Make your life happen

In Ask Cate, Blog, Business by Cate Stillman

When Alex Biondo came to work for me at Yogahealer.com, she was “letting life happen to her instead of making her life happen.” She had been in a career that didn’t fulfill her. She was carrying extra weight. She was feeling aches and pains for the first time in her life, in the form of intense back pain. She was self-soothing with an evening wine habit.

When I hired Alex in January 2015 I knew she had some serious work ahead of her to be “on brand”. I connected with her spirit, as she’d been in a few courses years before, and I’d watched her go through an empowering divorce in the process.

Over the past year Alex has been intensely coached by me on what I now call, “Awake Living.” In this video, she tells what exactly has happened to her in the past year.

“I felt like there was something more… that my life could have been a whole lot better. But, I didn’t know what I was missing.”

Mentors rub off on you

As far as I can tell, the fastest way to make your life better is to spend time with someone who has already done what you want to do. Your mentor should rub off on you. I mentor all the team members at Yogahealer, to varying degrees, on living an awake life. I do it because it strengthens the team, but also because I believe that we can all be much more exceptional versions of ourselves. I want exceptional individuals to serve our community.

We know when we’re deceiving ourselves. Usually, we feel like a fraud in some aspects of our life. We know better, but we make the same old choice. Usually we unconsciously surround ourselves with people who don’t hold us to a higher bar. We don’t put ourselves in situations where someone will call us on our personal discrepancies. Are you catching my drift?

Come clean with Personal Discrepancies

When Alex started to work for me, her personal discrepancies hit me like a police siren. Over the past year, I candidly pointed them out and offered her some coaching around reconciling what she said she wanted in her life with her choices and habits. You hear what happens in the video.

When you find someone who you want what they’ve got – get them to invest in your getting what you want. Take the course. Hire them to care about your progress. Go at it alone and you risk the likelihood of remaining a fraud to your potential self.

Specific Tools that Produce Results

Now that Alex has dialed in her habits, her household and her time management skills, she says, “I now get the stuff done in the day that is truly the most important. I feel better in my body and better emotionally than I have felt in years. And I’m also more focused. I’m focused on what I’m doing. I’m no longer scattered.”

Good tools, when used consistently, produce results. The three biggest tools Alex mentions are:

From using the 12 Week Year planning system, as she learned to do as part of my team, she says, “I have a clear picture of what I have to do every week. My priorities in the short term are set to meet my quarterly goals. It’s a whole new way of running my life. I have so much more control over where I’m headed. Also, I know I wouldn’t have been able to adopt this planning system if I just read the book on my own.”

This is where mentorship around using good tools leads to breakthroughs. If a mentor isn’t teaching you their system, they aren’t truly mentoring you. I’m not sure what they’re doing. The point is, 12 Week Year is a big shift for most people I work with. Every member of my past mastermind struggled for 6 months to gain competency. I was relentless. Eventually, they broke through into a more more effective way to invest their time. As a result, their on track to hit their financial and impact targets. Structure buys you freedom. Good time management uplevels your flow. Buyah.

Unlike most people I know, I’m a hardcore implementer. If someone I respect makes a non-casual recommendation to me, I follow up on it with an intense curiosity. Basically, though I’m agnostic, I take it as a message from God. When a student recommended that I Tidy Up, I made it a priority. The first sweep took me an intense 3 weeks. Since then, I continue to implement the teachings on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. My family is trained at this point.

What I’ve noticed recently, and a year later of sticking with the method, is that I’m in the next paradigm of cohabitation with my daughter and my husband. We are living in an energetic resonance that is true to our potentials. This was not the case a year ago. Alex adds, “You have more crap that you need. The Tidying Up method, made my house into a home. When your space is clear it allows your creativity, your productivity, your functionality in every way to work better. That happens when your space is clear.”

Default mode doesn’t get us where we want to go.

Take a moment and notice. Are your default mode habits getting you to a truly exceptional life of your dreams… or are they falling short? If they’re falling short – watch the video above. Listen for your take home lesson. It’ll be unique to you. Most of my course members and team members don’t have these specific skills when we engage under contract- time management, goal management, space/home resonance. Yet, it’s all mentor-able. Once we have the tools dialed in, we inspire other with both our integrity and our easeful living. Make your best life happen.