How to Live a Life Full of Wonder and Everyday Magic

Rediscovering Awe in Your Own Life

When was the last time that you really felt in awe of your own life? Not grateful because you should be, but that kind of deep breath, catching awe that makes you whisper. “Wow, I can’t believe I get to be here.” Most women I know we aren’t missing motivation. Do you know what we’re missing? Wonder. We’ve become so good at managing life that we have forgotten how to be moved by it. We know how to plan and organize and optimize, but somewhere in all of that effort, we have lost The Art of Amazement. And here’s the truth. When you lose your sense of wonder, you also lose your connection to magic. That spiritual energy inside you that makes everything more lighter, more possible, more alive. Without that creating the life you want starts to feel like forcing instead of flowing. 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. 

The Wisdom Found at Life’s End

Hello friends, and welcome to this episode. Before I ever became a coach, I was a critical care nurse. I was actually a nurse for 15 years, and I can tell you there’s something sacred about being with people at the end of their lives. In those final moments, something beautiful typically happens. The fear, the control, the striving, it all falls away. And what’s left is just pure wonder. I’ve seen people stare at the light coming through a hospital window and whisper, “Wow, it’s so beautiful out there.” Even this, when my father was dying, I saw it again. The closer he came to the end, the more in awe he became.

It was as if he returned to this, I don’t know, childlike state where he was curious and calm and completely present. In fact, I’ll never forget a week before he passed, I was sitting beside his bed, holding his hand, and he looked at me and he said, I’ll never forget it. He said, “Wow, isn’t it all so beautiful?” And he was right. Even in the sadness, even in the mystery, it was beautiful. And that moment reminded me of something that we all forget sometimes. You don’t have to wait until the end of your life to wake up to it. You can choose to live in wonder right now.

Curiosity vs. Control

So why do we lose that Sense of Wonder, magic? Because somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we start prioritizing certainty over curiosity. I mean, let’s admit it. We want control. We want the answers. We want to know how everything is going to work out. And in that pursuit of control, we forget how to be surprised and delighted by God, the universe, and nature. Do you remember how you were as a child? Everything felt so alive full of possibility. You didn’t question if you were supported, you just believed you were.

But as we grow, life can teach us to be realistic, to play it safe, and then we stop asking open questions and we start repeating the old stories, and that’s when life starts to lose its sparkle. But here’s the beautiful part. Wonder never truly leaves you. It’s still inside of you waiting to be noticed again. When you choose to see through the eyes of wonder and awe, you literally wake up your soul and your brain. Science now tells us that when we focus on awe or gratitude, we actually activate neural circuits that calm, anxiety and open creativity. Your brain was designed by God to notice beauty, to create to believe, and that’s not random, that’s divine design. Aristotle once said, “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom,” and I believe it’s also the beginning of faith. Wonder is what wakes us up to the presence of something greater.

It’s the space between knowing and not knowing and where the divine meets us. And from that space, we can access our magic. Now, when I say magic, I don’t mean tricks or wishful thinking. Magic, to me, is that sacred partnership that you have between your spirit and the divine, God, the universe, however you reverence that bigger part of what is happening out there. It’s what happens when your heart and your mind and your actions align with the rhythm, the natural rhythm of the universe. It’s realizing that you are not separate, that you are part of this bigger creation designed to co-create with the energetic forces that be. When you pray or you visualize or you hold an intention with faith, you’re activating both your own neurobiology and this bigger creative force. Science calls it neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself. Spirit calls it faith in motion.

But when you direct your focus and you repeat your intentions and you take aligned action, you’re literally strengthening new pathways in your brain. You begin to see opportunities, connections, and solutions that were always there. You just couldn’t perceive them before. That’s not just science. To me, that’s sacred. That’s the way you were created. So the question becomes how do we live this out practically, beautifully and daily? And it really comes down to four things: your focus, your questions, your translations, and your words. 

Focus Creates Frequency

So let’s start with your focus, because what you focus on expands not just spiritually, but neurologically. There’s a system in your brain called the Reticular Activating System. I talk about it a lot, but it’s this filter that sifts through all of the data that is always trying to make its way in to give you what you ask of it. Whatever you tell it to look for, that’s what it’s going to go out there and find for you.

