Are you reacting to change or proactively creating it in your life?
In this episode, Tiffany dives into the power of proactive change. She explores how to shift from merely reacting to life’s changes to actively creating the life you desire.
Here's what you'll discover:
- Reactive vs. Proactive Change: How to identify and harness both.
- Building Proactive Habits: Tips to cultivate a proactive mindset.
- The Power of Prioritization: How saying "no" can lead to more meaningful "yeses."
- Creating Room for Growth: Practical strategies for organizing your life to welcome new opportunities.
Tune in to start making proactive change happen!
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Intro
[00:07] Exploring the concept of change: reactive vs. proactive
[01:31] Discussing changes that are part of life’s infrastructure
[02:50] Importance of cultivating the ability to create change
[05:12] Practical strategies to organize life for new opportunities
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:01]:Welcome to Scared Confident. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. A word that I've been paying a lot of attention to lately is this word change. And as I, like, look among my life and just sort of at the world, I've, like, categorized two kinds of change. There's that change that happens to us, and then there's that muscle that, like, our ability to create change into our lives, but it's not happening to us. It's like, we push that change into our space. We push that change into our time. So an example of, like, change that happens to us can be positive.
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:38]:Like, you got a promotion or summer is coming or your kid is getting older, like those kinds of things. Like, that's change that happens to you. And it can be tragedy. Sometimes cancer. Things happen to you. Loss. Those are things that happen to you that you are put in a place where you have to react and respond to that change that's coming. And I think that we can get to a place where the only kind of change that we react to or the only kind of change that we respond to is the change that we're reacting to, those things that are happening.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:11]:And I like when you look at your life, like, from a young kid, there's a lot of things that happen that create change. They're just, like, institutional. They're built in the way that the world works. So, like, you're a little kid and you're at home or you're in daycare, and then you start school. Well, starting school is a change. It's like, in the infrastructure of our world. And then you go to middle school, and that's a change. You have to figure out how to acclimate there.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:31]:And then high school and then college and then after college, like, you've got to figure out how to get a job, and you may want to get married. And so that's a change that you do. And then you have kids. Like, these are changes that at some level are societal, and at some level are things that not happen to you, but they happen because of the environment that we live in, the way that we picture our lives, those kinds of things. And then you get to this thing called middle age, which I'm, like, decidedly in right now. Decidedly in. It's like the most shocking thing. If you're younger than me, when you're 44, almost 44, I'm telling you, it's hilarious to be like, I'm middle aged.
Tiffany Sauder [00:02:06]:This is what it looks like. This is who I am. This. I'm doing middle aged things. But when you're middle aged, it can get to a place where all you're doing is managing the choices you've made, but you have lost the muscle of being able to proactively create change in your life. Things like getting healthy, things like starting that business idea that you have, things like saving more money than you're doing, like, how do you create proactive change in your life? And that's what I think is, like, the secret to, like, youth and vitality. And I obsess over this idea of a life of and. And I believe that when we can't figure out how to add ands into our life, our heart desires that our childhood self laid in bed and dreamed about.
Tiffany Sauder [00:02:50]:When we can't figure out how to put those ands into our lives, it's often because we have lost the muscle. We've lost the ability to be able to put proactive change in our life, to create the capacity, create the space, create the systems, create the room so that more ands can happen. And whenever you add something new, it's inefficient. You don't know how to do it, you don't have the equipment, you don't know where it goes, you don't know, like, how you're insecure, like, all the things. And so to think about adding something new when you're in this season of life that is so busy, otherwise, I think we can let the growth muscle atrophy and we can lose the ability to be able to put proactive change into our lives. So I guess want to just bring some focus to those concepts in this short little episode this week of, like, where are you only reacting to change? And have you lost the muscle to be able to proactively put change into your life? And you know that my primary tool for figuring out how to add additional ands into my life is to ask myself the question, what am I willing to give up to get what I want? And I want to give up the things that I least enjoy, at least feel uniquely qualified to do, least invest in my relationships. And so I pick the administrative tasks of my life to give up so that I get to do other really cool things, like my laundry, like washing my sheets, like sweeping out my garage, like taking the trash can to the end of the driveway, like, it's silly. But all of these things that you do that take three to four to five minutes add up to be a huge part of our lives if we allow it to be.
Tiffany Sauder [00:04:26]:And so this, that's my primary tool is to say what am I willing to give up to get what I want? That has to be the question you ask, because every single thing that you start is a no to something else, even if you can't see it. A no to attention to your kids, a no to being able to be home for an evening, a no to going to sleep earlier, a no to idle time with your family. Like anything that you say yes to is a no to something else. Even if you did not intentionally make that exchange of time and energy, et cetera, it just is. It is not a zero sum game. And so in order to make it a zero sum game, meaning when you add something, it doesn't just become this life that is overflowing and crazy and chaotic. And so then we're only in this reactive state of change. You have to look at what am I willing to give up to be able to add, to be able to get.
Tiffany Sauder [00:05:12]:To be able to get better at, to be able to add this and into my life. So anyways, are you in the habit of creating proactive change? Are you in the habit of getting to a place where your life is in order so that you can say, I have the capacity for growth, I have the capacity to get organized so that I can add more? Ands, I just think that's like the holy Grail. I really do. That's what I think about when I'm driving around the world, when I'm taking kids places, as I think about getting my life to a place where we are almost 100% proactive, where we are in the moment, where we're in our relationships, and that we are spending time mostly on the things that we're uniquely qualified to do. So where is there proactive change in your life? Thanks for listening. Thank you for joining me on another episode of scared confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life.
Tiffany Sauder [00:06:03]:I will.
