Tina 00:00:00 Today I am talking about clearing what's holding us back from reaching our goals, our dreams, the experience that we want to have in our lives. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how September is the perfect time for a reset, and I talked about deciding that direction you want to go in. How do you want to experience your life in the next six months? So it seems perfectly aligned to talk about clearing what's holding us back and releasing what no longer serves us. And I believe this is the perfect time to do it, because we are in a full moon today. At least I'm recording this on the full moon. It's going to be released tomorrow, but what a perfect time to release everything that doesn't serve us. Let's get into it. You're listening to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. I'm your host, Tina Stinson, and I had a stroke at the age of 39 from stress and burnout that shook my world. Now I'm laying it all out. The deep level self-care practices and mindset shifts that I needed that kept me healthy, balanced, and thriving.
Tina 00:01:11 Join me in this intimate space as we explore healing, resilience, and the soul's journey to alignment. This is where real conversations about deep level self-care happen. Let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to the Soul Aligned Self-care podcast. I hope you've all been well. And to all of those new listeners out there, I want to welcome you and everybody who keeps returning week after week. I want to thank you for hanging out with me every Wednesday. So today's topic is kind of riding off the back of when I was talking about deciding what direction you want to go in your life, deciding how you want to experience your life, which we did a week or two ago, I believe it was like two weeks ago because it was around the new moon and yesterday was the full moon. I'm actually recording this on the full moon. I record on Tuesdays, and so this is at the top of my mind today. And I'm talking about clearing what's holding us back, releasing what no longer serve us, serves us.
Tina 00:02:22 And this is so important when you know, when you have big goals and big dreams or you're just making big shifts in your life, big transformations, because in order for something to really change, we have to change what we're doing. We can't keep doing the same thing and expect everything to change. So I thought that it was really important to go through this, and I'm going to share an exercise with you. You know me, I always have some kind of a, you know, a journaling exercise. Of course, this is a journaling exercise. Now before I get into it, I just want to share with you right now, I have a ten day free trial for the Soul Alliance Self-care circle, which is a membership where you can uplevel your self-care, get all the accountability that you need. And we do. We use tools like this. Every week we introduce a new self-care mindset tool to help you not only take care of yourself in the deepest way, but also to uplevel everything in your life your mindset, your happiness, your peace, all that stuff.
Tina 00:03:32 So if you want to check it out and take advantage of that ten day free trial, the link will be in the show notes. Now let's get into today's episode because I am excited about this one. So I want to, as I said, build on the idea of, you know, deciding the direction we want to go in by exploring the importance of clearing away what's holding us back. And as I said, with the full moon's energy. A time known for releasing and letting go. It's perfect opportunity to get rid of anything that no longer serves us and make space for a new version of ourselves. So why is it important to clear what's holding you back or release? Okay, once we know where we're headed, once we made that decision and we know where we want to go, it's really time to take an honest look at our actions and our behaviors and ask yourself, are the things I'm doing every day actually moving me toward my goals? Because we get so busy in our lives and we we have a lot of stuff that we're responsible for, okay? And it's really easy to move through your day to day and not pay attention to your actions.
Tina 00:04:49 I still do it myself, even though I'm quite aware that I need to, like, reevaluate things I need to let go of. I'll still sit there and scroll on TikTok for two hours. You know, that doesn't really bring me any closer to my goals. Although I do learn some cool stuff on TikTok. I learn really cool stuff because I'm on garden TikTok, so I love learning about gardening. But that's besides the point. Is it moving me? Is it always like maybe spend a half hour on TikTok? You know, maybe not two hours. But anyway, I'm getting off the topic. So, you know, as an example, if you say, you know, one of the things you decided on, you know, how you want to experience your life is that you want to improve your health. You want to feel strong, fit, energized. But every day you're skipping your workouts, you're eating junk food. You're engaging in habits that don't support that vision. Then your actions aren't aligned with what you say you want, and that creates frustration and a sense of being stuck.
