S3 E34 Life Fung Shui - Set Up For Success!!

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Good evening and welcome to the Comforting Voice Podcast. I'm your host, Shasta Rey, and I'm joined in the studio tonight by Emmy the Minimicaw. She has been a little terrorist tonight, in the cutest of ways, and she's sitting here with a little dish of food. So we'll see if she destroys anything or if she's content to sit and have her snack. She and I have already had a pretty heated argument about the cigar box, and I now have to keep it across the room. So I took the liberty of drawing a tea tag and a fortune cookie slip in advance, and generally just chose to keep the danger factor at a low minimum. So that's the immediate drama in my life that I have to tell you about. So I hope you've had a good start to your week so far. I hope you're not being bossed around by a short little bird and uh one with a sense of humor at that. Oh goodness. Let's just take a second, get you comfortable, get you off to a good night's sleep or a little bit of relaxation or chill time or whatever it is that you're here for, and then we'll just get started on our content. I have a really great episode for you tonight. So this is the part of the episode where you can get comfortable, rustle around, figure out if you're gonna sit this way or lay that way, whatever your case is for the moment. Get your pillow all squished up and in that position that is best for you. Get your listening device set at that perfect volume. Do a quick inventory check. Do you have everything that you need at your fingertips? Bottle of water, hot cup of tea, your weighted blanket, sleep mask, your favorite teddy bear, whatever you need, make sure that you're set up for success and you don't have to root around or go hunting it down later or deal with it once you've gotten comfortable. That's never fun. Alright, when you're ready and you're in that position, you've found your sweet spot, you're ready to doze off, but you still got a little of the day's energy flowing through you. Give yourself a really good productive stretch. Reach into your arms and legs, really engage those muscles into a good stretch, into your hands and feet, and finally stretch out those fingers and your toes and then give them all a good wiggle. And then after that, release your stretch. That is amazing for just offsetting stress and toxicity in the moment. It is wonderful. Follow that up with a good deep breath of air. You want to inhale to about the count of four. Hold it to about the count of three. Top that inhale off with another inhale, just really quick, hold it for another second or two, and then exhale slower to about the count of six or eight. You put that all together, you've got a really amazing stretch, and then the breath sequence, inhale to four, hold it to three, top off the inhale, another second or two, exhale very, very slowly. Do that a couple of times. Mix and match. Roll it all together, however works best for you, and you are gonna be off to a great night's sleep. Oh my gosh, you can do that every night as soon as you get comfortable, and you probably won't even remember what happened. You'll just wake up and it'll be morning. It's a wonderful thing. Now, really quick before you completely fall asleep, don't forget to check out the website. Go give it a visit, comfortingvoice.com. All of the episodes can be heard there. I've got some new links there. Well, I've got one new link there, and I added a new search feature. So on the home page, if you scroll down to where you start seeing episodes showing up, there are some buttons across the first episode, and I've got categories. You can go back to season one, season two, you can check out season three, but then I've got all of the stories categorized. I've got our first book, and it will, if you click on that, it'll take you just to the episodes of that first book. Same with our second book, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and then I've got a collection of the holiday episodes. I have one more I'm gonna structure for everyone, and it will be our ongoing top 10 listener favorites. And I'll probably update that top 10 every time we have either a listener-based milestone going on or a podcast milestone of some sort. So we'll make it fun, but go check out that new search feature. And then last, if you've got a comment, if you just want to say hi, if you've got a topic request, there's a contact form on the website, and there's also a small little microphone icon. So if you're on a device, your phone, a tablet, something like that that's got a microphone on it, you can leave a voicemail. Would love to hear from you. Okay, what do we got going on? So we don't have to deal with the cigar box. Let's see what your tea tag and fortune cookie slip are. Compassion has no limit. Kindness has no enemy. I like that. And your fortune cookie slip. Don't give up. The beginning is always the hardest. Good advice. Your lucky numbers off of the back of the fortune cookie slip fifteen, sixteen, nineteen, thirty-seven, forty-seven, and forty eight. Good luck if you play number games like the lottery. I hope you win big, or at least win your money back. And we have the bird attacking the microphone because I won't let her attack the archive receptacle. Did you say hello? She's a weird little bird. Alright, let's see what you guys have been up to. Every Tuesday we have a short little clip that we call Join the Fun, and it's a focus on the listener base. I do three countries from our listener base every week, and I come up with some really