Hello my morning people! How are you all doing? Can you imagine that we all started this amazing journey just last month? We all have come a long way. We discussed so many beautiful goals, shared so many stories with each other. I am so grateful for your love and support. Every time I get a personal message telling me how my podcast is making an impact on your life, it makes my day. Every time I see someone sharing a happy moment with me, it brings a smile on my face too. Every message, every comment, every phone call is a treasure for me. As you all know, I am just starting. I am no big pod-caster with a lot of social media presence with a big fan base. I am just like you trying to follow my passion. I struggle just like you, I feel overwhelmed with day to day responsibilities. There are days when I don’t want to do anything but then I think about this amazing community that we are building here. I really love what we are doing here. I have so many ideas and dreams for this podcast. I want to make it better, bigger. But at the same time, I really want it to be relatable to everyone. We discussed 10 goals until now. We discussed on an average 5 steps and 3 action items every week. This week I want you all to look back on what we discussed so far. I want to understand from you all, if you worked on any of these goals. If you find the steps useful, did you work on the action items we discussed. Did you find them useful or did you find anything particularly difficult to follow? Do you have any other tips which you find useful to get closer to your goal? This episode is all about looking back and figuring out what worked well and what needs improvement.
Keep Your Inner Child Alive
We started our journey by cultivating love for our inner child. It is such a beautiful concept and I am still in love with this beautiful goal. We all are so busy in our lives that we sometimes forget to live. We just pass through the day without stopping to enjoy the precious moments. That is the reason we always start our episode here with Happy Moment of the Week. I want you all to pause for a moment to think about the happy moments you experience everyday. I want you all to be intentional about the way we spend your day. This is a habit, a habit to look for happiness and once you get into the habit, it will become so natural to you to find happiness in small things. In our Inner child episode, we discussed how to live our life to the fullest, experience and rejoice full spectrum of emotions. We all took a pledge that day to work on something that we always want to learn or do since our childhood but never actually did. We decided to take up one activity that brings us joy and do it everyday. Today is the day when we all have to check in with our progress. Did we work on these action items? I received a beautiful message a few days back. One of my listeners started working on her passion after listening to this episode. She started recording stories for kids and she is absolutely enjoying the process. I really wish Meghana all the best for all future projects. As we say here, keep dreaming, keep working and be the best version of yourself.
Persistence Over Perfection
our inner child goal, we all worked on overcoming the mindset of perfection. Persistence over Perfection. I struggled for a long time to get over my drive for perfection. I had to work intentionally to be more persistent. We all decided to keep on trying without becoming over obsessed with the outcome. Tracking your progress is an important step when you want to create a new habit and continue it persistently. I started keeping a journal to track the progress. What about you? Did you start writing in your journal. I told you, you don’t need a fancy one. Just a simple notepad is fine. In all 10 episodes we decided to write in our journals. We committed to writing things that brought us joy, things which we absolutely love about ourselves, our dreams as if they have already happened. So, how’s your journaling going on? Are you loving it or find it a little difficult? Don’t worry, give yourself some grace. If it is something that you are doing consistently, then you deserve a big applause. You are absolutely ready for achieving your dreams with all your tools and techniques. But if you are struggling a little bit, try to set aside a designated time to write your journal. It will not take more than 5 minutes. But if you have not even started, I highly recommend you to start today. One day at a time is what builds persistence. As we discussed in our episode, make it fun. Enjoy the process. Celebrate your small victories. Consistency is what we want to celebrate. Don’t overthink about the outcome, just give your best and enjoy the journey.
