00:00 

Hey there, this is Tanya Hale with Intentional Living and this is episode number 131, "The Gift of Life." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright, hello there, my friends. How are you? I hope everything is going good. I just wanted to tell you a funny story. So I teach, for those of you who haven't been around and don't know this, I teach middle school eighth graders. They are totally my jam. I love them so much. But before school got out for Christmas Break, we were getting ready to start class one day and the bell had just rung and I play music out in the hall, so I was bringing in the speaker and kind of getting things settled before we got started. This cute little kid, who I just adore, he's kind of a cool kid...he's got the mullet going on, but he's small for his age. You know, he's just hilarious and he just goes, "hello, my friends." That's my favorite part of the day. And I just started laughing because I didn't realize that I said "hello, my friends" all the time to them but apparently I do it enough that it's his favorite part of the day and I love that. So that just was fun. 

01:17 

Alright, let's jump in today, shall we? I love today's topics so much. So much. I've just been so loving preparing this for you and I hope that you love what I have to share today because I think it's so important. Today is entitled "The Gift of Life." So I believe that one of our most overlooked blessings is the gift of life. So now you will often hear people say that they're thankful to be alive especially after surviving a horrible accident or an illness, and that is definitely a time that we become more self-reflective about the gift of being alive. But the gift that I'm going to talk about today is different than just gratitude for being alive and waking up another day. It's more than gratitude of having a body that's functioning and having air to breathe and water to drink. What I want to speak to you about today is the amazing gift of you and your specific life and the amazing gift of me and my specific life, right? We all have our own thing going on. 

02:17 

So the first question I want to ask you is do you really know who you are? We start our children singing from a very young age that they are a child of God and we talk about that a lot, but it seems that so many of us never really connect with that understanding at a deeper level. Okay yeah yeah yeah, we get that God is our Heavenly Father, but what does that really mean? For me when I seek to move deeper into this concept, it is so helpful to remember that God really is my Father. He is my Creator. Now I do have earthly parents who came together to create my physical body, but God first and foremost made that creation possible. And He is the father of my spirit, the part of me that is the essence of who I really am, the eternal part of me that existed before I was physically born here on the earth, and the eternal part of me that will continue to live on after my physical body has died. It is this spiritual part of me that really makes me me, right? 

03:29 

What do I know about her? Am I really in tune with her deepest desires? And how familiar am I with her strengths and her weaknesses? Do I know what she likes? Do I know what she enjoys, what she loves to do? It can be so easy for these aspects of ourselves to get lost and to be misunderstood. There is so much social programming that goes on that makes us think we should want certain things and that we should show up a certain way. 

04:00 

I know that when I first got married, we used to have homemaking nights for the women at church. We often would do crafts, you know, the cutesy little things that you would paint and glue and you would put together, put in your home. And it felt like something that I was supposed to do since I was an LDS woman establishing a new home, right? So I would show up, I would paint and I would glue and I would staple and I hated every minute of it. And the next month I would show up and I would paint and I would glue and I would staple and I would hate it all over again. And it was so multi-layered with negative thoughts and feelings because I wasn't enjoying the process. Then it would always look ugly and it wouldn't meet my expectations of what I thought I wanted to be creating. And then I would take it home either unfinished or super ugly and I would stick it away in a closet somewhere, because there wasn't any way I was going to put that in my home. Then I would feel guilty for not finishing it or not putting it up in my home and I had just spent all this money on it. So there wasn't  any part of the process that I enjoyed. 

05:13 

So I remember about seven or eight years into my marriage I finally had just had enough and I admitted to myself that I actually didn't enjoy doing crafts. I didn't like being crafty so I stopped doing them. I would still go to the meetings where the other women were crafting but I would show up and I would eat the snacks and I would walk around and chat with everyone and I loved it. But I had had this idea, this socialized programming that said to be a good wife and a good member of the Church, I had to enjoy crafting and have my home filled with all these cute things that I had made. So when I connected with myself enough to realize that I didn't enjoy it at all and when I acted with integrity and stopped doing what I deep down just didn't like, then I felt so much peace with myself. I felt like I started giving myself permission to really be me rather than someone I thought I was supposed to be. People would always ask me why I wasn't doing the crafts when I was just walking around eating and chatting. And I would just tell them that I didn't like doing crafts and it felt good and it felt true and it felt liberating. 