Tina 00:05:52 Okay. And so this is all about getting unstuck. This is all about Being able to experience peace, happiness and joy in your life. Creating that for yourself. Being intentional. Okay, so identify what's holding you back. That's what we have to do. So what exactly could be holding you back from living your best life? So here's a few things to contemplate. Your daily habits, all your routines supporting your goals. So like I just talked about with the health one, if you say you want to feel healthy and you want to change your health, but you're not doing anything to do that, you're not aligned. Write your belief systems to. Are you holding onto limiting beliefs that say you're not capable or you're not deserving? Or I'm too old, I'm too young, whatever it might be, you might say, I'm lazy. I hear people say that all the time. When they're not lazy, I would I would even go as far to say is there is no such thing as lazy.
Tina 00:06:53 We're not meant to be productive 24 over seven. We're meant to just be happy sometimes and just be okay. Another thing is, the way you talk to yourself. Are your inner thoughts kind, encouraging, and empowering? Or are they negative and self-sabotaging? So paying attention to that inner voice, even your outside voice like or your outer voice, I guess I would say not an outside voice, but even some of the words you're using like, how often do you say, oh, I can't do that, or I don't have time for that, or I'm trying. Or like all the words that we use that really aren't empowering, that are just cutting us off right there. It cuts that energy off where we can't move forward. Next could be relationships. Are the people in your life supportive or are they draining your energy? Like you should know who you can share your dreams with, your big dreams with, and who you can't. you know, some people say share your dreams. Some people say, keep it to yourself.
Tina 00:07:53 But I say share your dreams with the people who are going to build you up and support you and help you get closer to those dreams. That's who you share those dreams with, okay? Your environment is your physical space, cluttered and chaotic, making it difficult to focus on what's important. While I do believe your environment really has a huge effect on you, and you could really, really benefit from making the environment that you work in and live in a pleasant place for yourself. It's not going to always completely hold you back, but let me tell you, those small changes like adding your favorite colors, adding plants, just making yourself comfortable, you know, warm, inviting, less, not cluttered, make a big difference in the energy around you, your job or your career path. Is your work in alignment with your passions and your values, or is it just leaving you feeling unfulfilled? And how can you start to transition to something more fulfilling? So those are some of the things that might be holding you back.
Tina 00:08:58 an important note. It's not about making huge, drastic changes overnight. It's about acknowledging what no longer serving you and making small, gradual shifts in the right direction. So, for example, I'm not telling you to go if your job or your career path is holding you back from doing the things you love. I'm not saying quit your job tomorrow. I'm saying start thinking about ways you could start adding your passions and into your life. Maybe you could start a side hustle. Maybe you could just, you know, start learning how you could shift. Maybe you have to take some classes or something like that to start shifting into your passions as your career. Right. What do you need to do to point yourself in that direction? Okay. Taking those small steps makes a big difference. When I started my coaching business, or when I should say when I transitioned my coaching business from health coaching into life coaching, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted because I'm in my 50s. I wanted to set my business up so I could retire into my business.
Tina 00:10:05 Meaning I'm going to work like for as long as I possibly can. I enjoy it, and I want to be able to continue to enjoy working, even if it's 20 years later. So I want to create my business from that point of view. I don't want to create something and then have to change it. I want to create something that even as I get older, I'm still going to want to do it. It's not going to suck the life out of me, okay? And I did that by taking these small steps and being patient. And over time, I knew this would grow into exactly what I wanted, which is exactly what's happening. So it's not about always making those huge, drastic changes overnight. It's about making those small shifts. Those make a huge difference. Okay, so I'm going to share my, tool with you or my exercise or whatever you want to call it. And this is definitely a journaling exercise. I call it the not to do list. And I recently interviewed another coach who is very similar to me, who does the same thing with her clients.
