Imagine a day where you get to do and say what you think about.
Imagine a day when you don’t want to pick up the phone.
And you don’t.
Imagine breaking every unspoken rule your life is made of. @SecondFirsts (Click to Tweet!)
Oh my goodness.
Did you feel that?
All the thousand unspoken rules that govern every day of our lives just walked in this room to say hi to you.
They are so unspoken, so integrated in our words, that we end up living a life inside an invisible string of hypnotic requests that come from the people around us.
We are indeed hypnotized.
I hope you know this.
This happens so quietly.
Oh so, so quietly.
Come on be honest, haven’t you picked up the phone knowing it is a friend who you don’t want to talk to?
That is a hypnotic command we have been conditioned to respond to because it is the ‘right’ thing to do.
You end up picking up the phone speaking to this person, and resenting every moment of it.
The list that makes my life and your life a hypnotic state is so long that it would take a year of blogs to fully disclose it.
INSTEAD I WANT YOU TO IMAGINE A LIFE FULL OF WHAT YOU DO WANT.
How would that look?
Imagine you stop worrying about what other people will think when you don’t invite them to dinner, or you don’t say ‘me too’ when they share their favorite movie.
Something happened to me in the last few weeks, and my goodness, I started not responding to emails that demanded my attention, saying no to introductions to various people, stopped every single noise inside my head that sounded like this:
Christina you must write back, you must say yes, you must agree, you must nod, you must connect.
YOU MUST.
All of that, is noise.
So much of it, that we end up not even living a life.
Just responding to a hypnotic state.
THE TRUTH IS…OUR LIFE COULD END TODAY. TODAY.
Imagine if this is the end, today. Just like that. And all you were about to do today was please other people.
This happens to all of us because in our hypnotic state of living, we still romanticize life.
Pretending it has a nice introductory beginning and a riveting beautiful ending.
But the truth is, the beginning we don’t remember and the end we never see.
We die in the midst of running errands and pleasing other people.
One day we will just not be here. And if that doesn’t motivate us I really don’t know what will.
Your homework for today is: to not pick up the phone when the person on the line is someone you simply don’t wish to speak to.
This is simple but yet profound.
Yet life changing in so many visible ways.
With life,
Christina
Christina Rasmussen is a bestselling author, speaker and philanthropist on a crusade to change the way we live after loss. As the founder of Second Firsts and Life Starters both organizations to help people create a pathway back to life after loss, Christina has helped thousands of people rebuild, reclaim, and relaunch their lives using the power of the human mind. Her book Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, aims to take her message even further. You can find more information on her website and follow her on FB or Twitter.
Image courtesy of Mark Hesseltine.
