Transforming Your Relationship: Keeping Your Lamp Filled

“Women are like oil lamps, when the oil runs dry, you can’t get fire!” – Unknown

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between pleasure and happiness?

Those words are used interchangeably a lot of the time, but they are actually very different. Do you know what the difference is?

About eight years ago, one of my beloved mentors, Keith Cunningham taught me that “pleasure is momentary and fleeting, but happiness endures and is long-lasting”.

Just like the difference between pleasure and happiness, there are two kinds of self-care: momentary and long-lasting.

Both are necessary in life. However, if your self-care is heavily weighted towards the momentary pleasure type of self-care, you’re going to need a shit ton of self-care to get through life!

At the frantic pace of life today and with everything we juggle between the kids, house, work, marriage, families, friends and everything else, it’s important to keep our personal oil lamp filled.  We need to refill that oil lamp 1000 times faster than the women of 50 years ago did.

Momentary pleasures are important, and we all need to schedule it in. A few examples of what falls into this type of self-care are the simple things like talking to a friend,  playing with your kids, taking a hot bath, working out, dancing, taking a walk, creating, playing, or even a spa day.

But we also know the feeling when that pleasure is done. I call it the “spoon hitting cardboard” feeling. You know that feeling. When the spoon hits cardboard at the bottom of the empty ice cream pint? Yeah, that feeling!

If most of your self-care is focused on momentary pleasures, there just are not enough hours in a day to refill your lamp in a sustainable fashion before you feel empty again.

When you increase your focus on long-lasting self-care, you can keep your oil lamp lit longer and sustain your levels of passion and life-force longer!

Here’s the thing…..when you create a life you love, you need a lot fewer momentary pleasures to get through the day!  The kind of self-care that is long lasting is doing the work to create a life by design!

What does that mean?  Creating a life by design means creating a life that matches who you really are inside. A life where you show up as your best and most authentic self.  A life that keeps you filled up, inspired and charged with passion.

Doesn’t creating a life you love, one by designs sound much yummier than living a life by default?

A life by default is the one that was handed to you, the life that you fell into, the life that everyone else wants you to live, the life you think you have to live, or the person you think you have to be! Trying to be something you’re not in a life that is not fully of your choosing will suck the passion and life-force right out of you.

When you stay stuck in a life by default, you find yourself chronically depleted.  There will NEVER be enough hours in a day to adequately care for yourself while living a default life.

I know because I used to be stuck in a default life!!

I figured it out one night twenty-one years ago.  I’d been pondering how I could be SO unhappy at such a young age, and wondering if “this was as good as it gets”?, when I realized that my spoon had hit the bottom of yet another pint of ice cream at 2 o’clock in the morning!  And then I had an awakening. Thank goodness it was the first of many! I woke up…and began creating my life by design!

Today, my life is beyond my wildest dreams! I mean that literally, because I never could have dreamed of a life this amazing – I didn’t know HOW to dream that big! I’m living my life by design every day! And still designing my tomorrows. And I’ve learned a few secrets along the way that I want to share with you!

Here are my top 9 secrets to creating a life by design:

1. Never ever stop developing YOURSELF! Always be immersed in some form of personal development. You are meant to keep evolving, into a better and more authentic you, darling! That is a forever-journey! You will delight in your progress every step of the way. And every step brings happiness and joy!
2. Find out who YOU really are and every day, dedicate yourself to taking another step closer to your most authentic self!
3. Be courageous! Living a life by design as your authentic self takes courage! And it’s so worth it!
4. Surround yourself with a tribe of people who are on the development path with you! People who will challenge you, stretch you, catch you when you fall, champion you, support you and get you. Get into a tribe of peeps all happily on the development path with you. You can’t achieve wild success alone!
5. Design every area of your life. To have a life by design it includes designing all areas of your life: health, wealth, spirit, relationships, self, love, etc. You can’t have one area in disarray and live a life by design!
6. Model the successful path of others. Modeling is the #1 short-cut to living your life by design! If you want to master your finances, find a mentor who has mastered finances, has a repeatable system, with many, students who are all getting the same level of success that you want to experience, and learn from them! Take their courses, go to their events, read their books. Implement their systems, join their “tribes” and get your results faster!
7. Invest in your self-mastery! YOU are the bottleneck in your life right now! Invest in yourself!!
8. Master your ability to relate to others in the world around you!Your relationships are impacting your quality of life, all day, every day. It’s not happening TO you, you are CREATING it! Learn the skills to master it!
9. Create your love relationship to be an unshakable love and unleashed passion! There is NOTHING more important in life than your love relationship! Hands Down! NOTHING is more important than the quality of your love relationship!

Take inspired action today and start living your life by design so that your oil lamp is always filled from the inside out.