Choose Your Pace

When you notice your current stage of life, does it reflect the pace you want for yourself? If it does not align, consider an identity shift.

 Practice making small mindful choices every day so you can create a more peaceful and productive life.  Listen in for some practical steps on how to take control of the pace of your life! 

Main points: 

• How do you label yourself?  Identity is the starting point.  If you see yourself as a “hot mess” or “always late”,  you’ll likely continue to automatically behave that way. 
• Think long term-rather than overwhelming yourself with drastic life changes and unrealistic goals. We don't have to change everything at once, but we can take small steps daily in the right direction.
• Choose one area to start, such as phone use, eating, or driving.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

Hey friends, this week on the podcast, I'm sharing another episode from my group coaching program. Today, we're going to be looking at the pace that we've run at and try to find the practices that align for us. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Today We're going to begin with a practice that can help us find our way to peace. If it's safe to do close your eyes, put your hand on your heart, take a few breaths and try to notice. Are we in the energy of peace? Let's just take a few breaths. And just begin to notice what is the pace that we're currently running at? Is it a peaceful, aligned energy or is there a different energy? Perhaps like me, you end up in frenetic energy, overwhelmed. Let's just take a few breaths and just notice what energy are we in? We're going to decide to choose peaceful productivity this week. Today we're going to notice the difference between Low and slow and fast and frenetic. As we check in, we want to notice, are we currently able to breathe deeply? Are we able to move slowly enough that we're not making any mistakes? Have you ever done that? Get into the car, and you need to be mewhere, and you go a little bit too fast, and mething doesn't go quite right. Or, the difference of getting into a car and you've given yourself those five extra minutes if the traffic light takes a little bit longer or mebody in front of you is going just below the speed limit, you're able to just stay in that low and slow energy. Or are you finding like we often do this feeling that you need to stay fast and frenetic and moving quicker than serves you. Just noticing that, one of the first things we can do, either sigh. Take a few breaths, close our eyes, reconnect. And then we want to spend me time noticing. I'm going to give you a couple of questions. And if you have a journal or me time to put it into your Notes app, what you might begin to notice is if you can check in. Over and over again with me of these same questions for a few days in a row, you might notice me movement in the direction you want to be. Again, we get to decide to check the pace. Is it low and slow or fast and frenetic? And then we get to choose the pace for this year. It's 2025 when I'm recording this, I want to be in aligned, loving presence. What things move me out of that? Well, the things that are in my box of the serenity prayer, my thoughts. The feelings I have from those thoughts and the actions that I'm taking either deciding to do or not do certain things. Here's just a couple of questions. When you think about yourself, how do you label yourself? I think identity is the starting point. It's less about the practices in your life and more about your identity. when One of my favorite coaches, began her program, she realized one of the identity shifts she needed was to stop calling herself a hot mess. She had lived over 35 years of her life as mebody who was chronically late, always forgetting to do things, and had come up with the idea that her identity was, she was a hot mess. And when she decided to change that identity into meone who is aligned, who is consistent, who is able to do hard things, the decision for her identity to match who she wanted to be, the courage to change the things she can, changed everything about her life. If we start to label ourselves as meone who's just always kind of late, what's going to happen is that thought is going to create feelings and it's going to then create action steps that move us into the kind of person who's always late. What is your desired identity? Do you want to be mebody who is aligned to loving presence? Do you want to be mebody who is kind? Do you want to be mebody who is connected, calm? Choose the identity we want and then let's try to have the practices that go along with that identity. What do you think about being in a state of relaxation? What do you think about doing things in a low and slow way, particularly in the winter? If each sean of our life, we look out at nature and we see nature doing things differently. In the winter, it doesn't look like plants and animals are doing very much, but they're doing their important restorative work. What do you think about restorative time, time to rest, to avoid burnout? When you start to notice, you get to decide. I want to choose my pace and I want to check in daily, weekly, monthly, and see if I am living the kind of pace I want to. You might want to choose the values. Do you want words like relaxation, rest, and downtime to be good things? What