fun facts and little known trivia, and we just kind of get to know each other a little bit that way. So tonight's Join the Fun segment starts off with Lebanon. Lebanon is home to one of the world's oldest cedar trees, known as Cedars of the God, which have become a symbol of strength and endurance. Lebanon is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world with communities that have existed for thousands of years. Lebanon gave the world the first widely used alphabet through the ancient Phoenicians, making reading and writing more accessible across civilizations. So if you're joining the fund from Lebanon, you represent endurance, communication, and a legacy that helped connect people through the written word. Next on our list is Bolivia. Bolivia is home to Salar de Uuni. I hoped I said that right. Salar de Uuni, the world's largest salt flat. After a rainfall it becomes a giant natural mirror that reflects the sky so perfectly it's hard to tell where the earth ends and the heavens begin. That's cool, I didn't know about that. Bolivia has two capital cities, each serving a different role in the country's government, a rare arrangement in the modern world. Bolivia is one of only two landlocked countries in South America, yet it celebrates a national day of the sea each year to honor its maritime history. So if you're joining the fund from Bolivia, you represent perspective, resilience, and the ability to find beauty in unexpected places. And last on join the fund this week is Uruguay. Uruguay was the first country in the world to provide every public school student with a free laptop and internet access through Plan Siebel. I hope I said that right. Uruguay gets well over 90% of its electricity from renewable energy sources, making it one of the world's clean energy leaders. Uruguay has one of the highest literacy rates in the Americas, reflecting a longstanding commitment to education. So if you're joining the fund from Uruguay, you represent opportunity, forward thinking, and the belief that knowledge can brighten the future. All right, let's see what Lon sent in for this week's Got A Minute.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Environment. It is so very important to us. Today I am in a bit of a different environment. It's not quite as quiet as I like. I'm not sitting in my little studio and doing this. I am in my living room on a cold desert morning, 28 degrees here in the desert. So you're hearing a fan from my little wood stove across the room. And keeping this area warm, I've got a chihuahua in my lap. I've got another one next to me, and another one next to that. Our husky is outside saying, I'm okay with this. Speaking of environment, the husky is in her environment. We've got a uh bearded dragon laying in the sun uh next to me or across the room from me. So that's my environment right now. And where I'm going with this, finally, is we need to be the masters of our environment. Things are going to happen to us every single day. It's that simple. I don't care what social situation you're in, I don't care what money situation you're in, things happen every single day. And it is highly important to react accordingly. We can cease accepting the negatives. If it's nothing but negative, if the news is all chaos and hate, we have the choice to back away from that. We can start every morning with this will be my peaceful day. And mean it. Don't allow that inner voice of negativity to start rattling and rolling. This one's getting a little long today, so I'll wrap it up, but my point being we can control our environment just by our attitude. That four seconds in of breath that hold for six, that release for nine, that resets the brain, and then we can indeed say this will be my peaceful day. Thrive.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

That was amazing. Thank you so much, Lon. And I took a lead from that clip. Of course I cheated a little bit and listened in ahead of time, and I prepared material to go right alongside of that. I've actually talked about this very recently in the past, but I find it to be so very important, and I've made it one of the habits that I've gotten into, and it's made a very positive difference for me. So it has to do with your digital environment and other aspects of your personal environment. And so what I would like to start off with tonight is stating that your environment is going to quietly shape your life every single day. Most people think of environment as the interior of their house, their interior of their office or their workspace, or maybe just their neighborhood, you know, just the place they reside, spend time. But your environment is much bigger than that. It includes your social media, your conversations, your entertainment sources, your news, the music you listen to, your coworkers, the habits you get into, your routines, and even your own thoughts. So think of it as every day you're planting seeds, and the question isn't whether or not you're going to grow something, it's what you're watering. What are you fertilizing? What are you nurturing? We tend to become what we repeatedly consume. Human brains are pattern recognition machines, and whatever we repeatedly expose ourselves to begins to feel normal to us. And that's true whether it's being kind, whether it's outrage, whether it's fear, generosity, anger, humor, cynicism. Your brain isn't going to carefully separate out entertainment from your personality. It simply notices that it's seen something a thousand times, or you're putting hard focus on it a lot, and so it assumes that it must be very