De-clutter Your Mind
Then there was an episode all about de-cluttering your mind. Most of us feel stressed some time or the other. We all want to have a calm and peaceful mind but we don’t know the steps that actually work. As usual in this episode, I gave you the tools which you can use to de-clutter your mind. I mentioned how de-cluttering your physical space makes an impact on your peace of mind. Making a priority list and then sticking to it help us stay the course on our important tasks. I still remember getting a message from one of the listeners who told me his experience about concentrating on one task, the task at hand without thinking about other, upcoming tasks at the same time. One of the listeners mentioned in the comments that keeping her phone in the other room while working on her project helped her stop multitasking. My very close friend told me how this episode helped her get into the habit of 10 minute meditation everyday. Truly speaking I was blown away with all your honest and lovely feedback on this episode. The biggest change this episode brought into me was mindfulness, living and loving the current moment. I have mentioned this so many times but I am a work in progress. Do you know, I was planning to name this podcast Work in progress before? But the morning cup of sunshine gave me more positive vibes, so rest is the story you know.. Anyways, one of the major takeaways from this episode was journaling. I started journaling in March 2020. I just write on one of the pretty notebooks from the dollar tree and I am just loving it. How about you? Are you following the action items we planned in this episode? Did you find your support line to share your struggles, your happy moments? Did you ask for help, take a break when you need it? Please let me know how your journey towards self improvement is going? Are these steps helping you in any way? If you feel that any step in particular is making a big impact, please let me know. Or if any step is not really working for you, let me know about it. I am always open to new suggestions and feedback.
Becoming a Morning Person
After this de-clutter your mind episode, was one of my most popular episodes. “Becoming a morning person” I have a story to tell about this episode. This was the first ever episode I recorded. It is the first episode I worked on. When I initially wrote down the steps, I just loved it. I actually experimented all the steps for a week to make sure they are working. I recorded the episode after actually verifying the steps. This is a typical software developer mindset, you have to test end to end before deploying even a small change in your software. Can you relate to all my IT friends? Then I recorded a few more episodes. This was happening before the launch date. So when I finally started uploading the episode, I somehow started feeling not so good about this particular episode. I had some doubts about it. So even though it was the first episode written and recorded, I decided not to publish it as the first episode. I published it two weeks after the launch. To my surprise, as per the download stats on my hosting site, this is the most downloaded and popular episode out of all 10 episodes. I got the maximum number of comments and feedback on this episode. Sometimes, you never know what clicks at the other end. Right ? Specifically, 1,2 3 method we talked about in this episode worked for so many people. One of my listeners told me how much she could relate to this episode being the only morning person in her friends and family. I heard from so many of you about how giving grace worked in favor of forming this habit. Planning something nice to do as the first thing in the morning sparked joy in so many listeners. I love my morning so seeing so many of you loving the idea of a morning person was tremendously encouraging for me.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Episode 6 was Comparison is the thief of joy. This was the episode where we really dived down the complicated and complex human behavior. We all at some crossroad fall for the trap of comparison. We sometimes don’t even realize that it is robbing us of our precious life moments, friendships and relations. We decided to take some concrete steps to finally stop comparing ourselves with others. I urged you all to notice your triggers, accept that you are comparing knowingly or unknowingly with someone. One of the very crucial things that you have to do to finally stop the comparison mindset is to practice your self worth. You need to feel good about yourself first. The simple thing that you can do to feel good about yourself is write down the things which you are great at and grow that list. We planned to appreciate it instead of comparing. Did you pick up your phone and tell your friend how great they are at something? How much do you appreciate them ? Replace your envy with compassion. Do you know what was the one thing from this episode that stuck with most of the listeners? Superhero pose of Amelia Shepard. So many of you told me that this worked wonders for them. Do you know I love watching new, old series, movies be it Hollywood or Bollywood? When I find something motivating in those, somehow I feel as if my time is spent well. Years of watching Bollywood movies gave me a special skill to find something motivating which can go for any situation from any movie. No exception, I just love some movies or series. So when I got to know that Amelia shepherd is helping people I got a reason to watch that show again. Of course to find another motivating sequence. My friend Medha shared her story of how this superhero pose helped her. Her talk was so inspiring. Thanks you so much Medha for sharing your feedback as always.