do you want to think about words like idle, lazy, and unproductive? We get to decide the meaning. We get to decide how we want to live our life. We take a few different areas of life, and I want you to notice, do you tend to be more in the slow, low, peaceful, productive energy, or the fast, frenetic, overwhelmed, frustrated energy? How about when you're eating? When was the last time you sat down, especially if it was by yourself, and made the place setting beautiful? And you had the drink you wanted to drink and you had the time to eat and you weren't multitasking while you were eating. I think to another life coach of mine who often did a practice with people where she would give them all one strawberry and they would very slowly eat the strawberry and notice all kinds of things about it that they never would have paid any attention to. If you're desiring today to live a low and slow, peaceful, productive life, what if you choose for your next meal to make it the kind of meal that you just enjoy. It's the food you want to eat, a place that's beautiful. Maybe there's me music in the background. Rather than just driving through fast food and eating your breakfast in the car, what could it look like to change that one thing? Once a week. We don't have to change everything at once, but we can take small steps in the right direction. What about your phone? Isn't it hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, none of us had a phone in our hand all the time. You might have brought your book with you when you went mewhere. You may have had a conversation. I've even noticed when we go places, my husband and I see all these children and no one has to play I spy with their little kids anymore. They just hand them the phone and the kids are quiet. I feel like we're missing out on mething by constantly being on our phone. What do you want to decide about your phone? Do you want to turn off your notifications? Do you want to decide that from a certain time of day to another time of day, you're going to put your phone in a different room? What would you like to decide about driving in such a way that you're living a peacefully productive life? It might involve leaving a little bit earlier. It might be choosing to stay far away from the pern in front of you, maybe not even driving in the fast lane. You get to decide the small practice steps that create for you the identity of the pern you want to be. If I want to be mebody who lives in loving presence, what does that look like with my food? With my phone? When I drive? And then finally, in the community that I've created. Who are your five people? There is much evidence that says the five people that we spend the most time with impact us in a really powerful way. Who was the last pern that you were able to reach out and say, how are you? And they didn't respond with, Oh my goodness, I'm busy. I'm stressed. There's just much going on. The more we want to be people who are peacefully productive, we want to bring me people into our community who are al on that path. We're going to start, we're going to be the little light that brings the light out. Look for those people who are able to be content with sitting still, not filling in every moment of a day. Not finding their identity and being the overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, resentful pern. I know that was my badge of honor for a long time. I was busy and I was proud of being busy. But the problem with that is I didn't have enough time to recover from all the energy I was putting out and the energy that I was living in became a very resentful, Overwhelmed frustrated energy, not what I want it to be and not best for the people I love. One way to check in with yourself and say, Hey, am I in that align loving energy is to notice your patience with things you cannot change and would not choose. I love how Mary Ellen Edgar Beauty says it in her book, How to Be Brave. What are the things in life that you cannot change and you would not choose? That includes mething as simple as the traffic in front of you to mething as complex as maybe an illness in mebody you love. When you notice your patient is going to help you understand, Oh, I'm living in aligned energy or no judgment, I'm past capacity. This line is frustrating me. This pern not moving fast enough in the coffee shop is frustrating me. This pern not showing up for lunch when they said they'd be here is frustrating me. Maybe I am past capacity. let's start with our own identity. Can you name the values that are important to you? Who do you want to be? How is that showing up? Last week we talked a little bit about the words we would use to describe what peacefully productive or calm, aligned, loving presence looks like. See if you can notice a few of those values and write them down. We're going to notice the identity with this sentence. Who are you? How would you describe yourself? How would the people around you describe yourself? I would say young me, 2003 version of me. I enjoyed the idea of being very busy. I loved a calendar that had lots of things in it. I loved moving quickly and unfortunately because I didn't have these tools, it showed up in all kinds of areas. It made me physically sick, made me mentally overwhelmed and made me spiritually depleted. Choosing today to be mebody who's in loving aligned energy means