important. So let's just take a minute to look at social media. It's a huge part of our lives. Social media is literally training your feeds. Most people think we'll use Facebook for an example. Most people think, man, Facebook just keeps showing me garbage after garbage and this terrible stuff. It's all I see, it's all that's there. But all of these platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, uh, Twitter, that's now X, almost every platform is constantly learning from your behavior. And it's not just what you like or what you click a like response on, it pays attention to what you stop scrolling on. It pays attention to what you watch longer, what you comment on, what you click on, what you share, what you read, what you save. If you interact with it at all, it pays attention and it takes notice. Any kind of attention is treated as interest. Even angry attention, even stuff you don't like, if you pay attention to it, you'll see more of it. So what you can do is not feed that monster. Honestly, folks, I mentioned this before. One of the best things I've done for myself is simply stop arguing online. And it's not because people are suddenly right, it's you get sucked in and you contribute to the negativity, but then you just get more of it. Even if you feel like in the moment you have something constructive that you have to put there in front of all the other people that have commented and that are reading everything, it still teaches the algorithm you want more of it. So when you comment, you get more. When you share, you get more. When you watch, you get more. When you sit and read all the comments and you interact with those comments, you're gonna get more. The algorithm doesn't pay attention what you write or if you like it or not, it just knows you stayed there and you focused on it. So I've said this before, you know, you don't have to just totally eliminate social media. We're all on it, we all use it. It's just treat it like a garden. If weeds keep popping up and growing, don't yell at the weeds, stop nurturing them, stop watering them, stop fertilizing them. Instead, nurture the good stuff. Start following creators who educate, follow artists, follow your favorite animal creators, gardening, woodworking, cooking, history, astronomy, crafts, miniatures, puzzles, strange and interesting trivia, science, people making unusual things, photography. The more you like stuff that's healthy content, that's actually truly good for you in some capacity, the more it teaches those algorithms. This is my happy space, this is where I want to be, and it'll start giving you more of that. A few other things that I've found are people that sing, people that dance, people that say inspiring things and have unique perspective in a good way. So I've I've started just really engaging with different types of content, and then I've mentioned this before. A lot of times there's ways to say, don't show me this, I don't want to see this creator anymore, don't show me this on my feed anymore. And when you when you reject stuff in that way, it's gonna pay attention to that a lot of times. So reject the stuff you don't like. Research says mood really is affected by this stuff. Several studies have found that passive Facebook use can leave people in a worse mood afterwards, partly because people often feel they wasted time, or they compare themselves too much with others. And other research has found that in the workplace, for example, face-to-face interactions are strongly associated with happier moods throughout the day. So honestly, the takeaway isn't reject all social media, never use it. It's use it with intention, use it with purpose. Try to avoid the doom scroll trap. Our brains have evolved to notice danger, and thousands of years ago that kept us alive. Today, danger comes through this glowing rectangle, a screen. You get bad news, you get outrage, you get disasters, you get conflict, you get negative sarcasm, all sorts of stuff, right? And our brains naturally pay more attention to negative information than positive information. This is a tendency that psychologists often call the negativity bias, and I've mentioned this in the past also. Endless doom scrolling can amplify stress and anxiety without actually helping us solve anything. So be very careful of that. It's something that happens without our awareness of it. Give yourself permission to not need to know everything. One of the healthiest things you can do is admit that you don't need to have an opinion on every post and every headline. You're not required to fact check every stranger, you're not required to solve every world problem, you're not required to win every internet debate. Sometimes being peaceful is bliss, sometimes peace is productive. Try peace. I have absolutely worked on just scrolling past stuff, not commenting, not hitting any kind of response emoji, nothing. The only things I comment on are things where I think it's a positive post and it makes a positive difference, and I can contribute to that atmosphere of that post in a good way. So another another thing you can think about is imagine yourself eating nothing but candy. Eventually your body suffers, and information is similar. Ask yourself, is this nourishing me? Is this educational? Is it inspiring? Is it making me in a good mood? Is it funny? Calming? Is it useful in some way? Am I gonna benefit from this in some way? Or is it making you anxious? Is it making you sarcastic? Is it making you want to post cynicism? Is it making you feel combative? Pay attention to how posts make you feel and what