Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [28]
Your answers to all of these questions will help you assess how you feel about the Core Seven areas of your life. This is critical to determining where we should focus your energies to move you from by default to By Design.
If your answers are primarily 1’s and 2’s, you are living by default. How does knowing this make you feel? Are you ready to change?
If your answers are primarily 3’s and 4’s, living By Design should come easily to you. You are in a good place to embrace change and improve the quality of your life from good to great.
If your answers are mostly 5’s and 6’s, you’re already on your way to living By Design. But you’re open for more, aren’t you?
Congratulations! You’ve identified where in your life you’re strong and the categories of your life where you experience resistance and struggle. Before we move on to the next chapter, I’d like you to write down next to each of the Core Seven why you answered the way you did. What are you present with by revealing your answers? If you’re up for an immediate breakthrough, a huge aha, a barrier removed, or some resistance released, share your answers with someone you feel connected to.
Remember the exercise of completing all of your half circles? This is the perfect opportunity for you to become complete with some of those.
When you actually get down to doing the work in this chapter, I promise you will have tremendous breakthroughs that will start you on the right path to living By Design.
How are you feeling? Ready for more?
Turn the page.
Because the focus of this book is to quickly teach you the strategies to shift from living by default to By Design, the next step you’ll need to take is facing your addictions. Before you raise your hand in total disagreement, let me explain what I mean. Everybody is addicted. Jack Canfield, coauthor of the successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books, has said that we are “a society of addicts.” I completely agree.
Addiction is a state of psychological or physiological dependence on a habit-forming substance. It can also be considered anything in which you show a great interest and to which you devote a lot of time.
Okay, got it? Good, except, that’s not what I’m talking about when I refer to addiction. I am not focused on drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, sex, or any other vice. To me, those are symptoms or effects brought on by four much larger causes.
If you’re like me, you may know people who suffer from one of the addictions I mentioned above. As your coach, I want you to know why they do those things, how they got there, and some of the driving forces that brought those effects into play. I always want to go back to that specific day in their lives when they woke up and said, I’m going to take this, drink that, try this, smoke that, snort this, eat that, sleep with, et cetera.
I have a friend whose husband was involved in a terrible car accident that ended his career as a professional athlete. Depressed and unable to do what he loved most, he began drinking all the time until it was obvious to everyone around him that he’d become an alcoholic. His wife constantly made excuses for his behavior, saying he wasn’t in control and had been stripped of his identity as a pro athlete the day he crashed his car. I tried to explain that her husband had choices about how he responded to the changes in his life. He chose to drink. He picked up the bottle all by himself and raised the glass to his mouth without anyone else’s help. Still, she insisted it wasn’t his fault, even going so far as enabling him to continue his drinking. That was at great cost because it caused the demise of his marriage, his relationship with his children, and any hope he had of salvaging something from his former career.
In this case, I can easily point to the day of her husband’s accident as