Your Visit to Earth

The powerfully simple truth about the real purpose of our lives is that we’re on this planet at this particular time, in this particular place, to learn what we can about love while we’re here.

Your being here is the meaning. You don't have to have any meaning outside of that. 

It really is such a gift that we’re here at the exact moment and for the exact timespan that we are. Because, at some point, we will return home. And it matters how we decide to spend our visit. 

Not that you have to spend it any certain way. Because you don’t. You don’t have to get hung up on whether you’re ever going to find your purpose, because being here IS the purpose. It's just that we also have an incredible opportunity to get to use our agency to create whatever it is that we want.

Living your life on purpose

Whether you know it or not, you’re currently choosing how you’re spending your visit. Every day that you’re living, you’re choosing.

And if you want any part of your visit to be different, you simply have to make different choices. 

None of which will make you better. None of which will make you worthy. None of which will make you more lovable or more acceptable or more good, because you already are all those things.

They’re just going to change the visit and the experiences you have while you’re here. 

But every time we go to do something we really want to do, we have to be prepared for what our brain always offers us: negative emotion. When you sign up for living your life on purpose, you sign up for the 50% positive, 50% negative that makes up life. And to be present with the positive, we have to be willing to feel the negative. 

You’ll Learn:

• Why you want to order your own experiences off your life’s menu
• The one thing that keeps us from doing and creating the things we most want 
• Why our brain gives us negative emotion and healthy ways to navigate it to keep going
• How to truly be in charge of your visit to Earth

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Hello Podcast Universe! Welcome to Episode 178 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price, I am so happy to be with you. I want you to know that I am always thinking about you. I'm always thinking about how I can help, how I can make things a little bit easier for you, bless your life, and I hope that this episode will do just that. I also just, I just want you to know that you are good and that you are worthy and that you can't be better than you are.

Last night I was speaking in front of a youth group. Me and a friend are doing an emotional self-reliance class for some of the youth in our area, and at the end, one of the brethren that was kind of leading the meeting, he said, can you just like sum up the things that you've taught them over the last couple of months in like one sentence? And I was just like, like, no, not really, right? But like, if I had to sum up, like, what I'm trying to say to you all the time is that you are good, right? That you are worthy, that you can't be better than you are. I hope you know that. I hope that you aren't listening to this podcast so that like you can be better in some way because that would be a complete waste of your time, okay? Because you cannot ever be better. And I really want you to stop wasting your life trying to do something that can't be done, okay? You cannot be better.

And we're going to talk about that just a bit more in a minute. But before we get to the episode, I just want you to know that for sure, that you can't be better, that you can change your life and you can have a different experience by changing your thoughts, but it will never make you better, right? And of course, like one of the reasons that you think you need to be better, why we all think that we all have this like instinct to like change and be better and be different is because we all have an inner critic that is constantly telling us that we are wrong and like everything needs to change immediately. And it's always pointing out why we are not okay, why we can't be loved until we change and are different in some way. We all have this inner critic because we all have a brain, right? Is just part and parcel of the human experience. But as I have like said in the last few weeks, like, your relationship with that inner critic can be completely different than it is now. And you can quiet it, you can disarm it, you can reassure it, you can silence it. And I have a brand new workshop on how to do that is completely free.

You can download it and watch it anytime and really just change the hold that your inner critic has over your life. And I honestly, you guys have gotten so much good feedback about this that if you are at all interested, I really want to invite you to download it and watch it. I think it will make a big difference in your life and what to do. Like when this voice is just sort of like constantly criticizing you so you can get that by going to my website Aprilpricecoaching.com there's a button at the top where we'll take you to that workshop. You can also just text the word critic to 66866 and that workshop will get delivered to your inbox. Okay, so I just want you to know that that is there and it is available and it's totally free to be able to watch that workshop, okay?

So, some of you may be curious about how the 29029 event went for me. This podcast is coming out the week after that event, but I'm actually recording it before I leave. Okay, so I don't know how and I will assume it was amazing, okay? But you will have to wait another week to get the recap on that and to get my report on that. In my real life right now, I am just a couple of days out from that event. My gear is all packed. Last night I was laying out everything that I'm going to need and my workouts are complete. I'm just now tapering and keeping my muscles warmed up. But but no big workouts and my nerves are also very high right now. I was writing my son on his on his mission, I was writing a letter to him and I was like, everything is done and now there is nothing left but the pain.

