I had someone say to me the other day they were “content” with their life.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to feel like my fire is lit!

Where each day feels exciting or challenging or intriguing or even exhausting!

This is what it means to truly be ALIVE.

‘Content’ is just kinda meh.

There is a way to reignite your passion for life and I cover all the details in this episode!

I’ll see you inside! Xo, Janeen

>> WATCH on YouTube

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Janeen: All right, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am Janeen Alley, and you are listening to becoming the c e o of your life today.

[00:00:08] So this is a super special series that I am doing about becoming the c e o of your life, and we are in the middle of this sequence. This is part three of four. If you have not listened to the first two episodes in this podcast, go back a couple weeks and start with the first one and then listen to the next one and then come to this one.

[00:00:30] Otherwise, you’re gonna be listening to ’em out of order, and I’m not super sure if this one is gonna make sense to you, like it will if you’re listening in sequential order. So today what I’m talking about is the second secret to become the c e o of your life.

[00:00:44] And it’s to reignite your passion for life by living the dream, even if you don’t feel like you have a thing. So there is actually a wrong way to do this. It’s to hope. If we hope things will change, or [00:01:00] if we spend time hoping for a better future, or hoping someone else will take care of the problems that we see around us.

[00:01:06] And for a long time, I used to think that somebody smarter than me, like the scientists would come along and clean up our mess, this mess that we have created in our world today, or we spend a lot of time just hoping that we’ll have more time or hoping that we can make something work, right?

[00:01:25] So if you have gotten stuck here, of course this isn’t your fault at all. We all do this from time to time, but I have some news for you. Hope is not a strategy. This is actually a podcast that I did maybe one or two months ago now at the time that this podcast is gonna go live. So instead of hoping that things will change, I want you to instead shift your energy into taking a stand.

[00:01:53] Archimedes said, give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth. So when we take a stand [00:02:00] for something, we really can move the world and change the course of history. This is the way it has always been done. You think about the game changers in life,

[00:02:11] you think about Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. Or we think about Malala. I mean, there’s all these people who have taken a stand for something. And it has always been by imperfect, ordinary people.

[00:02:24] When you take a stand for something, you have access to vision. You’re in the flow of what wants to happen in the world, and it uses your life. We are all needed. Every single one of us is needed, and this is one of the things that I talked about two weeks ago. You have specific experiences in your life that have taught you incredible lessons.

[00:02:45] Lessons that you can use to lift and encourage other people. Taking a stand leads to a commitment which helps to give your life purpose. And this is what it means to become the c e o of your life, is [00:03:00] that you are living a life that is steeped in meaning. So in order for us To reignite our passion for life and live the dream, there are three things that you need to do. You need to take a stand and it can be anything. It can be something simple. It can be something big. It can be something just in your local neighborhood or even in your family, all the way up to a global stand.

[00:03:24] It can be something like trash cleanup in your neighborhood to creating a more inclusive community or to educate even yourself on something that you feel like you’d like to change within yourself. So whatever it is, you take a stand and then you make a plan and then you follow through. Is this tricky to do? Of course it is. Otherwise everyone else would be doing it. So you might have gone so far in the past to have made a plan, but you probably didn’t actually take a stand because we usually skip this step. We make a plan and then the [00:04:00] next day we get distracted because things come up right or we just didn’t want to, right?

[00:04:06] This is something I’ve talked myself outta so many things ’cause I just didn’t wanna do it right. Or we found something else to do, like email or shopping on Amazon, or getting on our Facebook because these things are so easy, right? We just forget about our plan. But the problem with this is we erroneously make this mean when we don’t follow through that there’s something wrong with us.

[00:04:27] Listen, I’ve got news for you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You have a human brain just like the rest of us. And one of the things that I have talked about a lot on the podcast is we have these two parts of our brain that makes decisions. We have our prefrontal cortex where we make decisions from our highest self, right?

[00:04:45] This is when we are aligned with ourselves and what it is that we ultimately want. And then we have our primitive brain that makes decisions based off of seeking pleasure or avoiding pain or conserving energy, right? There’s a lot of [00:05:00] mind drama that the primitive brain brings up, and if we’re listening to that mind drama.

[00:05:04] We get distracted and we don’t follow through on our plan. We end up watching Netflix and eating bonbons on the couch for hours sometimes, and I know as busy moms, this is hard to do, but we have some version of this that we do, right? We want to stay safe in the cave because doing the hard work feels uncomfortable, right?

[00:05:24] We doubt ourselves and we have to deal with all that conversation. All of the insecurities that we have about doing the thing starts the bubble up to the surface.

[00:05:32] We’re afraid that we might fail. We have that little voice in our heads that says, but who do you think you are? You don’t know how to do that. Remember the last time that you tried, let’s do something else. You can start all of that tomorrow, right? I don’t know about you, but that conversation is so familiar to me and I’ve had to just listen to it and be like, okay, thanks for your opinion, brain, but actually we’re gonna get to work.

[00:05:55] when we’re listening to this voice. It is so easy for us to put things off. It’s easy for [00:06:00] us to hop on our phones or spend too much time on social media. Like I said, get distracted with meaningless to-dos that end up eating up all of our time to do the thing that matters most.

[00:06:10] Meanwhile, we end up hoping things will change. Well, the way to bypass the drama of the primitive brain is to learn how to use our prefrontal cortex more and more of the time. Because the truth is, this is something that I learned from Malcolm Gladwell. Actually, I think it’s in his book, blink, but I could be wrong.

[00:06:33] I read several of his books, but he talked about this analogy that I still remember that I’m gonna share with you. And he says, our conscious brain is the size of an ant compared to the subconscious mind or the primitive brain, which is the size of the elephant as far as like how much we’re actually using these portions of our brain, right?

[00:06:52] It’s so easy for us to just default into the subconscious mind but we have to learn how to dimm down that voice [00:07:00] by allowing the ant, the conscious brain to drive the elephant, which is the subconscious mind. So how do we do this? We have to first, of course, start to notice the drama for what it is. We have to start noticing the elephant, not the elephant in the room does the elephant as far as the conversation goes, because it’s just a conversation that’s happening in our head, not you, or just thoughts that we have, right?

[00:07:26] We have a tendency, when we are listening to this conversation, to create the story of our future from our past experiences. The truth is, is we have the power to tell ourselves an empowering story about our future and what we’re actually capable of. So when we become the CEOs of our lives, we take a stand, we stop hoping things will change, and we learn how to create our future from our imagination. And then we learn how to grow into that version of [00:08:00] ourselves instead of recreating the past over and over again.

[00:08:04] All right, my friends. That is what I have for you this week. Like I said, this is week three of four, so if you miss the first two weeks, go back and listen to those and then stay tuned for the last and final session of this series. Of course, there will be more podcasts after, but the last and final session of this series will be live next week.

[00:08:23] However, if you are interested in connecting with me, I have opened up some time for you on my calendar. You can go to janeenalley.com/ceo and we can talk about next steps and how you can make an impact in the world from the things that I have shared. All right, my friends, have a beautiful rest of your week and we’ll catch you guys soon.

[00:08:42] Take care. Bye-bye.