of this information is in print for you in the show notes. Just click on this episode and the show notes will appear. So, fear… I understand fear. The night before the crew I'd hired came to town, I was having dinner with my daughter. She had come to spend time with me before I ventured out on my ninety-day trip to interview people in each of the fifty states about passion. I'm pretty sure I looked like a crazed woman during our meal. I was unexpectedly overwhelmed with fear. I'm sure it was the feelings I had of not wanting to leave my home, my husband, my daughter, and my new puppy. I'm sure it was because I was going to be gone for a long time. I'm sure it was because I was taking a completely blind step off of a very high dive. But mid bite of I don't even remember what, I just started to shake. The kind of shake that makes your hands tremble and your face quiver. And tears just started to stream from my eyes. Now, my daughter was 24-years-old, she wasn't a young child, but she didn't know what was happening, and it was apparent that my fear was scaring her. I remember her saying, “Oh my God, Mom.” Like, what's going on? So on top of what I was feeling, I needed to find a way to comfort her. I looked at her with calm and honesty and napkins in my hand, and I said, “Mackenzie, don't worry, I'm fine. What you're seeing is fear. Sometimes fear can affect us physically. I'm sorry, I don't want to scare you. I'm going to be fine.” And after a pause that included deep breaths and nose-blowing, I told her, “This is not a bad thing, and it's not a bad thing for you to see, because you're going to watch me push through this.” And she did. Whew. I get emotional just thinking about this. Now, my trip is an extreme example in many people's standards, but any of us can have a similar reaction to any type of challenge we face. Especially, I feel, when these challenges are self-induced. I mean, did I HAVE to put myself through this? No, I could have very easily stayed in my comfort zone. In any case, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge our fear - especially if we're allowing it to hold us back from achieving our dreams or goals. Many of us make excuses for why we're not doing what we'd really like to do, instead of identifying it for what it is: we're freaking afraid. We're afraid we'll fail. We're afraid of what others will think about us. We're afraid we're not smart or talented enough. We're afraid we're not young, pretty, or fit enough. We're afraid we'll look dumb, etc. It's important to know that the reason we stay inside our comfort zones all stem from our ego. Our ego communicates with us through our internal dialogue and uses the fear we create to control our actions. Two previous episodes come to mind for me when I think about the ego, so if you'd like to hear more on that, you can check out Episode 555, “Say No to Negativity” and Episode 550, “Experiment with Your Craft.” But the bottom line is that we can control the ego and the mind.

Description: Too often we allow feelings of perfectionism to stunt our progress. Find out if you're a perfectionist, learn why, and see how it's holding you back. Next step: complete the Push through Perfectionism Activity to understand that you win the majority of the time - even when you feel far from perfect! MM556 - Bail on Perfectionism Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Bail on Perfectionism Too often we allow the idea of perfectionism to hold us back. We let it stop us from attempting something new, and we let it stop us from creating. Let me give you some examples. For starters, I never saw myself as a perfectionist but my husband and daughter started pointing out some of the ways I do things differently than them. For example, the way I cut vegetables! My husband used to be a line cook for Perkins, so breakfast at our house can be pretty spectacular. Since I'm his prep cook, I start cutting the vegetables for our omelets and home fries before he gets to the kitchen. I, basically, got kicked out of the kitchen because I take “too much time” cutting the peppers, onions, and mushrooms because I try to make them all the same size. Isn't that what you need to do so they cook evenly? My husband comes barreling into the kitchen and he cuts everything in the same haphazard way he folds his laundry or makes a ham sandwich. That's something I can never understand: throwing all the ham into the middle of the bread in one big lump. You can bet that my ham is dispersed evenly throughout the whole sandwich. I will tell you something, though, his tastes better! My daughter is similar to my husband, she'll approach a project and boom! it's done. And I'm on the other side of the room not having even started yet because I'm feeling anxious about it not coming out right. Of not having exactly what I need to do the job. I, literally, write with mechanical pencils because I don't like seeing things crossed out on my paper. Even though I'm only writing notes or journaling. Pen is a big commitment, you know what I mean? But here's the thing: If we don't act on an idea in the first five minutes from the creation of it, chances are we never will. And in order to act this quickly, we have to get past our feelings of perfectionism. When I finished my undergraduate degree in English and Education, even after all of my student-teaching experiences, I didn't feel ready to be in the classroom. I didn't feel educated enough. I felt imposter syndrome, I felt like maybe if I had a master's degree I would be better prepared. My husband's like, “What do you need a master's for, you just got your teaching degree, that's what it's for?” I said, “I don't know, I don't feel ready!” Our perfectionism is driven by fear. Fear that we won't be smart enough, talented enough, attractive enough, perfect enough. We have to determine a jumping off point. We have to decide to take that leap of faith. We have to accept the fact that we will be nervous, that we may feel like a fake or a fraud, and that once we do get started, we may need to pivot or edit. But if we don't act at all because we are too scared of not being good enough, or because we never feel ready, we stay stagnant and risk becoming bitter and resentful. I really had to push past these feelings when I got the idea to travel the fifty states in ninety days interviewing people about their passion. I did act in the first five minutes by sending a message to someone I knew to see if she'd be interested in accompanying me on a trip like this as my assistant. But here I was a new podcaster and new professional coach,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Say No to Negativity Nothing is more detrimental to our goals and our mental health than negativity. And in order to make change in our lives, we can't allow naysayers and emotional drainers and doubters to dissuade us or invade us. Before we get started today, let's talk about what negativity is and where we often see it. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of negativity is “the expression of criticism of or pessimism about something.” First let's talk about a few obvious places we can easily spot negativity, and then we'll talk about why it keeps showing up in our lives. First: The Internet As much as I love the Internet, it's an absolute breeding ground for negativity.             - People come on intentionally to antagonize others - and sometimes even to “troll,” as                   they say, which means to post inflammatory statements just to watch people fight             - People are cruel to each other - they say things to people they probably would not say in               person (Or at least I hope they wouldn't!)             - People judge each other and their opinions or actions harshly (without even knowing               details to a person's story)             - People log on to “rant” or “vent” (I can tell you right now, if a post starts with either of               these words, I scroll right on by - there is no value in that for me?) Second: Work As much as you may love your coworkers, work can become a feeding frenzy for negativity.             - People hone in on what's wrong, instead of finding solutions because then they can               play the victim             - People like to complain because, as they say, “misery loves company”             - People show their value under the guise of dissatisfaction (“Look at everything they               have me doing!”)             - People dissuade each other because they don't want others to become more successful               than them Third: Loved Ones The attitudes and opinions of close friends and family carry the most weight for us and their negativity impacts not only our actions but our belief in self.             - They dump their emotions on us, sometimes often and often abruptly             - We feel a sense of responsibility for their happiness             - They try to control us through fear - to keep us safe             - They cause us to doubt - to keep us from being more successful than them - because our               success will make them feel like less These are just a few examples, but I'm sure it's easy to identify the negative situations and people in your life. My question to you is: Why does this negativity keep showing up for you? Here is my guess: The Law of Attraction dictates that whatever we put out into the world comes back to us multiplied. If this is so, could you just be getting back to you the negativity you yourself are putting out into the world? Maybe you're thinking right now that this is impossible because you are a kind, solutions-based, non-gossipy kinda gal. But can I ask you to look one more place? A place where only you inhabit? A place where all things you stem? How is your internal dialogue? Are you one of those people who encourages and supports others? Someone whose heart hurts when someone you know can't see their own worth, yet you beat yourself up every chance you get? What names do you call yourself when you're frustrated with your own actions, when you had cookies the same day you started your diet, when you made a mistake at work,

Being vulnerable can build confidence and clarity, even when the outcome can be seen as disappointing. Touch base with your passion here, see how you can redirect it, if that's what you need to take a more vulnerable approach! MM554 - Seek out Spaces Where You can be Vulnerable Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Seek out Spaces Where You can be Vulnerable If you're joining us for the first time this season, welcome, new Motivate Me! Friend! Our goal at Motivate Me! is to inspire you to live a life that's more exciting and/or more meaningful. We do this in Seasons 1-3 by interviewing people who are living passionate lives, so you can steal some of their tricks to apply to your world. But here, in Season 4, we are sharing tips, tricks, and techniques that will help you reconnect with your passion or redirect your passion so you can get your head and heart back in the game. There are many ways we can connect with our passion. Sometimes it's through our careers but often times it's not. Sometimes it's something we make money at, but that's not always the case either. Passions are so unique to us. You may be into creating art through paintings, sculptor, music, writing, interior design, food, or photography. Or you may be driven to help people or spread joy or be an advocate for the under-privileged or the under-represented. Your passion might be about the environment, horticulture, animals, or even architecture or teaching or textiles. The list is truly endless. Can you see how exciting it would be to be part of the world of politics or in the Olympic arena or behind the scenes in the fashion? I find all of it exciting! That's why my passion is exploring all of this with all of you. Over the past few years and through the pandemic, I fell away from my passion for a time. It was the prodding of some loved ones that motivated me to aggressively seek myself again, and the steps I took to reconnect with myself is what I'm sharing with you here in Season 4 of Motivate Me!. This is the 23rd episode of this season, and it's during this part of my journey that I decided I wanted to be more open, more honest, more vulnerable. I think because I'm a positive person people think I don't have struggles, I assure you I do. We all do. It was scary to be open in this way but it was also exciting. One of the ways I decided to put get out of my comfort zone was to share my intentions and my greatest struggle with a group of people in a small private Facebook group. I was very honest about what I was trying to accomplish with my podcast and I was ver honest about what I feel is my greatest struggle, which is finding my value. How do we know if what we find important will be valuable to others? And don't we need to feel like what we're doing is important to people in order to push through, in order to put our hearts into something, in order to put our hearts on paper or out onto the airwaves? I kept the post simple, but it was heartfelt and direct. And I subscribed to the idea that this post would help me become a more transparent person, that it would help me articulate my goals, and it would help me put my intentions out to the universe. Now, I want to make sure I'm clear about this: just because we decide to be more open as people and put ourselves out to the world, people are not obligated to respond to us in the manner we seek. So if you choose to do this, know that with this comes risk. Here's what happened for me: I shared the post and while I waited for responses, I refocused on the idea that the sharing of my doubts were the important part here.