So yeah, I am feeling all kinds of excitement and fear. I am feeling all kinds of like amazement and anticipation and also a lot of anxiety and feeling all the things. But before I go, before I leave, I just want to share some thoughts that I have had recently. And this is just going to be a short and sweet little message, but I hope that it will make a difference for you in your life.

So, as you know, Queen Elizabeth died a few weeks ago. And one night I was watching a show that was talking about her life and it played part of a speech that she gave once in in which she was quoting an aboriginal proverb and she said, we are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love. And then we return home. And I was so touched by that thought, and I have thought a lot about it since I heard it, because I think it's such like a powerfully simple but true statement about the real purpose of our lives. I think the point and the purpose is to simply be here, to pass through here to land on this planet at this particular time, in this particular place, and to learn what we can while we're here, to learn what we can about love. As we do that living and often like we make it so complicated, right? We do a lot of searching for our purpose outside of just simply being here and simply having this experience. But that is really what it's all about. We are just here visiting.

And your existence, your visit is the meaning of your life, your being here is the meaning. You don't have to have any meaning outside of that. And I really want to talk to you about this idea today. This idea about that you are visiting this place and time and that that it really is such a gift and that at some point we will return home. And it matters how you decide you're going to spend your visit. And I really just want to be here today to remind you that you get to do whatever you want here. I think we forget that in the day to day living, we just sort of like keep carrying out the same decisions we've always made and keep doing the things we've always done. We forget that like we are actually designing this visit and we are actually designing the life we are living. We get so busy living it, we forget that like we are creating it. And I just want to take a minute to remind you that you don't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything to make meaning out of your existence. And nothing that you choose to do while you are here is going to make you better or worse.

It's all just an incredible opportunity that you now get to use your agency to create whatever it is that you want. You are here and all that is left now is to decide how you are going to spend your visit. And I want you to know that that really is a choice. You are currently choosing how you are spending your visit. Whether you know it or not, you are choosing every day. We are choosing. And if you want any part of your visit to be different, you simply have to make different choices. Again, none of which will make you better, none of which will make you worthy, none of which will make you more lovable or more acceptable or more good. They are just going to change the visit. They're just going to change the experiences you have while you are here.

So, as I've talked to death, I'm sure by now you're all just sick of hearing about it. But in a couple of days I'm going to be climbing Whistler Mountain eight times to try and reach 29,029 feet. And if I make it if I make it to the top, it is not going to make me better. It will not make me more worthy. It will not make me a more respectable, valuable human in any way. It's not going to make me more acceptable or lovable or alter my value in any way. It is just an experience that I am going to have. I am here on this earth and that mountain is here on this earth and together where you get to have an experience, right? Because I want to do it. I want to see what it's like to be in a body under that kind of discomfort and stress and test my ability to be able to choose and use my agency to keep going again.

Not because people who can do that are better than people who can't. But just because I really did come to Earth to learn to practice choosing. And this is just an incredible opportunity to do that practice. I feel really lucky to be able to have the chance and honestly, I almost missed it. I almost missed this experience because I thought that I wasn't capable of these kinds of experiences and that like these kinds of experiences just like, were not available to visitors like me, right? And that is a lie. And I just wonder what experiences on your visit that you want to have? What experiences are you excluding yourself from? What experiences are you saying that is not possible for someone like me? I'll just skip it, right? Like, I don't. I don't need to have that experience. I'll just skip it. Listen, like you can't visit here, so I really want you to question that. Whatever you are telling yourself that you're just not able to be and or have or do on the itinerary of your visit to Earth, I really want you to question that.

So, another way that I sometimes like to think about this, I was just talking to one of my coaching groups about that this morning is to imagine that you're just holding a large menu, right? And that all the life possible life experiences are listed on that menu. And like this is going to be a really big menu, right? It's going to be bigger than the Cheesecake Factory, right? But just bear with me. I just want you to imagine, like, really and truly, like what if all the life experiences are just laid out on this menu and I just get to pick and choose? And if I was ordering of this menu, like, what would I pick? And how many things are my currently ordering just because like I always get the same thing right? Like every time we come here, I order this thing and like, I know it's fine. And so, I just keep ordering it, right? Like, how many things are my ordering? Because somebody else said I should order and somebody else said, No, this is the best thing. You don't want anything else, right? How many things am I not ordering? Because I think like it's too expensive or I'm not allowed to or that's not for somebody like me, right? Like, I just want you to know that there are no sealed portions of the menu and everything's available. If one human gets to do it, all the humans get to do it right. So, and how many things that my ordering or just doing in my life because I'm thinking like, if I do these, then I will finally be good.

