Ease is your default setting. But are you causing friction for yourself? Making your life unnecessarily difficult? In this episode I’ve spoken about the six tendencies to eliminate so we can all make our lives simpler. Because things are meant to flow smoothly with ease and grace!

Listen on the embedded player below, or on your preferred podcast platform. If reading is your jam, then scroll down for the transcript. Enjoy! 🙂

“The more you give value to simplicity in your life, the smoother your life becomes. And then whatever work you do, whatever tasks you accomplish, they become very pleasant to do because there isn’t that mental burden of additional tasks, additional thinking, additional choices.”

Susmitha Veganosaurus – The Feel Good Factor Podcast

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Transcript of Make Your Life Easier

(gently edited for a better reading experience)

Hey, gang, it’s good to be back. My last episode was a couple of weeks ago. If you listened to that, I spoke about how I would be going off on holiday and meeting family and having a good time at some function… Well, I did all of that. And then I came back and promptly fell sick. Haha

My throat went for a toss. Finally, today, after two weeks of break, I’m able to speak again clearly. And I knew that it was time to get back to podcasting.

Today I wanted to talk about how Ease is our Default Setting

Life is meant to be led with ease, flow, very gracefully. Things are meant to be easy for us things, are meant to go very smoothly. But all of us have these tendencies which create unnecessary friction in our own lives.

Things which we can change, we can give up easily. But because we hold on to these particular traits so desperately, we make our own lives difficult. We make our own lives complicated. And then it starts feeling like life isn’t easy, life isn’t smooth, everything is difficult. This is a feeling we get, but a lot of the times we’re creating these difficulties ourselves. We can easily get rid of them.

Now there are many traits, many characteristics that caused this. But today, I wanted to particularly focus on very important tendencies, which, if we get rid of them, then we can avoid friction. And we can choose ease in our lives.

1. Control

How much time and energy do we spend trying to control things outside of us? Controlling our family, our colleagues, or even the outcome of any work that we put in. We try so hard to control things, make things turn out a very specific way.

Here’s the thing, nothing is in our control. Well, the only thing that is in our control is our behaviour – how we choose to act, what we choose to do. But beyond that, nothing is in our control. And once we accept this, we start saving a lot of energy. We start gaining a lot more mental peace.

Because if things aren’t in your control, then there’s no point trying to control them, trying to make things work out a certain way. All we need to do is put in our efforts, do our work, do our part, and then let go. Whatever has to happen will happen.

2. Resistance to Change

Change is constant, it’s a guaranteed thing. There will always be change in our lives. Some of these changes we embrace easily. Some of these changes are difficult, we don’t want to embrace them. But it doesn’t matter how we feel about the change. Change is going to happen. That’s it.

“Resistance is futile.” Haha That’s exactly what it is. When it comes to change, don’t try to resist things. Allow the change to flow. The more you lean into it, the more you flow with it, the easier the change becomes for you to embrace.

For example, a couple of years ago, I had to shut down my business.

When I had to shut down my business, I had to accept that this is it, this is the end, I have to close it down, there’s nothing else I can do about it. Now, the sooner I accepted this, the easier it became.

No matter how emotionally difficult it seemed to let go of my baby that I’d grown and nourished. I’d built this business over so many years, so of course, it was emotionally difficult. However, it was still very easy and very possible for me to just let go of it, and focus on the steps, the processes that involve letting go of it.

Another big change happened later in the same year where we had to move out of our house, which we’d been living in for more than a decade. It was not easy. It was not something we wanted to do, but it had to happen.

That’s it, there was a change, it was due, and it had to happen.

Again, it would have been natural for me to just sit down, and be stubborn, and say “no, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to move out of here. I don’t want to let this happen.” But I realised that the sooner I embraced it, sooner I accepted that this is a change, I not only accepted it but looked forward to the newness.

Because yes, when something goes, something old goes, there’s something fresh or new coming into your life. And when I embraced that and started looking towards it, then I suddenly had energy. I had inspiration, I had motivation to pack up, to clean things out, to do everything that is needed in the process of shifting your house, which is a huge project.

So resisting change is an unnecessary waste of time, waste of energy. And we just have to accept that change is inevitable. So let’s go with the flow.

3. Worrying

Worrying about things which are out of our control, worrying about things which we cannot do anything about. In fact, worrying even to the point of analysing and over analysing and overthinking things. Oh, it is such a waste of mental and emotional space! And of course, that leads to your physical energy also being sucked out.

Instead of worrying, instead of over analysing, instead of thinking of all the ways something could go wrong, we could focus on all the ways something could go right. Because both are anyway illusions, right? Going right, going wrong, nothing is guaranteed. Both are possibilities. Both are future possibilities.

So why focus on how things could go wrong? And instead, why don’t we focus on how things could go right? Then start taking steps towards that, towards things working out.

Well, I can’t ensure things will go right. But once things have gone right, what is it that I can do to ensure that things are smooth? I’m able to embrace it and just move into that zone of, “okay, everything is working out, everything is going smoothly”, and then focus our energies on that.

4. Defensiveness and Justification

If we truly believe in something, if we feel that, “this is the way I should be living my life”, as long as it’s not hurting anybody, causing anyone pain, taking away somebody else’s freedom, or their choice, as long as that’s not happening, you don’t have to defend your way of living, your way of thinking. You don’t have to justify anything.

