How to Move with Intention for the Rest of Your Life with Carisa Findley
I had the pleasure of getting to chat with my friend, Carisa Findley, award-winning author, trainer, and international speaker, about holding yourself responsible for changing your life, how to move through life with intention, and the importance of having a failure plan.
Who is Carisa Findley?
I first met Carisa at HPX Live, Brendon Burchard’s event at the beginning of 2020. She’s an award-winning author, trainer, and international speaker who wakes up every day on a mission to help people live their fullest, most extraordinary life. Carisa supports leaders, business owners, and clients by helping them get clear on how to take their life to the next level. As a certified mindfulness teacher, Carisa develops trainings to help people learn tactical performance strategies to achieve the growth they desire.
Only You Can Change Your Life
It was in her mid-twenties that Carisa made the conscious decision to approach her life with the mindset of “How do I want to build an extraordinary life for myself? I want these great things but now what do I need to do and who do I need to become?” And that was the start of her spiritual journey. She found herself diving in, trying new things like meditation and visualization. “And it really gave me a purpose. And it gave me ownership on the ultimate outcome of my life.”
She started her journey by implementing mindfulness strategies to be better in life, relationships, work, etc. This led her to her current career as a certified mindfulness teacher. She started serving others because she saw the progression she was able to build. She’s been able to discover the tools that work for her, and tools that work for others. Her intention now is to “help people find their own journey to living their extraordinary life and giving them the tools that they need to do that.” How do you live an extraordinary life?
To begin the process, figure out where you are now, what you want to accomplish, and what you’re willing to invest. We’ve all heard the stories of people going off and becoming monks for their own spiritual journeys, and there is absolutely a place for that, but that isn’t what everyone is going to want to invest right now. It’s all about understanding what you can commit to at this moment, it doesn’t have to be big. Like with meditation, Carisa gets objections like “I don't have the right pillow to sit on, I don't have Tibetan singing bowls. And I don't have an hour to sit there and have my mind completely quiet.” That doesn’t have to be what meditation looks like for you to get started meditating.
Even if you’re willing to say “Hey, I’ll give you 10 minutes a day. And that's what I can put into my life to start to practice some of these things.” Carisa says the important thing to understand that this isn’t all or nothing, there is a place in your life for little practices to be placed throughout your day. At the beginning of her journey, Carisa was creating the vision boards and manifestations but quickly realized that nothing was coming true. It was because she wasn’t taking any action or owning any responsibility of putting in the effort and time to achieve those things. So the first thing you have to seriously sit with is that if you really want the change to happen in your life, you are the one who is going to have to do it.
Have a Plan for Failure
What gets us off track of any goal or intentional focus we set is that we think about these things in a perfect little bubble. We set goals, create intentions or routines and say “this is what I’m going to do.” But you’re creating these in your mind not factoring in the real-life obstacles that you’re most likely going to face along the way. Carisa always encourages people to have a plan for failure, to consider what might throw you off track, “maybe it is addressing that, hey, I want to get up early and work out. But what happens is the first thing I do is I pick up my phone and once I start scrolling I can't stop.”
Okay, so how do you plan for some of these potential obstacles? Think through what your backup plan is going to be.
“So if you want to get up and go to an exercise class early morning, but you know that there are going to be days when it's snowing out and your car's covered in snow, you're not going to want to get up a half-hour early to do that. But like what's going to be your plan B? Well, maybe your plan B is is that I know there is a class at noon, at one of my favorite fitness studios that I can go to as a backup. So it sounds so counterintuitive to plan for failure. But that's the difference that makes people either give up or keep going is that they've got a plan B in case one day they fail on planning.”
Realize that perfection is NOT the end goal, finding a consistent balance is. Something Carisa does, along with creating vision boards and setting goals, is looking back at what she’s accomplished, and “creating a gratitude board along with my vision board, what have I actually accomplished in 2020, because as you know, heavy as a year as it felt, I also did some pretty incredible things. And we all did some pretty incredible things, and we got through it. That's incredible enough.” So, if we can train ourselves to also pay attention to how far we’ve come and see our journeys and be excited about continuing to move forward. We can build “enthusiasm around moving forward on days that we don't want to.,” Carisa says.
Take the Power Away from Fear
We live in a world that teaches us that “we're never enough, we're not doing enough, there's always more to accomplish.” Carisa knows the feeling well. She started her public speaking business in 2018 and then really tried to get it off the ground in 2019, had some things booked for 2020, and then “of course, you know, everything came to a screeching halt.” It left her, like many of us, in a place where she was struggling emotionally with a lot of anxiety and fear.
