241: Living On Purpose

Extraordinary is a choice. Take that in, soak it up because of the hustle grind, repeat mantra that society has been touting for decades. It had it all wrong. I’m Tanya Dalton. I’m a seven figure entrepreneur best-selling author speaker, mom, and rule-breaker I’m here to help you live to your fullest potential. That’s what this podcast is all about. The intentional advantage is doing life on our own terms.

Define the status quo and seeing ourselves outside of the tie-dye definitions. Society’s name for us. It’s intentionally choosing to step back away from the chaotic rush of your every day and choosing, choosing to see that it’s your world. And it’s filled with opportunities. Let’s challenge the bedrock beliefs that so many have wholeheartedly trusted because we were told they were truths. Let’s have a healthy disregard for the impossible.

Let’s choose to be extraordinary. Hello, Hello, and welcome to the intentional advantage podcast. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 241. And you know what today is? I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but today is the last episode that you’re going to hear before my book comes out on purpose, the busy woman’s guide to an extraordinary life of meaning and success.

It comes out next week. It’s going to be on store shelves. It’s going to be in reader’s hands. Ah, and it’s so amazing. The last two years I have been working on this book, writing it and tweaking it and changing it and adjusting it and editing it and doing all of this. So it’s amazing to know that in just seven days from today,

if you’re listening to this the day it goes live on October 26th, you’re going to be able to have it in your hands. I am so excited for this. So I thought that today we would do something extra special. I wanted to give you a little extra treat. You are going to get to be the very first to hear the introduction from the audio book.

And yes, I recorded the audio book myself, just like I did from Jomo. But what was different about when I recorded Jomo is I went to a studio for Jomo and I read it there. This time I got to record it in my home, which was an amazing experience. I had an incredible audio engineer. His name was Michael, and he came into my home.

We sat at our kitchen table and we discussed what my vision was for the audio book. And I told Michael, I said, it was really important to me that you feel like you’re sitting next to me, that we’re two friends sitting on the couch, diving deep into your purpose, helping you feel better about your days that I’m the friend that pushes you to be your best with the audio book.

I want you to really feel like I’m right there next to you. I truly believe that is what comes through in this audio book. Michael and I, we had a great time recording this audio book for you. We had a fabulous time. We laughed a lot, but I’m going to be honest. We cried a lot too. He, he really resonated with the messages of the book and he would tell me,

I know this is written for women, but this is, this is getting me right where I need it. And that’s what I’m hoping it does for you as well. Really? With the audio book, it goes so well with the hard copy. The hard copy has all of the graphs and the charts and those kinds of things that help bring a lot of those abstract ideas to life.

But the audio book is a great chance to connect even deeper with a lot of those ideas that we cover. It’s a chance for us to connect on a deeper level too. So it really is about adding a richness to the experience. I want you to take action. That is my why behind writing this book for you. I want you to feel like you can live more on purpose.

That’s my why. And you’re going to hear more about my why in this introduction. You’re about to listen to, but really at the heart of it is I want every woman to know that we can all have extraordinary lives. So without further ado, let me just go ahead and let you listen. In on this introduction. I want you to enjoy the world premier of on-purpose,

the busy woman’s guide to an extraordinary life of meaning and success. Your lab results are clear. I felt a little bit like the wind had been knocked out of me. I even waved my hand behind me, blindly looking for a chair to sink into. When I heard those words, I needed to sit down and take in the weight of that disappointing phrase.

Five words that for most people would cue a feeling that might feel like air, horns and confetti flittering down from the ceiling inside of them. Are you sure? Did you run my thyroid? What about my hormones? I could hear the coin desperation in my own voice as if I were demanding that they find something, anything wrong with me. I couldn’t see the nurse on the other end of the phone,

but I could tell she was shaking her head as she sighed and reminded me. We ran a full panel. There’s absolutely nothing wrong. She paused. And then casually dropped in. You might want to take a look at your lifestyle, my lifestyle. No, just, no, I didn’t want to look at my lifestyle. I didn’t have time for that.

What I needed was a quick solution, a pill or a that I could take to fix everything. I was tired of being tired. I was frustrated with the extra pounds I was lugging around. That made me feel sluggish. And if I’m being honest here, I wasn’t the only one who’d had it up to here with my moods. I hung up the phone and I headed into the kitchen to pour myself a nice big glass of wine.

Apparently there was nothing I could do anyway. Are you uncomfortable enough? My friend, Tracy once told me we don’t leave our suffering because it makes us uncomfortable. That’s a funny statement. Isn’t it. After all, when we’re suffering don’t we want it to end. It’s like avoiding the dentist when you have a painful to fake, simply because you don’t want to hear that you need a root canal.