The sooner we go into that energy of this, “this is the way things are”, and then move with the flow, the sooner we start oozing confidence about that particular decision, or that particular way of living or being. You won’t even need to defend it to others, because you’ve accepted it with so much complete faith that there’s no question of somebody else not accepting it at all.

5. Over Complication

Think of your daily tasks. Whatever you do through your day, whether it is at home, whether it is at work, at your business, or wherever it is. How simple do you keep things for yourself?

Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that we’re optimising certain things. And then because of that, the simplicity goes away.

For example, if you have to go out and do some shopping, some grocery shopping and come back, so that you can start cooking a meal. It could be as simple as just walking up to the store, buying your groceries, and coming back and making the meal.

But we feel like, “okay, I’m putting this effort to go out and buy my groceries. So what else can I combine with this to make sure that that one effort of going out and coming back, I get more out of it?” But unfortunately, by trying to combine things, adding these hooks, and piling things on, you know, making the task bigger for yourself than it’s meant to be, you’ll make things very complicated.

And then the task becomes daunting

Because no more is it just getting into your car or wearing your slippers, and just going out and buying groceries, and coming back. It becomes, “okay, since I’m going to buy groceries anyway, next door there’s a medical shop, I’ll just pick up these few other things. And then there is a tailor, so let me go and check if the dress that I had given for stitching is ready. I’m going all the way to that place, so let me complete all these things.”

You have this afternoon meal waiting to be made, and you think, “oh God, if I step out now to go by grab groceries, I’m going to take many hours. Who’s going to come and make the meal? So should I not even do that task? Or should I do it? Okay, then what can I do for the meal because that’s not going to get ready by the time I’m back.”

It’s just an example that I’m giving you, but you see how something really simple can be complicated unnecessarily by us?

Ask yourself, “do we need to complicate things? Do we need to pile on these additional tasks to the original task, or to this original project? Do we need to do that?”

Before setting out to do anything, ask yourself, “how simple can I make this for myself? How quick and easy can I make this for myself?”

The more you give value to simplicity in your life, the smoother your life becomes. And then whatever work you do, whatever tasks you accomplish, they become very pleasant to do because there isn’t that mental burden of additional tasks, additional thinking, additional choices. You’re keeping things really easy on yourself, really simple for yourself.

Yes, sometimes we do need to optimise things. But most of the time, we need to give a higher weightage, higher value to simplification versus optimisation. To make your life easier to live.

6. The Pursuit of Perfection – all or nothing approach to things

We want things to be perfect no matter what. And because of this whole desire to keep things perfect, we make things hard on ourselves. In fact, so many times we don’t even get things done.

I have a friend who would not fold her blankets every morning when she got out of bed. She’d said that, “no, I don’t fold my blankets. I just leave them like that on the bed.”

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. Everybody lives life their own way, right? But the problem is that it bothers her. If she leaves the blanket without being folded, and it doesn’t bother her at all, then it’s fine. But she always said that it bothered her, and she used to feel guilty or uncomfortable whenever she walked into her bedroom.

So I said, “then why don’t you fold the blanket? It’s a matter of two minutes. You just take and you fold it and you put it.” And she says, “you know, my mom always taught me that every morning when I wake up, I have to not only fold the blanket, but I have to take out the bed sheet from the bed, and then neatly put it back, and tuck it in on all sides. Then fluff up the pillows and all, and then put the blanket. And it’s such a daunting job. There’s so much I need to do that I’m like, ‘nah, I won’t even fold the blankets.’”

I asked her, “won’t you feel better? Whether you’ve, you know, dealt with the whole bed or not, if you see folded blankets when you walk into your room, won’t you feel happy?” And she said, “no, no, if I don’t do the whole thing, I feel like it’s pointless to do it at all.” Then she continued to just live this life of feeling uncomfortable, but also not getting the job done.

It was very hard for me to wrap my head around this idea, but I realised that there are so many things in my life also where I make things more complicated for myself

I’ve learned to simplify things for myself, I’ve learned to not have this all or nothing approach. And it’s helped me. There’s still a long way to go, there’s still a lot we need to learn. So yes, of course, I still need to learn how to let go of perfection even more.

But whatever I have let go of, I’ve realised that, “oh my god, it makes my life so much easier and peaceful and stress free!” Because I’m like, “I will do what best I can do, what I’m able to do right now. And beyond that, whatever I can’t do, I can’t do, that’s it.” The moment I let go of that all or nothing approach life became smoother, easier.

So yeah, these are the strongly time wasting, energy wasting, friction causing tendencies in our lives

If we let go of them, life becomes so much more smoother, so much more easier. We’re able to flow through our days with ease and grace, peace of mind. And of course with peace of mind comes better health. Overall, it improves the quality of your life.

I’ll repeat them:

• wanting to control things
• resisting change
• worrying – analysis paralysis, over analysing things
• defensiveness or justification – trying to spend time convincing others that how you live life is right
• over complicating things – to pile things on, one on top of another, so that then the entire task becomes very daunting and difficult, and not very pleasant to do
• the pursuit of perfection – like this all or nothing approach to things

Think of all the areas in your life. Whether it’s your personal life you’re dealing with – your home, your family, your cooking, whatever it is. Or whether it is your health and well being and those practices. Or it’s with work and colleagues or your business and team members, and you know, the way things are turning out there.

Think of all the different facets of your life and start observing where you’re showing these tendencies, these friction causing tendencies

Then see how you can let go of them, and once you do let go of them, how much of a difference it makes in your life and your peace of mind, in the way you live your life with ease and grace.

All right, take care.

Transcribed using Otter