[Summer Series] How to be Full of Life

Welcome to the Summer Series, where we are revisiting some of the most loved episodes from the past. And this week we are diving into a very powerful reminder of what it means to be full of life. If you've been feeling a little flat, a little routine-heavy, or disconnected from your spark, this one is for you, my friend. I hope it inspires you to infuse your days with more energy, more beauty, more intentionality, and more presence because how you live really matters. So let's dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here's your hostess, master life coach, Tonya Leigh.

Hello, hello friends. Welcome to the Summer Series. How's everybody doing? I just got back from vacation. I unplugged for two weeks. Which is rare for me, I haven't done that in a long time. I even left my computer behind. And enjoyed a week in California with some friends and went to see Fonz's family. And then we headed to Colorado to hang out with my daughter for a week, which is fun. It's fun letting your child host you. I'm so used to being the hostess and it's like, wow, my little girl is a grown woman now because she's hosting me for the holiday. So we had such a good time. And now I'm back feeling so full of life, which is what this Summer Series episode is about. We are revisiting a podcast that I did, I don't know how long ago, but it's called How to Be Full of Life.

I really believe that's what we're all after. We all just want to feel super alive. We want to feel turned on, inspired, excited, optimistic. We want to just feel, if you think about it, because you can't appreciate the excitement, the joy, the expansion without its opposite. The contraction, the frustration, the disappointment. And I talk about this in the episode. But to be full of life, you have to be full of feeling. You have to be willing to feel. And I've been thinking a lot about the moments in my own life where I felt like I was lacking life. I've also thought about the almost two decades of coaching and where women have been when they've had that just very melancholic kind of feeling about their life. And in the podcast that you're about to listen to I talk about how to be full of life, but I want to just address why I think we don't feel full of life.

I think it's really important for us to identify what is holding us back. And one of the things that is very obvious is that we have an emotional avoidance culture. We live in a world obsessed with feeling good and only good, and negative emotions can be avoided through scrolling, snacking, shopping, staying busy. And these types of behaviors just cause us to feel emotionally numb. If you want to be full of life, the first step you must take is learning to be present with your emotions, to allow yourself to feel life flowing through you, which means learning how to feel bad. And it doesn't feel good. But remember, you can't feel the positive emotions if you're not willing to feel the negative ones. The other reason why I feel like so many of us don't feel full of life is that we are living in a culture of overstimulation and under connection.

If you think about it, we are flooded every day with notifications and content and digital noise, and what we're really starving for is real presence, real connection. And this is only getting worse, my friends. Which means that we have to be so intentional with how we spend our time, who we hang out with. We have to be intentional about connecting with people. If not, it's just way too easy to sit at home and connect with our phones, to connect with this virtual world. And then we wonder why we aren't feeling full of life. Are you getting outside? Are you meeting friends for lunch or dinner? Are you going to play tennis or pickleball or going to yoga? Are you engaging with life force or are you engaging with your screen? The other reason why I feel like we don't feel full of life is we have what I call checked to box living.

We are following a list of shoulds. We are told this is what you should do, this is what you should become, this is who you should be, this is where you should live, this is how you should dress. And we check off the boxes. But once we've done everything right, we're often left wondering is this all that there is? And what I want you all to know is that I deeply believe that everybody comes in with this internal guide, this life that is meant only for you. And this requires that you get to know yourself. This requires courage to follow your intuition, to go after the things that maybe people think is she crazy? Is she a little crazy for doing this? But you know it's part of your unique soul path. And I'm telling you, when you get intimate with your unique dreams and you start creating and evolving, you become alive.

If you don't do this, guess what? Life feels very, very stagnant. I think the other reason why we don't feel alive is that we live in this hyper productive and hustle culture. Success is measured by output, not aliveness. And so we're chasing it and we're like, "Oh my God, I'm checking off the boxes. I'm accomplishing goals, I'm doing all the things, and yet I just feel dead inside." What if success became more about how alive you feel versus what you've accomplished? One of the things that we do in the membership is I have every member choose a signature goal. And this goal is a goal meant for this feeling of aliveness. It's not a should goal, it's a goal that is signature to each member. A goal that maybe they've put on the back burner for a long time. A goal that will grow them, that will require them to step into a new self-image. A goal that excites them, that they can't to wake up in the morning and pursue and yet it's often hard because it's so outside of the norm of what they're accustomed to going after.

