Episode 4 What You Water Grows

Episode four what you water grows. What you give your focus, attention, and energy to is what you will have more of in your life. Be intentional about what you are focused on and what you want to build.

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Hi, welcome back to Exhale. I'm Laura Bunchcar, and in case no one has told you today, you are worthy of peace. So take a deep breath and exhale. Today's topic is what you water grows. Whatever you consistently give your attention, energy, faith, and effort to will grow. This applies to good and positive and productive things as well as bad, negative, and traumatic things. What are you growing? Your mindset matters. You can examine your thought patterns and determine where your thoughts and energy are directed to. In turn, you can see a direct relation to what is happening in your life. In other words, take time to really examine what it is that you are focusing your energy, time, and attention to every day. What do you think about the most? What do you put the most out toward in effort and in words? What are you speaking on the most in your day? Is it the things that you want to call into your life? Is it the attention you want to bring to the good in your life? Or is it the things that you're lacking in life or that you feel are negative attributes about yourself or your life? Because the more attention you give to the thing that you are calling out the most in your thoughts and in your words is the thing that will continue to grow and you will have more of. So if you're trying to rebuild your life and you're trying to change and heal and grow, you need to be speaking on, thinking on, and acting on the things that you are moving toward more than the things that you are trying to leave behind and release. There are areas you can direct your thoughts to. It's because of the heaviness of it, and because you've not yet learned how to exercise your brain to where you can take control of it and redirect those thoughts when they pop up unsolicited. So that's a practice, and there are exercises that you can do to help strengthen that so that it becomes more automatic. And the biggest one is simply being armed with comebacks. And that sounds like a childhood thing that you learn to have a good comeback, but it's really productive in changing your mindset because those negative thoughts are gonna pop up, and those um hard times are going to sit on you at times, but you can control that and redirect it if you kind of build an arsenal of thoughts and redirections that when it does pop up, if you know that it's something that often pops up, have yourself a good redirection to send it in a positive spin or positive direction. Habits are also very important, they're probably the hardest things to uh change and redirect, but they are one of the most important because what you do repeatedly becomes a very big part of your life and where you're going. So take the time to examine your habits and what you are repeating so that you know what you need to eliminate, what you need to cut back on, and what you need to add in to redirect your habits into a more productive positive motion as well. Your relationships. There are times where you have relationships that are toxic for you, or maybe they're not toxic, but they're just holding you back from where you're going, you've outgrown them, or you can't grow with them because the person doesn't want to continue growing. They're happy just being where they are, even if that's not a healthy place, and you can't change that or fix that for everyone else, but you can change that for yourself. So this is where you're going to have to choose your own healing and rebuilding over staying stuck to appease a relationship that maybe needs a little distance now, not necessarily ending it, although at times that is necessary, but definitely putting some distance and standards and boundaries in place for that relationship. Your faith is an area that you can exercise to bring more of what you are wanting and the peace that you need in your life. You can lean heavily on it, you can dig deeper into it, you can study it and find the resources that you need in it that will help you obtain that peace that you're looking for. Train your mind to notice the good and the blessings versus immediately harping on or pointing out the negatives and the lack. It is a training, just like you would be training for a big race that you're running or a swimming match that you are doing or a big game that you are playing in. You will have to put in the work to change the way that those automatic thoughts come up, but it's worth the work. It definitely changes your life. We've talked about changing your brain, changes your life, changing your thought patterns, changing your mindset. All of these things are very pivotal in making that transition into your new lifestyle that you're rebuilding with peace and joy. You need to feel what you want more of and work and focus on more of that versus feeling and sitting in the soaky mess, like we talked with the buttermilk blessings. Things are gonna happen. Bad thoughts are gonna come up, heavy things are gonna happen in your life, but you get to choose how much attention and focus you give to them because good things are gonna happen, and good things are gonna come up in your life as well. You have to make the conscious choice that you're going to focus on and direct more time and energy toward what is good in your life than what is hard and heavy in your life, and sometimes that's gonna be a little harder because there may be more of the hard and heavy times in this period of your life than there is the good, but there's always some of both. So it's going to be really important to change the tides to where more of the good is coming in and being focused on, and the way to do that is to start changing those habits and mindsets and the way you speak to yourself. We talked about that a lot, and we will continue to because it is very important that you learn the habit of speaking to yourself the way that you would speak to a friend and examining your situations