Tina 00:11:14 It's it's definitely something that's super beneficial, and I can't wait to share her episode with you. it's not going to be coming out until November, but I'll be sure to, like, tag it in this, in this podcast episode so you can listen to both. anyway, let's get into this exercise. Let's get into how how you could do this. So the first step is really tracking your time. So over the next day or week. So I would say day if your days really do kind of tend to be the same day after day, like everything you do is very similar. Or if you are the type of person who's every day is different for you, like me, every day is different for me. And so I would track a whole week then. So you can write down everything you do. That's right. Everything like even, you know, like me scrolling on TikTok, writing it all down every moment. Be brutally honest with yourself. If you spend, like I said, the two hours scrolling on social media, write it down.
Tina 00:12:14 If you're just, I don't know, I'm binge eating Oreo cookies. Write it down, whatever it is. Okay, the point isn't to judge yourself, but to get a clear picture of how you're spending your time. Now, the next step is to evaluate your actions. Okay, look at these the list of activities you're written down and ask yourself, are these actions actually moving me towards, you know, the the life that I want to experience? When I decided how I want to experience my life in in all the different areas like my health, my fitness, you know, my relationships, my spirituality, my self-development, my home environment, my money, my career. are these actions moving me closer to that, or are they holding me back? And for each item, every single one, you're going to go eat through each one. Because I know there's going to be a lot in there. Right? Decide whether it's truly necessary or if it's just a distraction. And so I'm going to have you sort them into three categories.
Tina 00:13:18 And I want to start out by saying one thing can go in all three categories. And I'll explain that in a little bit. So the first category is ditch okay. These are activities that you can completely eliminate because they don't serve your goals okay. Like scrolling on social media. But you can also so the three categories are ditch delegate. Do I call this the 3DS okay. So you could also say okay I, I like scrolling on social media. So like for me, like I said, I like garden TikTok, but I shouldn't be on there for two hours. Like that's not really a good use of my time. I don't think it's healthy. And so maybe setting a timer and doing like 20 minutes, but then like getting ditching the rest of it. Okay, so I'm kind of like mixing it up a little bit, right? Delegate is tasks that need to get done, but not necessarily always by you. You could pass them off to someone else, or you could also hire someone or just ask for help to handle them.
Tina 00:14:20 All right. So as an example, this could look like hiring a house cleaner once a month, once a week, once a quarter, whatever it is delegating tasks to another person okay. And this can also be a partial thing. So you could ditch something right altogether. Or you could ditch part of it and then you could delegate part of it, and then you could even do part of it. So it could go into all three categories. So I want you to keep that in mind when you're putting these things in the different categories. So for example, for the something that can go into all three categories would be cooking dinner. Okay. You cook dinner every night. You love cooking, but you hate having to cook every single night. So how can you get rid of some of this? Like. All right, so you might not want to ditch all all of it, right. Because you do enjoy cooking, right? You just don't enjoy that pressure of having to do it. So how many nights a week can you ditch it completely.
Tina 00:15:14 Right. And delegate it to another person? All right. Also, you could also, eat out one night. You could get one of those meal services where you could have all the stuff prepped for you, and you just have to cook it. if you have children, you can have your kids make sandwiches one night, right? They'd probably, like, enjoy the fun of being creative and being in charge of something like that. you could just have, like, a girl dinner where you're just, like, snacking on just random stuff, right? So what nights are you going to decide to do the cooking? Right. So that's where something can fall into all three categories. So on Wednesdays and Fridays you're going to cook, okay. And so that's when you're going to do the cooking okay. You're going to delegate it on Mondays and Tuesdays and then you're well you're actually not going to ditch it. You're kind of ditching a few days, but you're delegating it to something else. And then you're going to just go to takeout.
Tina 00:16:19 So that could be ditch. So like Saturday and Sunday you're going to like maybe just do takeout or go out to dinner. Right. So that's how it can fit into all three categories. So this isn't like a black and white kind of situation where you're either going to ditch it, all of it or not. You're going to like kind of kind of put it into different categories, but there are going to be things that you could ditch completely. Like I could ditch social media completely. Right. I don't need to scroll on social media. It doesn't always serve me. I do say I learn stuff and I do. I learned some interesting stuff. It does make me laugh a lot, but there's some bad stuff on there too, right? but I could ditch it, and it's not really going to be life changing for me. Okay, so there are things that can be ditched, maybe hanging out with a toxic person that you've just been tolerating because you want to avoid the conflict of just not hanging out with them anymore.