Those are the kinds of goals I want us setting. I love being productive, you all. I love a goal. But when it becomes about the outcome and not the process, when it becomes about your worthiness tied to how much you achieve not who you're becoming, that's when we get in the slippery slope of chasing the wrong things and just feeling dead inside. Rest, joy and play are essential to feeling alive. But constant striving without space for stillness and pleasure, it dulls the human spirit. And so for many years I've talked about this concept of leisurely hustling. Recently, I think more about it as joyfully hustling. It's one of the core values of SOSI. It's like I want us to joyfully hustle towards our goals. I want us to have meaningful goals that make us excited, and I also want us to enjoy the process along the way.

I want us to take time for rest and to play and to enjoy our lives and our families because I know that just makes us better workers. I do. I think my employees are better when they're rested. I'm certainly better when I'm well rested. In fact, yesterday was International Self-Care Day. And one of the things that we do at the School of Self-Image is that it's like an annual holiday. Everybody gets the day off. They get a stipend that they get to spend on a self-care activity. And I love knowing that that day off, that moment of taking care of yourself, of slowing down and resting is going to help us speed up on the other end. And it also just makes you feel alive. The other reason why we often don't feel full of life is that we have default thinking patterns. Without awareness, people just recycle old beliefs.

I'm too old. It's too late. This is just the way it is. And these unconscious thought loops are subtle energy drains. And when this happens, what I've realized is the inner critic becomes louder than the inner dreamer. And so when the critic is the loudest voice in your head, guess what's going to happen? You're going to feel so energetically depleted. You're going to feel a lack of life. You are going to feel pretty dead inside. So we have to be aware of what are you thinking and realizing that is just a thought. So many people come to me and they're like, "This is a fact." I'm like, "I'm too old is not a fact." That is simply a thought that you keep thinking and every time you think it, you are creating more and more evidence to prove it true. And so you're building this mountain of results that don't serve you based on one thought that if you stop and realize there are so many other things that I could think that would lead to better results, your life would be completely different.

And that's why, within the membership, we look at our thoughts every single day. Are we thinking on purpose? Are we curating our minds like maybe we curate our closets or our homes or any other thing that we care about? Your mind is your greatest asset and you get to shape it. You get to style it. You get to choose what you think and what you focus on. And I will tell you, whatever you choose to focus on is going to determine how much life you feel inside of you. Imagine waking up every day and deciding I'm going to look for opportunities. I'm going to look for what's going well and right. I'm going to look for things to celebrate. I'm going to look for the blessings. I'm going to look for what I love about myself and appreciate about myself. Now in the beginning that's difficult, especially if you've been so accustomed to doing the opposite of that.

It takes work. It takes effort. But it's effort that's so worth it because it's going to lead to a completely different life because the life that you're living right now is simply a result of thoughts that you've thought in the past. You're sitting in the result of your thinking right now. So if you want your life to feel more vibrant, more exciting, we've got to start with what's going on between your two ears. And then another reason why I think people don't feel full of life is that they are existing in bland environments. If you've listened to this podcast, you know that I am a big, big advocate of environment having such a huge impact on your self-image. Yes, can you sit around and try to think differently in the same environments? Yeah, you can. But guess what? You start switching up your environments, it's so much easier to think different thoughts.

People really do underestimate how much surroundings impact their self-image and their mood. If you are living in messy bedrooms and cluttered kitchens and you don't like what you're wearing and the people that you're around are constantly complaining and being Debbie Downers, they all shape how you feel in your life. You can't feel full of life when your environment feels lifeless. So switch it up. Invite a new person to coffee, someone maybe that you work with that you've been interested in having a conversation with. Go to a different store to buy your groceries. Maybe go somewhere for the weekend, get out of town, go see something different. Shake up your environment and it will shake up the aliveness in your life. All right, so that's the reasons why I feel like we don't feel full of life.