We talk about so many great things here: about where you can get information that will help you discover a passion or goal, about the power of having the right materials, about universal materials we all need on our creative quest, and about how to acquire materials on a low budget - and who doesn't want that? MM - 553 - Get More Materials Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Get More Materials Episode 542 talks all about gathering the necessary materials - materials that will help rev your creative engine and reconnect you with your passion. If you haven't listened to Episode 542, I think it's a great idea, especially if you're someone who's in search of their passion or in search of a goal to achieve. Because in this stage of my process, I knew I was searching for something but I had no desires. So maybe Episode 542 can help you, too. The general idea of gathering your materials in the first place was to kickstart your exploration process. It was to get you to play again, play with the materials that speak to you. Now, I wonder when you reached out to gather materials, did you, like me, have some around your home that you could start to play with? Did you have a good idea where those materials were, and you went over and just picked them up again? I knew were mine were because I had a sense of guilt every time I saw them, because I knew I should be using them, and I wasn't. My materials are writerly things. I knew exactly where I kept my blank notebooks and favorite pencils, so I started this process by picking up one little, one-subject notebook. I grabbed one pencil. And that is how this began. Very quickly, though, I felt myself being pulled in many creative directions when I sat down to write: I wanted to collect notes on what I'd been reading, but I also had begun writing non-fiction and journaling. And I wanted to write down other writing or business ideas I was having so they didn't distract me, so I would finish things I was currently working on. All of this began to overwhelm my little notebook, so I went back into the cabinet and pulled out five more one-subject notebooks. I went back to the drawer and pulled out a black marker. I labeled each notebook by subject making sure to have one about my “50 States in 90 Days” book that I'm writing and one about this journey I am taking with you: “Coming Back from Flat.” I had all the notebooks labeled and I was filling pages in each one, and you know what happened? So many ideas began to flow that I needed better organization, and I wanted to collect all of my ideas in one place because I know that this way they would have more weight. That they would have a better chance of materializing. So I went back into the cabinet. This time, I pulled out a brand new, fat binder and a brand new package of dividers with tabs, it was like they had been there waiting for me. Then I grabbled a stack of lined paper, my colored markers, and my clipboard. I labeled the tabs with the colorful markers and began ripping the pages from the notebooks and filing them into the binder - not caring that the notebook pages are smaller than the looseleaf ones. Then I put a stack of paper on the clipboard and I began to write. If I needed to, I added a note to a page already started in the binder, or if I needed to, I'd start a new page on my clipboard. Everything got dated and everything got filed. Before long, I ordered more looseleaf paper, a ten-pack of legal pads, some more pencils, and a few more books to read. The more I used my materials, the more I needed them. Let me say that again: The more I used my materials,

Connecting with our people is vital to the human psyche. The question is: How can we nurture this connection without losing ourselves? How can we use this connection to fill us instead of drain us? Great ideas and examples of exactly how to do this in this episode! MM552 - Connect with Your People Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Connect with Your People Today we're going to talk about the importance of connecting with your people and its role in helping you reclaim your passion. How doing this can help you get your head and heart back in the game! First, let's talk about why we should connect with our people, and then we'll talk about how. Every action we take in life is done out of either fear or love. Fear is what holds us back and love is what propels us forward. Connecting with friends and family is all about love and it serves multiple purposes. For one, it clears our conscience. It clears our conscience because we know that our friends and family are doing well, because they know we care, because we are pulling our weight in our relationships. It keeps us grounded, and it's good for our soul because caring about others is a form of service. We have to have a clear conscience if we're trying to achieve our own goals. I don't know about you, but if something or someone's on my mind, I can't focus to meditate or read or write or create anything. However, when I sit down with a clear mind and feel good that I put effort into my relationships, I'm much more creative and productive. It's similar to when we talked in another episode about how much easier it is to focus on our wants and needs when our other responsibilities have been met, like how when the house is clean, the family is fed, and the day job is in order. Now, there's two types of relationships we're reaching out to when we connect with our people: one is those people who fill us with all the feel-good hormones, and the other is those that drain us. The thing is, sometimes we have relationships that are draining and we aren't willing to walk away from them. That's fine, I'm not here to lecture you on your relationships. I'm here to say that you need to do whatever it takes for you to free up your headspace. For many of us this means making sure we're playing our part in our relationships. And if some of these people are the kind that bring you down, that's fine, just mentally prepare yourself for those people and know that you need to keep an emotional distance. It's not that you don't care about them, it's that you don't allow them to consume you. Chances are, these are the relationships you most need to nurture in order to keep a clear mind. Either way, back to you! So, if you've been following our steps for Season 4, you've been journaling and writing and playing with your craft. You've gathered some materials that will help you explore your passions more, and you've been making yourself a priority. That's awesome, and I really hope you've been working on this for yourself. Now it's time to take some of that time and reinvest it in your relationships because doing so will refill you. The quandary is: How do I make time for everyone and everything in my life and still have time and energy leftover for me? Well, here's a list of some simple ways you can stay connected to your people, ways that have a big impact but don't create a big time commitment for you or them. Please don't get me wrong, there are times when we can sit on the phone or FaceTime with friends and family, but there are also ways we can achieve a similar outcome without depleting our precious personal time.

Revisit what it means to feel “flat. Be inspired to take a small action in a direction that will get you loving your life again. Get ideas on actions you may find inspirational! This week's “truth talk” - at the end of the show - is a personal one. Lynette knows that together, we can find passion in life again. MM551- Take a Small Action Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Take a Small Action Somebody asked me recently what it means to feel flat; what it means to “come back from flat”? So before we talk today about taking a small action, I think we should clarify our goal. If you're new to Season 4 of Motivate Me!, I suggest listening to the first episode of the season, Episode 532, where I go into detail about my personal journey into and out of feeling flat. But for right now, here's the nut shell version: Feeling flat simply means you've lost your verve or your passion for engaging in life and for being creative. That you're not moving forward in life, you've stopped striving for something you used to really desire, you're not taking part in things that previously made your life more exciting or more meaningful. That your head and heart are just not in the game. I fell flat after traveling the fifty states in ninety days interviewing people about their passion. Once I got all the interviews from the trip edited and posted on my podcast and on YouTube, and my responsibilities for the trip were over, I crashed. Not because I wanted to but because I was unclear of my next moves, so I began to wait it out, and during that, I allowed life to swallow me up. That's kind of it. But then the pandemic and quarantine came and I fell further, which is what I go into more detail about in Episode 532. But the outcome was that I drew a line in the sand and made the decision, because that's all it is a simple decision, to reconnect with myself and my passion for life again. And I began to aggressively seek myself again. The secret to all of this is just to make an intentional effort. The steps I took to do this are what we are sharing with you all through this season. It's the tips, tricks, and techniques I used to get my head and heart back in the game. To get back to being excited about something again. To get back to creating. I knew what I needed to do, so I just got back at it, and these are things anyone can do, that's why I'm sharing them. All we need to do is make the decision. Life can change so quickly for the better and the worse. Have you ever had an experience where you met a new person and your whole perspective on life changed? Whether it was a romantic partner or a new friend, but you just felt so amazing about yourself and about what life now had to offer? Or have you ever started something new and it just opened up a whole world you didn't know about? Like for example, I was just on the International Volunteer Headquarters' website where you can select a country and get involved in helping their community, whether it's teaching or building or community projects. The United States has opportunities on there too. Imagine how exciting getting involved in something like that could be? The people you would add to your life, the new experiences you would have. It's like when we step out, the world opens new wings up to us. I experienced something similar to this when I joined a new exercise program and again when I started taking classes at the community college. Life shifts like this for us when we take small actions and it's exciting and fun and illuminating, and it moves us in our next direction. Did you have desires that you know you've detached from?