So are you spending your day scrolling through social media, feeding your brain the steady diet of what’s wrong in the world, the outrage, the opinions, the noise, or are you paying attention to what’s right, to what’s working every single day? Think about it. I was in preparing for this episode, and I was like, “Let’s think about all of the amazing things that happen every single day.” Did you know that yesterday about a hundred thousand planes took off and they all landed safely? Babies were born. Someone got good news from their doctor. A stranger actually paid for someone else’s coffee. The sun came up and you didn’t even have to make it happen. Your heart kept beating all night while you slept. When you start noticing these small miracles, life starts to feel different, lighter, steadier, more hopeful. It’s not about pretending bad things don’t happen. It’s about giving at least as much attention to what’s good and true and still working because your brain is like a spotlight.

It will always find what you shine it on. So if you want more peace, if you want more, wonder if you want more magic in your life, are you focusing on those things? If you want peace, are you focused on peace? If you want joy, are you focused on joy? And if you want magic, are you focusing on the daily moments of wonder and little miracles that happen every single day, because your focus is your frequency.

Change the Question, Change the Outcome

The second thing that you need to pay attention to are your questions. Pay attention to what you ask yourself day after day because your brain is always listening and it’s always answering and it doesn’t care if the questions are helpful or hurtful. Empowering or limiting, it simply goes to work. Finding evidence to prove you right. Some questions will stretch you to expand your faith, your imagination, your capacity for joy. And others, well, they’ll keep you in the familiar. They’ll keep you small, they’ll keep you circling the same problems year after year, stuck in the same emotions that steal your wonder and dull your magic. When you live in fear, scarcity or doubt, your questions start to sound like that energy. They begin to echo it right back to you.

Questions like, “Why is this so hard? What if this doesn’t work out? What if they don’t like me? What if it’s too late? What if I fail?” You can feel it, right? Each one of those questions tightens your chest. It makes you shrink. It cuts off possibilities, and it closes the door on a new potential future. You can choose to ask questions that open rather than close questions that return you to curiosity and faith instead of fear and control. I call them Wonder Questions. These are the kinds of questions that soften your nervous system, invite the divine into the conversation and remind you that you’re not doing life alone.

Wonder Questions sound like, “I wonder what this is teaching me right now. I wonder how this might be for my highest good. I wonder what would happen if I trusted this process and it was all working out for me. I wonder if this is going to be even better than I can imagine.” Can you feel the difference? These questions expand you. They open up a new space for new possibilities and opportunities. They move you out of your head and back into your heart. The place where your intuition and your peace and your creativity live. Here’s the deal. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions. And when your questions are rooted in faith and curiosity, your brain and your spirit start looking for evidence of possibility. Curiosity is one of the most spiritual things that you can practice. It’s your way of saying, “God, show me what I can’t see yet.” So the next time you catch yourself asking something like, “Why isn’t this working?” Pause and try instead going to a place of wonder, “I wonder what’s being worked out right now behind the scenes that I can’t even see yet.” That’s how you turn fear into faith by changing the questions that you ask.

Translate, Don’t Spiral

The third thing that I want you to pay attention to are your translations, because it’s not what happens, it’s how you translate what happened. Two, women can go through the exact same experience. One can call it failure, while the other one calls it information or feedback. Your interpretation determines your emotion. The way this works is something happens and you have a thought about it, and that thought determines how you feel and then how you feel determines how you show up what you do or what you don’t do, and that determines your results.

When you interpret a setback as punishment, your body is flooded with stress. But when you interpret it as preparation, your body relaxes into peace. Same circumstance, completely different chemistry. So when something doesn’t go as planned, pause and ask yourself, “What else could this mean? What if this isn’t rejection? What if this is just redirection?” Because the difference between a breakdown and a breakthrough is often just the story that you tell about it. The story isn’t just mindset work, it’s spiritual work. It’s choosing to trust even when you can’t see the full picture, knowing that something good is still being written. Now here’s the thing with that, people will often say, “But Tonya, are you being delusional?” And what I say to them is, “Listen, there are many different stories that I could be telling about what’s happening right now. Why would I choose to tell a story that keeps me afraid, that keeps me small, and therefore showing up in such a way that will end up creating the very thing that I don’t want?” Choose carefully because they are determining how you feel, how you show up and the results that you create.

The Magic of Your Words

And then the final thing that I want you to pay attention to, access, wonder, and that everyday magic are your words. Because words carry energy. They have frequency and weight. They can build faith or they can feed fear. In fact, a few years ago, I remember this so vividly, I was in the car with Fonz and we were in the process of packing up to move from Colorado to North Carolina. And I was feeling so overwhelmed and I said to him, “Oh my gosh, I have so much to do.” And he turned to me and he was like, “No, you just have things to do.” Removing one little word, the word so changed the whole frequency of that sentence. It removed some of the heaviness.

