The Causey Consulting Podcast

Creating Your Future

October 08, 2020 Sara Causey Episode 48
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Creating Your Future
Show Notes Transcript

Lots of people advocate journaling. If you don't like writing or you don't want it to be a rehash of your daily activities, how do you actually use it to deliberately create your own future?

Key topics:

✔️ If you skipped your shadow work last week, DO IT.
✔️ The gremlins always find their way out, in one form or another.
✔️ If you focus on what is, you get more of what already is.
✔️ Instead of "hoping" for the best, create it for yourself.

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Unknown:

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. Today I want to talk about the power of journaling. I'm sure you've heard me talk before about how much weight our words carry, how much our own words about ourselves really matters. Well, the written word matters, too. Now, before I get into journaling, and the homework assignment that I want to give you, I want to circle back to last week's homework assignment, which was about Shadow Work. If you felt afraid to go into the darkness, to carry a lantern or a flashlight in there and poke around and really see what you may have been hiding from yourself, or habits that you feel like perhaps you don't want to carry with you into 2021. If you skip that work, it's important to do it. I want to read a passage from Honoring Your Ancestors by Mallorie Vaudoise. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly, I hate to mispronounce someone's name. But it is a bit of a sneak preview to the final homework assignment that I will give you for the last week of October. But I digress. That's in the future. So here's the passage. "The truth is we really can't hide trauma and ignoring it doesn't make it disappear. Some of the ancestors in our lines may have tried to do this out of love thinking that they could spare their children the suffering they had known if they stayed silent. But fortunately, or Unfortunately, our bodies remember what our minds forget, we still end up haunted by the past, even if no one tells us about it. Even spiritually inclined people can be guilty of this online and in person, I frequently see something called spiritual bypassing. The term was first introduced in the early 1980s by John Wellwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist who defined it as a tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds and unfinished developmental tasks. In other words, spiritual bypassing is shifting the conversation to talk about love and light, whenever it starts to get a little too real. The problem with focusing on love and light 24/7 is that your trauma continues to affect you, no matter how many positive thoughts you think, or how many crystals you buy. And talking about love and light all the time. Also really annoys your friends." As I might say, in Russian " , ?" So if you haven't yet gone spelunking into that shadow work, if you're trying to suppress and repress things, or "Oh, I just want to talk about peace and love all the time." I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. In the same way that the dark is overtaking the light, we also have to be aware of our own mortality. This existence in our flesh suit doesn't go on forever. You don't want to carry the unnecessary baggage with you as you move on to the next phase of whatever whatever it is that comes next after you unzip your flesh suit and step out. So if you haven't done that homework yet, do it. Now for this week's homework assignment. I'm sure that you have heard plenty of people advocate for journaling for a multitude of different reasons and in a plethora of different ways. I know I've heard people like Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield, Rhonda Byrne talk about the importance of having a journal, especially a gratitude journal, being able to have a thankful heart. You know, gratitude is one of the highest vibrations that we can achieve. And typically when we express gratitude, we find more and more things to feel thankful for. Now, I've recently learned a trick that has helped me tremendously, and I want to share it with you. So sometimes we can get into almost like rote words. Like we're just saying the same thing over and over again. It's like if you recite a prayer every day, and you can you know the prayer by heart, you can do it on command any time, but it doesn't really mean anything to you anymore. You're saying the words you're getting the the proper recitation, but there's no emotion behind it. Sometimes that can happen with gratitude journals, especially if you're just saying the same things over and over again and especially if you are referring On your current situation, if your current situation is not what you want your future situation to be, in my opinion, and in my experience, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by focusing too much on what is. So for example, it might be, I'm so happy that I have clean water. I'm so grateful that I have indoor plumbing. I'm so glad that I have air conditioning in the summer. I'm so glad that I have clothes in my closet like, okay, yeah, plenty of people in the first world have those things. And believe me, I'm not ignoring other people in the world who don't. We in the first world have a lot of creature comforts and a lot of conveniences that we take for granted. So don't walk away from this podcast episode thinking that I'm telling you not to feel grateful, tremendously grateful that you have all of those creature comforts and conveniences. What I'm advocating that you do is think about what you want to deliberately create for your future. If you're all the time putting in your gratitude journal, that you're glad you have clean clothes and air conditioning? Well, I mean, I'm sure you'll always have clean clothes and air conditioning. But what do you want to achieve beyond that? Do you want a bigger house? Do you want a nicer car? Do you want your family relationships to be better? Do you want to have a more intimate connection with your spouse, like, think about what it is that you're wanting to have show up in your life in the future? If you close your eyes and imagine your dream life? What does it look like? I'm sure you're not fixating on indoor plumbing, clean clothes, and air conditioning. And I'm sure you're thinking about a beautiful house and a beautiful landscape and a loving relationship, and so on. Those are the types of things that do