I feel like I just recorded a whole new podcast. I told you all I wasn't completely taking the summer off, but I did want to revisit some of the episodes from the past. So now I'm going to share with you how to be full of life. I hope you enjoy this episode. And hey, listen, if you have not downloaded the podcast guide, what in the world? It is so informative. It's full of episodes that can guide you on your self-image journey. So you can go to schoolofselfimage.com/guide, get the guide, and enjoy this episode. One of my favorite quotes by Rumi says, "With passion, pray. With passion, make love. With passion, eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?" In this episode I'm sharing with you how to be full of life. For today's episode, I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot recently.

A few weeks ago someone asked me how I was feeling and my response was, "I'm just feeling so full of life." It's such an incredible feeling, but it's probably not exactly what you think. In fact, when I say full of life, what comes to mind? And a lot of people automatically go to this version of themselves that's happy and ecstatic and all positive emotion. That is not what I'm talking about. Full of life is an intensity of emotion. And you can't have ecstasy without the opposite of that. You can't experience the highs without also being willing to feel the lows. And so when I talk about full of life, it's really just being open to what life presents to me. And so it means not wasting my energy fighting against what is happening. It means not spending time fighting negative emotion. It's really me just having my arms wide open to life and saying, "Bring it. Bring it, I was made for this."

And I've actually done a whole episode on that topic alone, so make sure you check that out. But I was thinking about the members of the School of Self-Image and one of the first things that they do when they join the membership is they do a case study of their future self. And there's a whole process that I run women through, but the one thing that I've noticed with every single one is that their future selves are full of life. And I was talking to a friend of mine who's actually a member of the school not too long ago, and she was telling me all of these aha's that she's been having since she joined the membership. And she said, "I remember that version of me when I was about eight years old, and I started to think about this concept of being full of life and wondering when we lost it." A few days ago I went to the park. Fortunately here in Colorado, well, I'll speak for Denver, we've been having gorgeous spring-like days.

And so I was at the park and I was watching the kids on the playground and I realized kids are full of life. Just watch them. There's an excitement, there's a passion, there's a drive to want to experience more of life. So what happened? Why have so many adults lost that thirst for life itself? Why is it that so many adults are feeling depressed and defeated and frustrated with the life that they've created for themselves? And listen, you all, I've been there. Most of my 20s and even parts of my early 30s, it was me trying to get that thirst for life back. I wanted to be full of life. And today I can tell you I am, I feel like a kid again. I feel like I'm aging backwards. And I've been able to watch myself and understand why that is.

And it really comes down to an attitude. But what happens is a lot of you want the outside world to change first before you develop this attitude. And so you never allow yourself the experience of feeling full of life now, which will attract more things outside of you to feel full of life about. So are you ready to get that aliveness back? Do you feel like you're a wilted flower right now and you just want me to come and put some water on you so that you can begin to bloom again? Because I'm going to share with you what I've noticed within myself over the past decade that has landed me in this place right now where I really feel so alive and so full of life. I just feel an energy that I had lost for a while. But she's back. And she is back, my friends, in a big way.

Okay. So thing number one, and I mentioned this earlier but we're going to talk about it in a little bit more detail, to be full of life, you have to be full of feelings. You cannot experience that aliveness if you are afraid to feel all of what that means. Recently, my daughter's been going through a heartbreak and I have watched her cry and lay in bed and just be so sad. And of course as a mom, I want to make it better. But then as a woman who feels so alive right now, I don't because I know part of being fully alive is feeling heartbreak. It's feeling disappointment. It's feeling frustration. It's feeling anger. You can't experience the ecstasy, the love, the joy, the happiness, all of the things that all of us want to experience, unless you're willing to feel the negative side of that.

And so I've just been comforting her and supporting her and letting her know no one gets through this journey of life without heartbreak, unfortunately. It's just part of the curriculum. When we came into the world, it was like, okay, heartbreak check. Got through that one. Might have several on your particular curriculum. I know I have. But you have to be willing to feel. I think back to the years where I felt dead inside, wasn't a lot of energy moving around. And the one thing that I noticed is that those were the years where I did not want to feel. I didn't want to feel discomfort. I didn't want to feel boredom or sadness or frustration. And so what would I do? My particular antidote to those things was to eat. I would eat my feelings, and that would make me feel more dull and lifeless.