Instead of saying, “I have so much to do,” it was just like “I have things to do.” And as I felt lighter, I could think more clearly, and as I could think more clearly, I could focus on just the next thing that needed to happen. And I ended up getting it all done. But that small shift gave me space to breathe. That’s the power of language. Have you ever noticed that? We call it spelling. It’s like literally casting a spell on our lives. Our words have that kind of energy. Every sentence that you speak is shaping your internal world and your internal world is influencing your external world. When you say things like, “I’m stuck,” you freeze possibility. When you say, “I’m learning,” you open it back up. When you say, “I’m overwhelmed,” you literally shut down. But when you say “I’m guided, you open back up.”

Notice your words not to be perfect, but to be powerful and to speak intentionally. You might just be one word away from a lighter experience, one sentence away from a whole new experience. Here’s what I say about words is that if you’re going to tell a story, and literally almost everything that we tell ourselves every day are stories. They’re not facts. There are fiction about the facts. And if you’re going to tell a story, make it a beautiful one. Make it one that you actually want to live out, that you want to experience. That is how you access Everyday Magic and return to that sense of wonder and awe, the creativity of your own brain to tell the story that you actually want to live out. So how do we come back to wonder and magic when life feels heavy? Well, we slow down, we breathe, we look again.

We stop trying to control everything, and we start asking, what if it’s already okay? Because the more we notice the good in our lives, the more we activate that same goodness within ourselves. When you quiet your mind and you set an intention, something amazing happens, your brain begins to orient toward that vision. It’s like your mind becomes this compass turning you toward what aligns with your faith and your purpose. That’s not manifestation and the trendy sense. It’s you co-creating with this energy that we find ourselves living in. It’s you doing your part while trusting that the universe is taking care of its part. That’s where peace lives, that’s where your power lives. That’s where the Everyday Magic lives. And here’s what you’ll notice. When you start to see yourself as a woman who lives in wonder, everything changes. You stop forcing and you start flowing.

You stop chasing, and you start attracting. You stop needing proof because you know that your faith is the proof. The woman who lives in wonder doesn’t wait for signs. She becomes one. She carries her peace into the chaos. She brings light into the rooms that she walks into. She’s aware that she and the universe are working together always, and that energy, it blesses everyone around her. That’s what true creation is. Not self-centered, but soul-centered. So today I want to leave you with this. Wonder is an awakening. It’s an awareness to what already is, and then magic is within you. It’s not out there. It’s you aligning with that part of you that is most expansive, that is always looking for love, that’s always looking for possibility. And when you use wonder and the magic that is already you together, that’s when you turn your life into this beautiful art form.

Because here’s the thing, the moment you pause and you say to yourself, and you really believe it, wow, “I get to live this life.” That’s when you know that you’ve stepped into wonder. And here’s the really cool part. You don’t have to wait for your life to change every day, all day, around all of us. There are wondrous things that happen. The question is, “Are you looking for them?” If you want to create something extraordinary, whether it’s a business or a relationship, or maybe just the next version of you, I want to encourage you to start by being in awe of the ordinary. And then beyond that, there is this energy that I call living as if your prayers have already been answered. Because at the end of the day, the reason why we want anything is because we’re after a feeling. Now, things outside of you don’t create your feelings.

Guess how you think? One of the best tools that I have that actually if you want to go and download it, please go. Now, you can go to schoolofselfimage.com/sweetspot. But it’s a powerful tool that I began using many years ago of helping me get really clear on what my Sweet Spot looks and feels like, and then learning how to live in that energy every single day. That’s when I really felt like I started creating Everyday Magic. And part of that was being in awe of the life I already had to really appreciate it, to really give reverence to the blessings that were already around me. And as I started to live in that energy, it’s like one door after another just began opening up until one day I looked around, I’m like, oh my gosh, I am actually living the exact life that I wrote about in my Sweet Spot day. And so be sure to go and grab that free guide again. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/sweetspot. The whole goal is first all to look around at our lives and be in that wondrous state where we’re like, wow, I really get to live this life.

My dad really was right. It is all so beautiful. The question really is, are you looking for that beauty? I promise you, when you start looking for it, you’re going to find it everywhere. Have a beautiful week, my friends. I’ll see you on next week’s episode. Cheers.