in the same way you would if a friend were telling you about their situation and you act accordingly. Again, that takes practice. You won't automatically do that or learn that, but you will get to that place if you continue to move in that direction. Whatever we repeatedly feed with our focus, our words, our habits, our energy, and yes, even our choices, it was is what tends to take up more space in our lives. You can't only say you want peace while continually watering chaos. You're never going to have peace if drama and chaos is the driving force of your day and your life. And it's so easy to get caught up in today because we have social media giving it to us, we have people in our workplace and in our families feeding us drama and chaos, and it may even feel comfortable to you because maybe that's how you've lived most of your life, maybe that's how your home life was when you were growing up, or your current relationship. So in that way, it becomes even a little harder because that's your comfort, even though it's not healthy for you, it is comfortable for you because it's what you know. And change can be scary. And we've talked about how two things can be true at the same time. Even if you are not happy and you want things to change, the uncomfort and unknowing of change can sometimes hold you back because of the comfort in the chaos and in the toxic. So it's going to be noticing that that is happening and then taking the steps and doing the practices to move you in a new direction. And once you do that, the change will seem less and less scary. And once you step into the change and start adapting to it, it's going to go back and forth a little, but it will become more and more comfortable. And once that piece becomes your norm, then you're going to be very protective of it, and you're going to wonder why you didn't choose to move toward it quicker. You can't say that you want confidence and then be self-critical all the time. So talking to yourself negatively and about yourself negatively, even in a joking manner, is going to hold you back from the confidence that you're seeking to do whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish in life. So this is where your practice of thinking differently, speaking to and about yourself differently, is going to start to change your life. Because if you are more confident, you're going to step into change more boldly. You're going to volunteer for change, and you're going to start planning and executing the moves that you need to make to get to those goals that you've set. Because you're now confident in yourself and in the moves that you're making. You can't say that you want connection while watering isolation. And wow, is this a call out for myself and others that I know? Because a lot of times in your healing, you will want to self-isolate. You will feel like that's the only way that you can get to where you need to go. And while for a time that could be true, there's a time that isolation crosses over from being healthy to being toxic and self-sabotage. Because if you isolate too much, it's going to feed depression and anxiety. And the longer you stay isolated, the harder it will become to integrate yourself back into people and crowds and workforces. A lot of times people who work from home a lot have a problem with this. If you want to be able to connect with people and you want to find a relationship, healthy friendships, and be able to be in the business that you want and make the connections you want there, you're going to have to practice being more social and being more open to being around people instead of isolating yourself. You can't say you want a new life and build a new life and expect one while continuing to feed the same old story of your past every day. If you're always living in the past and speaking on the past and trying to call back in what once was, it's going to be very hard for you to build a new life and to move forward. And here's what's important: it doesn't matter how great your past was in comparison to where you are, you're never going to be able to duplicate it. You're not going back there. But the good news is you can go forward and build something just as good, if not better, than what you're reminiscing about in the past. So again, two things are true at the same time. You can have a very beautiful past and still have a very beautiful future, even if the present is not where you need to be and want to be, or even if it's toxic and traumatic and some bad things have happened. So that's what you're reminiscing about, and you're forgetting about the bad that was including in that. And that puts you in a toxic cycle where you continue to repeat that, searching for that good that was in there while often forgetting and ending up having to repeat the bad that was also included in that. Because you can find an equal or better good than what you had in the past, but without the toxic that went along with it. That's why you're going to have to break the cycle, let go of that, and start moving toward and building anew so that you can find something and build something that is that equal or better good that you are missing without the toxic that kept you pulled and torn and hurt. I would like to share, share, you heard the appalachia coming out in there for me a minute. I would like to share a poem that I wrote that will give some more insight to the topic that we're talking about. What you waters grows, and time is something that is included in that. The name of this poem is Time. Focusing on the ticking of the clock will bring you nothing but madness. The incestuous lure of yesterday's regrets will fling you into the deepest abyss. The illusion of time wraps you in chains. Shake them off. Set yourself free. Freedom has a value beyond currency. Peace is the diamond in the rough. Break out of taut limitations. Ignorance is to blame. Conditioning is real. You had the power all alone. Rise up and breathe in your stardust claims. Spit off the complacent poison. You have been fed far too long. Frolic through the fields. Stare up at the stars. Absorb tranquility. Exude gratitude. This was a