Here's an example: You're a great writer but are having trouble getting that novel published! Have you ever thought that maybe non-fiction or essay writing would be a better fit for you? Have you ever thought about sharing your love for writing in other ways, such as becoming a teacher or translator? All sorts of great ideas for you here! MM - 550 - Experiment with Your Craft Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Experiment with Your Craft I'd like to start off this episode with a favorite quote, it's a Buddhist proverb that says: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Some people feel proverbs have one specific meaning, but that's not the way I look at it. I feel they're like songs and poetry: we connect to them in our personal way, and our interpretation of them changes over time as we evolve. Here's what I mean, my first experience with this proverb was when I was in college to become a teacher. As a teen, I was much more focused on my social life than school, so I got off to a slow academic start, and I didn't go to college until I was in my 30s. So when I first saw this quote, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears,” I felt like it was speaking to me. At that time, I took it to mean that until a person (the student) is ready to learn, the teacher is just not visible. And no matter how hard or long the teacher tries to reach the student, until the student is ready, the teacher might as well be trying to get a tangible hold on something like smoke or water. It's impossible. On the other hand, when the student is ready to learn, the student will seek out the teacher, and they'll go to great lengths to do their learning. Which is what I did when I was ready. From my first year of teaching high school English on, this quote has always had a place in my classroom. Of course, the irony is that I'd gone from being the blind student to the teacher who was now trying to grasp in my students what isn't, necessarily, tangible. What I did do is try to help my students see what I couldn't at their age, and I did that by enlisting them in my process. The reality is, I learned more from my students than they did from me, which is the second experience I had with this proverb. I came to understand that we're all students and we're all teachers. I let them know that I was learning from them, and in doing that, I empowered all of us. My third and final experience with this proverb is its connection to the ego, that to be an authentic student, one must shed their ego. And that's a really humble, vulnerable, and daring place to be! I've spoken about ego on the show many times before. Ego is what controls our feelings and inspires our action or inaction. It's our mind where all that thinking and overthinking comes from. The ego's intention is to keep us safe and keep us comfortable, but it does that through keeping us afraid. Afraid of failure, afraid of looking dumb or silly, afraid of physical harm, afraid of risk. Our ego is what keeps us inside our comfort zone. So what does all this have to do with experimenting with our craft? We have to allow ourselves to become the vulnerable student again. We have to give ourselves the freedom to “try things on for size.” We need to broaden our perspective: Am I in the right niche of what I'm doing now, or can I use what I'm good at in an entirely different field? You may be someone who's already aligned with your passion, or you may be someone who's trying to figure out what your talent is. Either way, how will a pastry chef know if he should be making and decorating cakes unless he experiments?

When your whole body is activated you get excited about life! You get inspired and motivated to participate in the world! Connect with what sets you most on fire, get suggestions on how to activate that, and receive tips on how to get your loved ones on board when they fall short of seeing what is important to you in this process. MM549 - Get Your Blood Pumping Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Get Your Blood Pumping I have a disclaimer for today's show: This episode is not a lecture on the benefits of exercise! And I have to tell you, of all the tips, tricks, and techniques I used to get my head and heart back in the game when I fell flat, this technique is one of my absolute favorites. And I think it's one that most of us just don't do enough. I've come to understand that from a very early age, freedom has been a core value of mine. The day I got my driver's license remains one of my most favorite days of all time. I was, literally, hooting and hollering for ten straight minutes at the top of my lungs on my first solo drive. Another example of when I felt deliciously free was when I moved from New Jersey to California eight days after graduating high school. I only knew one person who lived there, and I knew before I went that two months after I got there, he'd have to go out to sea for six months. But, I wasn't scared by this, I was excited by it! Then there's our podcast tour where we traveled the fifty states in ninety days interviewing people about passion. I'll tell you something about that, I did feel fear before I headed out on that bad boy trip, lots of fear. But once I hit the open road, it was like my heart split open and I experienced actual bliss. I felt so alive. I felt so free! Can you feel my blood pumping in these examples? Now, here's the thing, we can't do one thing, no matter how big it is, and ride that out for the rest of our lives. If we don't continuously nurture this side of ourselves, we will continuously lose ourselves, and we disengage from the world, our passions, and joy. In this way, it is like diet and exercise, this is another way we sometimes “let ourselves go.” We need to do things that excite us often, and when we're off, we need to recalibrate. So, let's talk today about ways we can get our blood pumping again because this will increase your motivation, ignite your excitement about life, make you more creative, and improve your mood - and who doesn't want all that!? And after I share my list of ideas with you, I will share a struggle I've been having within my marriage about exactly this. OK… so if you want to feel great but you're short on ideas on how to push yourself into that, here's a list of SOME things to consider: -get in the sun - for some vitamin D -connect with nature - especially walking barefoot in the dirt -take a risk - call that guy, invest in that stock, take that trip -play like a kid - get on your bike (I'm in love with my electric bike), paint with your fingers, role play -tire out your body - go for a hike, do yardwork, clean your basement -meditate - you know I'm a fan! It can be exciting! -watch a scary movie - not my favorite, but it will get your blood pumping -listen to music - make different playlists: one for stretching, one for outdoors, one for cleaning, one for sexy time -be curious - learn all the things! Why is NJ the only state where people can't pump their own gas? How was the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup really invented? What's Pink's real name? -visit new places - go on an adventure, explore, try new foods, take pictures

We have the power to unlock the secret to childhood creativity and it is SO simple. Learn how to step away from the world, how to reinvigorate your mind, and how to find you again. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Unplug to Recharge Listen, it's no secret that in today's society many people are trying to mimic the highlight reel they see of the lives others share on social media. And, it's no secret that we pick up our phones twice as much as we think we do. The NY Post estimates that we pick our phones up eighty times a day, which is every twelve minutes. I've seen other reports that say that number is even higher. For the record, I'm a cell-phone, Internet, social media, people-loving person myself who really enjoys staying connected with friends and family online. And I'm curious and I love to watch all different kinds of videos: true crimes, inspirational, historical, etc.… all the things. I get “sucked down rabbit holes” all the time, as they say. If you're not familiar, getting “sucked down a rabbit hole” looks like this: You think to yourself, “Oh, Billie Eilish has a new song out!” So you search YouTube, play the new song, then play three of her other videos, then watch videos about her life. Then you decide to search for footage about her and her brother recording their first album in their bedroom, which leads you to search to see if her brother has an album of his own. Yep, he does! So you flip through all his songs on the app Spotify. Then you go to Billie's Instagram to see how her new album is being received and get sucked into reading pages of comments by her once adoring fans who are bashing her because they think she's doing something called “queer-baiting” - because she titled one of her posts, “I like girls.” Now her fans think she's just baiting a specific fan group in order to build her base. On one hand, all this searching and watching was interesting and entertaining, it was also informative because “queer baiting” is new to me. On the other hand, I lost an hour of my life, and I walked away feeling horrible. I couldn't stop reading the posts, one after the other, bashing Billie. And I thought, “Wow, fans! Where's your loyalty?” Shouldn't fans show support until they at least know what they're bashing? Isn't Billie allowed to be human? I understand what they're upset at, but they're making assumptions and they're judging - judging harshly - and I'm not about it. It honestly made me super sad, it's still resonating with me. Like, I hope Billie Eilish is OK right now. I hope people who've been through this reach out to her. In the rabbit hole, I did see that she's become friends with Justin Bieber, so maybe him or Pink or Gaga or Britney or Lindsay or anyone else who's been put on the pedestal to be ripped down is giving her perspective. I had a whole conversation about it with my husband because this is one of the ways celebrities end up in rehabs. Billie Eilish has a strong support system, I just hope it's enough to get her through this, because she's 19-years-old and that's a crazy place to be in all of this. Anyway, do you see how invested we can get when we get sucked down the rabbit hole? How much energy we put into things that have nothing to do with us, things we have no control over? Now, I'm not saying to never explore random things and people online. Sometimes we do this as a family, and we learn new things about people, their life, their craft. I just found out some pretty interesting things about Louis Armstrong's life! I'm just saying that sometimes we need to unplug from it all to recharge who we are,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Say Goodbye to Feeling Selfish This topic has evolved for me over time. What does “say goodbye to feeling selfish” mean? At first glance, we probably think about how hard it is to let go of our daily responsibilities just long enough to embrace a personal interest, but is that it? Is that all there is to feeling selfish and is it that easy to just let go? I mean, where did the idea that we're selfish begin for us? We're not born believing we're selfish human beings. This goes deeper than that. Really deep. And, if we feel like at our core we are truly selfish, how will we ever be able to dedicate the time, space, and energy we need to create, to evolve, to flourish, to deeply love? How will we ever feel worthy of success or abundance if we are heavily rooted in the belief that we don't deserve these things because we're not good enough? I think the fundamental idea we need to prove to ourselves first is that we are good. So let's start there, let's prove it. Here's what I would like you to do: I would like you to take some time to look past what you think you already know, to look past what anyone in your life has told you, and I want you to write down some facts. Just list examples of when you know you did good for someone. Think about times when you sacrificed your time, your effort, your energy, your money. Think about the times you have prayed for someone, times that you sincerely wished well for someone, think about how you have shown love to others. Here's why this is important: You may have been a bratty, selfish teen who was trying to fit in and put friends before family, but are you that person now? Have you been that person for the past twenty or thirty years? Or maybe the person who called you selfish used that term to get you to do what they wanted, because, in reality, they're the selfish one? Maybe no one called you selfish at all and you just assumed people thought you were because of a story you created in your own mind about a situation? The funny thing is, none of that stuff matters, that's why we need to focus on facts. So, first make that list of all the good you have done in the world. See that you are not a selfish person, that you're, actually, quite a giving person who has true and pure intentions. Someone who wants good things for others. Know that people who believe they're selfish are most likely not selfish - why? - because a selfish person would never put the time into caring about how what they want impacts others. Wow, that would be a big contradiction! I will warn you that gaining this awareness is not a magic cure. Even when you see the facts on paper, you will probably make excuses about how you have done good things but that doesn't make you a good person. If this is you, you will just need to continue to prove to yourself that you are good. Continue to revisit this in your mind daily - and sometimes you will have triggers that set you back. Especially because people who believe they are selfish have the hardest time protecting their personal boundaries. OK, so let's say that you got this down. You made your list, you're proving to yourself, “Hey, self, I'm a pretty damn good person, I'm not selfish at all,” and you are reinforcing that idea daily through your giving thoughts and actions - what next? Do a chore a day. Sounds so simple, right? It is. Do whatever you need to do to feel as if you're pulling your weight in your world so you can spend untethered time on something you're passionate about! You may be laughing at the idea of having to do only one chore a day,