06:31 

This is the thing: it was true. It was me. It was a piece of me that had gotten lost in what I felt were social expectations. And I think we do this all the time. I'll give you a couple more examples. For years, I thought that I should love little kids. Okay now. I'm not a kid hater. You know, come on Jesus Christ loved the little kids. They're so innocent and cute. And they're just a few years away from coming from God's presence. All the amazing women at church love teaching the littles their Sunday School and Primary lessons, and these women were sweet and loving and so kind and I wanted to be that way too. But I just couldn't love it. I'm not saying that I don't like little kids at all. For sure not. They're just not my jam. I loved my own kids desperately, my nieces and nephews, my friends' kids...totally fine with all of them. Love them, enjoy them, all the good. But put a strange little five-year-old in front of me and I just don't enjoy it. I can think that they're cute, I can appreciate where they are in life and how they're developing, but I don't want to hang out with them. I don't want them touching me all the time, and wiping their boogie noses on me. There's a reason I'm a middle school teacher and not an elementary teacher. I never enjoyed very much...I did enjoy some primary callings, but teaching classes, yeah, I just didn't love it. 

08:03 

But I'll tell you what, I absolutely adore those middle school kids and somebody needs to, right? Every day at school is a great day for me. Okay, well, almost every day and when it's not, it's very rarely because of the kids. It's usually something else going on with things that we have to be doing. I found that though little kids aren't enjoyable to me, the teenagers bring me so much satisfaction. And isn't it amazing that I know this about myself? Because look how I can serve the world by knowing that I love teenagers way more than little kids. Isn't that brilliant, right? 

08:43 

So I'm going to put this one out there. It's the same with pets. And some of you may never listen to me again after this, but guess what? I don't love pets. I'm annoyed by the hair, and by the time and the energy that they demand. I don't enjoy dealing with the smell and with the accidents. A dog licking my hand or my face or sniffing my crotch is disgusting to me. And cats rubbing up against my legs just totally gives me the willies. I hate that feeling, right? 

09:13 

So these are just a few things about me that I've come to understand and accept. And yes, I even love these things about me. Are they different than a lot of other women I interact with? For sure, and that's totally okay. Getting to a place where I can know what I love and don't love, what I enjoy and don't enjoy, what I want and don't want, this creates a space of liberation and empowerment that I believe is part of the gift of our life. A huge part of accepting the gift God has given us is to learn about ourselves, to accept ourselves and show up as ourselves. Are you showing up as you? Do you know yourself enough to even know whether you are or not? 

10:01 

One way you can know is that it doesn't feel forced. Right? You don't have to talk yourself into doing it. You don't have that forced feeling. It just feels comfortable. It feels more natural. Last week we talked about this darkness, this shadow side, right? For me, some of the shadows were thinking that I had to love being with little kids or I had to love pets or love crafts, but I didn't. And although I kept trying to force myself to enjoy it, I had these thoughts on the peripheral of my brand that kept saying, "I don't love these things. I don't enjoy this. This isn't fun". But I wouldn't acknowledge them because I thought that not loving those things would make me a bad person. But guess what? They don't make me good or bad. They just 

make me a person. They make me me. And when I could love them, learn to embrace the person I am, the person God  created me to be, then it feels as though a whole new world has opened up for me. A world where I can start to tap into my strengths like never before because I'm not constantly forcing myself to do things that don't feel true to who I really am. This is the gift of life, the gift of knowing me, accepting me, and showing up as me. I'm sure there are still things that I do from a sense of social programming, but I'm working to understand myself better and bring them out. I'm working on embracing the gift of me, what God gave me when He created me. 

11:37 

So here are some suggestions of things you can do and questions you can ask yourself to help you get to know your true self better. First, spend some time alone with yourself and listen to yourself. Pay attention to those thoughts hiding in the peripheral of your mind. Let them come out and take a look at them. Don't be afraid of them. I was afraid mine would make me a bad person and they totally didn't. In fact, I feel they made me a more confident, more fulfilled woman. Pay attention to what you're drawn to and ask yourself why. So are you drawn to live performances or movies? Are you drawn to wanting quality clothing or wanting a great deal at a thrift store? Or drawn to a certain group of women that you know? What about a genre of books or movies or learning about a certain topic, learning a particular skill? What do you always find yourself intrigued by? 