poem that I wrote a few years ago. It is in Euphoria Unleashed, Roots to Light Extended Version. It is available on Amazon. And it dives deeper into letting go of the past and letting go of taught things and expectations that have been placed on us and being in the present, feeling what is, paying attention to what's around you, and being able to be grateful. I'll break it down for you a little more. Focusing on the ticking of the clock and yesterday's regrets instead of learning from them and moving forward. That's the beginning of the poem that says to you that this is where your problem is going to be. This is going to be a downfall for you if you're always focusing on the ticking of the clock and yesterday's events and regrets. Repeatedly feeding regret, resentment, shame, or the belief that our best days are behind us, or carrying yesterday's pain around like a badge into today's present instead of healing those parts of us and breaking free of the bondage that they hold over us. Things have power over you when you hold on to them. The longer and harder that you hold on to them, the more power you're giving them. Freedom has a value beyond currency. Peace is a diamond in the rough. These are things that are very dear and important to me once I found them. Peace is the goal always. It is the goal that I have to have in my life because once I found it and realized what it was, and it took me into my 40s to truly find it and realize what it was. I'm very fiercely protective of it now. And I do make decisions and choices and changes in my mindset that revolve around finding it and staying in it as much as possible. Peace isn't something that just finally happens, but when everything around you becomes perfect. Peace is something that you work for and you obtain, and then even when things aren't perfect, you can still find a way to be in it and be in your own truth and your own peace. You say you want peace, but you must choose to practice and cultivate that peace. If you're cultivating drama and chaos, you're gonna get drama and chaos. If you cultivate peace, you're gonna get peace. Where your attention goes is where your life grows. The next part of the poem says, ignorance is to blame, conditioning is real, you had the power all along. Habits are what make the difference. When you know better, do better. We are all ignorant to begin with. You have to learn. Ignorance is not stupidity. It's okay to be ignorant about something that just means you didn't know about it yet. It's not okay to choose to stay ignorant about something when you have a choice to learn and grow. This is when you know better, you do better comes into play. And we've learned that from the great Dr. Maya Angelou. We often repeat what we were taught. This goes to the generational things that we've talked about. You want to break those generational cycles. We often repeat it because we've been fed it and we've seen it and lived it all around us. The beliefs about ourselves and families, the labels we're having to shed and overcome, the coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, and decades and generations of a set way of thinking and believing. These are things we have to break free of if we want changes in our lives and a different future for the generations that come after us. You can't change what you haven't noticed yet. You're going to have to take that. Time to examine your thoughts, your life, and your focus. This is where your truth and your story and who you are are really going to come out. Are you who you are and who you want to be, or are you who you thought you were and who you were expected to be? A lot of times we do get caught up in what our family, friends, teachers, mentors, what they expect us to be, what has been generationally in our family, what is considered cool or acceptable for the generation that we are part of, especially in our early years in college and high school, you're going to have to really get real with yourself and decide if what everyone else is doing, that's in your family, that's in your friend group, that's at your job, or that's your generation, is what you truly want to be doing with your life and who you are, and be willing to make changes and break out of that. If the answer is no. The next part of the poem, which is the ending of the poem, says, frolic through the fields, stare up at the stars, absorb tranquility, exude gratitude. Notice your life, experience it fully. Take in the peace, inhale, give thanks, give out gratitude, and exhale. Feel the release and feel the peace. When I wrote the ending of this poem, it was like the beginning told you the heaviness of not yet having peace, not yet having boundaries, standards, and living in everybody else's expectations and living in the past. The ending of the poem tells you where you need your focus to be going. Have fun in life, go frolic through the fields, run through a bunch of daisies, smell the flowers, stare up at the stars, don't be afraid to dance in the rain. Feel the peace, enjoy the peace, and be willing to make that a priority in your life. And last but certainly not least is mentioned in the poem is gratitude. And we've talked tremendously about gratitude because it is one of the biggest things that you will learn and practice that's going to make a difference in your life. It's a habit that you need to form, it's a practice that you need to do, it's a mindset that you need to obtain. Gratitude is the key to everything. You should be grateful for what you have, the opportunities, the healing that you're doing, the rebuilding that you have, the people that you have, so many things. The air that you breathe. You could go on for days about the things that you have if you truly choose to focus on what you have versus what you don't have. Here's a few facts about some of the things that we talked about today. Gratitude. The scientific studies show that practicing gratefulness actively changes the brain, lowers stress and cortisol hormones, and triggers feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. When we're doing our journals and we're writing, three things that we are grateful