Wake Up!

The Powerful Guide to Changing Your Mind About What It Means to Really Live

Lindsay Teague Moreno

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780785224495
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

What this world needs now more than ever are women who think differently. Our fears, excuses, and procrastination must change if we want to enact meaningful change. So, what is the secret to discovering lasting fulfillment in a culture that wants us sleeping?

In Wake Up!, Lindsay Teague Moreno explores the six core foundations for a fulfilled life and the mindset shift that can occur when you stop looking at the expectations you put on yourself. Through stories and tough questions, you will emerge more prepared to live the kind of life that feels right, regardless of what other people think of it.

Perfect for women who work inside or outside the home, Wake Up! will show you why it’s so important to understand how and why we change our minds and wake up to what we really believe. In the areas of relationships, health, finance, business, and personal and spiritual life, Wake Up! will help you assess what you believe and how that affects your success. Then Moreno walks you through how to burn down the old ways to build the life of your dreams by:

• Squeezing lessons out of life’s biggest letdowns
• Finding fulfillment in the middle of the fire
• Shifting your mindset to control your thoughts and make the future happen on purpose
• Living a life with no excuses and nothing to lose

Moreno shares ways you can change your mindset in each core foundation so that your life works for you, rather than the other way around. Only you can emit that special energy that comes from being brave enough to live a life you'll never regret. Whole-life fulfillment is only a mindset shift away.

PART 1

THE FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE

This is a book that’s full of big ideas and challenges that could completely change your life. Not a single one of them will do you any good if you don’t actually do the work laid out in each section. I’ve decided to lay this book out into two parts: the foundation for change and the six cornerstones of a good life. First, we’re going to lay the foundation for changes that stick, and then we’re going to get to work on actually changing. Along the way I’m going to tell you a few stories and give you some insight into my own life as I navigated through everything I’m about to teach you. This process scared the hell out of me, and it changed me forever. I hope the same for you, because the good life is waiting!

1

THE GOOD LIFE

I have a good life. It’s a life I love. It’s a life I designed through understanding who I am and what I value and then working with my physiology, psychology, and biology to make what I want for my life a reality. It’s not rocket science, and you absolutely, positively can do this too.

I live a life with six distinct areas of focus, which I call the Cornerstones of a Good Life: personal, work/business, financial, health, relationship, and spiritual.

My life is not perfect. It’s hard almost every day unless I seek out the easy. It is wrought with thorns in the bushes and unexpected turns in the road, but damn, it’s so good. My life is filled with freedom. My life is filled with deep and profound love for myself and for others. For the most part (even with a lot of work to do on myself), I have the power and confidence to say yes to the opportunities that are for me and no, thank you to the ones that are for others. I’m not afraid of a challenge. I relish the opportunity to prove how powerful I am in the writing of my story. I refuse to settle because I don’t have to. I can live in whatever way I feel called to, and I do. I change my mind a lot when I get new information. The way I live my life makes others uncomfortable at times because it cannot be controlled. You never know what I’m going to get into or discover in this wild and crazy life, and I like it like that. Some days I feel like I can fly while I watch others with the same potential and abilities continue to walk. Again, I say, we are not that different, you and me.

I don’t require one hundred friends when I know a small handful will do. I don’t spend my life chasing the next thrill hoping happiness lies behind it, because I already know it doesn’t. I’ve built enough financial success to never have to work again, and yet I follow the draw toward entrepreneurship again and again. I know I sound like a self-abusive freak, but part of my purpose and fulfillment is in my work. Working toward something is where the magic lives in my life. It’s afforded me so much heartbreak and failure. It’s afforded me notoriety, success, and popularity, as well, which I’ve found isn’t where fulfillment lives.

I’ve got a husband who has dedicated his time and energy to breaking the cycle of abuse and poverty. I’ve got kids who know they’re loved and accepted for who they truly are. I’ve built a family with my husband that looks nothing like how either of us were raised. I’ve found a way to make my health a priority in my life despite never having the desire to take care of my own body before. I’m physically stronger and more flexible than I’ve ever been at forty years old. I’m now mentally stronger and more open than I’ve ever been.

