Author’s Note: These three truths, along with an affirmation, will be a four-part message to practice and meditate on.
I was asked to speak at two different places this week on my sweet late husband’s birthday!!! I always want to do something life-giving on that day to celebrate the life of Hugh. So, the topic. After changing it several times, I landed on something I hear regularly on Lewis Howes’ podcast, The School of Greatness.
At the end of each show, he asks the same question of his guest, and I will take the liberty to paraphrase it a little: “So, you come to the end of your life, and you can take nothing that you have taught or believed with you, but you can leave three truths. What are those truths?”
As you know, I grew up in a home affected by alcoholism. Because of this, as a little girl, I began speaking words of courage and hope to myself on repeat. I became a single mother and walked through financial struggles. I have loved people through addiction. I have experienced grief and lost people I thought I could not live without. I started my business at age 50 and built a life centered around kindness, joy, and service. Through every single adversity and season, these are the three truths that carried me, and hopefully may carry you too.
I have lived long enough to know that what I leave behind in the hearts and minds of others is way more important than any material manifestation. So, for Truth One:
The words you speak become the life that you live.
I learned at a very young age the absolute power of words and their ability to make my life a prison or a pathway. I recited positive affirmations and spoke and practiced gratitude like it was my religion, and it saved me. I came to know that gratitude became a magnifier of all that was good in my life and served as a magnet to bring the right people and circumstances into my life.
I made motivational speeches in my bathtub with Prell shampoo in my hair, encouraging all my tub animals to live the life they were meant to live. I sat on my pink bedspread and read books and wrote words of affirmation, believing that my life would be built on the power of my words.
Along with this truth, I know that I don’t always get to choose the first thought that enters my mind, but I do get to choose which thought gets to stay. I also learned to believe that my life would eventually begin to resemble the words that I repeatedly spoke over it. And this was a big one for me: I learned to speak to myself in such a way that gives my future somewhere hopeful to go. I have to continually work on this as a daily practice.
Reflections for Today
What is one sentence you repeatedly say to yourself?
Is that sentence helping to build the life you want?
What would happen if you replaced it with something life-giving?