It brought up PTSD from the recession in 2009 and she struggled with it. But “I remember one day kind of really coming out of that fog and having this kind of just thought that if I'm struggling this much, and I have the tools to help me with this anxiety and fear like meditation and visualization and breathing and exercise, what are people doing that don’t?” So she decided she had two choices, either letting her state of anxiety and stress continue throughout the year, or she could “lift up out of the uncertainty and see it as an opportunity to help other people who don't even have the practices that I do. And that lit me up and empowered me. So I went full steam ahead and started developing online courses and weekly content that I could put out to help people who are still struggling.”
Keeping that in mind helped Carisa make it through 2020, and is still helping her now. Looking back now, she sees how much progression and growth her business has made from content that didn’t exist until the circumstances forced it into creation. “Four months ago, none of this part of my business even existed, I was not creating weekly videos. I mean, now I've got hundreds of email subscribers, followers, people that I'm helping, courses, webinars that are all coming out. And you have those moments where you're like, wow, like I can do anything that I put my mind to. Even with as much work as it has been and how much uncertainty I’m facing, it's also been really empowering.”
Even under normal circumstances, we “get caught up in the day-to-day, and operate every single day based on old beliefs about ourselves. We want this new life but still operate like 90% of our day in our unconscious that has been programmed by the past. So it's only natural that we start to just kind of pivot back towards the way things always were, we always get pulled back into our comfort zone.” So how do you move toward a path of intention again after life derails you? The first step is acknowledging when you see yourself being pulled away.
“I think it's just being empowered to have the ability to be aware of your mind and when it's happening, know that those thoughts are not you.” Anytime you feel like you’re beginning to lose momentum because you’re being pulled toward what’s comfortable for you, acknowledge your fear of stepping outside of your comfort zone. And then ask yourself if that fear is true. “And that question helps me disrupt the cycle the fears get into. Or say, okay, is that true? Is it true, that I will lose all my money? If I try to make this investment? And so it takes the power away from fear. And once I've asked if it's true, and really examined it, I started to take its power away.”
Once you’ve taken the power away, replace it with an affirmation. “[Repeat] affirmations as a way to say, hey, highest self, I need you. I'm in a negative thought process. What mindset do I need to have as I move forward to try to overcome this fear? And I love that ability to just be like, oh yeah fear, you think you're so tough, my higher self is tougher. And here's what I got to say to you. I am a powerful force of the universe, and I am connected to the abundance that is within the universe.”
Awareness is Key to Change
We all have habits that create strong neural pathways, so “if every time you walk into the kitchen, you go for a snack in the pantry, the more you do that over and over, the more that pathway gets reinforced.” Whenever your higher self makes its presence known and tells you that you aren’t going to snack throughout the day anymore, you’re only going to eat at meals, what are you doing to do the next time you walk into the kitchen? Your programming still tells you to go to the pantry for a snack and then you end up fighting with yourself. “Then your your body kind of switches to the sympathetic state, into fight or flight, you're angry, you know, then nothing is working in your favor.”
So it’s important to be prepared for those moments ahead of time. For Carisa, this is where meditation has really helped her because she uses it to strengthen her awareness. “That's the first step. Do I have the awareness to see when this pathway is firing off and I'm going to the pantry? Do I even have the awareness to see the connection to that? And you have to prepare for it because at the moment, it is hard to not walk to the pantry to get a snack. And I'm sorry, there's no affirmation that's going to turn you away.” If there was, we would say no, my body is fit. But you have to prepare your failure plan. Plan for what’s going to happen on the first day of your diet when you walk into the kitchen.
We all set goals and want to have them magically achieved but that’s not how goals work. You have to put in the work and really commit yourself to it. “You have to be able to have the meditation practice, have the practice of awareness for a long time before you can get into that cycle of being and have those next level conversations with yourself. But it takes time.” And the more connected to your “why,” the easier it is to commit long term to doing what it takes to reach your goals, it becomes harder to give up.
Having a clear focus of where you want to be will drive you to keep pushing forward. Carisa says, “I went to Tony Robbins a few years ago. We did an activity answering things like, what do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? Now imagine yourself in five years, and you have not accomplished any of that? How does that feel? And that was such a powerful motivator for me like I could picture myself standing in front of my vision board. And knowing that I had not accomplished any of these things, looking at my list of goals and knowing that I had not done any of it. And it made me feel sick.” You have to make the decision for yourself to put in the work and do whatever it takes because in the end it’s worth it.
Affirmation
I intend to evolve to my highest self with love and intentional practice every day.
Links From the Show
Follow Carisa Findley on Instagram.
Visit Carisa’s Official Website.
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