Weekly Happiness Note August 22, 2024

3 Ways to Feel Centered, So You Can Create a Life You Love

Aug 22, 2024

"Knowing how you want to feel and taking intentional steps toward that is the key to finding your way back to your best self."

Happy Thursday! 🌞

Do you sometimes find it hard to get unstuck from a bad mood? If so, you’ll want to check out this week’s happiness note. It’s called ‘3 Ways to Feel Centered, So You Can Create a Life You Love’. In it, I share a few strategies to find your rhythm and get back on your best track.

Check out this week's note, including a weekly planning framework for August 26th - September 1st. ❤ Emily

Here is a short 90-second video that highlights this week’s topic, and for the rest, subscribe below:

This Week’s Featured Topic:

3 Ways to Feel Centered So You Can Create a Life You Love

When you feel unhinged in your life, how do you return to a place of feeling centered?

If you’ve felt off for a while, do you recall what it’s like to feel centered and grounded?

I view feeling centered as the experience that comes from being in alignment. It’s when who you genuinely are matches how you show up in your daily life.

It’s easy to detect when you come across someone who is not aligned. You can feel it. While you can’t always put your finger on what seems off, you may find yourself thinking something like: he doesn’t seem authentic, she is hard to read, or I’m not sure why, but I don’t trust that person.

If you feel out of alignment, your inner dialogue might go something like this: I’m overwhelmed, I’m such an idiot, everything feels overly challenging, I don’t know who I am anymore, or I feel lost.

Feeling centered and grounded doesn’t protect us from challenges and hardships in life. But returning home to your inner truth creates a deep sense of personal harmony.

Being aligned with your truth makes traveling through life’s bumps less lonely and confusing. It’s like moving through life with your best friend at your side.

If your best friend were going through hard times, you wouldn’t tell her: “You’ll never get through this, you should give up, you shouldn’t feel like that, or worse, you’re a loser.” You would never think of saying any of those things.

Instead, you’d lift her up and tell her she’s got this and that she is strong. You’d comfort your friend and tell her it’s okay to feel sad, scared, or frustrated. You’d remind her that who she is is so much more than the experience she’s going through.

Feeling centered is like this, too. It’s about staying connected to your inner wise guide and Bff. It’s about making that relationship more valuable and credible than the voice of the obnoxious roommate in your head who loves to tell you why you aren’t good enough or why things won’t work out for you.

Guiding our daily lives from a place of feeling centered won’t extinguish the urge to listen to the obnoxious roommate in our minds. But it does help us feel like we are worthy of being on our human journey. When we know our worth and stop beating up on ourselves, it’s easier to see all that is good about our lives.

When I feel out of alignment, these are the 3 strategies I use to get back to feeling centered. Next time you feel off your game, give them a try.

1. Draw on Your Sources of Inspiration

Who or what inspires you? Make a list, either on paper or in your mind, of the type of people and experiences that help you feel hopeful and uplifted.

Sometimes, the best way to get motivated to get back on your game is to be moved by someone else’s story of resilience. Countless stories, past and present, illustrate the strength and tenacity of the human spirit. More often than not, the person at the heart of the inspiring story tapped into their beliefs and inner resolve. They turned inward to steady themselves so they’d feel up to the task of moving through what appeared to be unthinkable.

This same human spirit lives within you, and when you feel connected and tethered to her, life instantly feels better.

When you are unsure how to return home, draw on your sources of inspiration.

2. Use Microsteps to Create Momentum

The best way to create habits of thinking and being that stick is to know how you want to feel and then make small steps forward.

I’m a fan of using microsteps to make a change. Microsteps are small, realistic, and attainable steps that meet you where you’re at.

When we feel off our game, there can be a tendency to build evidence and momentum that keeps us feeling stuck. But when we focus on what we want and want to feel better, Microsteps is the ideal place to start.