for in the moment of today, three things we are grateful for that happened already, either earlier that day if you're writing at night, or the day before if you're writing at morning. Those practices trigger all of these things. They reduce the stress in your life, they reduce the cortisol, they activate the dopamine and the serotonin, which physically and scientifically is proven to in fact change your life, changing your brain, changing your mindset, changing your life. Because of that choice to practice gratitude daily. That's how important it is when I'm telling you to do these journals. I do this every day. If I skip a day, I hit it right back the next day. You know, sometimes we do get busy, we may forget to do it that day, but the key part of that is getting back in it the very next day or even later than you usually do it. Sometimes I travel a lot for work. We've talked about this because my day job is a regional property manager, and several days a week I am traveling. So if I forget to do it in the morning or I have to leave really early because I'm driving very far and I won't have time, then I pull out my phone and the notes of my phone sometime during that day while I'm eating lunch or whatever the case may be, and I do my grateful things that I'm grateful for that day because I know that continuing that practice changes all of these things and is going to make not only my day better, but the projection of my life in a direction I want to go in. The next fact is about habits. They're automatic routines that can control a large part of your daily actions, they help your brain save energy, but also can be the hardest things to change. Because once you develop a positive and helpful habit, then it becomes automatic. Your brain will automatically go to that habit versus the negative habit that you had that you replaced with the positive habit and the healthy habit. And it's not even necessarily about positive versus negative, more about healthy versus unhealthy. If you have unhealthy habits and unhealthy thinking patterns, and you want to replace those with healthy ones, then you're going to have to practice that and change that habit. It won't be easy, but once you do it, it will be automatic and your brain won't even think about it. It will automatically pick up that new healthy habit instead of the old toxic one that you left behind. Then how these all tie together is mindset. Your mindset is changeable, it impacts the performance of you on a daily basis, it affects your health, your heart, your health, your gut health, all those things are impacted by your mindset. A flexible, growth-oriented mindset improves your overall mental health and lowers your stress hormones. And as we've talked about plenty of times before and will continue to, stress can physically make you sick. It has been proven that a lot of autoimmune diseases are brought on or fed by stress. Even if you have a genetic trait that you're developing these, in some cases, it's because they are triggered by a thing or event that was traumatic and stressful in your life that brought them out. You can carry it and never develop it. But if something comes in contact with it, whether that be another sickness or disease or alcoholism or drugs or just a traumatic event and stress, it can trigger that dormant autoimmune that's laying in your system and make it develop. And here's the thing: once you have activated it, that doesn't mean you have to keep feeding it. You don't have to make it worse by continuing your stress load and not finding peace. You can actually improve it by cutting those things out and learning better habits and better mindsets that aren't toxic and move you in the direction that you want to go in. We talked about how I grew up on the farm with mama and papa, and they were growing all the tasty, wonderful things in their garden, but they were also growing us and teaching us lessons. Think about a garden in general. A garden needs to be tilled before it can have anything done to it. You've got to till the land up and get it ready for the growth. Then you have to plant the seeds, and those seeds have to be watered, and your garden has to be weeded. There's work that goes into this garden. It's tilled. Have you ever seen people be out physically? Like my grandparents weren't rich, they didn't have all these machines that did all this for you. My papa had a tiller that you had to get out there and physically do with your hands. And then once that was done, the seeds were put in the ground by hand, one row at a time, one little part at a time. And then they were out there all the time watering the garden. If there wasn't enough rain, they had to get out there and pull the weeds that tried to grow in their garden and really take care of it before they saw the harvest. And then, as most of you know, when you talk about a garden and growth, the harvest is a lot of work too. You got to get out there by hand and pick all of those things or dig up those potatoes, whatever it takes, picking the beans, get them in, bring them in, they have to be processed in some way, they have to be washed, they have to be the beans have to be strong and broken, the peas have to be shelled, you know. Then the canning process, like it's all work. You didn't just get up one day and decide you wanted to have a garden, and then 10 days later, the food was on the table. There was a whole process and a lot of work and steps that went into that. It's the same way with growing and healing and finding your peace. There's going to be steps and there's going to be work, but just like all of that is worth having the food from the garden to sustain you throughout the year and throughout those cold months when you're not growing anything, the work that you put into your healing and your growth and your rebuilding is going to be worth it because you're going to be harvesting a beautiful, peaceful life down the road that you built from doing that work. They're the steps that you have to focus on. You got to focus on what you have to do to get there. If Papa had said, I just don't feel like working in the garden, I'm just not