What does it mean to emotionally detach yourself? What are the benefits to doing this, how can doing this help to build relationships based on respect, and how can doing this increase your personal support system? MM546- Emotionally Detach Yourself Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Emotionally Detach Yourself Where did we start believing that if we don't care with every fiber of our being, or become consumed with the lives of our loved ones, that we don't care? How many times have we allowed what our spouse or children are going through to consume us? I can think of many times I've done this. One example would be speaking to my husband during the work day and hearing about how he got ripped to shreds during a big meeting because he didn't have something prepared. This will weigh on me all day, and at dinner I'll empathize with him and how embarrassing this experience must have been - only for him to tell me that his boss realized that he'd never passed along the material and let everyone else know it. Similarly, say I was concerned about a situation where my daughter called for a freak out session about a fight she got into with her college roommate. She'd get me all spun up, and I'd be concerned about her and the situation. But later, when I'd ask how things were going, she'd say that the issue had been resolved for hours or sometimes even days. In both of these situations, I'm sitting over here with a knot in my stomach over things I have absolutely no control over. I'm distracted and less productive in my own life because I'm worried about my family - when their situations have been resolved and I don't even know it. Does this happen to you? I know I'm not the only one! This is why I want to talk to you about the importance of detaching emotionally from friends and family. I want you to think of emotionally detaching as just taking a small step back from the details of their everyday lives. Think of this more as creating just a little bit of emotional distance, where you are just not quite so invested in the outcomes of their situations. Why do this? Because it's not your job to solve their problems. Why else? Because you need to be focused on what you're here to accomplish. I've learned a lot about emotional detachment, and I practiced it a lot until it became my natural behavior. I've learned that if it's not in my control, I can give it less weight in my heart and my head. I have whole-heartedly accepted the idea that 99% of what we worry about never occurs, and that whatever my family experiences in their journey that is out of my control is meant for them and has nothing to do with me. Now, this doesn't mean that I don't care, I care a ton. And it does not mean that I love them less or am here for them less. I always want to hear about their jobs, their friends, their lives. These are my favorite people! I just don't wear their challenges. I don't own them. I don't feel like I need to fix them. I focus more on asking questions that help them make their own decisions than giving advice. So Motivate Me! Friends, the reality is that our focus should be on our own paths, and we should allow our loved one's focus to be on their own paths.  Our lives will naturally and lovingly intertwine. We are all teachers and all students in each other's lives, and I have learned so much about my family and myself from creating some emotional distance. On one hand, it's freeing to let go of feeling responsible for everyone else's happiness. We think we do, but we really don't have control over other people's happiness. This is a personal journey based on a person's p...

Putting our ideas and work out into the world for feedback is a vulnerable place to be. Learn why it is imperative that we go through this process, and how best to protect ourselves when met with negative energy. MM545- Be Open to Feedback, but not Too Open Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Be Open to Feedback, but not Too Open So hopefully, you have been taking a deep dive into yourself in order to reconnect with what excites you. I'm wondering what you have you discovered? I'm wondering if you have shared your new ideas with anyone? If not, I recommend that you start thinking about with whom you can share these discoveries. If you've been meditating and journaling, chances are your energy is shifting and your perspective is changing. Are you gaining clarity on who you are, who you've always been, and what drives you? Have you gathered materials and begun to create? Are you starting to see that a new pathway could be opening up for you? Have you started a new project or business plan? If you are making mental or emotional moves, or if you've begun to work on something tangible, it's important to verbalize these new ideas. To learn how to articulate them. To see how they feel when they hit the air. Doing this will inspire even more clarity and even more ideas. It allows us to voice our excitement and build human connection. By speaking these changes or new ideas, we claim this direction for ourselves. We start believing it for ourselves. We map our brain to achieve it. We put it out to the universe. We practice being vulnerable. We gain confidence. And also in doing this, we open ourselves up to feedback from others. Being open to feedback is a big part of the creative process, the part that is not always easy to do, so it's important to know how to protect ourselves after putting ourselves in such a vulnerable space. We want to approach this feedback with an open-mind, we want to listen deeply to the ideas of others - not spend this time building a defense against what they're saying while they're speaking, we want to learn from them and their perspective. However, in the end, we need to make our own creative decisions.  This concept is easy to understand if you've ever seen the reality show Project Runway. Tim Gunn comes around and critiques the show's contestants as they're working. Well, he doesn't always get it right, and sometimes the fashion designer sticks to their vision. This is not always the right call by the designer, but there have been many times where that look wins the episode. There is something to be said for sticking to our vision, but like in the show, sometimes we have to “edit” that vision to make it better than our initial idea. We cannot distinguish between holding our ground or editing our initial idea if we're busy being defensive. So we have to really take in what others have to say, consider their opinions, revisit what we want to accomplish and why we want to accomplish it, and then make the decision to either pivot from our original direction, tweak it, or stay rooted. Now, what happens if the feedback we receive is not what we had hoped for or needed? What if it sucks the wind out of our sails? That moment where we were so excited about it until, for whatever reason, the person or people we shared our ideas with is not? I have three suggestions for this. 1. Sometimes we need to take a short break. Whether it's days or two weeks, create space between what you're working on and where you want to take it. Maybe your aspirations are a little ambitious and you need to break your plans into smaller steps.

So often incredible ideas surface in our minds and we discount them and discard them. What if you went on a journey to generate more ideas, and what if you knew how to manage them in a way that would help you bring them to fruition? MM544- Managing Your Creative Ideas Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Managing Your Creative Ideas When do you feel most passionate about life? For me, it's when I'm creating. And when I'm in my creative zone, ideas upon ideas continue to come to me. Being open to these ideas is part of why and how I believe they flow so fluidly, but it's my job to manage them - and to organize them. When I was working to reclaim my passion, I had to make changes in my approach to being creative. At one point, I had found legal pad after legal pad that was filled with ideas and fiction writing I had put on paper, but I'd put those pads down and never looked at them again. I knew I couldn't let that happen this time around, because I was setting the intention that this time wasn't going to be like the rest. That this time I would collect and categorize my work, and that something substantial would come from it. So, I took all the notes I'd been writing in my little one-subject notebooks, I busted out a big blue binder and an un-opened pack of dividers with tabs, and I set up my organizer. I labeled each section: “Reading Log,” “Journal,” “MoMe!,” “Zoom,” “Biz Opps,” “Writing Ideas,” “Podcast,” and “Flat.” And I set out to fill these sections but in a compartmentalized kind of way that was not overwhelming. I had loose notebook paper on a clipboard, and whenever I had a question or idea, I wrote it out, I journaled, I found an answer, and I locked it into the binder. If I had an essay idea or product idea, I wrote that down, too, and locked that into my binder. You get the picture. I wrote everything and I dated everything. Why date what you write? Because it gives our ideas value, because every important document is dated, because what I wrote on this paper was important. And won't it be fun one day to look back on where it all began? Yes, I set that intention with every step of my process. They say if we collect our ideas and keep them organized and together, the weight of them will carry them to fruition. Why not give that theory a shot? During this whirlwind of a time, something happened. I had been meditating and journaling and excited about helping people with what was bringing my passion back, and I was reminded how much I enjoyed the process of creating. That, yes, I want to produce something valuable to help as many people as possible, but I was filled with actual joy just in the doing of the thing. And that's what I continued to focus on: the process. Now more than ever, I realize that I am in love with the process of creating and not the outcome of it. Elizabeth Gilbert really put my feelings into words when she said, “Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless.” I love getting immersed in what I'm creating. To give you an idea of what I mean, here are some of the projects I have worked on: I have completed the writing of two novels (they're not published, but they are written!), and I have two other books in the works. I've designed a podcast, a 50-state tour, and now this program about reclaiming your passion and coming back from flat.

