Shannon Kaiser will help you release blocks in 2012 so you can live your best year yet with these foolproof tools.
The Awakened & Aligned Podcast with Shannon Kaiser
Episode 1: Resolutions Don't Work/ Find Peace in 2012
- Hi, welcome to PlayWithTheWorld.com podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Kaiser. I'm an inspirational author, a travel writer, and an intuitive life coach here to help you love your life to the fullest. Now, as you know, I haven't always been this happy of a person I truly am happy and at peace at every second of my life now, but it hasn't always been that way. If you've been following my journey, you know that I was in a career that I didn't relate to and I spent the majority of my life looking for happiness in all of the wrong places. I would avoid trying to feel the feelings of anxiety and depression by turning to things that were not good for me. I went through many different addictions, trading one addiction for the other, starting with a workaholic addiction. Everyone I knew called me a workaholic, but I didn't care. I thought it was normal to work 80 hours a week, all to mask my pain that I was in a career that I didn't feel connected to and it didn't relate to me. I pursued a career in advertising and marketing, climbed the corporate ladder, and the higher on that corporate ladder I got, the more and more alone and out of alignment with who I really am, I felt. So I would cry every single day and I thought that was normal. So I turned to lots of things like overeating and then turned into over exercising and then using men to escape my pain and then worse getting into drugs and picking up some pretty bad habits there. Well, I hit rock bottom and I was forced to recognize my life and the shambles that it was. I took responsibility and I became accountable. For the first time in my life I put myself in the equation and I said, I deserve better and I wanna be happy. So that is exactly what I am here to talk to you about. On the other side of misery there is hope and there is excitement and it's right around the corner. So if there's any area of your life that you're not happy with or you're feeling stuck or you feel out of control, I'm here to help. This is what I do and this is what I did with my life and these podcasts are just one way for me to do that. So each podcast is going to be a series of motivational mantras is how, that's what I'm gonna call them because they're little tips and tricks and inspirational things that I've used to help pull me out of depression. I'm no longer a depressed girl, I am so happy and I am leaving my dreams at every moment. So this is for you. As we leave 2011, we enter into 2012. How exciting, another year has gone by. Now if you're like me, you probably love the holidays but there's something different about New Year's. It's different than any other holiday. Mostly because we have an opportunity to go inward. And reflect. We can look at what isn't working in our life and what is working. We can choose to see the hope in the future. And if there's an area of your life that you think you'd like to pay more attention to, it's a time to focus on that and give a little love to yourself and others. That's what New Year's is all about. So Happy New Year to you. And as I'm preparing my content for my workshops, I'm gonna have a new year, new awesome you workshop. And it's going to be very exciting because a lot of times what we do in the New Year is we think about resolutions. Well, I'm not one to make a resolution, although I'm a very goal orientated person. Resolutions don't work. I'll give you an example. For the past 15 years of my life, I've made it a resolution to lose weight. And every year I look at that list and I'm weighing more than I did the year before. And I think to myself, resolutions don't work. And then I beat myself up mentally and then I go overeat. And then I just, whatever it is, it's a vicious cycle. And I continue to prove myself right by saying resolutions don't work. So the consensus is that we don't like resolutions. What I do is called super me mantras. It's a little different than resolutions. It's basically a little mantra you can say to yourself. So instead of saying I wanna lose weight this year, I looked at my resolutions. This is 2010 going into 2011. And I said, I wanna be the healthiest fittest me. But instead of saying I want to be, I said I am and I made it the present tense. I am the healthiest fittest version of me. So throughout the whole entire year, I focused on feeling healthy rather than weight. I focused on feeling alive and excited. What does health look like? Well, for some people it may be going to the gym daily and that was me. I used to be an endurance athlete and I would work out three, four hours a day just to keep up with my triathlon schedule. But I grew out of that phase and it no longer is me. Now, my excitement of feeling healthy comes from taking care of myself. And that could be taking a hot bath. That could be gently petting my dog. Feeling healthy is different than feeling light and thin. I feel thin and light all the time now no matter what my weight is because I truly appreciate what life has to offer us. So my shift happened this year when I realized I can't enjoy ice cream for breakfast or lunch or dinner. It's before when I would beat myself up that I would resist the ice cream or resist the foods that's when the weight would pile on. So I'd beat myself up and get mad at myself. It was a vicious, vicious cycle. For me, it was about treating myself kindly and looking at the areas of my life that I could be more compassionate and it started with the way I viewed food. I would use food as a comfort. And so naturally, if I have a goal and I'm not meeting my goal, then I need to look at what is the motivation behind that goal? And that's what I'm here to talk to you guys about today. If you have a resolution or a goal that you've been wanting for a really long time, you should ask yourself, why don't you have it? And when you get quiet and when you listen to yourself, the reasons that you don't have what you truly want are usually not the reasons you think. The first one that pops to your head isn't always the right answer. So