words come up that your you know natural instinct to comment. What are those words? Are you posting, you know, something that's not as nice as it could be? Or are you contributing to positive comments? It's not about being a goody two shoes, it's about reprogramming the way you think. So let's switch gears from social media and apply this to a work environment because I mentioned recently that I've had a change of careers, and in the middle of it all, I have seen toxic, toxic work environments. Oh my gosh, I didn't even think it was possible to see some of the stuff I've seen, but there it was. And it made me realize how deeply it can affect you, and that's an environment. So this is another big one. You spend thousands and thousands of hours at work, and all of those hours shape you. There's basically four different categories that I kind of came up with, and this is just kind of my little assessment of the degrees of good or bad in a workplace. It's not a scientific thing, mind you. So let's go with level one, and this is where you just hate the job. Some symptoms of this is gonna be if you're working, say, a traditional work week, Monday through Friday, and you have Saturday, Sunday off, Sunday comes around, and you're gonna spend a good portion of the day dreading the next day. You're gonna dread Monday. It's gonna kick in and it's gonna affect your day in some capacity. You're gonna be experiencing constant stress, you're gonna experience constant exhaustion, probably a lot of irritability, poor sleep, and you're gonna feel really, really trapped. And over time that starts leaking into your home life. So then the next level of your work environment is the kind of it's okay level. And that's where your job's not exciting, it's not horrible, you don't loathe it, it pays the bills. The people are tolerable, and honestly, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just okay, and sometimes having an okay job is a good place to be if you're in a transition period, or if it's part of a goal of getting to somewhere else. Sometimes it helps you build something better. The next level would be the I like my job kind of level, and you don't necessarily wake up excited to go there, but you don't spend the previous day dreading it. It doesn't drain you to wake up, it's okay. You wake up, it's alright, you like it well enough. Waking up in the morning is not a chore. You get yourself there. You generally enjoy your coworkers, and you feel like you're a part of things in some capacity, and people like you well enough. Here again, you just don't mind going there. It's okay, and it doesn't make your life worse. But then you've got the I genuinely love what I do level. And these people often describe work as meaningful, interesting, energizing, they love doing it, and they may still have a bad day here and there, but they don't hate their life because of it, they don't dread going in, and they don't just, you know, have that mood, that black cloud over their head at all times because of it. And environment matters at work. Stress isn't just emotional. Long-term toxic work environments have been linked to burnout, low job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and poor overall well being. Chronic stress can affect sleep, concentration, and physical health over time. Your environment slowly becomes your normal. And another environment, your friends, your social life. There's an old saying, you are the average of the people you spend the most time with. This actually goes into the work environment too. If you're around a lot of toxic people, those play into the people that you spend time with, and you're kind of the average of what you expose yourself to. So ask yourself, do your friends encourage you? Inspire you? Do they laugh with you? Do they want you to be your best self? Do they celebrate your wins? Or do they constantly complain? Do they criticize you? Do they create drama? Do they dump negativity on you? Are they constantly negative? Negativity is surprisingly contagious and thankfully, so is kindness. So just know it's okay to be selective about how you pick your friends and who you spend most of your time with. There's an interesting trick that psychologists recommend. Make your bad habits harder to engage with. So in some of this that I've been talking about, some examples might be deleting toxic apps off your phone so you just don't use them. Turn off your notifications so you're not checking your phone every time you hear a Facebook notification go off or whatever. If there are accounts on social media that fire you up, or they they present content you don't like, makes you mad, maybe it's political, maybe it's on a certain topic, whatever it is, unfollow them. Block 'em. Do whatever you can so you don't see it and it doesn't keep coming up on your feed. Put books within your reach. Put healthy food where you can see it. And another interesting one is charge your phone in another room. Small weird little barriers like that can actually change your behaviors over time and in a very easy way. And that's one of the things I've been doing in various areas of my life, just small little changes, small little positive changes, and then I take some of the negative stuff and make it harder to engage in. And you know, the stuff I'm talking about today, um, your environment, no exception here. Make the hard stuff more difficult to engage in and keep the healthy stuff right at your fingertips. And then don't just remove stuff, replace it. Because nature hates a vacuum. So don't just remove a bad habit, replace it with something