Reading takes very little commitment with the possibility of the greatest reward. It is the single easiest way to grow and learn. And don't worry, if you struggle with reading or retaining, we have pointers for you! MM543 - Read Everything, Read with an Open Mind Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Read Everything, and Read with an Open Mind During this past year, there were times where I felt like I was lying dormant, like all I had to give was apathy, and just getting through the day was all I could muster. Have you had times like this? Maybe you're feeling this way now? During times like these, there is something we can do that takes very little effort with maximum gain and that's to read. Now listen, I know reading isn't for everyone, but hear me out on this. The beautiful thing about reading is that it's low commitment, it can be free, and we do it at our own pace. To get reading, we just need to make the decision that we're going to do it, even if that means that we have to psyche ourselves up and prepare to do it. Quick tips to get started: 1. Pick a topic or author you enjoy 2. Set aside designated time 3. Turn off the television 4. Put your phone on silent 5. Request the support of those around you 6. Don't get discouraged if you need to re-read sentences or pages because you felt distracted (There is more coming up on how to stay focused when reading in a minute.) If we do make the decision to dedicate the quiet time needed to immerse ourselves in a book, it can have a PROFOUND impact on our person and life. If you listened to the introduction of Season 4, you heard me credit a close friend for insisting I read Jane Pauley's book, Your Life Calling. During the time my friend was reading it, she kept hearing my voice through Pauley's words. She kept seeing the conversations we'd shared while coasting down the Tennessee River the summer before. She was moved enough by this to keep sending me pictures of pages from the book. She went out of her way to get it to me, and then, she badgered me until I read it. And I say that in the most loving way, Jan. And I thank you for that. The truth is, I was honored that she saw me in a light similar to the experienced and wise Pauley, and at the same time, I was annoyed. I was annoyed because Jane Pauley had done so much in her career, and I was currently lying dormant. I was annoyed with myself for not continuing to try harder at what had meant so much to me. The thing was, at this point, I didn't even know if it still meant much to me, it felt like I just didn't have it in me to get back it. Because of my friend, Jan's, badgering, I picked up the book and turned the first page. I realized then that it wasn't just that Jane Pauley's book was informative, entertaining, and insightful, its' structure is similar to how I had envisioned writing my book about traveling the 50 states in 90 days interviewing people about passion. Jane Pauley includes previous show guests and their interviews, as well as her own life and her career experiences. She does all of this to introduce her audience to people who have designed lives they love, so readers can learn how to (and be inspired to) build a life that is more exciting or more meaningful. Pauley and I share a love for interviewing people about passion, we share the want to help people live lives they love. Needless to say, Jane Pauley got my attention and I perked up! I was most moved by her sister's interpretation of her talent. Pauley writes of her sister, “Ann told me I have a gift for helping people see themselves in positive and powerful new ways...

This show isn't just for people who know their direction in life. We are here to help everyone find their path and expand on it. Having the materials necessary to help you unleash your passion will rev your creative engine and get you ready to create! Find out how the right materials are like Halloween candy! MM542- Gather the Necessary Materials Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Gather the Necessary Materials In my efforts to work myself out of being flat, I did the steps I have recommended so far, and next to having cleared the space in my brain for freedom of thought, and after declaring a physical space for freedom of action, I needed materials! So often people teach us how to achieve a goal, but what if we're in the place where we don't know what's meant for us? My challenge was that in this stage in my process, I was searching for a goal and I had no desires. This is what Coming Back from Flat is all about; it's about going on a mission inside of yourself to find and free your self in a way that opens the world up to you in a new light. At this point in my process, all I knew was that I liked to write, and that putting ideas on paper helped me make discoveries. I had been a high school English teacher and I have a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I have two novels written that I have made some attempt at getting published, but to be honest, I let fear hold me back in this. I tell myself that my novels aren't any good, my writing is weak, and no one will want to publish or read them. My feelings on this are important to share with you, because over the past couple of years I have been denying my talent. Even though I knew I should have been writing a book about our “50 states in 90 days” tour, I allowed this negative talk to prevent me from doing it. I was avoiding writing; I was avoiding my talent. Part of my job in reclaiming myself, though, was to be open and up for anything. And what happened was that I naturally fell into writing, and this time, I didn't allow myself to resist it. Journaling in a little, yellow, one-subject notebook created an avalanche for me. Ideas began pouring out, and I needed more materials. I needed materials that would allow me to get my thoughts out of my head and on to a tangible space. And I needed to not be stingy with my materials. I forced myself to use the paper, use the pencils, to value every word because every word was important. I allowed myself to put one idea on a single page, if that's what I was feeling. I didn't care if I crumpled a page up and ditched it, if I decided that what was on it wasn't meaningful. Freedom of thought. Freedom of action. Freedom to create. I needed all the freedoms. When ideas started to flow out of me, I was hopeful that I was on to something, but I was still tentative; I was looking to go deeper into this, but I wasn't ready to fully commit, either. So, I dug more little one-subject notebooks out of my cabinet and with creative freedom gave myself license to fill the pages. These notebooks are where I began to find myself again, and they also gave me a place to jot down other writing or business ideas that came to me as I was working, this way, I wouldn't get distracted. Materials specific to your talent will rev up your creative engine, I'm sure you know which materials do this for you! I'm drawn to a fresh, blank notebook page and mechanical pencils in the way that painters may be drawn to colors and brushes and blank canvases. Singers might get excited by equipment, like microphones and speakers, and chefs have their ingredients and gadgets.

Have you ever journaled in a way that produced personal discoveries and shaped your path in life? Did you know that you have the power to do just that? Listen in to learn about freeing your mind and discover the eleven techniques that will help you set powerful intentions. MM - 541 - Journal with Abandon, Journal with Intention Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Journal with Abandon, Journal with Intention I went on a quest to come back from feeling flat, and if you've been following along here to see the steps I took to do that, you've realized that in doing this I reclaimed my passion. I had been stretching and meditating and eating healthier, then I started journaling. But the type of journaling I did here was very different from the kind I had ever done in the past. In these journal entries I didn't, typically, record life experiences unless I was trying to resolve or discover something. I was more searching for answers in these entries. I just started journaling all of my thoughts on a specific topic and I kept it simple and old school. I dug out a one-subject, bright yellow notebook that I'd had in the cabinet for years and I labeled it “Free-Writing.” And I started journaling with the intention to make personal discoveries. All you have to do to do this is relax. Just start rambling on about a topic that you want to know more about. In light of this episode, I just revisited my very first journal, and I have to tell you, I'm feeling a little moved. I didn't know what to write about in this entry, so I started with gratitude. I wrote about how thankful I am for my husband and his support, specifically because I've grown and changed a lot through our 35 years together. In the first paragraph of my entry, I write: “I've learned and grown and changed so much through the years, and he has held on. Nothing is sexier, nothing shows me how much he loves me more than this.” The entry goes on to discuss our struggles and challenges, and the idea that marriage teaches forgiveness, whether the marriage lasts a lifetime or it doesn't. I talk about how people take too many things too seriously, and that if we could get an aerial view of life, we would see how we're maneuvered in and out of people's lives for different purposes. That our time here is just all a learning experience and that everything we experience is meant to be. As I was writing this entry, as usually happens, one idea led to the next, led to the next.  And here's how my first journal entry ended: “I am growing to understand what it feels like when I am where I am supposed to be - just like when Kz was little - I am learning my Peace back!” The phrase “Learning my Peace back” just flowed out of me. And in my journal the “P” is capitalized. This is not an idea I'd ever had before. Something you should know, there has been an idea gnawing at my subconscious over this past year. I had the realization that the only time in my life where I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be was when I was raising my daughter. I never saw this as “Peace,” per se, but I never felt when we were drawing on the family room floor, or baking cookies in the kitchen, or strolling up and down the Seaside Heights Boardwalk that I should be doing something else. I just knew that what I was doing was enough. I was doing the most important job of my life: providing our daughter with new experiences, bolstering her creativity, just giving her a happy life. Important to know: I had no idea about this sense of peace when it was occurring. Similarly, all I knew the day she got her driver's license was that the dots in my he...