Then I will finally be worthy. Then I will be a good person. Right? And I really want you to like, think about that metaphor for a minute and notice, like when you go to a restaurant and you order up the menu, you never think that, like anything you order is going to change your value or make you a better person. Right now, you just order what you want to taste, right? And I really want you to think about your life experiences in the same way. Like stop thinking that the things you decide to do are going to determine your worth and make you better and just start doing things because you want them, because you want to taste them, because you want to have that experience in your life.

Okay, so of course, if it was as easy as like ordering up a menu or or like, just like picking out a travel itinerary, there are a lot of things in her life that we would do. But of course, most of us are not ordering what we want and there is a good reason for that. There is a good reason that we aren't doing all the things that we want to do on our visit that we might want to do for every one of us. That thing that keeps us from really picking what we want and really choosing the experiences we want and really doing the things we want. And, you know, on our visit is because we are trying to avoid negative emotion. We don't want to feel bad. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We don't want pain. We don't want discomfort. We don't want to feel scared or inadequate. We don't want to fail, right? We don't want to feel any of these negative things that might be required that we might feel on the way of doing these things in our lives. Like all the things that we say we want to do, all the things that like secretly or not so secretly that we want to experience what while we're here.

What keeps us from doing those things truly is the negative emotions that we might feel as we go to do them. And we are really trying to avoid those. Okay, so let's just take like the 29029 event, for example, like when I first thought about signing up, like I was like, well, I don't even want that physical discomfort, right? Like, I don't like hiking. I don't like being out of breath. I don't like my muscles burning. I really I just don't really even, like, want the physical discomfort of it, right? But I also didn't want that, like, emotional discomfort. I didn't want the humiliation of finding out, like, I was not strong enough. I didn't want the pain of training. I didn't want the discomfort of doing things mentally, physically, emotionally, that I had never done before. I didn't want to fail. I didn't want to look stupid. I didn't want all the effort that it was going to take. And this is true of anything that you want to do on your visit here. If it is outside your comfort zone or outside of your brains, like main biological priorities, which are seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, saving energy, anything outside of that, like that's going to bring up a lot of negative emotion.

That's why your brain is giving you the negative emotion in the first place. It doesn't want you to do anything. It doesn't think it's good for your survival. And so, it's going to bring up all that negative emotion. And that negative emotion is what stands between you and all the things you want to do on your visit. And so good to know that, right? So, I was just talking to one of my clients this week, and she was talking about how, you know, I really want to work on my business, but I just find myself not doing it like I like I really want to, but I can't figure out why. Like, I don't feel motivated when the time the time comes to go to work on it.

Like, I just don't want to write. And I was like, Yeah, like, this is the problem for all of us, right? It's not that we don't want the experience. We all have a list of things that we want on this visit. But then when the time comes, all we have is the negative emotion. I'm like, I hear this from people all the time, like I want to lose weight. And then like, the moment comes and it's like, No, that's the last thing my brain wants, right? And so, it's just so important to recognize, like, all these things that we say we want, they all have accompanying negative emotion, and none of us want that, right? None of us want the negative emotion that's associated with it.

And so, when we ask the question, what do I want on my visit here? What do I want to order off the menu? Here it is also so important that we recognize that we are simply ordering from a list of results, right? Like for 29029, I'm ordering that red hat, I want that list. I want that result, right? But what we have to know is, like when we're ordering that result, when we're ordering the hat and when we're ordering the businessman, we're ordering the like the body that we want, we are also ordering the accompanying negative emotion. If we are going to create that result in our life, there is going to be an accompanying negative emotion that we have to feel and be willing to experience in order to get what we want. What we need to know is that everything we want is going to come with its own set of discomfort and negative emotion. And when we sign up for the result, we tell ourselves, this is what I want. We need to also be mentally and emotionally signing up for the negative emotion that is going to accompany it.