not need to escape your attention. As you're journaling. I want to give full credit and full props to the author, Jake Ducey. Because if I had not watched one of his recordings on YouTube, where he really breaks this down and explains it, the way that I'm explaining it to you, I would still be stuck journaling the same way that I always have, which of course, as you can probably imagine, would continue to get me the same results. So instead of growing instead of feeling like okay, I'm moving forward, my business is at a good level now, but I want it to go even better. I want to have even more freedom. I want to have even more money in the bank. I you know, some of you know that I've been thinking about doing the Jeremiah Johnson and just going off to the mountains getting away from suburban sprawl getting away from people. As an introvert, I'm like, yeah, people? Well, okay, how do I when I close my eyes, and I think about all of that, and I look at these pictures of places like Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming for dream inspiration, what is the landscape look like? How does the air smell? How does the water look? What kind of animals am I seeing? Like, I want to have some dreams beyond just thank you that I have clean clothes, thank you that I have a house with a door. I mean, at some point in life, we typically do want to move to the next level. So a major trick to how all of this works, is you get your journal. And as Jake describes, what you want to do is set a timer. Maybe you had to do this in school in like an English or a creative writing class where the teacher would set a timer, and you had to write for that full length of time, you might have been coming up with a fictional story or writing poetry of some kind. But for that 10 or 15 minute window of time, you had to keep writing. So that's one of the main steps that you do, you set a timer for whatever length you feel like would be appropriate. And you journal for that length of time. And you imagine what it is that you want for your future self and you write it in present tense, so you're not fixating on the things that you already have. Again, please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying not to be grateful, not to thank God for the things that you currently have in your life that are amazing. I'm talking about deliberately creating your future. So for example, if you right now are in credit card debt, you could say something like, I am so happy and grateful that I am debt-free. Or if you feel like man, I'd love to get my student loans paid off. I just don't know how it's going to happen. Don't worry about the how it's going to happen. You write in your journal. I'm so happy and grateful that my student loans are completely paid off. If you want to have a sports car, I'm so happy and grateful that I have this beautiful sports car. I really enjoy driving it every day. So you're essentially taking your future self, bringing it into the present, and you're doing it in this timed journal exercise. Now, the first day that I did it, I was like okay, I don't think I've done an exercise like this since school. Probably not even since high school, I don't even think I did it in college or grad school. So that's been many moons ago. I'm not going to tell you exactly how many, but it's been many moons ago since I sat in high school. So I set the timer for five minutes. And I just blew past it. I really could have said it for about 20 minutes, I just wrote and wrote and I had so many great ideas about what I wanted, what I could visualize, what I felt a sense of like real joy and bliss about. So when you do it every day-- you need to carve out time to do it every day. This is not something that's just oh I'll do it when I feel like it type of thing, or once a week or once a month exercise. No, no, you need to be doing this every day. So I typically set the timer for about 15 minutes as I do it throughout the day now, and it is awesome. Like I've only been doing this for maybe two to three weeks at this point. And I have already manifested some of the things that I have written about in that journal. I swear it's almost like some kind of magic where I'm putting the pin to the paper and getting exactly what it is that I've asked for back out of it. And I want you to have the same success and the same joie de vivre. So here's your homework for this week. If you don't already have a journal, get one, I would really highly recommend that you start with a clean copy not something you've already been doodling in or not a notepad or you also keep notes for your business or whatever. This really needs to be a clean notebook that you haven't written anything in already. You don't have to go break the bank, some people like to, you know, come up with something craftsy that read it looks like something that would be on Pinterest or Etsy. Do that if it feels right to you. But if you're more practical than that, you don't want to like put fancy paper in it or graphics or what have you. You can go buy a notebook at Walmart or the Dollar Tree and it does just the same. Get a clean notebook. Get a pen that writes well, because so many of us type now more than we write things by hand. You don't want to get a bad hand cramp. Again, I speak from

experience on this:

learn from my mistake! After that first 20 minute writing bender, I felt like I had carpal tunnel. So get a good clean notebook, get a good pen that writes well and puts ink out easily on the paper. Find some music or sounds of nature, whatever it is that kind of puts you into that state where you can really focus. And YouTube has a wide variety of videos that last for 10 or 15 minutes. If you're thinking you know, okay, I'm like you were I haven't journaled like this since sometime in junior high or high school. Maybe you just start out with five minutes. If that scares you, start out with 2 minutes. Write out what you can get down in only, you know, 60 seconds or two minutes, but the point is to get started with it and see how much better you feel like there have been times when I have gotten up from my desk after I finished this exercise and I felt giddy, like, I genuinely felt like a little kid excited about Christmas presents or something. I mean, it felt so good. So it's worth the investment of time. Get the journal, get the ink pen, get a timer and start deliberately creating your future. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it. If you haven't already, take a quick second to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now.