How To Enjoy Your Life More

Living in Survival Mode

I want to take you back to about 20 years ago. I’m working 12-hour night shifts in an ICU. So there’s fluorescent lights, beeping monitors, hanging out in hunter green scrubs, the kind of environment that doesn’t necessarily scream joie de vivre. And I remember one night, somewhere around 5:00 AM standing at the nurses station thinking, “Is this it? Is this what my life is going to feel like? Just getting through it?” And here’s what’s interesting. It was not that my life was terrible. I had people that I loved. I had a roof over my head. I had a career that mattered, but I wasn’t enjoying any of it. I was enduring it. I was in survival mode. I was waiting for some future version of my life to finally be one worth enjoying. I told myself things like, “When I lose the weight, I’ll finally enjoy getting dressed.” Or, “When I have a better schedule, I will enjoy my weekends,” or, “When I have more money, I will finally enjoy my life.” It was always when, when, when.

Conditional Relationship with Life

And then something shifted. I don’t even remember the exact moment, but I started to realize that I was in a completely conditional relationship with my own life. I was saying, “I will love you when you change.” And my life was just sitting there like, “Okay, I guess we’re both just waiting then.” That realization changed everything. And I can tell you, sitting here almost 20 years later, that the woman I am today and the life that I have today all started with a decision. I made it under fluorescent lights at five in the morning. I decided to stop waiting to enjoy my life. And that is what we’re talking about today because I think that most women are doing exactly what I was doing. They are postponing the enjoyment of their own lives and they don’t even realize it. So let’s dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where our motto is simple, elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger. She lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

Transactional vs. Creative Living

Here is what I see with almost every woman I work with. She has a transactional relationship with her own life. She is waiting for a life to give her a reason to enjoy it, waiting for the promotion, the weight loss, the relationship, the move, the moment when everything finally lines up and she can exhale and say, “Okay, now I can enjoy this.” And it sounds reasonable. It sounds responsible. It even sounds humble. I’m not going to enjoy my life until I have earned it, but what it really is conditional love. You’re telling your life, “I will love you when you are different.” And I want you to think about how that would feel if someone said that to you. Imagine your partner looking at you and saying, “I’ll enjoy being with you when you change.” You will not feel loved. You will not feel like you are enough. And yet that is what most women are doing to their own lives and then wondering why their lives do not feel good.

The women I know who are genuinely enjoying their lives, and I mean truly enjoying them, they’re not performing it for Instagram. They flip the entire equation. They stopped asking, “What can my life give me?” And they started to ask, “What can I bring to my life?” There is a big difference, my friends. That is a completely different energy. One is a consumer, like give me, give me, give me, and then the other one is a creator and creators enjoy their lives because they are actively building something that they love every single day, not waiting for it to arrive. So let me give you three shifts that I made that took me from the woman waiting under those fluorescent lights to the woman I am today, because today I genuinely enjoy my life. And I want to be clear that these are not things that I figured out once my life was good.

Shift 1: Stop Negotiating with Life

These are the things that made my life feel good. So let’s start with shift number one. Stop negotiating with your life. Most women are in this hostage negotiation with their lives and they don’t even realize it. The negotiation sounds like, “I will be happy when… I will relax when… I will enjoy myself when… I will celebrate when…” There is always a condition, always this demand, always some milestone that has to be hit before she gives herself permission to feel good. And here’s the other side of it. Most women believe that life should have zero problems, that if they’re doing it right, things should be smooth sailing. So when challenges come and they always come, she takes it as evidence that something is wrong, that she is failing, that enjoyment is not available to her right now because look at all these problems. This is the single biggest robber of your joy.

This belief that somewhere out there is a version of your life with no challenges. There is not. There never will be. Challenges are not a detour from a good life. They are actually the texture of a good life. They are how you learn. They are how you grow. They are how you become the woman you are becoming. They are inevitable. The French have this concept called joie de vivre, and most people translate it literally, which is the joy of living. But what it really means is the joy of all of life, embracing it all. The hard days and the easy ones, the mess and the magic. It is not joy despite life. It is joy because of life, all of it. I truly enjoy my life now and I have hard days, but I enjoy those hard days because I realize without the hard days, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the easier ones.

And it’s not because I’m being delusional or because I slap a positive spin on everything. It’s because I know that we can’t have one without the other. They’re part of the deal and I stopped fighting with the deal. This is the shift. Stop negotiating. Stop putting conditions on your enjoyment. Stop romanticizing some imaginary future where everything is perfect. It does not exist. What exists is today. And today has plenty in it worth enjoying if you stop demanding it to be different first. So that’s shift number one.

Shift 2: Make Here the Destination

Shift number two is make “here” the destination. This one I learned at 5:00 AM in that ICU. Most women are living in when-I-get-there mode. There’s always a there. The next city, the next job, the next body, the next stage of life, and here, wherever here is just the place they are tolerating until they arrive somewhere better. But here’s the problem. You are only ever here. That is all you have. You will never actually arrive at there because the moment you get there, it becomes here. And if you’ve not learned how to make here good, you will just start looking for the next there. I want to repeat that. You will only ever have here. I started this practice at 5:00 AM in the hospital. I asked myself, “What if I stopped treating this life that I have as something I’m just getting through and I started to treat it as the life I’m actually living? What if I made here as good as I think there will be?” And so I started small. I started paying attention. I started finding things to enjoy right where I was, not where I wished I was. I chose to bloom where I was planted, and that changed everything.