I’m convinced I can do, create, or accomplish anything that is set before me. As long as it’s going to teach me, you can bet I’m going to do it with all the vigor and dedication a human can muster. I don’t half-ass anything. I go all-in with my entire mom-who-does-yoga ass. There is no second chance at this life, and I’m here to make this one a great success story.

I’m not some kind of superwoman, raised in a stress-free environment by wholehearted parents. I’ve hustled for every dollar in my bank account. I’ve fought for every relationship in my life. I’ve worked for every follower. I’ve shown up to my life through the hard stuff as an imperfect and flawed human, which has made it very clear to me that anyone can do this. Absolutely any human being has the capability to demand more from their life, and yet, at an alarming rate, we don’t.

I’m going to teach you how to create that moment in your life so you can make the kinds of changes needed to feel fulfilled in all six cornerstones of your life, which I believe is the key to living and dying without regret.

I want you to believe that you can fly. You simply need to know how, and friend, that’s where I shine. My playbook is open, and you’re about to read it!

This same power that I have discovered in me has been discovered by so many before me, and it lays dormant in most of us. It goes unearthed, unseen, unappreciated, undiscovered, and, most unfortunate of all, unused by most people.

I’m not a genius; I’m not special; I wasn’t raised with this belief, and I don’t live in a way that’s entirely different from the average American, except in my mind. I just had the pure audacity to believe that fulfillment exists, that I am worthy of that kind of life, and that I could find it if I tried. I’m a normal person who chose to believe that there’s more and that I can make everything I want in my life real simply by deciding. One day I was in the hospital crying, and the next I put a plan in motion to never feel like that again, and as long as I continue to focus on that, I will get what I want. The same is true for you. It feels like flying.

In this book, I’m going to teach you how to fly too. You’ll discover you knew you had the ability all along. You’ll discover some deep truths about how powerful you’ve always been and that you just didn’t have all the information yet to believe it or move forward through what has been keeping you stagnant. You’ll discover your mind has been holding out on you in the name of safety and in avoidance of fear.

In the past decade I have systematically and strategically reevaluated and rebuilt all the parts of my life. My finances, my work, my family, my relationships, my personal desires, my health, and my spiritual relationship with my creator and the world around me are all under the microscope. Not just now, but always. Each day I learn more, think differently, become different, and therefore look for ways to change the way I live my life and act according to my values. Through this process, each step I take is met with challenge, beauty, highs, lows, wins, losses, opposition, support, backlash, discoveries, truths, lies, and every emotion on the spectrum.

It hasn’t always been fun, and my ego would tell you it’s cost a lot, but it’s been worth it.

As I looked back at the order in which I burned my old life to the ground and the frequency with which I was willing to give it all up, I discovered patterns and paths that others either didn’t see or weren’t willing to explore in their own lives. I have often felt like an outsider in my life as I unearth new thoughts and ideas, and I think that simply comes from having a different mindset than my peers. I realized all the things we say that we want, like happiness and success, are down those often-overlooked paths. We get so caught up in our addictions and thrills that most of us actively reject fulfillment, having believed the lie that it is hiding behind the next exciting activity or the next positive experience. We’re like addicts looking for our next hit. But our drug is dopamine, and you can get it almost anywhere you look.

We are watching, in real time, the result of a society of people who have more resources than ever before and yet are completely unsatisfied in their lives as a whole. Fulfilled humans aren’t spending an average of twelve hours per day watching, listening to, reading, or interacting with the media. And yet that was the average in a 2020 Nielsen report.¹ People living a life of meaning aren’t looking for ways to numb the next uncomfortable experience or feeling.

When I think about what my community (both physically and online) would be like if we were filled with whole-life fulfillment, I can see massive changes in the way we interact, live, work, play, and support one another. And I want that. I believe in the power of fulfillment. I believe individual changes trickle out like tossing a stone in a pond and watching the ripples spread outward.