Tina 00:17:11 And I always find this interesting because people feel like if they're not going to hang out with anymore someone anymore, they have to announce it somehow. They have to like call that person up and just be like, I'm not hanging out with you anymore instead of just spending less time with them. Like slowly over time, just spending less time with them. And if they do ask you why, you could share with them without being mean or anything like that, you could share with them why you're not spending as much time with them. But that's something you could ditch a toxic friend, somebody who's always toxic. Somebody who's maybe not supportive, maybe always talking about other people and gossiping someone like that. That's something you could definitely ditch, right? So there are things that you can solidly ditch, and then there also are things that need to solidly be done that might not serve you in the long run, or they might not look like they serve you in the long run. And so, you know, we all have to take care of our kids.
Tina 00:18:05 We all have to sometimes take care of a parent. may not be like, I don't know. I always enjoyed taking care of my kids. It's not always the most funnest job in the world. And that's that's the time when you want to ditch or delegate some of those activities. But, taking care of a parent can be really difficult. It's something that has to be done. it can be delegated to a certain degree, but it does serve us in the long run. It just changes our personalities. It changes the type of person we are. Sometimes it changes that relationship for the better with the parent. Not always. That's a very, wishy washy kind of situation. but there's just there are things we have to do. We have to work. Right? So some of us have to work. We have to make money in order to pay the bills. We don't always love our jobs. We have to do it. How can we make it better? How can we start shifting it? Okay, so there's things that do go solidly on each one of those categories, but you're going to go through each one.
Tina 00:19:03 And and the key here is this is such a simple exercise. But it's not always easy to do because you have to be honest with yourself. You have to really say like you might say to yourself, I have to do that. I can't ditch that. But it really might be something that you can ditch, but you're holding on to it because it makes you feel safe. It makes you feel comfortable, but it really doesn't serve you right. So it's it's about being honest with you and really looking at these different activities that you're doing, you know? So I might say, like with my business, I need to post on social media every single day. And is that necessarily true for me to have a successful business? Absolutely not. That's not true. I can ditch that. I can ditch that whole idea. There's people who have very successful businesses who spend very little time on social media. You don't have to. So like, be honest with yourself. If you don't like doing something, then don't do it.
Tina 00:20:01 Okay, okay. Let's see. So I guess maybe I really want to kind of go more into like the delegation. So a lot of us also are afraid to delegate activities to other people because it's not going to get done the way we want it to, or it's not going to be as good as it would be if we did it ourselves. And we really need to let go of the perfection, right? I learned this lesson like the hard way. I was forced to let go of it. So like, I was forced to let go of my perfection that I had when I became a single mom. And nothing is perfect when you're a single mom with three kids. Nothing. Nothing is ever perfect. And so in order to be functional, I had to let go of that. I had to let go of, you know, if I wanted the kids to, to help me out somehow. I wanted them to fold laundry. I had to let go of what it looked like when they folded it.
Tina 00:21:01 It's not going to look like the way I want it to look like, but it's done right, so who cares, right? So you have to let go of those little things, and you have to let go and give the people that are helping you, or even the people that you hire a little bit of the creative freedom that they deserve when they're going to do this task. Otherwise they're going to be miserable and they're not going to want to do it. Okay. So it's about letting go a little bit and seeing how it works out. Okay. So hiring someone to clean your house, they might use different cleaning products okay. They might clean things differently. Right. As long as it's clean who cares. Like really who cares? so if you're asking your partner to take on more responsibility in the household, then you know they're going to cook dinner. If they're going to cook, you know, something that's not really your favorite, or maybe the way they cook it is different than then you would cook it, letting go of that because at least somebody else is cooking dinner that day.
