What Can You Remove from Your Life?
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I’m obsessed with Ease.
Let me be clear. Here, I’m not talking about Easy. Easy is about doing less, taking shortcuts, and staying inside our comfort zone. Easy says, “I don’t want to do hard things.” Easy seeks pleasure at the cost of joy and borrows from your Future Self. Easy is what so many of us are in pursuit of.
But the truth is what we are genuinely seeking is ease. Ease is a state of being. It’s an organizing life principle. It’s possible to experience ease even when we are navigating challenging circumstances. You see, easy and difficult cannot coexist simultaneously. But difficulty and ease can.
To be in a state of ease, we must always start with a clear understanding of and conviction around our top life values. Whether conscious of it or not, our top 3 life values decide all our actions. If you’re frustrated with yourself for taking an unwanted action or, for that matter, not taking a desired action, know that it’s not because you’re lazy, lacking willpower, or simply not smart enough. It’s because what you want to or think you should do conflicts with one or more of the life values you hold most dear.
So, first, know your top values and learn how to operationalize each one. This knowledge empowers you, giving you a deep understanding and, ultimately, control over your actions and decisions. And then, never go against them. Values always win. Values drive the car, while goals and aspirations remain stuck in the back seat, loud but ignored.
Our core life values are evident in our actions and not always in our words. We say one thing and do another. If you can give me an honest account of how you spend your time (actions), I can guess your top life values with surprising accuracy.
Ease is a life value commonly pursued by people committed to consciously creating their second half of life. I frequently coach two groups, young adults and women, building powerful second halves of their lives. The latter demographic yearns for ease more than any other feeling.
They’re tired of the hustle and have learned that they don’t need to walk a mile on their knees to feel worthy of the good life. They are willing to do the work but no longer feel the need to prove themselves. They have enough life experience to know the truth of what we might have heard from a parent when our 8-year-old selves complained about a perceived injustice, “You’ll live.”
They know they’ll live and don’t want to make it more complex. They want Ease.
To optimize for ease, we must take a brutally honest look at six areas of life and ask ourselves questions that may result in inconvenient responses.
- Time — How can I remove commitments that don’t bring me joy?
- Money — How can I differentiate between must-haves and nice-to-haves?
- Energy — What and who drains me? What and who energizes me? What am I willing to do about it?
- Relationships – How can I practice Radical Acceptance? What skills am I missing, and how will gaining those skills ease my relationships?
- Mission and Purpose – How can I leverage my experience and gifts to support others?
- Work — How can I shift from a “have to” to a “get to” mindset?
As I write this blog, I’ve been training continuously and intensely for an upcoming race. Just a few weeks before the race, however, my training came to a halt due to injury. So here I am, trying to keep my mind from going into a meltdown about how my race is out the window and it’s all my fault for overtraining.
The truth is that I will either be able to participate in my dream race or not. Nothing about my physical experience at this moment is easy, but I don’t have to step out of the state of ease that I’ve spent a decade cultivating.
At this moment, less training, thinking, and projecting leads to fewer assumptions, anxiety, and stories, which in turn leads to staying in the present moment, the primary practice for unlocking ease.
Ultimately, ease is about subtracting, removing, and deleting.
What can you remove from your life that will massively increase your state of ease?
