If My Plate Could Talk: “4 Signs It’s Time to Action In Your Life”

Hello, Cogisphere. I hope you are doing as well as possible and the end of your week is coming to a smooth end. I'll tell you this. It is so important to slow down your week before you start a new one. I think we can have an opposite desire, opposite impact. Sometimes when we're in the midst of beginning something new, we can just be going a million miles an hour and then realized that we start the next week exhausted. So that's not ideal. You know, I remember it's been several, several years. I was a part of like a business group.

And one of the things that the leader taught us that I thought was pretty interesting was to try and end your week by 6pm before. Good evening. Speak Wonder. Hello from Philly. I'm so glad that you're here. And I have really tried to honestly keep that in my life. Not every day, but specifically like on a Sunday by 6pm making that my cutoff. And I'll tell you, it is a, it's a game changer when it comes to going into the following week. Refresh. Hello from Statesboro, Georgia. I am actually in Georgia right now.

I'm in Helen, Georgia. For any of you that are familiar, this is my first time here. It's been on my bucket list of places to visit. It is beautiful. It is freezing. It is snowing outside, but not cold enough to stick yet. But tonight is supposed to be like in the teens. So I will be inside, nice and warm. But yes, please come in, let me know where you are. And welcome to if youf Plate Could Talk, where we take time every week to really focus and center on what is on our plate, tangibly and metaphorically, really looking at what we're holding, what we're carrying, what we're processing and how to maintain a level of harmony around that.

And how is that intersecting with things that might be happening in the full context of our lives? Grief that we might be experiencing trauma, different things that we are working to heal, and all things life. Oh, polar vortex. I believe it. Like, this weather is, is crazy. I grew up a majority of my life in Atlanta, and so I'm pretty familiar with Georgia summers and winters. And this is not typical. Hello from South Carolina. And thank you. Yes, I know my dress has nothing to do with the actual weather here, but I just felt like wearing something light and something cute.

So it is what it is. Let's get into the focus of today. I'm so glad that you came for this time anchoring thought. I've been trying to start us with one of these each week. Today's anchoring thought is by Eckart Tolle E C K H A R T T O L L E I'm a big proponent of. If there's a quote that's not mine, I'm always going to let you know. Awareness is the greatest agent for change and a very simple and profound thought. But it fits really well as we're kind of continuing our conversation around emotional intelligence and self awareness being one of the first principles or dimensions of emotional intelligence.

And the thing that I want to really highlight today is we are often aware of what we need to do. We are typically less aware of how we feel and how the way we feel is impacting what we do in the way that we do it. So one of the things that I want this week and just as you move through the future is for you to really center in what is your true level of self awareness and try not to have it be a situation where your level of self awareness isn't substantial or you're not dialed in into your self awareness until there's an issue because that's typically the problem.

West Virginia snowing and 20 here. Yes, you can keep that. I will say I have a close friend who lives West Virginia and I love the area. But yeah, really thinking about what's your true level of self awareness? Do you have a self awareness practice? Answer that for me in the chat. Do you have a practice of self awareness some way daily that you spend time genuinely checking in, noticing and responding to what you're noticing in yourself? And not just you notice when you feel bad, you notice when you're exhausted.

We often notice the extremes, but the self awareness that comes from a high level of emotional intelligence that is most helpful to us is the level of self awareness that is also very subtle. Do you know your subtle, subtle signs that you are heading in the right direction? Do you know your subtle signs that you're heading in a direction that goes against what you would like for yourself? So I want to talk about four signs that you may need to move into action. Because a part of self awareness is awareness to action.

What are you noticing? What is impacting your life and how can you then take action? Let me kind of pull this together as well. When we talk about the dynamic of what's on our plate and what do we notice? Is there or not there? Part of self awareness is being able to acknowledge are there things that I have on my plate that as a result of me not really paying attention to them or not Being aware of how they're weighing on me, I kind of lost. Yeah. Kelly, thank you for acknowledging that. A lot of us have a level of self awareness that's just like, oh, I realize that's there and then it's a fleeting thought and we move on.

But the whole concept of creating a plate that has a level of harmony and not allowing what's on our plate to overwhelm our physical body, our mental body, our spiritual body, and the way that we're nourishing ourselves means that it has to be a level of active self awareness. Which means I don't just acknowledge it, but I honor it by doing something different order to support myself. So, yes, journaling can be a great piece to be accountable. A checklist. I'll give you another example before I go into these four signs.

Let's say that you're working through your checklist and then you're taking some time to acknowledge and reflect and you realize, I'm not feeling great today. A way of honoring and taking action in your self awareness would be, okay, I need to do something differently. Maybe I need to take a nap. Maybe I'm not feeling great because I ate something different than what I normally would and I need to pay attention to that. Plan a meal. Maybe it's a meeting that you know that you're anticipating and you're not feeling as ready for, so you want to do some level of preparation there.