I mean, no one wants a root canal, but what’s ironic is that the root canal isn’t, what’s painful. It’s all the moments leading up to it. Getting the procedure done is actually an opportunity for immediate relief from the pain, not a band-aid type fix, but a chance to remove it permanently. Yeah. There’s some discomfort in getting it done,

but aren’t you already uncomfortable? It’s funny. But I know for me, the discomfort of suffering didn’t seem to outweigh the discomfort of change. Honestly, if I could have picked between taking a good hard look at my lifestyle or walking barefoot on a bed of hot coals. Yeah. I probably would have started taking off my shoes for the next two months after my phone call irritation and moodiness,

that became my runway of hot coals. I slipped into being comfortable in my own discomfort. I justified it in every way possible, but late at night when the house was still and there were no distractions to be found, I couldn’t escape my own thoughts. I lay bleary-eyed and wide awake watching the red numbers of the clock tick by the midnight hours I stared at the ceiling.

Then I chatted with my regular nighttime visitors worry would come over and sit perched on the edge of my bed while regrets whispered quietly in my ear and stress while stress just hogged all the covers while chattering on at full volume. I couldn’t quiet them down. Counting sheep. Didn’t help. Neither did counting down the hours. I got to sleep right now. I’ll still get four hours of sleep.

All right. If I go to sleep, now I can get three hours. Maybe I can get two hours of sleep. You’ve been there. Haven’t you? Why did I think it was easier to sit in my own suffering? I honestly don’t know. I think it’s because I felt like this was just the way life was supposed to be. What are you filling?

I thought I was checking the boxes of everything I was supposed to do. Maybe you feel the same punching the clock, wrestling your days, like an angry bear, dragging yourself through the daily motions, struggling to find satisfaction. We’re filling our calendars, but are we filling our souls? Have we stopped to ask that question or have we resigned ourselves to the belief that this is just how life works?

We’ve been sold a promise that really isn’t true. If we hustle and suffer through life will magically work out in the end. Maybe we thought our life map was supposed to look something like graduate high school, attend college, get your degree, find a real job. Get married, have a couple of kids retire. Then we start enjoying life. Yeah.

And when it doesn’t seem to work out, when we veer off the expected track, we are somehow failing. That’s what we believe after all, we live in a world where expectations and perseverance are put on pedestals. So we get stuck cycling through the soul, crushing motions, living a life on repeat until the day comes that we can retire at the age of 65.

And then, then we can finally enjoy life a little bit. The days of the cushy retirement package, they’re over and truth. Be told that cheesy gold watch. Isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. And honestly that is not how life really works. We don’t have to settle or slog through our days to earn happiness. We have to stop borrowing from today to make tomorrow great.

It’s time to start living our lives for today. And for tomorrow, it’s time to get a bigger vision. It’s time to rise above the mediocrity. You dream of more go get it. You believe you were designed to change the world. Yes you were. You wonder if you can reach that brass ring. It is yours to grab. It is time to take up more space to stand tall in the belief of yourself.

This is your chance to say life can be different. Life can be on purpose, living on purpose. Don’t let that word purposeful you. It is such a heavily weighted word. Purpose simply means working on something bigger than today. Living a life aligned with a larger idea, created and set by you. We all have a purpose in our lives, even if we don’t know right now,

what that purpose is. I want you to hear you were designed for more. You are made for a life that brings joy and satisfaction to yourself and to others. We can live each day on purpose by deciding how we want to spend the precious time that we have not just waiting for an imaginary clock to wind down so we can. One day enjoy life.

We have lied to ourselves for far, far too long. We say it’s not possible. Or we find imaginary obstacles conveniently placed in our path. We make excuses to ourselves because we aren’t really sure what is truly possible. I know because that’s exactly what I was doing. When I was on the phone begging for a diagnosis from that nurse, I was looking for a magic pill when it really just came down to owning the choices I was making chasing after success,

not taking care of myself because I was too busy, trying to look like I had it all together. Now don’t feel bad. If you found yourself in a similar situation, feeling guilt or shame, that’s only going to hold you back. This is the perfect chance to rise up because the truth I learned from that hard season is this. Once you accept responsibility for your own life,

you can do anything. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. What matters is what you do in moving forward by picking up this audio book and listening, you have made the first step in taking back responsibility and deciding how you want to live. I do think though that if we’re going to go through this journey together, I think it’s really important to clear the air about one thing.

This is not a goal setting book. Yeah. We’ll talk about goals and how they fit into the big vision you have for your life. But goals are simply the vehicle to get you where you want to go. They’re not the end destination. It’s funny because when I sat down to write, I had planned to write an entire book focused solely on goals.

I promised my editor, Jenny, that I would write a goal setting book. I’ve taught thousands of women how to achieve their goals. So it was easy to give her an outline of each chapter. I could coast into writing 200, some odd pages, only about goal setting. No problem. Here’s the thing. When you decide to write a book,

you have to believe that you know that topic inside and out, but then you got to step back. You have to give the book room to breathe and allow it to show you how it needs to unfold. I started with a very strict outline from the very beginning. My writing began to lead me off of the well beaten path that I had planned.