Tina 00:21:59 So delegation can free up your time and energy, but you have to let it, okay? Because if you're going to stay all caught up in your perfection and the way it's being done, it's really not going to free up anything. It's still going to have a hold on you. Focus on what really matters. Another thing, too, is when you're delegating and maybe delegating some things out and hiring other people, you might be saying, I can't afford to hire help, and that might be true, but I challenge you to look into it because you might be surprised how affordable some things are. It doesn't hurt to look into it, and it could be something that you could maybe do in the future. So like, say you want to hire someone to clean your house and you're like, okay, I really can't do it every week. Can I do it every other week, or can I do it once a month? You could have someone come in once a month and do like some of the heavy cleaning that you don't do every week, you know? Or you can have someone comment on the seasons to, you know, like clean the windows.
Tina 00:22:57 Right? Do like that deep cleaning where you wash the sideboards and you and clean the windows and clean the blinds and you do all those deep cleaning kind of things. Right. Switch out your linens maybe, I don't know. Okay. So I want you to remember that your time is valuable. And if you're really working on some big goals and dreams and those tasks that you could be hiring somebody else, somebody else who may be specializes in that task, that could do it a lot quicker and more efficiently. you're going to the amount of time you'll gain back and piece is so valuable. So definitely look into how much it would cost, because delegating tasks that drain you allows you to invest your energy in the things that really, truly matter to you. And everybody's different, okay? Different things matter to everybody. So how do I how do I like, kind of turn this into some lasting change? How do I make this effective? So once you've sorted everything out into the three categories the three days, ditch, delegate and do, it's time to start making the changes.
Tina 00:24:07 And this is where the real work kind of begins. Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. And that's one of my favorite sayings, because it's whenever I'm, I'm stuck somewhere and I'm not getting the result I want, and I'm just doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I calm myself out because I'm like, if nothing changes, if I'm not doing anything differently, nothing's going to change. I say that out loud to myself. So I love that saying, you have to be willing to let go of what's not serving you, even if it's uncomfortable, okay? And it probably is going to be uncomfortable. So what are you ditching completely? What tasks can you delegate to someone else, and what actions are you committed to doing yourself, knowing they will move you towards your goals. This exercise is meant to help you clear away the things that are blocking your progress and create space for more happiness, joy, and peace in your life. Remember, it's not about perfection, it's about progress.
Tina 00:25:03 I think Marie Forleo says that progress, not perfection. It's so true and it's never too late to start. The most important thing to remember is that you know you're never too old, you're never too young, you're never too busy or too stock. Whether you want to improve your health or change careers, or cultivate deeper relationships or learn new things, create a new business. Try new hobbies at all. Starts with small, intentional steps. Okay, the best time to start is now, right? Your future self will thank you. Okay, just start now. Take the first step by doing this exercise, clearing away all those things, all that clutter that is holding us back, all those those beliefs, maybe, those actions that we take that are just no longer serving us. Letting them go. Making room for more of what we truly want. More of what really serves us. When you take the time to assess all your daily actions and then realign them with your goals and start taking action, you'll start to feel more in control, more empowered, and more at peace and very importantly, unstuck.
Tina 00:26:19 So if, as I said at the beginning of the podcast, if you'd like more tools and support like this I share exercises all the time, like the not to do list regularly in the Soul Alliance Self-care circle membership. And right now there is a ten day free trial going on, so you could take advantage of that. You could hop in there and you could see all the past work that's in there. So it's kind of a cool way to see if it's something that you want to do. So the link will be right in the show notes. I hope that you I hope that you implement this exercise and that have a have a good time doing it. Sometimes I, I feel like a detective when I do this work because I'm really like, like looking into the nitty gritty of my life and just taking all that clutter out, and it just feels good. We all know how good it feels to declutter, so I just, I so enjoy doing these exercises. I hope you do too.
Tina 00:27:18 Let me know how it goes. Let me know how it works for you. Let me know if you have any questions. You can message me on Instagram at Tina Stinson coach. That link will also be in the show notes. also, you could follow me over at Soul Aligned Self-care, which is the podcast Instagram. but if you want to message me, go to Tina Stinson. Coach, I love to hear from you and I love to support you on your journey. Okay, until next time. Lots of love.
Tina 00:27:48 Talk soon. Bye.
