Actualized Living W/ Erik

What's going on? Cadre family coming to you live here this Wednesday evening. It's been a couple of weeks. I was out last week getting ready. I had a marathon over the weekend, so ran that, and that went well. Coming to you live with not much of a clear agenda in mind other than to think about, you know, this theme of wellness. And, you know, as we're pursuing wellness in their lives, where that's found and where these changes in our lives we want to make and what, you know, reinforces some of the continual patterns in our life that maybe have caused a barrier.

Right. What are these things in our lives that get in our way of living the life that we want to be living, whatever that may look like. In this realm of acceptance and commitment, therapy, something that I practice in my day to day job, we use this terminology of towards versus away moves. Are we moving towards? Are we moving away from the life that we want to be living? And it's important to frame our decision making in this way because there's a lot of other things we can get caught up in as we think about the choices that make up our life.

Our lives are made up of these little choices that pile up on one another. And over time, these choices become bigger, into patterns, into comforts, into so on and so forth. And soon enough, we find ourselves somewhere that we is our, you know, call towards the life we want to be living, or we end up somewhere far away from where we think we want to be. The beauty of life is no matter where you're at on that is there's always a chance, no matter what, to make a move towards that life you want to be living.

And so we often start, like, what does that life that I want to be living look like? How do I identify that? Well, first, often it starts with what's important to you, right? What are the things that, you know, really pull you in, that give you purpose, that give you meaning, that bring excitement to your life, that brings intrigue, that gives. Gives you a sense of willingness to maybe make sacrifices to go out of your way to have this thing in your life? For some, maybe it's adventure. For some, it's creativity.

For some, it's, you know, these. These are general, more general categories. But when we break them down, often they're very innate values in our life that have been there for many years. Unfortunately, we often make decisions that pull us further away from where we find purpose in our lives. Right. An example of this is, you know, maybe I really love being creative, but I'm not a very talented artist. And so, in my mind, I've kind of closed off that vein because I've identified with somebody who's not good at art.

And so rather than trying and doing these things out of my value of creating, I choose a behavior that reinforces this idea that I hold really closely onto, that I am not an artist. So I can't create. I shouldn't. I can't, couldn't, you know, I'm going to fail. I'm going to embarrass myself. It's going to hurt when other people make fun of what I create, create, so on and so forth. Right? And so those are those away moves, right? Those things that create a positive feedback loop. I think I'm a bad artist.

I believe that it's true. I make a decision to not take opportunities to be creative because of that belief. And now, because of that.