12:40 

Okay, now sometimes we're drawn to things that aren't healthy for us in some way or that we don't want to engage with. So understanding our "why" is an amazing way to get to know ourselves better and to see what's going on. Right? That "why" that we find will show us where we may have some work to do and how we can move into the kind of experience we really want to have. For example, you may be totally enthralled with drinking wine, but you decided you don't want to drink alcohol. Knowing yourself doesn't mean you start drinking wine because you're enthralled with it, you're enticed by it, but it does mean that you look behind the desire and see the thought or the why that is behind it. Okay, now that's some fascinating work. Why am I drawn toward whatever it is, in this instance alcohol? Is it because I want to fit in? Is it because I feel like I'll be able to relax and be myself? Is it because I, you know, whatever. Okay, so this is fascinating work to discover our "why" behind things that we may be going. Yeah, that's not really the direction I want to go. 

13:55 

So learning to understand the thoughts going on behind the scenes is always the work that we do here in coaching, right? What are the thoughts creating my feelings and my behaviors? That's amazing work. This is what I do as a coach, right? So ask yourself this, here's another thing. If you lived all alone in a cabin far, far away from anyone, what would you want? What kind of food would you want to eat? What activities would you want to engage in? How would you decorate this home of yours? What kind of clothes would you wear? What would you do with your free time? What would you desire for yourself? Getting to know yourself at a deeper level like this is so enlightening. I've been working on this myself for the past few months and I love what I'm learning about myself. I'm really starting to clarify what my true desires in life are and why. They are my desires and I'm gaining such an appreciation for who I really am. And it does feel liberating and empowering. It feels like I'm truly starting to see myself for the first time. Okay, so maybe not actually for the first time, I've always caught glimpses, but for the first time, this deeply and this consistently with so much confidence to move in that direction. And it's beautiful to me. It is helping me to appreciate myself at a whole new level. Give it a try. Coaching will help so much with this. I will ask you the hard questions and I'll hold you to answering them. Right. I can help you find yourself. I really can. And it's an awesome process. 

15:39 

So now let's talk about the second piece that I feel is so important for us to understand how our life is a gift. Let's start off with the reminder that our worth has not and does not change. We were born a person of worth. We will die a person of worth, and we are a person of worth the whole time in between. Nothing we can do will create more worth or take away from our worth. We have always been 100% worthy. We have always been and always will be 100% complete. Now we may not recognize it. We may not show up for it, but it is always there and it always has been. We just get to choose whether or not to see it, whether to embrace it. We get to choose whether or not to accept it. And our choices in this area completely impact the experiences we have while on this earth. So here's the thought: If we are choosing not to see, accept and embrace our self worth, how does this impact our relationship with our Heavenly Father, the one who created us and our worth. If God truly did create us with all of these strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes and desires, what does it mean when we either aren't interested in knowing them or if we don't accept that God created it for us? 

17:17 

You are a product of God's creativity. Who you are is who God created you to be. It's like He created us, sent us here to earth and then told us, "there you go, sweetie. Go see what you can do. Go see what you can create. This is my gift to you." And we want to hang out down here on earth and negotiate this gift of our life. We sometimes find ourselves saying things like, :God, I think you made a mistake here. My metabolism isn't supposed to slow down this early in life. Wouldn't it have been better if you had made me a little bit better at math? This struggle I have with vulnerability, ah, come on God. I think you were distracted when you created this part of me." It's like we want to negotiate this gift of life with God, and we judge our life as not being good enough. 

18:10 

Can you imagine sitting down with God and really telling Him, "this gift you gave me? Yeah, I'm not really liking it. I know you meant well, but you didn't get it quite right. Thanks, but no thanks. You mind if I re-gift?" Right? Every time we question our worth, it's like we're telling God that He didn't do it right. We are stepping into this place of then judging God and what He created. "It's not good enough. I'm not good enough. God messed up when He created me." But what if we learned how to just be in awe of the gift that is our life? What if we saw our life, our strengths, our weaknesses, our flaws, our abilities? What if we saw them all as a beautiful gift given to us by a loving Heavenly Father who doesn't make mistakes? I am God's creation. When I don't love and accept myself, I am rejecting what God has created. I am deeming His creation as unacceptable. I am judging God and finding Him wanting. Wow, right? Most of us have never looked at it this way. 