Everyone’s steps will look different. The main idea is to personalize the Microsteps and make them attainable so that you can experience small wins. These wins help create new momentum toward feeling aligned and living a life you love.

3. Give Yourself a Daily Physical Reset

One way to consider what it means to align with our center is to consider the relationship between our human body and our human spirit. We identify with both, yet we may not give a lot of thought to how our physical health affects our wellness or well-being.

When our human body feels stressed out, burned out, depleted, and not cared for, it’s challenging to have the awareness and wherewithal to listen to our inner spirit and wisdom. Feeling centered and connected to our spirit is hard when our bodies are perpetually tired and worn.

Instead of aiming to overhaul our physical health immediately, use Microsteps to create a daily physical reset. See how it feels to implement ‘one’ small physical reset at a time.

Here are some ideas for boosting your physical health daily:

Leave your phone out of your bedroom at night, reduce distractions, and aim to get a solid night’s sleep.
Stay hydrated throughout the day. Set reminders on your phone or on sticky notes to drink more water.
Start your morning with a meditation practice.
End your day with a gratitude practice.
Be mindful of what you consume throughout the day. That includes what you eat, what you read and listen to, and what you consume on social media.
Unplug from your devices and social media for the day.
Aim to eat whole, live food for a day.
Get outside and move your body.
Have dance breaks throughout the day to move your body and ease stress.
Make a point of laughing throughout the day. Watch something funny or tap into your sources of humor.
Hug the people you love.

Add to this list, or create a list of small, attainable ways to boost your physical health, one step at a time.

Feeling better in our bodies makes it easier to feel centered and connected to our spirit and truth. When we are connected to our truth, we can’t help but create a life we love.

What about you? What do you most love about your life?

❤ Emily

This Week’s Quote:

Limited on time or don’t feel like reading

Check out this week’s Video instead:

Planning for Next Week📝:

Use the framework below to plan your upcoming week: August 26th - September 1st. Some people like to map out their forthcoming week on Friday to ease into the weekend, knowing they are ready to hit the road running on Monday. Others (like myself) have a Sunday planning ritual. Do what works best for you. Over the years, in supporting many people in their planning and goal-setting, it seems to work best to pick a day of the week that’s easy to stick to so that your weekly planning becomes a habit and ritual.

What are your wins? Before you organize the upcoming week, ‘August 26th - September 1st’, reflect on the week you are wrapping up. What are your wins (big or small)? What is something you are grateful for? What have you learned about yourself this week? Record your reflections in your journal or the Notes section of the Planner Printout. Feel free to comment below (others in this community will also be able to see your comment) or hit reply to this note and share directly with me.

Planner PDF printout: This printout is from the ‘Fall in Love with Your Life, Seasonal Planner’ and will give you the framework and planning system to help you organize your upcoming week: The week of August 26th - September 1st. Click here to access. You will need to enter a password to open the PDF. It’s in all caps: FILWYL

Accountability: If you’d like an accountability check-in to support you in making the weekly planning ritual a regular habit, just hit reply to this email after you’ve organized your week and let me know you’re organized and complete. Feel free to share your weekly intention/power word. I’m always happy to be the check-in support and would love to celebrate your wins.

Instructional Video: Get free access to this mini 20-minute video course. It will show you how to efficiently use the ‘Fall in Love With Your Life, Seasonal Planner’ method of organizing your week. Go here to access the free video course.

Priorities: What are your top three priorities for the upcoming week? What are some of the daily ways you will prioritize yourself? Remember to balance your energy output with energy input. Think: What has been energizing me lately? What has been draining my energy?

Connect with Nature: We are in the last stretch of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. What do you love most about nature in this season? What about the one we are headed into?

Journal reflection points prompted by nature: What were your wins from this season? What are you leaning into for the next season?

Or come Share in our Facebook Group

Share your intention for the week of August 26th - September 1st. What are you calling in? What is your power word/phrase?

Weekly Happiness Note with Emily Madill

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