The bliss we experience in our everyday lives will become ripples in the water for the people who connect with us if we’re willing to wake up to our lives and realize there’s more out there. I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. I want that for you. But it won’t be done in the way our culture tells us it has to. We are told that it must look a certain way, it must feel a certain way, and it must all be done and changed at the same time under a false and extremely damaging idea called balance.

BALANCE

If I see one more Pinterest pin claiming to teach women the elusive but easy-to-attain secret to balance, I’m going to lose it. Let me say this plainly: balance is complete and utter bullshit. There is no such thing as balance in the good life. I rank balance right up there with the idea of a diet. In fact, I believe balance is to our fulfillment what a diet is to our health. It keeps us addicted to how others tell us we should live and keeps us controlled by products on the market that are damaging to our health and mindset in the long run, and the majority of us end up worse off than we were before we started.

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I believe balance is to our fulfillment what a diet is to our health.

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I think the idea of balance is often thought to be a virtuous thing, and I often see it hanging around in articles or books that are well intentioned. Many would define balance as having a good amount of all the things we want out of life: family, friends, work, hobbies, and whatever else we may desire. When we, as a society, first started talking about balance, our intentions were good. But over time the idea of balance has been warped into this notion of juggling all of everything all at the same time. It’s not a little of everything balanced in a nice and even way. It’s all of everything, piled on top of us until we’re drowning in to-do lists and really cute planners with zero empty days.

If you’d like to derail your personal growth, just believe the lie that you have to do it all at once, it needs to look fun, and it needs to feel like a breath of fresh air. You’ll find yourself diving face-first into in a gallon of rocky road ice cream (or whatever your preferred method of numbing is; I’m a baked goods girl, myself. Jesus be a Rice Krispies Treat with extra marshmallows and real butter. *praise hands*).

We sure do swallow whole the idea of balancing our life, don’t we?

Never mind the fact we’re busier than ever before and we glorify busyness as a measure of success. How is it possible that only about 9 percent of Americans say they can be both busy and happy at the same time?² Our culture has glorified busy because more work improves the bottom line, and we believe that happiness is hiding behind what that bottom line can provide us. We’ve falsely believed that money, power, status, and influence will make us happy if we just work hard enough to find them. It’s designed that way to keep you asleep and keep you stuck so you stay in a predictable buying pattern. You can get off of that merry-go-round whenever you decide to, but you have to decide. You’re going to decide; I can feel it.

At forty, I’ve had a lot of success in my career, finances, personal endeavors, and intimate relationships. Many times, I’ve heard people describe my path with phrases like “overnight success,” and I cringe a little every time. There’s nothing overnight about success. Because success isn’t a thing you go get. It’s a feeling you get when you evaluate your life and take action. It’s an emotion you connect with when you do your work. Success isn’t fifteen minutes of fame. Success isn’t an event. It isn’t something that blows away in the wind. Success is a mindset and series of positive habits you’ve diligently created and are dedicated to.

The idea of balance keeps us just out of reach of what we want. The lie that someone else has found balance keeps us searching, buying, and trying. We know we have it in us, we just have to try harder. We can do it all with a smile on, and we can provide it all without needing a rest. We can read it all, see and share it all, give it all, and hold it all together. Whole-life fulfillment will allow you to focus on your life with the freedom to lose the guilt about what you’re not doing because it won’t all get done at once. This is a long-term play, not a short-term win. We’re talking about creating new habits and lifestyle patterns that end up making a huge difference in your life as they become second nature to you.

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This is a long-term play, not a short-term win.

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WHOLE-LIFE FULFILLMENT

The only way you’re going to believe that you can build a life you absolutely love with every part of your being is by discovering it. I can tell you all day, and I’ll spend this entire book trying to convince you of it, but you must make the discovery yourself. You must be the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Foundation for Change
• Part 2: The Six Cornerstones of a Good Life
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• The Wake Up! Cheat Sheet for Living Your Good Life
• Notes
• About the Author