19:28 

What if we looked at every aspect of our lives as being exactly as God wanted it to be so that we could grow exactly into the person that He created us to become? What if a huge purpose of life is to learn who we are and step into her with confidence and gratitude? To not keep resisting this gift of our unique life, but to learn to embrace it and appreciate it for all of its ups and downs, to learn to love our 50-50, the half of us that is easy and the half of us that is hard. We so often get caught in this place of judging ourselves and we think we should be something that we're not. We get caught up in what we think the world is thinking of us, of the world's social programming, rather than learning to see God's view of us. How amazing would it be to fully lean into the experience of being you, of seeing that with all of the 50-50 you create something so unimaginably beautiful, something so perfectly unique that you bring a creation to the world that no one else can bring. What if we decided to use this human experience to grow and evolve and expand ourselves into the person who we were created to be in all of our 50-50, to use this humanness to have experiences that enrich and beautify and enlarge who we are, who God created us to be? What if we really saw all of us as a beautiful gift given to us by God to give us a truly unique and amazing experience? How much confidence would this give us to move out into the world in a completely different way? What could we accomplish and do with that confidence? 

21:38 

When we embrace our true selves and when we then present that person to the world, we are able to give and serve more at deeper levels. We are not self-conscious or insecure of all the things. We are not because we're so infatuated with all of the things that we are. But we're not infatuated in a conceded or what other people are or what they're engaging in or what experiences they're having. It has everything to do with us delighting in the gift that God made us to be and sharing that gift with those we come in contact with. This doesn't mean we don't work, look at, and work on the darker parts of our lives that we don't seek to improve and repent. It just means that we see it as part of our whole, as part of our learning and growing and creating. We find joy and delight in the whole process of taking what God has given to us and using it to move forward and create experiences for ourselves that help us to to show up the way we really want to. 

22:54 

And also, what if we just delighted in the gift that God created other people to be? What if we could just see them and accept them and embrace them for their gift of life as well? We would stop judging and criticizing and comparing. Wouldn't that be a beautiful, beautiful place to be? Wouldn't that be a gift of life as well for us and for the other person? Learning to be ourselves and see ourselves, our lives, everything about us as a gift is, I believe, one of the most important and beautiful things that we will do in this life. This is when we will step into what God truly created us to be. This is when we will do what God truly created us to be, created us to do. The gift of life is truly celebrating the life that God has gifted us with. 

23:59 

We can make this next year the year to fully learn to embrace and delight in who we are. Just imagine what we could experience this year if we were to engage with life while accepting this gift of us. Imagine how your relationships with your spouse, your children, your friends, your co-workers, yourself, and God would change. Imagine the fulfillment and the contentment you could create just by loving this gift of your life. You can do this and I can help you if you feel like you don't even know where to start with this, like this is just too big for you. This is what I do as a life coach. I help you move into this space and together we can get you to a place that you may have only dreamed of. This is the process of growing up, creating what we choose to create, learning to love our gift of life. 

25:05 

Okay, that's going to do it for today. A couple of things. One, I have an end of year review that is spectacular, if I do say so myself. I love it and everybody who I've given it to before has gone, "oh my gosh, this was so great." I want to give it to you. This week on my "weekend win" email, I am going to have that on there as an attachment. You can download it. So if you want to get that for free, you just need to go to my website, tanyhale.com. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page and there's a place where you can sign up to get my weekly email. It's just a really quick, meant to be read in a minute or less, kind of email and this week I'm going to be including my end of year review. Okay. So if you want a free copy of that, just go ahead and sign up for my "weekend win" email and you will get that this Friday in your inbox. 

26:05 

Okay. And my friends, coaching is an amazing experience. I am loving working with my coach so much. The insights, the personal growth...she's helping me see things about my thoughts and about the beliefs that I have that are not serving me. And I am making some changes that are just amazing to me. They're impacting my life greatly and I want to be able to do the same thing for you. So if you're interested in learning about coaching and starting off this new year as in a as a better version of yourself as you know, I can do this for you. I can help you with this. And you just need to contact me. You can go either to tanyahale.com or you can go to my Facebook page and you can sign up for a free coaching session. Okay, that's gonna do it for me. My friends have an awesome new year. Enjoy and I will talk to you next week. Bye. 

27:11 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.