Motivation Monday (August 31, 2020)

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TRANSCRIPT
​(May contain slight errors. To quote any part of this podcast, please refer to the audio.)

Each week -- a new theme. Each day -- ten minutes to focus our mindset on what matters.  I’m Sarah Parker Wolf and you’re listening to the FOCUSED INTENTION Podcast. Thanks for joining me!
This week’s theme is HOW IT IS
And Today is Motivation Monday and that means we focus on getting ourselves ready for a great week ahead!

So, welcome to the first daily episode of the FOCUSED INTENTION podcast. I’m excited that you’re here with me and I hope that you got a chance to listen to our introductory episode just to give you an idea of what you can expect each day from the FOCUSED INTENTION podcast. If you didn’t, that’s okay too. I’m sure you’ll catch on quite quickly, it’s not that complicated. 
 
We do have a theme this week. It’s “How It Is” and today is Motivation Monday so hopefully we will leave here with a little bit of motivation to get ourselves focused and live with intention throughout the week. 
 
So, in my regular day job, I mostly write advertising copy and I will tell you, I have never used the word “unprecedented” more than I have in this dare I say, “obnoxious” year of 2020. It’s true enough that we keep delving into unsettling situation after unsettling situation and throughout all of this, I keep coming back to the same idea…that our lives are very rarely how we “think it should be” it’s just “how it is.” Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t take action to mold the future but we are all starting with the present and you can’t change the present. It is how it is. 
 
So, I think back to when I was younger and the magazines that we would read or the TV shows we would watch and how much it informed how we thought things should be. What we thought our house should look like, what we thought we should wear or how to style our hair or how old we should be when we get married or how many kids we should have and all of these preconceived notions were stuffed into our heads and we become disappointed when things don’t turn out the way we thought they would. I always think I need to dig a little deeper. Where did that come from? Where did I even get that idea? 
 
It really comes from thinking in too many ways. We focus on the past and all the things we could have or should have done different that we can’t change. Or we focus too far in the future on how we wish something could be instead of starting where we are at. My house sometimes has a big Nutella smear across the refrigerator and it certainly doesn’t look like anything I have seen in Good Housekeeping. I didn’t get married at 26.2 years old or have 2.3 children or whatever we’re supposed to have. Life looks different for everybody. 
 
We get to the point where we want to make a change of some kind. Whether that’s one of these big, giant changes that people are calling for throughout the United States and throughout the world or whether it’s just I want to lose five pounds. We have to be okay with where we are starting. So, that is kind of what this week is about. It’s just “how it is” and when we accept how it is, we can move forward. We can think of action steps to move us in the direction we want to go. But if we are in some la-la land, we’re hiding under the table, hiding our proverbial ostrich head in the sand, we can’t start to move forward because we can’t even figure out where we are starting from. 

​There is all kinds of time when we are focused on nostalgia and how things were. Why can’t things be the way they were? And then there is a whole bunch of time when we are focused on the future and it’ll change tomorrow – tomorrow will be different – or we’ll do things differently, or I wish it were this way. But today, how about you and I, how about we NOT focus on we wish things were or how they once were, or even how they may be in the future. Let’s focus on right now and how we are going to work with what is right in front of us. How we can take action based on where we are today to mold the future that we want to create.  We can make this “now,” we can make it miserable and think only about how things were or how we want things to be. Or we can choose to make the best of what we are experiencing right now. Let’s figure out where we are starting from. A good starting point for all of this wonderful life of focus and intention we are trying to create, but we are going to start with “how it is.”  
 
Today’s focus then is a simple thought,though it is a tall order.
 
Our intention is this:  I focus on the NOW – this moment. I focus on the NOW – this moment.
 
As you go about your day, in this yes, unprecedented time, when anxiety or stress or even blame starts to eat at you, come back to this intention. Let’s repeat it a few times so we don’t forget it.

Let’s take a deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. One more time. In through the nose, out through the mouth. 
 
I focus on the NOW – this moment.
I focus on the NOW – this moment
I focus on the NOW – this moment.
I focus on the NOW – this moment.
I focus on the NOW – this moment.
 
Thank you so much for spending ten minutes with me today. And I hope that if you enjoyed the episode, you’ll be back tomorrow and that you’ll subscribe or follow this podcast and you’re your friends as well. You can also go to Sarahparkerwolf.com and sign up for my weekly email. I will send you a nice printable of all the week’s intentions so that you can keep that close by when you want to go back and think about that. I also encourage you to visit us on Facebook. Just look up “Focused Intention Podcast” and there we are. And of course, if you like what you hear, come back tomorrow, rate us, review us so we can invite more people to share this great time with us. So now,  let’s go out and live with intention, love like crazy and have a great day!