Without question writing this book has transformed me as a woman, a business owner, and as a mother, it’s changed my thinking in ways I never anticipated. It shifted the way I run my life at home. And in my business, it’s infused more joy and harmony into every single day. Even on those days where nothing, nothing goes as planned. While I packed away at my keyboard,

the world outside my windows had transformed. Two huge shifts have been happening since the global pandemic with so many lives up ended. The pandemic has acted as a catalyst for many people causing them to stop and really question whether they’ve been living their lives on purpose. They’ve been asking themselves I’m exhausted, but I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing. What have I been doing with my days?

Or why do I feel so unsatisfied with how I’m spending my time? Or how do I figure out what to do? So my life feels more meaningful late at night, staring up at that blank white ceiling. Those were the very same questions I had been asking myself, but what’s the goal. It had been easy to think that I would write about goal setting.

After all people love goal setting books. We’ve convinced ourselves that goals, well, goals are the magic solution. If we can just accomplish this one big thing, suddenly life will be easier. We fixate on that finish line, hoping that maybe happiness, happiness will lie and wait on the other side. And then we’re disappointed when it’s not sometimes what we think we want is not actually what we need.

Goals are not the goal. When we are so busy, focusing on crossing that imaginary finish line, we miss enjoying all those meaningful moments. As we make progress, there is an incredible abundance of joy that can be found in the cracks and the crevices of our daily life in the small moments when we live a life on purpose. But because we think goals are the magic solution,

we place an incredible amount of importance on these giant achievements. And we discount the small moments when in truth, our daily actions will bring us more ongoing joy than a finish line ever will. In fact, most people undervalue the small continuous steps because they think that the fastest route between where they are today and the life that they dream of is to hustle and constantly chase every opportunity,

especially the big defining ones. The idea of living a life of unhurried purpose feels like it would take too long. The term unhurried purpose is a misnomer. It’s deceptive because living with unhurried purpose is actually the faster way to get to where you want to go. There’s no real shortcuts to getting to the ideal life. It simply takes consistent small movements done with purpose.

That’s the heart of this book, the daily choices that we make, the small decisions and opportunities that get us to that bigger life that we dream about. We look across the chasm between where we are today versus where we dream of being. And that void is as wide as the grand canyon. We fool ourselves into believing that the quickest and easiest way across is to build a jet pack that will quickly propel us to the other side.

So we spend 30 years slogging and toiling to create that faster way to zoom across the divide in that 20 seconds flat. We like the idea of that speed. Don’t we in reality, simply placing one foot in front of the other on a purposeful path, climbing down into the canyon and then up the Rocky trail that would get us where we want to be in just a matter of days,

all the while enjoying the views together, we will uncover how you can find a more meaningful life in those small, easy steps. We don’t realize it, but unhurried purpose is hidden in our daily lives. In the choices we make to live our life to the fullest. Staying true to the path we believe our soul is designed for living on purpose. Isn’t about changing who you are.

It’s about rising up becoming the best version of you. You don’t need changing, but there’s a good chance. Your mindset needs a little bit of adjusting any time that we’re ready to up-level whether it’s in business or our personal life, we need to step out of our comfort zone and question our thinking. Now I know I have thought several times that it would be really nice to have a crystal ball to just show me what the future holds in truth.

You actually have one, you have a crystal ball. If you want to see a clear path of where your life is heading, take a good look at the daily choices you’re making, choosing to choose. We have more choices than we think. We just need to open our minds a little bit. We’re not talking Jedi mind tricks here. Our brain is hardwired to make choices and decisions without skipping a beat.

In fact, we can easily plant a tiny seed of an idea and it immediately begins to grow. This seems like a of work, but really it’s not take yawns. For example, yawns are one of those things that seem to be contagious. When you see someone else open and stretch their mouth into a satisfying you on making a loud, yo, you feel pulled to Yon yourself even while listening to the word yawn in this book right now,

has you thinking about yawning? Doesn’t it? I know because as I type the word yawn in this passage, I can feel a yawn begging to be released in my own throat. And with this new found need to yawn. I notice a second, very quiet thought, begin to form. Maybe I’m tired. And just like that, a new thought has been planted.