positive. So instead of doom scrolling, maybe listen to music, listen to an audiobook, listen to a podcast, take a walk, walk your dog, call a friend. Do you have other animals? Engage with those pets, water your plants, try a new recipe, cook something, or engage in a hobby of some sort. Now here's some fun trivia for you. The average adult makes thousands of decisions a day, and many psychologists estimate that a huge portion of those decisions happen automatically through habits rather than conscious thought. And that's why environment matters so much. You don't have to rely entirely on willpower if you set yourself up for success. If your environment already nudges you in the direction you want to go, it's easier to go in that direction. So, final thoughts, you don't have to redesign everything, you don't have to do any major overhauls right in the moment. Just start asking yourself, what keeps showing up in my digital environment and in my regular environment that's not good for me? And keep it in mind that your environment helps facilitate habits, your lifestyle, your mentality, all of that contributes to your future, and if you want a different future, you start changing by what surrounds you and what shapes you in the moment. So sometimes that smallest click, that little unfollow, that mute, that don't show me any more of this, turning something off, scrolling right past something, choosing to take a walk, connecting with a friend, finding a better job, finding a new hobby. Those tiny little changes over time quietly become the story of an entirely different life. And then last but not least, and this is huge, this is really, really huge with all this, negativity doesn't stay contained. We tell ourselves, well, it's just my job, but emotions rarely stay where they were created. They come home with us in the event of our careers, our jobs. They just stick to us and they come home and they they show up in those conversations, they show up in those interactions, they show up in our reactions to what we do in our personal home life. Psychologists call this emotional spillover, and it describes how stress or emotions from one part of your life can carry over into another. So for example, if you spend eight hours in a workplace where you feel criticized, ignored, overworked, totally disrespected, and it's making you like amp up your anxiety. Even if you never mention work, that stress doesn't just disappear at five o'clock because you walk out of the building and you don't talk about it. It can manifest as impatience, irritability, emotional exhaustion, burnout, withdrawing from people generally speaking, a short temper, and having less energy for or even desire to be with the people you love. So sometimes the people we care about the most receive the leftovers from our terrible day. And it's not because you love them any less, it's because they're the people we finally feel safe enough around to let our guard down around. And that's not good for anyone. But if negativity is contagious, keep in mind that so is happiness and joy. And research has shown that emotions can spread through groups. We've all experienced it. So, like if you walk into a room where everyone is happy, everyone's laughing, everyone's having fun, you're probably gonna smile too. If you walk into a room where everyone's in a horrible mood, everyone's mad at each other and bickering, often you're gonna even feel that tension before anyone has to say a word. So keep in mind that that same thing can happen right at home. Do you want to contribute to everyone's happiness and peace? Or do you want to help contribute to everyone feeling like they have to walk on eggshells around you? It's a good way to keep yourself grounded and get a little perspective when you need it. Just some final thoughts. Your environment doesn't just shape you, it shapes the version of you that everyone else gets to experience. When you improve your environment, you aren't just giving yourself a better life. You're giving your family, your friends, your coworkers, and everyone around you a happier, healthier person to spend time with. And that's a gift that's gonna reach further than you can even fathom. It truly is. So all of this is something to really think about. And from my personal experience just this past year, of making some little changes like this, rejecting the negative stuff, rejecting the angry stuff and the stuff that charges a person up or that just bums you out. You know, sometimes you see that news stuff and those politics stuff and the drama that shows up on social media, whatever it may be, and it'll just affect you in a negative way. So I've started rejecting all that, and I've been treating social media as like something nice to do uh here and there through the day, but not a place to live in. I try not to spend too much time there anymore because I find it to be negative generally speaking, and I use it to connect with people that, you know, here again, they're good friends. We do uplift each other, we encourage each other, we use it as a good place to make connections with each other, and I just try not to focus on the stuff that, you know, quite frankly, it's a time waste, it's a time sucker. I think the most important thing to remember in all of this is that if you set up your environment for success, you're gonna find success. So set yourself up for success. That's all I've got for you tonight. I'm gonna see you on Friday as our vintage bedtime story continues. You don't want to miss it. It's a good one. And until then, sleep tight, good night, and bye bye.