You are 100 percent capable of meditating. Let us show you why and how. Let us teach you how beneficial meditation is and why it is so important for you. MM - 540 - Trying to Meditate is Winning Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me! It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Trying to Meditate is Winning Please don't bail on me right out of the gate because you believe you are incapable of meditating. So many of us think we can't do it. So many of us think we aren't supposed to have any thoughts and that if we do, we failed. Please hear this: Just like how you cannot stop the heart from beating, you cannot stop you brain from thinking. We all have thoughts when meditating. Our goal when meditating is not to not think at all, it is to let those thoughts pass, watch them like a movie, and then gently still the mind again. Prayer is a form of meditation. Listening to music is a form of meditation. Observing the ocean or a sunset or snowfall is a form of meditation. And meditation is a form of self-care. It's rest. It's stillness. It's relaxation. It's enlightening. This is why even by just trying to meditate you are winning, because even if you think you could have done better, you still greatly benefitted. It took me time to understand all of this, which is why I want to share with you how it has benefited me. I didn't know anyone who meditated and the only image I had of anyone meditating was of people who didn't look like me, so I assumed it wasn't for me. I tried it only once or twice over the years and I never lasted long with it. But as I got more curious about spiritually, I started to pay more attention to the idea of meditation, and I paid even more attention a few years later when I started my coaching program. Sometime during that time, I came across Deepak Chopra and Oprah's guided meditation series. What I really loved about them, even though you have to purchase their 21-day programs and there are many free experiences on YouTube, was a couple of things. First, Deepak and Oprah teach powerful concepts in the time preceding the meditation that were aligned with what I had been learning in my coaching program. This was helpful to me because it reaffirmed what I'd been learning and it revisited the concepts in a new way. Also, Deepak and Oprah give you a daily mantra that you use to refocus your mind when it begins to wander. This mantra is the daily intention, and the 21 mantras strung together are designed to help you achieve a specific goal. Something else I really liked about their programs was the quality of the recordings, Chopra's speaking style, and the twenty-minute timeframe. These are all important aspects to consider when looking at the different meditations available. You can choose from a ten-minute experience or one that plays all-night long while you sleep. There are guided meditations where a host guides listeners through the process, and then there are those that are music only. There are male hosts and female hosts, and then, there are endless focus topics to pick from. If you want to gain confidence or self-worth, lose weight, overcome self-sabotage, grow your intuition, connect with source, or you have a different focus area, there are offerings for pretty much everything. One of my favorite guided meditations is by Mindvalley and it's on YouTube titled, “A Relaxing Guided Meditation to Boost Creativity.” It's eighteen and a half minutes long and I think it's a great starting point for new meditators. My husband, John, even enjoyed it. Someone else I follow on YouTube is Jess Shepherd, she has many, many meditations and I feel I have benefited from all of them. So,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Motivate Me!  It's Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let's get into the right headspace. Let's engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let's take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me. Today's focus is: Improving Your Diet It's almost impossible not to discuss diet when looking to make self-improvements. Before we get started today, I want to call your attention to the idea that diet is not just what we eat. It's anything we fill ourselves up with: what we watch, what we listen to, what we read, and who we surround ourselves with. These things, as well as food, impact how we progress in the world. Eating the wrong foods makes us feel lethargic, strips us of our self-confidence, and creates disease, that's the bottom line. And whether we make small changes or big changes to our diet, any improvement is an improvement. Starting small may be as simple as increasing our water intake by two glasses a day. One thing I do know is that if I start feeling better, I start doing better. I'm not here to preach to you or to make you feel down about your current physical state. My role is to just share my story and to be as honest as possible with you about what I did to get my head and heart back in the game, and addressing diet when doing this was important for me. So many health issues can be cured by diet, like diabetes and fatty liver, for starters. But diet can impact your mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and even something like seizures. I had no idea how much we can control our health and quality of life through diet! It seems obvious, but I just never made the connection. Let me share a story with you. My husband was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes about fifteen years ago. Diabetes runs in his family, so in our uneducated minds, it was just a matter of time before my husband would get it. He was great about managing his medications so I was not very involved in his process, and we didn't make too many changes in our lifestyle after his diagnosis because the medicine was doing that for us. About ten years later, in preparation for our daughter's wedding, we went on a strict clean-eating, healthy grain diet. I mean, I was measuring everything we ate and we could not have been eating better. We were eating chicken, pork, seafood, vegetables, fruit, quinoa, brown rice, and brown rice pasta. That is pretty much it in a nut shell. I even cut cheese out of my diet. It was during this time, though, that my husband was put on a second diabetes medication. And we thought, wow, this disease is really progressing! We just assumed that this is how diabetes worked, that it worsened over time. Our daughter got married that May, and over the summer we all pigged out. It wasn't until that following January that I decided I had to get back on the healthy bus. Our daughter and her husband had returned to California the Friday after the New Year, and my husband was going on a four-night business trip that following Monday. I had post-holiday blues, especially knowing it would be months before seeing my kids again. I was sad that my husband would be away for most of the next week, and I felt physically disgusting. So that Sunday before he left, I meal-prepped three meals and was determined to punish myself with them. One of the meals was a vegetable soup and one was ground turkey meatballs, and I can't remember what the other one was. They were delicious, don't get me wrong, but I was just aggravated with myself and with life in general. I was well-versed in different dieting styles, so I made meals that I knew were low in fat and low in carbohydrates. I had been hearing about the “Keto Diet” but didn't know exactly what it was. For the next four days I lied on the couch battling migraines and body aches. I ate what I had prepared,

In this day and age, our body, mind, and soul needs the kind of rest that is free from the mindset of over performing, free from keeping up with the façades presented online, free from overall feelings of inadequacy inspired by our inability to commit to the ideals of others. We need the kind of rest that is born in the present and breeds satisfaction; the kind that multiplies our joy and takes us out of the competition. Today we are talking about the importance of rest for the body, the mind, and the soul, because rest in all three of these areas is vital to the process of coming back from flat. So often in this day and age people are on a mission to do more and be more. Like the busier we are, the more important we feel; like the more productive we are, the more valuable we seem. We run more errands, do more exercises, accumulate more things. Do and get, do and get. On top of all of this, many of us are striving to compete with the façades people present online. How many times have we been left with our mouths, literally, open when a couple who appears online to have the perfect life and relationship split up? Meanwhile, we're over here exhausting ourselves trying to create some semblance of a life that matches up to their magical online image? How defeating is this? To feel like other people can attain this level of so-called happiness but it is unachievable for us? There is all of this, and then there's the Pinterest worthy birthday parties for our kids, and the travel magazine worthy vacations and photographs we must take. There is the rescuing of a dog versus the buying of one, and the growing of our own food, as well as the composting of it. I don't know about you, but I have never felt so guilty to use a paper towel in my life! What would happen if we just stopped the hamster wheel? What would happen if we took a second to acknowledge that we can be some of these things, but that we are not expected to be ALL of these things? We can't put our energy into EVERYTHING, we need to establish OUR personal thing. What would happen if we unsubscribed to the overperforming mindset and focused on protecting our body, mind, and soul? I think I know what happens when we try to stop. We feel guilty, like we're a bad person, like we're even letting our generation down. And, guilt is so huge. Guilt causes us to feel restless and it steals us of our peace. It steals us of our ability to be able to just exist in the present moment, and where are we if we're not in the present moment? Come down a rabbit hole with me for a minute. If we are not living right now in this present moment, then we are either living in the past or we are living in the future. Let's dive deeper on this. A Brazilian motivational speaker by the name Junia Bretas suggests that if our mind is focused on the past, we are living with regret and depression, and if our mind is focused on the future, we are living with worry and anxiety. In the spirit of helping us to truly rest our body, mind, and spirit, let's walk through this together. What are we thinking about from the past? Maybe a relationship that ended? Maybe words we've spoken that we can't take back? Maybe a parenting decision? Maybe a job we left? A home we sold or never purchased? How does it make us feel to focus on these regrets? Does it bring us down? Make us sad? Prevent us from moving forward because we don't want to feel like this again? But, if this is something that makes us feel so horrible, why are we living in it? Why are we staying there? Why are we wearing our mind out daily with these regrets? On the other hand, what is it we worry about for the future? Do we fear never finding love? Do we fear losing our job? Do we fear getting a disease? Do we fear death? No wonder why our body is not resting, we are too filled with anxiety. Here are some ideas I would like you to put into your toolbox. First, 99% of what we worry about never occurs.