Maybe your family's schedule is chaotic and too much so. Your level of self awareness moves you to shift things around in that way. Could be a number of ways. But the key I want you to get from this is being able to move from awareness to action. So four signs that you may need to take action in your life. Number one, and I want you to think of these as a continuum. You have a persistent level of unhappiness that would be on this side or the other side of the continuum would be you're always feeling like you're on.

You constantly feel like there is something that you need to do that has to be done and that you can't rest. So persistent unhappiness. And along the continuum of always feeling on which one do you notice you spend more time? Where are you in that continuum? And I'm not asking you necessarily to say, oh, I'm persistently unhappy, but do you notice that you trend towards feeling low or you trend towards feeling constantly on the go? That might be a better way to kind of make it a little less daunting.

Number two, lack of motivation. Or other side of the continuum would be a lack of energy. So lack of motivation can come from feeling depleted and not even knowing why. And then the other side of that is noticing, hey, something's off with my energy. The way you're energetically showing up. And I want to use the continuum because you could be in a situation where you genuinely feel like, hey, things are pretty great in my life. But then when you take the time to slow down and step back, you're like, but I'm not quite feeling like myself.

I'm not quite enjoying things the way I feel like I should or the way I normally did. I was having this conversation with someone just the other day where they were talking about feeling checked out. And they were like, my internal energy feels checked out. They're still showing up, they're still doing all the things. Everyone on the outside would think, wow, you're amazing. But their internal energy felt checked out. So, yeah, if you're in a place for those who are chiming in and you feel like you're always on the go, that's a sign that you need to take action and you get to decide what that action is.

But an example might be, can you mitigate that some? Can you moderate it so that you're not going and going and going and feeling like the whole world will fall apart if you stop or crash and burn because you get to a place that you're exhausted? So number one, persistent unhappiness along the continuum to always filling on. Number two, lack of motivation. And the other side of that continuum would be just low internal energy. Number three, feeling stagnant or overwhelmed. We can feel stagnant because we're not making a decision because we feel complacent.

We need a change. We need something new and something different, something we're passionate about. But on the other side of that, maybe you feel overwhelmed with everything that's on your plate. That could be really great things or not so great things, but either way it goes, your plate is so full that if you are really honest with yourself, you're completely overwhelmed and you're unsure of what to do. That's a level of awareness that can be helpful if you're willing to take action and move some things off of your plate.

And number four, this is a big one that often doesn't go in this self awareness conversation, a decline in your health. And I don't want you to think about a decline as something big, catastrophic. You have the flu or pneumonia or something which can be a sign that you're doing too much. But I really want you to look at the small dynamics to your health that also are a sign that you're not doing well. Sleep is disrupted, Mild or moderate headaches that are consistent. Stomach distress or gastrointestinal distress breakouts would be considered a health decline.

Noticing a change in your skin, in your level of hydration, even noticing a change in your appetite or your eyesight. Part of why and if your plate Talk we look at what's been on your physical plate. What are you eating? Is because the way that we engage with food is one of the biggest signs that something is off and can be one of the easiest points of awareness. So I want you to go through those four and I want you to first consider do you see yourself on any area of this continuum? One thing that you could do is you could take the words unhappiness and always filling on and draw a line in between them.

And then maybe each day this week put a little dot on the line between where you notice yourself. Right? You do the same thing for motivation, lack of motivation and lack of internal energy. Are you right in the middle and you're feeling in a place of harmony? Or put a little dot and notice with the M over it. This is where I was on Monday. This is where where I was on Tuesday. That's a really great tangible way to have a self awareness practice and track these four things. Maybe you get to the point that you're like I don't feel like tracking.

All four are ideal. But man tracking the one between stagnant and overwhelmed was really great. Or really noticing how am I physically feeling today? I would encourage you when it comes to a self awareness practice around your physical nature is to either rate how you're feeling 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest, or take time to write down three different things you're noticing about how you're feeling in your physical body. Success Tip of the week Create a self awareness practice.

Right? Let's coincide it and put it right together and really give yourself permission to change something and do what you need. Speak Wonder thank you for your honesty. Feeling depleted? Boy, have I been there. You know, it's pretty interesting. I came into the weekend feeling depleted and depleted from good things. So I always want to keep in mind we may have really good things happening in our life, but the pace and the level at which they come can still make us feel depleted and exhausted. So one of the things that I have done is coming into this weekend, I have planned for intentional rest in order to help restore myself.

So if anyone else is also feeling that way, remember that being aware isn't designed to make you feel bad about yourself. It's designed to help you be the greatest agent of change in your life, moving from awareness to action and honoring what you need unapologetically. That being said, I hope you have a phenomenal and incredible week, and I look forward to seeing you later in the week. Be well.