Not because my circumstances changed. They did not at the time. It took a while, but I changed. I went from a woman who was enduring her life to a woman who was engaged with her life, and that energy, that shift is what eventually created the life that I have now. What this looked like was things like bringing a book to read on my breaks instead of hanging out in the break room, complaining with my coworkers. Or I’d pack beautiful lunches on my day shifts. And I remember going outside, there was this beautiful oak tree at the hospital I worked at and I would spread a blanket out, and I would imagine I was at this lovely picnic in France and I would just enjoy my lunch.

And then I started to even change my thoughts about my work. Instead of complaining about how hard it was and how overwhelming it was, I started to see it as, “You know what? I am so blessed that I have this career. I’m so blessed that I get to take care of these patients who are vulnerable and really sick.” And what was really interesting is how even the energy at work started to change. I started to have patients’ families request me to be their family member’s nurse, and then doctors even were requesting that I take care of their patients. And the best part, all of that energy that now I look back and can see that I was using to resist my life, it was freed up. And I started to think about possibilities. I started to think about other things that I could enjoy, and that led me to Sommelier School, which then led me to food and wine writing, which then led me to Paris, which thing after thing after thing, led me to right here. It all started by me enjoying the here.

It was through blooming where I was planted that I continued to grow and pick bigger and bigger containers to plant myself within. You do not get the life you want by hating where you are. You get it by learning to appreciate where you are so that you can start attracting what’s next. So that is shift number two.

Shift 3: Rewrite Your Self-Image

And then finally, shift number three, be the woman who enjoys her life. This is the self-image shift, and it’s the one that makes the other two actually stick. So I want you to imagine that you were handed a character to play. And with this character comes a script, a wardrobe, a way of moving through the world. The character’s name is yours. Her life looks exactly like yours. Same house, same job, same family, same body. But the script, well, it says something very specific at the top. “This is the woman who enjoys her life.” That’s like the headline of your script. And now everything flows from that one line.

She wakes up maybe and stretches instead of reaching for her phone. She gets dressed with intention because a woman who enjoys her life cares about how she feels in her clothes. When things go sideways at work, her next line is not, “Why does this always happen to me?” Her next line is, “What’s the opportunity here?” Because the character she is playing does not crumble. She adapts. She stays in the game. She keeps enjoying it because that’s what her script tells her to do. And down deep, she knows that the universe has her back, that God has her back, that she has her back. Now, here’s the thing. You already have a script running, but most women just never stop to look at what it actually says.

And if you looked at yours, honestly, it might say something like, “This is a woman who’s trying really hard and is exhausted and is waiting for things to get easier.” Or, “This is a woman who will finally enjoy her life when she loses the weight.” Or, “This is a woman who does everything for everyone else and has nothing left for herself.” And then you wonder why your life feels exactly like that. It is because you are playing that part perfectly. Now, you can understand the concept of not negotiating with your life. You can agree that you should bloom where you’re planted, but if at the top of your script, the top of that page, it still says, “This is a woman who is struggling,” you will keep playing that role no matter how much you know intellectually. This is why the self-image shift matters more than anything.

You have to rewrite the script, and that requires becoming a stylist of your own mind. The same way you would look at your closet and decide what stays and goes, you have to do that with your thoughts. What beliefs are you wearing every day that do not fit the woman who enjoys her life? You’ve got to learn to get rid of them, to replace them with something that feels better and looks better because they do not belong in your closet. Because if you believe that joy is something that you earn later, your script will always have one more scene before the happy part. Your brain will keep writing conditions, one more thing to fix, one more goal to hit, one more problem to solve before you are allowed to enjoy yourself. If you believe that you shouldn’t have challenges, your script becomes a tragedy every time something goes wrong, and you cannot enjoy a life that you have cast as a tragedy.

But if you rewrite that first line, if you decide that your character is a woman who enjoys her life, everything changes. It changes what you notice. It changes what you choose. It changes how you respond when life does not go according to plan. It changes how you treat yourself because a woman who enjoys her life is not beating herself up all day. She is her own best friend. She speaks to herself with warmth and honesty and the assumption that she is doing her best. This is the real shift. You do not need a new life. You need a new script. And after almost 20 years of doing this work, I am more convinced than ever that the woman who enjoys her life is not the woman with the fewest problems. She’s the woman who decided to rewrite her script and played that part on purpose.

All three of these shifts have one thing in common. They require you to think differently. To stop negotiating, you have to change what you believe about enjoyment. To make here the destination, you have to change what you believe about where you are. And to become a woman who enjoys her life, you have to change what you believe about yourself. That is why every week I write The Edit. It is my free weekly newsletter where I help you look at your thoughts that are running your life and decide which ones stay and which ones go. Think of it as a weekly styling session for your self-image. So if this episode resonated with you, the edit is your next step. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/edit to subscribe. It’s free, and I’ll also link it in the show notes.

Now, I want to hear from you. Which of these shifts hit you the hardest? Was it negotiating? Was it blooming where you’re planted? Or was it the self-image piece? Drop it in the comments. I cannot wait to read yours. And also, if you’re not subscribed to the podcast yet, what in the world? Just hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Now, here’s what I want you to think about this week. You do not have to wait for a better life to start enjoying this one. The woman who decided to enjoy her life right now, I mean, right here, right now, exactly as it is, that is the woman whose life eventually becomes extraordinary, not the other way around. So have a beautiful week and I will see you in the next episode. Cheers.