We are in control of our mental and physical space, but so often we surrender these spaces to others. In this episode learn how to prepare mental and physical space where you can value time with self, establish freedom of thought, identify negative self-talk, and receive creative ideas. If you are serious about wanting to get more out of your life, like, you know you are just FLAT, and you have made the DECISION to feel more, accomplish more, be more... then you’ve been paying attention to the steps I’ve been lying out here for you: 1. Making Yourself a Priority (take your time learning how to do this) 2. Taking on a 30-Day Challenge 3. Adding Daily Stretches So what’s next? Next comes, Preparing Your Mental and Physical Space. Here is what I mean when I say, “mental space”: Mental space is the space we hold in our mind for determining our perceptions of the world, for establishing our personal values and beliefs. It’s the precious key to our well-being, and it’s where our creativity stems. Our mental space needs to be nurtured, and finding the time to do that is often low on the priority list. That’s why we call this time here together on Motivate Me!, “Me! Time.” And that is much of what you are doing when you spend time here with us: you are nurturing your mental space. It’s important for us to see this time as valuable. Valuable enough for us to schedule this time. As in, put it on a calendar as we would anything else we find important, like taking a loved one to an appointment. The first thing I had to do when digging deep to recover myself during quarantine was kick everyone else out of my mental space. Other people don’t belong here. In the third episode of this season I give you techniques on how to make yourself a priority. Our headspace is where that begins - it is where everything begins. Episode 534, Making Yourself a Priority, is an important episode, if you haven’t already listened. This is why preparing your mental space is so important because we need to have this one most important thing: FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. So many of us let others or the course of life just bump us along. We follow the leader of our tribe and do and believe the way others expect of us. Many of us don’t stop this flow to go against the current and form our own opinions. Many of us don’t realize we’re even doing that. When I was 18-years-old, I moved from New Jersey to California to hold myself accountable for this. To figure out where I stood on politics, on sexuality, of race and gender, if I wanted to go to college or not. I need to figure out all the things. And I needed freedom from everyone who mattered to me to figure out what mattered to me. I needed this to establish myself and my person. Taking a big leap like moving across the country is not necessary to accomplish this same goal. And being young isn’t either; we can do this at any age. Many people get into a place later in life where they decide they have a point of view they want to live. We are always entitled to change our minds, our views, and our opinions. And our feelings and ideas matter. Our feelings and ideas make a difference in the world. The only thing we do need to abandon is the idea that anyone else has the power to control our thoughts and beliefs.   The best part about our mental is space is that it’s private. Not one single soul has access to our thoughts unless we give it to them. So play with this space. Try on all sorts of ideas. See which fit for you. Start slowly. Do this privately. But do this with the intention to create. To create what you ask? I don’t know and you may not know yet, either. However, if we give ourselves the freedom of thought to be anything and do anything, we will discover something we want to create. Something that gets our head and heart back in the game of life. So, scheduling time for ourselves can be difficult and establishing our own ideas and opinions can be intimidating,

Description: We are teaching our bodies how to be. We train them when we’re active and we are training them when we’re not. So DECIDE what you want the rest of your days to look like and train your body accordingly. MM536- Get Stretching into Your Life Once I made the decision to go on a mission to aggressively seek myself and my passion again, I knew I had to do things that made me feel physically good. Things that would prevent later excuses, like aches and pains. Things that would engage my body. Things that would prepare my body for further physical engagement. “Tech neck” is a real issue, and many of us have it from looking down at our phones and computers. And as a teacher, writer, and social media presence, this was a problem for me. I had recently spent three days a week, two hours a day, for twelve weeks at a holistic therapy center where they helped me regain strength and flexibility in my neck, shoulders, and hips. I didn’t want to lose what I had started there, so in line with making myself a priority, I began doing the stretches I knew helped me most. There is a quick video posted on my Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda Instagram and Facebook page of me doing some of the neck stretches I do each day. I highly recommend looking into stretches that target your problem areas. It’s insane how much better your body can feel when stretching for only ten minutes a day. My body no longer aches, even when spending all day and night reading and writing. I call that a win! For additional awesomeness for the body and the posture, I highly recommend previous show guest Blake Bowman from. He teaches stretches that are always in synch with what I’m experiencing. You can find him on Instagram or YouTube under @guerrillazen. I’ve never seen anyone so focused on posture. And he gives real techniques that you can implement immediately and use to work on your own problem areas. Something fun that I do with my stretches is turn on music I don’t typically listen to. For me, it’s, “Alexa, shuffle 90’s R&B music.” When doing your stretches, take your time. Focus on you, focus on the muscles you’re stretching, focus on your physical and mental wellness, as well as mindfulness. Breathe in positivity. Breath out negativity. Feel the music. Feel the healing. Come chat with me on social media! You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda, and you can join our private Facebook group: Motivate Me! Support System to speak with me there. If you are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review… and share it with your friends if you know that they are working to get their mojo back, too! I am going to leave you with some truth talk: The reality is that we are teaching our bodies how to be. We train them when we’re active and we are training them when we’re not. So DECIDE what you want the rest of your days to look like and train your body accordingly. Remember, you Motivate Me!

Description: Jump on board the Motivate Me! train this season to get your head and heart back in the game and reengage in life again. Try a challenge. Take a small step. Commit to doing something daily. Reinstate a small routine. Get engaged in something. Let it inspire you. MM535- Taking on a 30-Day Challenge Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Motivate Me! It’s Me! Time where we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let’s get into the right headspace. Let’s engage in the idea that this is “Me! Time” - where YOU are the priority. Let’s sit in that idea for a second. Let’s take two slow, deep breaths. Inhale some fresh air, exhale the old. Understand that everything you want to do is only a decision away. OK, let’s prepare for today’s focus. Today’s Focus: Taking on a 30-Day Challenge I’m not somebody who is normally big on taking challenges. But when I was trying to work myself out of the funk I was in that was filled with negative self-talk and procrastination that never materialized, something as simple as a “New Year, New You” 30-Day Challenge really helped change my headspace. To find the specific challenge I did by FabStory, you can visit my Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda Instagram, it’s posted there. This challenge was just something fun that I committed to do daily for myself. To show myself that I could and would commit to something on a daily basis. Let’s remember, we were in the thick of the quarantine here, just coming off of the holidays with the second surge of Covid-19 and the new strain in full force. It was a very scary time. My mindset was shaky, at this point. I was trying not to think about the fact that we couldn’t plan anything, that we had no future in sight. No vacations, no plays, no concerts. Not knowing when we would be able to go anywhere for the holidays or see family. And we had just moved out of state. I was afraid to go to a doctor’s appointment! Like everyone else, I was nervous about getting the virus, and I was sad and fearful for the people who had it or lost loved ones from it. The world was insane and there was fighting everywhere: in the streets, on the news, on social media. And on top of all that, I felt guilty. Guilty because we weren’t suffering physically or financially. Guilty for being so down and not feeling like I had a right to be so down. I felt selfish feeling sad when other people were out their losing lives and businesses. The only thing that made me feel better about this was knowing that I was not alone; that so many of us were feeling the same way. But, because of all of this, I was eating and drinking too much. I was watching too much television. Spending too much time on my phone. I could have been writing my book, but I wasn’t. I could have been walking, but I wasn’t even doing that. My groceries were being delivered, so I didn’t even get out and move around on those nice big shopping days that would always push my body a little. Everyone else in my family had important jobs they were working from home doing, and my life had boiled down to making meals, doing dishes, and busying myself. Not what I was used to at all. So, doing this simple 30-day challenge got me into doing different things, and it got me in the mindset that small steps were important. What’s funny is that I’m the type person that usually attacks things in one big bite, instead of several small ones. Doing anything slowly has always been torture for me, not recently, though. I was just dragging. This year slowed me down, waaay down, and this challenge helped pick me up again.  Over Christmas, I had made a vow to reengage in life, and I had to start slowly to do that. So as last episode discusses, I started by making myself a priority. Then, I took responsibility for my own happiness, and I let go of feeling responsible for the happiness of others.The challenge is what I did next and it gave me a little smat...

Description: Discover seven techniques that will aid you on your quest to making yourself a priority, so you can get your head and heart back in the game to reclaim your passion! MM534 - Making Yourself a Priority Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Motivate Me! It’s Me! Time where we are working on coming back from flat. Before we start, let’s get into the right headspace. Let’s engage in the idea that this is “Me! Time” - where YOU are the priority. Let’s sit in that idea for a second. Let’s take two slow, deep breaths. Inhale some fresh air, exhale the old. Understand that everything you want to do is only a decision away. OK, let’s prepare for today’s focus. Today’s Focus: Making Yourself a Priority Some of us are more familiar with this idea than others. Some of us struggle with this more than others. Let’s take a deep dive into what making yourself a priority looks like: 1. Decide and commit (Listen to this episode to hear what this looked like for me.) 2. Prepare Others and Require Support 3. Take Responsibility for Your Own Happiness - But Not for Others 4. Envision Where and How You Will Make Yourself a Priority - this Includes Mental and Physical Space 5. Making Yourself a Priority is not Selfish - This is a Gift to Self and Others 6. Take Your Time: Create and Protect Your Mental and Physical Space 7. Set Boundaries to Gain Self-Respect and Prevent Resentment Visit the motivatemepodcast.com website to get connected to our Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda Instagram or Facebook, as well as our private Facebook group: Motivate Me! Support Group. I would like to leave you with this final thought: Setting boundaries is a form of self-respect. When you respect yourself, so will others. This will not only make you feel valuable, it will help you find your value.

Description: Bonus episode that shares the story of how the Motivate Me! team managed to travel the 50 states in ninety days interviewing people about passion. They used the Motivate Me! Action Plan to make this grand decision, learn about the action plan here! MM533- 50 States in 90 Days Tour This is a bonus episode that shares the story about how the Motivate Me! 50 States in 90 Days Tour idea came about, and how the team and crew pulled it off. This episode is important because it helps listeners learn about Lynette, the trip, and the Motivate Me! Action Plan: Envision, Explore, Execute. Listen for the full account, and then get ready to come back from flat with Lynette and all of her fellow motivators out there!