It doesn’t matter that all the evidence points the other way after all, I had a full night’s sleep last night. It’s 10:00 AM. I’m sitting on my screen. Porch. Sunlight is pouring onto my lap. I’ve been up and moving for hours, but suddenly I have the slightest dip in my energy simply because I’ve decided I am tired. I’m not really tired,

but my brain is tricking me into believing. Maybe I am. That is how powerful our brain is when it makes a choice, even without our knowledge, we buy in completely. So what if we decided to actually choose our choices? I know that’s an odd statement, but I want you to mull that over for a minute. We assume that a choice is always something that we actively choose,

but it’s not. Those yarns are a perfect example of this. Our brain makes a thousand choices every day, and many of those are made without us thinking about them at all. Our brain chooses to pull our hand away when our finger brushes against the hot stove to shut our eyes when we sneeze or to even utter a curse word. When we bang our shin against something and always a really loud curse word in front of our kids,

right? We tell intentionally, make these choices. Our brain chooses them automatically. Isn’t your brain amazing. Our brains, automatic decisions are a fabulous benefit because I don’t want to think too much about my balance. When I jerked my leg upward to stop the pain of stepping barefoot on a Lego again, but it’s also a drawback because it means I can easily slip into autopilot with my brain making decisions about how I live without my conscious knowledge,

not choosing is a choice we often make when we don’t pause and question our thinking from time to time, we can find that we’ve been sleepwalking through our days. It’s time to choose, to be awake in your own life. When I made that choice for myself, everything changed now, I’ll admit at first I felt a little bit like a bear being roused,

a long, deep hibernation, but once I wiped that crust asleep for my eyes, I began to see clearly for the first time I started moving forward with vision. Clearly seeing the direction I wanted to take. I learned how to create freedom in my life, where I actually decided what life looks like, which meant saying goodbye to guilt, overwhelm, and stress.

I could see that I could be the architect of my own time and how I spend it. I began to discover how life could be so much easier. I just had to wake up and see that if I wanted more joy, more gratitude, more abundance of love, then I could choose it. Now we only have one thing to do before we start.

We have to stand in the belief that choosing the life we desire is possible. Whisper it to yourself. Say it in the mirror in the morning. When you get dressed, post it next to your computer at your desk. You don’t need to know how to make those choices right now. We’re going to get there together through these next nine chapters right now.

You just need to be open to seeing that the choices are there. The first choice is to start listening to chapter one. I’ll see you there. So there you have it. The introduction to on-purpose, the busy woman’s guide to an extraordinary life of meaning and success. And here’s the truth. You should go get this book. You need this book.

I absolutely know that you do. If you want more of what you just heard, stop what you’re doing right now and go pre-order it today. I’m going to be unapologetic in this audacious ask of you because it’s not really that audacious. I’m going to ask you to buy the book. If you have heard even a snippet of this episode or we’re really any episode I have shared here on the podcast that resonates with you,

I can promise you, you’re going to find this book. Life-changing life affirming. Pre-ordering the book is an amazing way to support me and to support this free resource, this podcast that I create for you every week. But it’s also, it’s really a fun way to be a part of this launch, because you’re going to get your copy on launch day.

And then we can celebrate this big milestone together, because I feel like you, my listeners, you’ve been right by my side throughout this whole journey. I have been just completely overwhelmed with gratitude, with the excitement and the momentum and the kind words. So many of you are sending my way. So if you haven’t gotten a copy of the book, whether it’s the audio book or the hard copy book,

or both, a lot of people love getting both. Go get the copy if you’ve already got it. Thank you. Go get a copy for a friend or your mother or your coworkers. This book honestly is ideal to read with other people, especially because I have a full reader’s guide that helps you apply everything you’ve learned in the pages of the book.

If you are wanting to step into your extraordinary life, you are in the right place. Now go get the book. It’s your chance. And you and I both know that women supporting women like what you’re doing when you order the book. That’s how we make our collective voices louder. That’s how we know that we have the intentional advantage. Go get the book.

Now, Tanya dalton.com/on purpose. Thanks so much for joining me today. Quick question though, before you go, do you like prizes? When you leave a rating and review of the Intentional advantage podcast, you’ll be entered to win my life changing course, multiplying your time. Simply leave the review and then send me an email@helloatTanyadalton.com with a screenshot. I choose one winner at the end of every month.

So go ahead. Do it right now. Just a quick comment with what you loved about this episode or the show in general and a rating and send it our way. Not going to lie by stars is my favorite, but I’d love to hear what you think of the show. And if that’s not enough of an incentive for you to win the multiplying your time course,

I have to tell you the reviews are the number one thing that supports this podcast. And me, it’s the best way to spread the word and get business tips and strategies to all those other women out there who need it. So there you go. Two great reasons for you to go and leave a review right now. So go ahead and do it,

send that screenshot my way, because I want to give you a free course. And thanks again for listening today. I’ll be back next Tuesday and I’ll plan to see you then.

 

This transcript for the Intentional Advantage was made using AI. The Intentional Advantage is a top productivity podcast with a female host.

Tanya Dalton loves to help women be more productive. She is considered one of the best female keynote speakers on the topic of productivity, time management, finding balance and goal setting. Her talks are motivational, inspirational and actionable.