Evan Sanders's Blog, page 7
February 21, 2023
When You’re Living Faith
When you have faith that the right things will be in your life and show up as they are designed to, then all of the fear of what might leave begins to disappear.
As with all things, they are meant to come and go.
But we love to hold on. We love to grip everything so tight even to the point of sometimes not giving it enough freedom.
Relax your grip. Breathe.
The things that are meant for you will be there.
This has been one of the greatest lessons I have ever learned (and am still learning every single day).
I used to be at war with life. I had such a hard time with “going with the flow.” I figured that if I just hiked upstream against the rivers will that I could just “make things happen.”
But the problem was I couldn’t adjust when things inevitably ended and thought that the heavens themselves had something against me.
What I failed to see in those younger years is that things were leaving for a very good reason.
Of course it would hurt. Sometimes it hurt badly.
But every single time, something better came along. Something that would teach me, help me grow, and put me on the right path.
I know it can be hard to deal with the coming and going of things. It can be difficult to understand.
But if you hold onto your faith and trust in whatever you believe in, you’ll be okay. In fact, you’ll be more than okay.
Keep that heart open. Never close off.
Heal your wounds and stay open to wonderful things happening. When you lose your way, come back to who you know you are and what makes you…you.
Don’t ever forget where you came from.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 20, 2023
Dream Big
Dream. Dream as big as you can. Dream as if there were no limits. When you find your dream, give yourself the chance to dream even bigger.
No matter what you do, the world will tell you it’s impossible, improbable, impractical and everything else in between. But if you believe in what you’re doing, and it’s done with a good heart, you must make it come to a reality.
Why?
Because you can.
And because you can, you must.
You are the only one who sees what you see. The dream is completely unique to you and it lives and dies with you. So while you are here on this planet, give it one hell of a run for its money.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is by a Nike advertisement and it goes something like this…
All your life you are told the things you cannot do. All your life they will say you’re not good enough or strong enough or talented enough. They’ll say you’re the wrong height or the wrong weight or the wrong type to play this or be this or achieve this. They will tell you no, a thousand times no until all the no’s become meaningless. All your life they will tell you no, quite firmly and very quickly. They will tell you no. And you will tell them yes.
Step into what you’re afraid to do. It’s going to help you grow. It’s going to give you a path to becoming more. That’s why you’re really here in the first place – to discover who you were always meant to be.
That path is a long one and it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s easy to get discouraged at times. In fact, with all of the things that happen in life, it can be really easy to lose your way completely.
But I want you to always tell yourself this when you are lost. “Come back.” Come back to who you know you are. Come back to the beat within your chest guiding the way. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been lost.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 19, 2023
Deep Conversations With Your Maker
I have been in deep conversations with my maker. For weeks I wandered in the mountains asking questions and searching within.
The answers arrived in their intuitively packaged forms, the doors opened once they were knocked upon and the paths illuminated before me. And that word came back again and again…
Trust.
There’s this moment in The Matrix when Morpheus looks at Neo and says, “There’s a difference between knowing the path…and walking the path.”
Finding the answers is a victory in of itself. Sometimes it can take your entire lifetime to find the ones you have been looking for. But an entirely new challenge arrives when you start to actually walk the path you know you have to travel.
Joseph Campbell didn’t call it “The Heroes Journey” by accident.
He knew better than anyone else that when you begin to answer the call, that’s where the greatest victories and defeats begin their outpouring.
And it’s true. The endless failures you may have to endure in order to become who you are truly meant to be. That’s where I have been. That’s why I’ve been silencing everything around me and just listening to that guiding voice.
“Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.”
I have put to rest that seething voice of the dark wolf that has kept me in the harbor for so long. It looked at the past constantly and trapped me with judgement as thick as molasses.
But with trust, faith, and courage I’m free. There is and always will be fear in this heart. But there’s great courage as well.
And it’s still true, the most beautiful thing about life is that you can start all over again and be everything you were always meant to be.
February 18, 2023
The Path Of Self Love
Through all of the twists and turns, ups and downs, victories and defeats…you have arrived, here, at this very moment.
But what you tell yourself, about yourself, matters more than anything.