Description: Motivate Me! with Lynette Renda is all about passion. Join us for “Me! Time” and come back from flat! MM 532 - Welcome to Season 4 of Motivate Me! Hello and welcome to Motivate Me! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Lynette Renda and myself and my team started this podcast six years ago to inspire people to live a life that is more exciting and/or more meaningful. Since then, we have conducted well over 400 interviews and even traveled the fifty states in ninety days to interview people about passion. Our Goal with Season 1 was to use our show guests as models. For our audience to see HOW others were living passion-filled lives and apply what these guests were doing to their own lives so they could get similar results. Our Goal with Season 2 was to air a live daily episode from the road of our 50 states in 90 days Tour. Here, we were inviting our audience to take this trip with us. We were showing them the benefits of taking exciting, calculated risks in life. We were modeling life outside of comfort zones. Our Goal with Season 3 was to air the interviews we’d done in each of the fifty states. To demonstrate that people from all over the country are living their passion. To inspire our audience to do the same: whether it’s part-time, full-time, paid, or volunteer. That there is so much more to life when you are living one that is chosen by you and not just happenstance. We planned the trip and did the trip, I worked with an editor for a year to post all of the interviews from the trip on the Motivate Me! TV with Lynette Renda YouTube Channel. And it was amazing… and it was a lot… then, two of the team members got married and moved from the east coast to the west coast. And life happened, and my husband and I moved to a new state, and the pandemic hit, and there was quarantine and chaos, as well as special memories and lots and lots of fun distractions.  But, let me tell you what happened next… (listen to this episode to hear how I fell flat and what and whom inspired me to re-claim my passion). All of this to say… Our Goal with Season 4 is to help people come back from flat! To reengage in life, to reclaim their passion, to get their hearts and heads back in the game. This is different from the other seasons. There are no interviews involved. This season is just me and you, and your commitment to “Me! Time.” And, this commitment is key. I took steps to reconnect with myself. I did it a little at a time, but I got quick results… even though I wasn’t looking for results! I was just doing things daily that I knew were beneficial for me. And, boom! The process worked so quickly and completely! My passion was back. I was inspired, and I was moved to act! That is how I am here with you, now! I realized that THIS, what I was doing on a daily basis to reconnect with myself, is what Motivate Me! is all about for 2021. That THIS is what I needed to be sharing with our audience. The light flicked on and I told my husband that I needed to start recording what I was doing. That I needed to share this on my Instagram for my audience in quick easy steps. That meant firing my Facebook business page back up, because some of my followers don’t have Instagram. That meant, taking the uphill climb to reinvigorate our website, because when I was on shutdown, so was it. The site got hacked; it was a mess and needed to be completely re-done. Tip: Acknowledge when you are tested like this. Tests like these are proof when you are in the right direction, because I was not deterred, and because my team jumped right in to help which showed me they were all-in and would not be deterred, either. We all felt the timing and the energy in this, and it felt then (and feels now) amazing. So, how can you get the most out of Season 4? Out of “Me! Time”? I suggest three things:             1) Listen to this podcast every Monday             2) Follow along on social media on eith...

Enjoy the Season 3 Finale of the Motivate Me with Lynette Renda podcast and YouTube show featuring Lynette Renda, Chelsea Rathie Sitzman, and Cassie Hunter! Over 20,000 miles driven, 4,000 miles flown, 200 unique guests spoken to, and 244 videos and podcasts aired... the Motivate Me! #50statesin90days trip has been a great success. See their journey through this episode's slide show. They would like to send out a GIANT THANK YOU to family, friends, hosts, and most of all to the Season 3 guests who helped them make a positive impact on this beautiful world!

Live from Home on the show's one-year anniversary! Lynette celebrates being back at the Jersey Shore with previous Girl Scout troop member Leanna Goodman. Leanna reflects on how what Lynette has accomplished has impacted her perspective on her own life and nursing career. Lynette's wish in this final trip episode is the same as her wish in the very first episode of her podcast: that her audience finds a way to live a life that is more meaningful or more exciting. http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

The last interview on the Motivate Me! crew's 50 states in 90 days tour is with Grammy winner Ben Kane from Electric Garden! Ben is a music engineer who is passionate about making music and music recordings. He earned a Grammy for best R&B Album for his participation in D'Angelo's Black Messiah album. Ben gives a couple of powerful examples of how patience and determination can turn a passion into powerful accolades. He will have you asking yourself: "How much do I want it"?  http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com

Live from the Road: Behind the scenes footage we never thought we would air for you - be we are! It's too cool not to. Just hanging out in Aric Johnson and Krisi Krings home recording studio in NYC. If you have never been inside an apartment in the big city, this is what it looks like. Other than the bedroom, this is pretty much it. Despite any inconveniences, you will hear Aric and Kristi say that this leap of faith was the best thing they could have ever done! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Aric Johnson took the leap from Colorado to Manhattan in order to create. Whether he is working on writing, music, or film, he says pushing past perfectionism is key. He suggests practicing imperfection; he follows the "hurry up failing, so you can succeed" philosophy. Aric's challenge to you: Stop holding yourself back by creating barriers; start moving toward your passion today! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Singer, songwriter, speaker Kristi Krings uses her voice to change the world. She does this through song, as well as through a speaking career that includes a program that promotes kindness. She took the leap from Colorado to NYC, and with her producer husband turned their apartment into a recording studio. Do not partake in this episode, unless you are willing to have an honest conversation with yourself about how you could be living more authentically! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Follow-up interview with Season 1 guest Michael Scotti Jr. In Season 1, Michael talked about how fear almost held him back from applying for a job at the Major League Baseball Network. Just over a year and a half later, Mike has been promoted and has an Emmy with his name on it on the way! Let Mike motivate you to get past feeling half-ready in order to start making real progress. http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Vice Principal Nicholas Perrone from New Haven, Connecticut is passionate about breaking down the "school to prison pipeline." Nicholas is on a quest to help students make good choices, to help them better their lives, and he will go to great lengths to accomplish this goal. If you have ever considered becoming a teacher or a school administrator, the emotion in Vice Principal's interview will encourage you to take that next step! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Tagan Engel has taken her love for food and people in different directions during her lifetime, but none that has been as emotionally fulfilling as using it to strengthen her community and improve the health of its members. Tagan will broaden your perspective on how to build out your passion in directions you have not yet considered. http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Hanifa Washington is uber passionate about connecting hearts and people. She is all about thought partnership and human connection, about finding and sharing her own voice, about living truth. Two nuggets from this interview are that all people are one, and that to pursue passion, people need to start with "rest." There is so much more here, PLUS: you get to see Hanifa perform! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Mistina and Luke Hanscom from Lotta Studio have created a space that embodies their passion, as well as promotes the talents of those in their community. Together, these two artists formed a unique niche, and in doing so, have designed a life they are excited to live. Take in their experience and apply it to your life. Like Mistina and Luke, what small decisions can you make today that will bring about great change for you - and possibly others? http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Michaela Lamb is passionate about all things weddings! Ever wonder what a wedding planner's role and life is like? She goes into great detail about the feeling of satisfaction she gets from making wedding dreams come true for others, and the feeling of accomplishment she feels from business ownership for herself. Get motivated to take a calculated leap in your life! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Live from the Road: Wedding planner Michaela Lamb and Lynette have a conversation about why, despite how much they loved teaching, they left the field to enter another one. And who was instrumental in this change and how. Do you feel there is something missing in what you are doing now? http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Entrepreneur Linda Stacy from LivingBluPrints.com is all about creating systems that allow less burnout and more turnout. Her passion is helping hyper-busy professionals find work-life balance. She discusses her own struggles in these areas, and promotes taking the first step in the right direction and letting the rest evolve when heading into new territory. Linda is going to get you thinking about how you organize in your life - not the things, the time! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

For Toby Fisher, flipping homes is about more than financial gain. He is an ethical real estate investor who has found ways to reap financial and emotional reward from his projects. Toby will inspire you to live a life that you love, to ward off feeling overwhelmed by taking each project one step at a time, and to have faith, even when you feel there is no reason to. http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Live from the Road: With two states and three days to go Lynette is full of awe, emotion, and gratitude. Listen to what the last days will bring! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Richard Boddie was in a car accident that caused him to slow down. This, and a personal development program, forced him to take an honest look at how he was going about life. It was tough for him to take off the mask. He would like to share his passion for self-discovery with you by asking you to answer the question: Who am I? Check out this episode to hear more details about this and SO much more! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Jeff Photiades, a wealth management advisor, will ABSOLUTELY change your perspective on life. Just some ideas shared here: you are 81% more likely to achieve life-changing goals when it is written down, putting labels on yourself creates misery, and "Life is perfect, we just don't like it that way." Please open your mind so that Jeff can help raise your awareness - get ready to take notes! http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/

Live from the Road: This is what happens when a podcast host on a 50-state tour sits down for a chat about comfort zones with a business owner and a self-published author!  Thank you, Marie Romano and T.L. Manning!  http://5ed.8db.myftpupload.com/