Monthly Archives: January 2016

What’s the Plan?

by Dreama Vance

DarrenHardyDarren Hardy is a motivational speaker that I heard at a convention. He had a PowerPoint slide with two side-by-side images. On one side was a slovenly dressed, middle-aged, overweight man in front of a clunker of a car, in front of a run-down house. On the other side was a picture of a well-groomed, trim man with a beautiful woman and two smiling children in front of a sleek car in front of a beautiful house and landscaped lawn. His question was, “Where do you want to be?”

I always laugh when I think about this picture because it is such a visual image and is applicable to just about everything in life. Indeed, his message in his presentation was that it is what you do everyday that determines where you will be in five, ten or twenty years. But first, you have to have a plan.

Everything starts with a plan. Do you want to have lunch with friends? You have to make a plan. Do you want to lose ten pounds weight? You have to have a plan. Do you want to be spiritually enlightened? What’s the plan? The odds are pretty good that something is not going to fall out of the sky, hit you in the head, and magically transform you.

Getting things done and accomplished requires a plan. When you go buy weekly groceries, you probably go with a plan… either you have a grocery list of things to buy, or you have some idea in your head of what your meals will be in the coming week and therefore know what you need to purchase. There is a maintenance plan for your car and when you take it in for service, you either plan to wait for it or plan for someone to pick you up and return you when the car is ready. There is a plan.

Making plans and following them help us get to where we want to be. You have the picture of what you want and then you break it down into daily practices that are doable and will get you the desired outcome. If your plan is to one day run a marathon and you have never run a mile, you aren’t going to go out and run that marathon today. You are going to train for it. You are going to map out a plan. You are going to keep your ultimate goal in mind, but start with a much smaller and manageable aspect of the bigger picture.

Only you can make your plans. Others can help and give assistance, but your plan depends on you… where you are now, where do you want to be, what are you already doing on a consistent basis, how big a step can you take at a time… these all depend on you.

Can you meditate for two hours everyday? If you already meditate for an hour, then probably the answer is yes; but if you find it difficult to meditate twenty minutes, then you will need to decrease your time to a more comfortable period so that you can maintain the daily habit. If twenty minutes is uncomfortable, then you will soon give up. Better to decrease the time and establish the habit. Once the habit is comfortably established, then you can slowly increase the time. See how it works?

What you do consistently is how you achieve the desired outcome.

So make your plans for your health and well-being by mapping out the changes in your diet and your exercise routine, your spiritual life, time with family, whatever your priorities are. What do you want that picture of you to look like in five years time?

Design your plan!

Tell a friend…

So how are those New Year’s Resolutions?

by Dreama Vance

DreamaMaybe I shouldn’t even go there 🙂 but if a change in your diet was one of your resolutions and is now a thing of the past, then let me share a secret to success.

Many people think going cold turkey is the best way to stop doing something or the best way to stop eating something. For some people this is successful.

If this works for you, congratulations! For many of us, however, the step is too big. A hole gets left when the activity or the food choice is eliminated. This hole is particularly noticeable because what we want to eliminate is something that is habitual. When we completely eliminate the habit, we tend to look around and wonder what to do with ourselves! What do we do instead with the time? What do we eat instead of bread, or soda pop? If the answer is Nothing, we may start to get very antsy. The Universe abhors a vacuum!

So the secret is to insert a step called “Substitute” first before you eliminate. You can stay at the Substitute stage for as long as you need to remain at that level. Always keep your ultimate goal in the back of your mind, knowing you will eventually get to it. The Substitute level is a step in your journey to better health and wholeness.

Here is our example of how we eliminated bread at our house. First we changed from “normal bread” to sprouted grain bread. In the U.S. there is a brand called Ezekiel bread, and this is what we started buying. I will tell you that when we started eating this, it tasted like straw or hay to me… at least that was my idea of what straw would taste like.

But, after a bit, we got used to the taste and forgot about the other stuff we used to eat. In other words, we created a new habit and just always bought the Ezekiel bread when we went to the store. We stayed at this level for quite awhile. Sandwiches and wraps play a big role in most of our food choices because they are convenient and easy to fix or grab and go, particularly for lunches.

When I was finally ready to eliminate bread, the step was not so big. By then, I had figured out that I could put everything I would normally put in a sandwich into a bowl without the bread.

At our house, one of our favorite Sunday traditions is breakfast burritos. The burritos have evolved as we have changed our diets. When I eliminated eggs and cheese, we substituted beans and potatoes – vegan style. Here, too, we utilized the substitution step. Later, we changed the tortilla wrap to a sprouted grain wrap. Then, later still, we completely eliminated the wrap and put everything layered into a bowl.

The first time we tried the burrito without the tortilla, we were sure we were going to really miss the wrap. What a surprise to find the taste was so much better without the bread! Who knew the bread actually dulled the taste of the other ingredients? Yep, even my husband liked it better without the tortilla wrap.

I used the same technique with coffee. I substituted Teeccino, which is a caffeine-free herbal coffee. You even brew it like coffee. Sometimes, just the routine of making something, like a pot of coffee in the morning, is what we find comforting. I used this for years, until I stopped, and then replaced it with warm lemon water in the morning.

There are two points to make this Substitution step successful. One is to allow yourself the freedom to substitute. It’s okay. You don’t have to go cold turkey. Realize that you will take that final step of eliminating what you no longer desire in your diet or life and that the Substitution step is a step towards this.

The second key is to substitute with something that is better for you and similar enough that you still enjoy it. In other words, you want to replace so that you are not creating what feels like a big hole in your life.

This technique has been used successfully by many in changing to healthier diets and in creating better habits.

Here’s to the New You!

Tell a friend…