Your entire future depends on that story.
Coming to a place of acceptance isn’t always the easiest of things.
There are situations and events that are often incredibly difficult to deal with and even harder to let go of. Resentment, more than anything, has a very seductive quality to it. While you get to be “right” about something and wage a moral crusade, it often has a serious side effect of the negative elements of the past sticking to you like molasses.
It takes courage to arrive to a place of taking responsibility for what happens next in your life. It’s not to say others weren’t responsible for what they chose to do. They are. But to own the fact that this is your life and that you’re the only one that can decide how you are going to move forward is incredibly empowering.
Self-love isn’t about epsom salt baths, wine and candles (although, hey, those are niceee). It goes far deeper than that…all the way down to the core of how you treat yourself.
Do you speak to yourself with love and respect? Or do you rip yourself apart any chance you get? As I talked about yesterday, this story of negativity or positivity determines how your life looks and unfolds.
When you can embrace who you are, flaws and all, and learn from your mistakes without destroying your own sense of worth…you engage in the greatest act of self-love there is. You are refusing to let the darker seeds to plant themselves in your mind, heart and soul and are instead cultivating light.
It’s the purest act of defiance in a world that’s constantly telling you that you aren’t good enough. Continue to stand up for yourself. Watch the conversation that’s going on in your head. Uproot any weeds that have taken up lodging and sit in your wisdom.
This is the path of learning to love who you are.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 17, 2023
The Whispers Of Intuition
You’ll find your way again when you remember that the answers you’ve been seeking are already within you.
It’s funny how that works.
Spending so much time seeking answers for things you already know the truth to deep down. It’s not about finding it “outside.” It’s about plugging back in and reconnecting to your intuition.
That voice that “just knows.”
When you make that turn within, you will hear a gentle but powerful whisper directing you towards the path that will help you become all you are meant to be.
There, lives ancient wisdom. Older and wiser than you could possibly imagine. All caring. All loving. All knowing. And your greatest task is to trust that voice that comes from within and to follow all the way through to the end.
Quiet your mind and listen. You’ll know you’re “there” when you can feel it in your bones but find it difficult to put to words. That’s because your answer is not it a thought. It’s something far deeper than that. It’s a “knowing.”
While there are endless choices, paths and options in front of you, don’t be afraid of the one that has the most heart in it.
It may be the toughest choice. It might be the one that you know deep down will challenge you to your core. You might deny the calling time and time again because you are scared of what it’s asking of you.
But in the end, no matter how far you may wander, you will always come back to what you already know.
The path. The call. The adventure.
Every step you take is part of the journey. There’s no steps backwards. You don’t start all over again. The path unfolds right before your eyes with each step you choose to take.
Take those steps with love. Keep your heart open. Always rise to the higher version of yourself even though it may be the hardest thing at times to do. Let go of what’s happened in the past because it’s already long gone. Free yourself from always looking away…and just be here.
It’s all you have. It’s all you ever had. Step by step. Breathe by breathe. Here. Here. Here.
Home.
February 16, 2023
The Best Time To Plant A Tree
There’s an old saying that goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
So with the seeds that you have in your hands, plant your intentions.
Be careful of getting lost in the past thinking about all of the things that could have been. It’s an endless abyss that’s incredibly hard to disconnect from. Very quickly those stories can turn dark on you if you’re not mindful.
Be careful of getting stuck in the future. You can get equally as lost in the land of possibility as in the memories from the past. It’s okay to imagine where you want to go and dream about who you want to be. But you must always come back.
Come back to being right…here.
Think about what you want to create in the moments in front of you. Because truly, those are the only ones you have.
They are the stepping stones to the future.
They are the seeds that mend the past.
You’ve heard it over and over again – be in the now. Reel your mind back in. Take a deep breath. Trace it moving through you. Breathe again and again.
You are here.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 15, 2023
The Lure Of Perfectionism
The perfect moment will never arrive.
There’s no such thing.
It’s not because the idea of perfection isn’t seductive. It is.
It has people chasing after it all the time.
Rather, this idea of perfection is impossible to quantify. Turning the purely subjective into something objective is a task that leads to endless time being wasted.