When I first started my coaching practice, I remember like when I signed up for my coaching certification just thinking like, oh my gosh, it's going to be so amazing. I'm going to be able to help so many people and it's going to feel so fulfilling and it's going to feel so great and I'm going to be able to spend my days coaching and that's going to be like it's going to just feel amazing, right? Well, the reality was that like once I got my coaching certification, like I just stood in the shower terrified and inadequate and insecure and had so much anxiety that I wouldn't be able to do a good job, that I wouldn't be enough, that that I would let my clients down, right? And I was like, oh, like when I signed up for all of the amazing of coaching certification, I also signed up for this moment of fear in the shower, this moment of dread, this moment of insecurity, and that they were going to like, go together.

And as long as I was willing to feel that negative emotion, I would be able to continue to create my goals. I would be able to continue to create those results just like on the treadmill. As long as I am willing to continue to feel dread and pain and discomfort. Like, as long as I'm willing to feel that I get to move, continue to move towards my results, I get to continue to move towards that red hat. Okay, so there is nothing that you want that doesn't come with those negative emotions. Otherwise, everyone would just be ordering whatever they wanted. And you're right, and this is why we're not right. Every time we go to do something, boom, there comes the negative emotion. And. And what I really want to offer you today is, is the assurance that what you want is 100% available. It is your visit and you get to choose. But you are also choosing the negative emotion that will come with it. And if you are willing to pay that price and manage your brain through whatever negative emotion that thing you want requires, you can have it.

Now, of course, every bit of that negative emotion is created by your brain. And so, if you decide I want this thing and it's going to require this amount of negative emotion, then of course, the answer is to manage your brain along the way long enough to create the things you want. Like, I just have to talk back to my brain more than it talks to me. I have to remind my brain that I'm in charge and I keep going anyway, despite what it's telling me, despite the negative emotion it's creating, I move forward anyway.

And if you want an extraordinary life that contains all the things you want in your visit. The answer is being in charge of your brain, like feeling that pain, feeling the discomfort, feeling the negative emotion, and then managing your mind enough to be able to stay in it, to not give up, to not quit when it arrives. This is the key to everything. So if I could talk to you face to face, if I could coach each one of you and talk to each one of you, I would ask you, what is that you want? What do you want to do during this visit? While you were here, While you were passing through? What is it you want to experience? What are the things you want to be sure to experience before you return home?

And what is the negative emotion you think that's going to require? What are you going to have to feel that is hard? What are you going to feel that is painful along the way? And what are you willing to feel in order to have those experiences? What are you willing to feel in order to be able to like, create these things in your life? And then finally we would ask, What do you need to think today to manage your brain and show up through that negative emotion? It really is. What do I need to think today? What do I need to think right now to manage my way through this? Like when again, when I was on that treadmill, I couldn't think past the step in front of me.

I couldn't think two months down the road and then three months down the road in the workout, That's like four months from now. I just had to like decide right today, what do I need to think to stay on this treadmill so that my body can adapt and I can like get a little bit stronger and get that much closer to my goal. And that's what I want to offer you, is that whatever you want, just because you're having negative emotion doesn't mean you're not qualified for it, doesn't mean it's not meant for you. That's just the accompanying price that comes with the thing you want. And now what do you need to think today in order to move forward and take the steps just for today? How do you show up in your life and make the choices and make the decisions and take the action that you need to make today to get you one step closer to your goal? You just have to manage your thoughts today, in this moment, okay?

Manage your brain enough to show up and do all of the things that your brain doesn't want to do. Do all of the things that are uncomfortable and hard to do so that you can get one step closer to having the experiences you want on this visit. You are here. This is your visit. You could to learn and grow in any way you want. You could love as much as you want while you're here. You get to choose. While you were here, the experiences that you really want to have. And none of them are going to make you better. I hope you know that by now. But any that you want are available. And the only thing between you and them are the negative emotion that your brain is going to give you as you go to do them. And you can manage that. You are in charge of that. You are the agent. No matter how bad you feel, no matter how much you want to quit, you never have to. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome. I love you for listening. I love sharing this visit with you. And I will see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your Earth life experience, sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever. As your coach, I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay. And that, my friends is 100% awesome.