Less is more
In the next episode, Less is more. We discussed how changing some small habits can affect your life in a better way. We can have a beautiful space to enjoy by having less stuff, more time to read by having a less screen time, more peaceful mind by having less stress, more savings by having less frivolous lifestyle and finally more healthy life by having less fad diets in our life. This episode was well loved by everyone who listened. I got a call from a close friend who told me that she felt like I am sitting next to her talking directly to her. She loved how simple things can transform our life. One of the feedback that I got on this episode was how simple yet effective the steps are. As we discussed in this episode, did you start reading a book everyday? I just finished Becoming by Michelle Obama and I am in awe of her personality. How about you? Which one are you reading today? Do let me know in the comments your favorite find. One of the very important action items we discussed in this episode was cutting out the fad diets. How is your journey going on? I am still working on improving my relationship with food. If you have any tips and tricks to do so, do share with me too. I would love to hear from you.
Reach for the Stars
Episode 8 was Reach for the stars. This came right after the 4th july long weekend. After a nice relaxing weekend, Monday is always hard. Right? But listening to this episode early Monday morning gave a much needed boost to the new week. In this episode, I asked you to dream big, believe in yourself. Today is the day to start taking action on your dreams. Did you start working on your dream? It is very important to be fearless, consistent in your journey towards the big dream. Don’t be afraid to fail. It is okay, you can always bounce back and give your best to pass that obstacle. Don’t hold yourself back just because your dream is too big or uncomfortable. Lastly, the very important step that we discussed is how to be humble in your failures and success. One of my listeners told me how the exercise of thinking about the dream as if it has already happened felt therapeutic to her. She said it felt so beautiful that she included it as her routine in her everyday mediation practice. Imagining what life could bring if we worked on something consistently was tremendous help. I loved her idea. Do try this next time you do meditation. It really feels great.
Self Love
The last episode in this series was Self Love. It was the toughest episode for me to put forward. I firmly believe that self love is beyond what we generally hear everywhere. It is beyond just pampering routines. It runs much deeper. The steps were simple but very deep. You will love yourself when you love your soul, your mind and your body. I shared a lot of stories and experiences in this episode. Just helping others or simply forgiving others can help you love yourself. The power of positive affirmations to love yourself is tremendous. For some people, it is really hard to love the way they are. We are our biggest critics but I want you all to be your own biggest cheerleaders instead. Love the way you are. Love how you look, how you feel. Again the idea was to cultivate the self love within yourself by working on yourself. Did you start working on your passion at least a few minutes a day? What adjective did you choose to say in your morning positive affirmation. Are you working out at least 30 minutes a day? These are the action items which will bring you closer to your goals. Don’t underestimate self love, it is one of the most important qualities to have for a better life. After this episode was aired, I received a message telling me how the story of women not loving their body was so touching. She said, we specially women always find it hard to love the way we are. She said , she has also said it so many times to herself but seeing the impact it brought tears in her eyes. She finally decided not to say a single self loathing word about herself. She even told me one really good point about how uncomfortable she felt accepting the compliments because she was unsure of her self worth, Self love was a really deep subject. I have to break the episode in two parts just to give you all time to process the first couple of steps. But I feel much better after listening to all your feedback that it is really making an impact.
This is an ongoing journey towards a better life. We all are in here together. We will stick together, working with each other, helping each other and building this beautiful life. There are a lot of fun things in the store. We still have new goals to work on. The next episode is extra special for me. For the first time, in this podcast journey, I will be having a guest on the show. This special guest is very near and dear to me. The first one to give feedback, the first one to try the steps and first one ready to take on the challenges. I am sure you will enjoy listening to this guest. We will restart our goal journey right after this guest episode. I am so happy to talk to you all today. It brings me so much joy to me. I love our community, our energy. I have a lot to share, a lot to listen and a lot to work. Thank you so much for being part of my passion. I can’t express how grateful I am for this amazing tribe. On this note, let’s be the sunshine in each other’s life. Talk to you in the next episode. Bye!