So instead, begin. Begin your journey wherever you are. This moment is as good as any. The thing you really have to look out for is spending an entire lifetime waiting for that perfect moment and to be stuck idling on the side of the road.
Reset your intentions and learn from what it means to be out of action. The important part is that you actually start.
Courage is not about being completely fearless. It’s about what we decide to do in the presence of fear.
Courage can’t exist without it. It needs it. It’s the opposite side of the coin. In fact, you can look at the fear you’ve been feeling and see that the courage that has always been within you is right around the corner.
Every step you taken in your life is new. You’re different. Life is different. Everything around you has shifted and changed.
No matter how “the same” things seem, they are completely and entirely different. Everything, in every moment, is coming and going.
Don’t allow your mind to trick you into thinking that you’re the exact same person as you used to be. Even if you’ve “stalled” on the side of the road, you’ve still changed.
We don’t exist in a box that has an on or off switch. We exist across many different planes – mental, emotional, spiritual, physical etc. – and while we may not be chasing our biggest dream, our life is moving in so many different ways.
All we have to do is acknowledge it.
Allow your courage to set you upon a path of your greatest growth and development. Fear will always be part of the equation. But learning to work through it is one of the best practices there is.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 14, 2023
Cross The River
Our own growth and development is a lot like crossing a river.
When we first arrive at the river bank, we stand there with a mixture of emotions at what exists in front of us.
Fear, doubt, courage, excitement, worry and everything else in between.
We think about what the journey is going to be like, sometimes delaying for great lengths of time, and deny ourselves the journey at first.
But eventually, there’s comes a decision to enter the water. We feel everything in that first moment. It can almost be a bit shocking at first.
But if we allow ourselves to just stand there for a bit – without running back to the shore – we get used to the water running over our toes. In time, we make many steps forward and continue the journey.
At some point, the water climbs up our calves, up our legs and even at points to our chest. We battle the current, do our best to keep our feet in contact with the rocky bed underneath us and manage keeping ourselves afloat.
Time after time we stub our toe, accidentally dunk ourselves, float a bit downstream and have to trek back up again. But we keep going. We can see the other side of the river and there’s no sense in turning back now. We must stay the course.
Eventually, we reach a point where the water begins to slow down again, it moves back down from our chest, to our waist, to our thighs, down to the calves and then as we climb the bank on the other side, we see the water trickling around our toes once again.
The end is similar to the beginning. But what has changed?
You.
You did what you didn’t think you could do before and the entire time you spent in the water fundamentally changed you down to your core.
You believed in something, had the courage to see it through, and now you walk up the river bank, completely out of the water, and move onwards to the next river in front of you somewhere along your path.
This is your journey.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
February 13, 2023
A Practical Guide To Building Self Awareness
In this video, I will be discussing the topic of self-awareness and its importance in our lives. Self-awareness is the understanding of what is happening in our lives and how we are showing up in the world. It helps us to identify if we are showing up in a healthy and productive way or in a destructive way.
Self-awareness can be developed through two different methods – self-reflection and self-observation. Self-reflection is looking back on past experiences with compassion, wisdom, and understanding to gain insight into our story.
Self-observation, on the other hand, is being present in the moment and observing what is happening for us in the moment. By developing self-awareness, we have the ability to change our story and move forward in a positive direction.
Full Video Transcript Below
There’s a lot of people talking about that you know you need to be self-aware. You need to be self-aware. You need to be self-aware, but everyone has the same question: was like well, how do I actually do that? So I want to break that down simply for you and give you some things that you can use. But first, let’s kind of dig into what self-awareness is on the basic foundational level.
Self-awareness is understanding what is happening for me right in my life. How am I showing up in the world? What way of being am I showing up in the world, and what’s going on in my experience? Fundamentally speaking, what is happening for me in my experience?
The benefit of self-awareness is we really get to be able to look at our lives and go, “Am I showing up in a way that’s really healthy, that’s really productive? Or maybe am I showing up in a way that’s incredibly destructive?” Right. And when you give yourself the capacity to really look, look at what’s happening for you and your experience, then you give yourself the capacity to change it. Right? “Oh, I don’t like the way that this story is going. I can change it.” But if you don’t have self-awareness, you can’t change nothing.