for the longest time, I really want to be thin and I want to lose weight and weigh X amount of pounds. If you were to ask me a couple of years ago why I don't have that, I would just say because I love food so much or because I don't have enough money to pay a personal trainer like the famous people. But what's really behind that is a motivation much deeper and that is what I want to share with you guys in 2012. But before we get there, I want to give you guys a couple of things that you can kind of pull from, put them in your Peace Pack. I joined a yoga studio this year in the spirit of being healthy. I started Vikram yoga. Vikram yoga is so intense and it is one of the most therapeutic things that I've ever done for myself. It is practiced in intense heat. The studio is usually heated to over 108 degrees. So you're dripping sweat if you're doing it and the moves are very, very intense in the sense that you're holding them for a long time. So it's not only a physical workout but it's a mind, body, spiritual workout. And some of the things that I've learned in yoga this year have truly transformed my life. They've taken me on a journey from being someone who was judgmental, of being someone who was unkind to herself, to being someone I stand in front of you today at full peace and compassion for me and everyone else. The greatest gift of all is loving yourself and the greatest gift is honoring you and your gifts to the world. And yoga has helped me do that. Let's dive in. For example, the first thing the instructors tell you is don't compare yourself to other people. Well, that applies to every aspect of our life. Don't compare yourself to people at work. Don't worry about the person next to you and why the boss likes them better or don't worry about why one daughter likes your husband more than you. You don't have to worry about anything else except for yourself. If you're too busy comparing yourself to other people then you're never giving yourself an opportunity to put yourself into the equation. I'll say that again in a slightly different way. If you're too busy comparing yourself to everyone else then you're limiting yourself. You're not allowing yourself to truly live out your full potential. What does this look like? Well, if you go to the gym and you're constantly worrying about what other people are wearing or the person next to you on the treadmill is running faster than you or you're driving into work and the person next to you has a nicer car or whatever it is there's something behind why we worry about what we compare ourselves to. So if somebody has something better then maybe you feel like you don't have enough or you're not good enough. You're not pretty enough. You're not smart enough. You're not thin enough. The list goes on and on. But in yoga as I've learned to apply this to every aspect of my life there's no benefit in comparing yourself to anyone else. There's no real reality to comparing yourself either because it's a dialogue you play in your own mind. It's not real and you don't need to consume your time worrying about what other people think of you or worrying how someone else is doing in comparison to you. All you have to focus on is yourself which is exactly what yoga has taught me. To let go of the restraints and the restrictions and the judgment there's no need which is a very compassionate way to be which is exactly what yoga teaches its students. It teaches its students to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself which I talked about taking care of myself isn't just about working out and eating the right foods it's about honoring myself. If I want to try ice cream and enjoy it I will. If I want to take a hot bath I'm going to. If I want to do a yoga class in 108 degrees I will. Same goes for you. How are you taking care of yourself? Because you know that when we don't take care of ourselves our outward world will reflect that. If you feel chaotic and out of control take a look around how is your area? It's either very messy and cluttered your closet you can't find anything in it your desk is piling up or it's meticulously clean. Spotless, spig and span which is another form of controlling your environment because you feel out of control in your own world. So rather than beating yourself up ask yourself what is the real problem here? What do I really feel? So it starts with getting in touch with your feelings making sure that you're not comparing yourself to other people and truly taking care of your stuff. The thing about bic rum that I've really learned the thing as I close out 2011 what I've learned is that peace starts with you. Peace is in me. I spent 30 years looking for peace outside of me looking for it in the shopping malls in drugs in men in jobs in job titles it was nowhere to be found. It wasn't until I looked inward and fearlessly started to remove the things that weren't working so I could create a life of truly living from a place of authentic true me. It wasn't until then that I was able to see that peace is possible at every moment of your life. Peace starts with you. So when someone cuts you off as you're trying to go park at the mall peace starts with you. If you are frustrated because the person you live with your significant other isn't doing their amount of fair share around the house peace starts with you. If someone makes you angry choose not to be angry and immediately in an instant you have an opportunity to choose peace because peace starts with you. I want to thank you guys for joining me today for the first official updated and revised play with the world podcast. I'm Shannon Kaiser motivational life coach, author and travel writer. Please visit playwiththeworld.com. You can sign up for a free love your life to the fullest kit and you can also click on events and get all kinds of information about workshops, lectures, all kinds of things I have going on and I would love to hear from you guys if you have a question you want me to address. That is what this podcast is for. Like I said, I have had a lot of time using my life credentials to wrap around and recognize what will work in life to truly attain lasting peace prosperity and love because you can love your life to the fullest. You