going to do it. And Mama said, Well, I just don't want to can all this stuff. That's too much work. I'd rather focus on something fun or something comfortable. Well, then we wouldn't have eaten in the winter. And it's the same with you. If you choose not to focus and do the work, then you're not going to reap the benefits. The whole reap what you sow. You got to sow it. You got to do the work if you want to get the benefits. If you just tilled out up the garden and threw out a bunch of seeds and said, okay, whatever the rain and sun grows, grows, whatever the wind blows away, just blows away. I'm not going to put any work into it. You might still get a few things that grow here and there. But you're not going to get the true harvest that you would have gotten if you tended the garden and put in the work and did all the things that helped you get this beautiful, bountiful harvest. There's one thing that Papa always said. He did tell me I could have and be anything I wanted to be, but he didn't say because you are special and entitled to it and you can just have it. He's always tacked on. If you want it bad enough, you believe you can have it, and you're willing to do the work for it. Because all those steps are equally important. It doesn't just come because you said you wanted it and that you're somehow special and entitled to just get it. You have to do the steps that it takes to obtain it. And I enjoyed that job very much too. But when the opportunity came up to work in property management, I knew that it would be the way to grow in a career that could someday get me to relocate to a beach. So I put a lot of work into it. I learned it. There are still things I'm learning now because you only can learn what is available to you to learn. And as you grow and as you meet new people, then there will be more things available to you that you can learn from them and more trainings that you can take and more things that you can do. So I was very eager to everything that I could learn, I could learn. If the opportunity came up for me to take on more work, and I knew that I would be able to learn something from it, and it would help me grow faster in my career. Sometimes that meant taking on more property, sometimes that meant traveling more, and uh sometimes it meant taking a bigger property, moving from part-time to full-time, but I was able to go from working part-time in a career I knew nothing about to being a full-time regional manager over a portfolio of several multimillion dollar properties in a span of five years because of those things. I knew I wanted it, I was willing to work for it, I had faith that I could do it and that it was worth putting the work into. Same thing with healing and rebuilding. I was experiencing anxiety and depression, I had Lyme disease, I was having panic attacks, I was a caregiver, and I was raising children, and there was all of these pressures, and all of it was important to me. I wanted to be there for my husband who was sick. I wanted to be there and raise my children, and I wanted to be the healthy version of myself to do those things. And in order to do that, I knew I was going to have to choose to find what it was that was going to get me healthy enough to do that. So that's how I chose to do the work, to believe I could do it, and to get into all of the changing of the mindset, the changing of the habits, and getting things together so that I could be the person I needed to be for myself and my own future, as well as for my children and my late husband and all the other people that were in my life and are in my life. Because choosing you and healing you and rebuilding you is taking care of the people that you love. You're no good to them if you are miserable, if you are hurting and you are sick, and you're making yourself that way. I'm not talking about a physical sickness. Of course, things like that happen to us and we get sick and we have no control over it. I'm talking about making it worse or making yourself sick by choosing to always live in the stressful, traumatic parts and not trying to heal, grow, and rebuild in your life. Some things are beyond our circumstances. We can get counseling, we can get a coach, we can listen to podcasts, we can read books, and we can do things that help us accept where we are, but also focus on where we can go and grow and heal. We can be grateful for our past, grateful for the things in our present, while also building toward the future that we want. So, like always, I invite you to focus on where you are, where you want to be, and what changes you need to make. Do the work with your journal and hit that subscribe button. Share this with your friends and family, coworkers, anyone that you think might need help. Or if you're someone who also likes to help others through your social media, and you have people on there that may not be people that you could send it directly to, just share it on your social media and it'll reach a lot of people. That's actually how I first started was sharing uh uplifting messages on my social media, just good morning and good night messages that were uplifting. It made me feel better to find and read these messages. So I thought, okay, well, if it's helping me change my mindset and helping me feel better and start and close my day in a better mind, um, then maybe it'll help other people. So I started sharing it and it did, and people were reaching out to me and telling me how much they loved it and commenting on it. So sometimes the best thing that you can do to help other people is just to put something out there that they can find something in because you never know what people are carrying around every day and what heaviness is going on in their life. So if you put something out there, that could actually be the same as smiling at someone on the seat street that was having a bad day and now that uplifted their mood and was able to help them change. You're not responsible for trying to fix everybody's day. But when you can put some kindness and love out into the world and make a difference, I think we should. Until next episode, thank you for being here and exhale.