There’s two different types of ways to really dig into self-awareness. The first one is the easier one, and I’m going to talk about self-reflection. Right, self-reflection when it really gets down to it is, we look back on an experience. It could have happened 10 seconds ago. It could have happened you know 10 years ago. We looked back on that experience and we begin to look at it through the eyes of compassion, through wisdom, and through understanding.
What really happened here? How did I show up in this situation? What was I feeling in this situation? What was I thinking? And when you just begin to look at yourself in that moment, or you look at something, right, other person’s events, whatever it might be, you start to gain a lot of wisdom. Right? And when you gain that wisdom, there’s a deeper level of understanding of, “Okay, I understand how I arrived here,” or, “I understand why this, you know, kind of transpired the way that it did.”
And you do this by looking at it, right? It’s something that’s generally that happened in the past. This is the easier version of developing self-awareness. Right, looking back at something. And some things that really help, right, is talking to other people about it. Other things that might help is journaling, right? Because you’re being able to look at that experience and really put your finger on it of, “Okay, this is how I showed up. This is how I viewed it, and that’s why I got these results.” Okay, so that’s the first part, really simple, right? Self-reflection.
Now next piece, self-observation. This one’s a little bit tricky because it calls for a really, really, really fine-tuned level of self-awareness.
Self-observation is what is happening for me in this moment right now. Okay, how am I showing up right now? Do I have the ability to kind of look at myself in the moment and go, ‘I’m not really showing up in the best way right now,’ and to be able to pause and just shift it?
I say this is tricky because there’s so many thoughts and emotions flying around all the time and there’s so many events that are transpiring and so much information that’s coming in that can be a little bit trickier to kind of go like, ‘Okay, all this being said, can I put a pause button on that and really understand what’s happening for me in this moment?’
How am I feeling right now? How am I viewing this right now? And so, when you get to this level of self-awareness, self-observation that we move into, you can shift that experience in the moment right, we can change it in the moment, and it’s pretty incredible when you get to that spot because you’re not looking back at, ‘Okay, well, I showed up the past two years in this way and I had this story, and they got me these results,’ you can go, ‘Wow, I’m really not showing up in the best way right this instant, and I’m going to change that now, so it doesn’t last for a longer period of time.’
So the way that we really begin to develop this like self-awareness muscle is that we start really looking at ourselves and our experience first through self-reflection, the easier version of it, and then we go through self-observation, and then we can really begin to gain a deeper insight into our story, how we’re showing up in the world, is this something that’s, like I said, productive or is this destructive? And when you come to that insight site, you give yourself the opportunity to change it, and that’s the coolest part of all of this.
Self-awareness gives you the capacity, the ability to be able to change your story going forward, so it’s not just the same thing repeating itself over and over and over and over again, it’s actually you going, you’re like more in the driver’s seat rather than the back seat right to our habitual energies and the way that we tend to do things over and over again.
So I just wanted to kind of talk about this as kind of like a structural topic, like self-awareness, what is that? How do we build it, and how do you go about that? All right, thanks so much for watching.
If you’re looking for some help/support navigating through life’s challenges and would like to learn more about working with me privately, head to www.1on1withevan.com
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
When You Come To Complete Acceptance
It can all change so fast.
In a blink of an eye what you understood to be so rock solid can shift drastically.
You can either fight against it or go for a ride.
But that choice will determine everything.
Acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like what’s happening. It’s about embracing the reality of the situation.
“This is happening. It’s not happening any other way.”
From that statement alone – no matter how challenging what’s in front of you may be – you can gain a tremendous amount of strength.
Since you’re not fighting against life as it is and instead aligning with how things have changed, you are given one of the greatest things of all: choice.
You can’t always control what’s happened to you.
But you can absolutely get on board with what is happening now and make your decisions from there.
Whether you want to call it destiny, the plan, luck or just chance it’s important that you roll with how things are.
Remember, you don’t have to like it.
But you do have to accept it.
Embrace it.
Understand it.
Approach it with wisdom.
That’s where the good stuff happens.
That’s when your best self comes forward.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project
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