I have to take the time to care for myself first. In the book of Deuteronomy, there's a passage that says the people of Israel for 40 years kept walking around the same mountain, but hoping that mething would be different. Every single year, at least when I'm watching television, the Different commercials are full of things like buy this new product, eat this new vitamin, try this new thing and everything in your life will be different. And over and over and over again, people try the short term fix and nothing changes. What if this year we're willing to take small action steps and create peaceful productivity with just tiny differences. Instead of going around the same mountain, turn north, do one thing differently. The first thing I'd love for you to notice is who are you? Who do you want to be? Decide to check the pace you're running and choose the pace you'd like to run. If you're currently fast, frenetic, overwhelmed, resentful, and you would like to be in calm, Lower, slower, aligned loving presence. Let's notice it and make one decision. What would you like to decide? That same Bible verse, when God says, go north, it was a direction of let's stop doing things this way and try doing it that way. We're going here. That's why maps are helpful. I'm here and I'm going there. What's your north? It might be the energy you want to be in, might be the relationships you want to create. It could be the financial stability you want. It might be just having a space in your home that's welcoming and inviting. What is your north? Which priority are you choosing? For many years, I worked in the nonprofit world where we had every single sean, 10, 20, 30 different priorities. Everything's equally important. And then the energy was scattered and really nothing moved forward. We can do that with our own life. We have ourselves, our relationships, our responsibilities. If we don't decide to prioritize one thing, we keep putting energy in lots of different directions and nothing really changes. Maybe today you're deciding I want to align to the values that I've chosen for my life. I want to choose the pace that I'm currently living. I want to have more white space. I want to have time for community. I want to make sure that every single week I get to do that creative activity that fills me with joy. In order to do that, if our life is really feeling full right now, we're going to have to say no to me things, defer me things, or delegate me things. Could you decide today to say no to one thing, to def something, or to delegate it? See if you could make one choice. I'm going to say no to this, or I'm going to defer it. I'm going to decide to do it three, six, nine months from now, or I'm going to delegate it. I'm going to let mebody else do it, even if they can't do it as well as I can. And could you decide that you're going to choose that your priority is actually important because it's important to you? That's what makes it important. And if we can put that priority in front of us and decide we're going to take the small action steps in a peaceful, productive way, maybe doing it twice a week, maybe doing it for a little bit less time. And then finally, how do we get into that aligned energy? We're going to have to practice staying present. Again, we're going to end our time together as we began it. If it's safe to do you can close your eyes, put your hand on your heart, take a few breaths. Thanks. Notice where you are. Can you notice any of the smells? Do you hear any unds? Can you touch mething and notice the texture? Do you have a thought that serves you? One thought I love is, in this breath, all is well. And up until today, that has been true. I'm going to keep that one as one of my power thoughts. Can you intentionally focus on one small action step that moves you closer to the priority that's important to you? And if your priority is, I want to be mebody who lives in loving, aligned presence, that's as important as saying, I want to get the whole basement clean. That is the decision to make today. What's your north? What's your priority? What's your small action step that moves you in that direction? And my encouragement is to not try to do too many things. If you feel like it's just almost too hard, right, many of us start the new year and that's it, I'm going to have a whole new body, I'm going to go to the gym six days a week for an hour, and then that feels overwhelming we do nothing. What would it look like to say, for the next thousand days, I'm going to move? Every single day. It might be one push up, it might be going for a walk for two minutes, but every day, for the next thousand days, I'm going to move. I'm saying that example in particular because one of my Facebook friends just celebrated that a thousand days of small movement every single day. That's our decision today to notice what's important, to make one small decision, and then to choose in advance the small action steps that move us forward. Choose your pace, check in, see what your current pace is, choose your pace for the next season and if you want to be peacefully productive, make that decision today. I thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative. Purpose filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbetts, life coach, or visit my website, Kelly Tibbetts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.