For some people it's working. For some people it's maybe gambling. There's so many ways that we can try to escape life. But you can't be full of life if you're spending so much time running from it. And so now I just allow myself to feel the discomfort, the fear, the worry, the anxiety, the anger. I allow myself to feel all of it because I know that in order to be fully alive and to be full of life, I have to be willing to experience all that life has for me. So that's the first thing. The willingness to feel all of life, all of life's emotions. The second thing is I noticed, when I was thinking about being a kid, one of the things that I feel like all kids have are dreams and goals and desires. Now, as a kid, you may not think of it as a goal yet, but there's something that you're looking forward to.

Maybe it's looking forward to summer vacation. Maybe it's looking forward to seeing your grandparents at Christmas. Or maybe it's looking forward to graduating from middle school and then there's high school and then you're looking forward to college. Then a job and having a family. It's like you have all of these goals and these dreams, and then there's a certain point where so many of us get to where we just stop. We're like, okay, I did all of the things that I was told I was supposed to do. So you get married, you get the job, you have the kids, you have your retirement plan going, you have the house, and then you just stop. And the reason why I'm so full of life now is that I don't stop. And I easily could, my life is so good right now. I could stop dreaming, I could stop having goals, and I could be content, but I know that full of life doesn't exist in that place for me.

Aliveness is having something to look forward to. It's having a life outside of your current life that you are excited to get out of bed and create. This is why one of the first things that I have members do within the school is they have to create an extraordinary goal for themselves. An extraordinary goal is outside of the loose five pounds, that's not really exciting. Or organize my bedroom. Okay, that's a great thing to do, but does that make you excited about life? Does that make you think, wow, there is more to life than where I currently am and I'm excited to go out there and create that for myself. To be full of life means to be full of dreams and goals no matter how old you are. I was watching this video about this woman on YouTube. She's 71 years old and she still dances every day.

She looks phenomenal. And she's going out, she's got a very vibrant social life. And she said, "I want to be an example that you don't have to just roll up and die when you get a certain age. That you can keep going, that you can continue to be full of life into your 70s, 80s and 90s." This is why I intend to always have an extraordinary goal that I am going after. I want to have those goals to give me something to look forward to, give me a focus so my mind just can't wander unsupervised because I haven't given it something to look at and give its attention to. And, on top of that, knowing that each of those goals are going to introduce me to the next version of myself. I think it's so exciting. So do you have dreams and goals? And if you're feeling dead inside, if you're feeling like you are not full of life, then I'm going to highly recommend that you create one for yourself and make it extraordinary.

Another one of the ways that I cultivate this fullness of life, this aliveness, is to move. We're going to talk about exercise. I know some of y'all are very opposed. You don't like it. You have a lot of thoughts about it that don't serve you. You have many excuses that seem valid. And you resent that you feel like you have to do it. And all of that needs to stop. You need to make a commitment to move your body and move it often. And let me tell you why. If you look into nature, things that are alive, move. Guess what doesn't move? Dead things. If you're feeling dead, if you're feeling heavy, if you're feeling just this burden on yourself, that is a call to get up and move your body. One of the reasons why I'm feeling so alive these days is that I'm moving more.

I'm exercising almost every single day. I'm getting up and I'm stretching instead of just sitting at my desk all day working. I'm going to the gym. I'm going to the park. I am moving. And my brain is trying to convince me that it's a terrible idea. My brain tries to convince me that I can do it tomorrow, that I have too many other things to do that are more important. But do you know what? Nothing is more important than my aliveness. And so I just don't listen to that part of my brain because that's the part of my brain that if I continue to listen to I would be feeling dead like I did all those years ago. If you want to be full of life, you have to move like someone who is full of life, that's full of energy. And if you all are feeling low energy, I know that feeling.

I have been there. I talk about this with my members. One of my goals right now is getting to that next level of fitness for myself. Because I've had years where I've just been low energy and wondering what in the world was wrong with me. But I've been moving more, and with that movement I've increased my energy. Now, the brain, when you're feeling tired, will try to tell you that you just need to rest. But what if that is the trick trying to keep you where you are? If you haven't been moving on a regular basis, just start by stretching every day, going for a 30-minute walk. Just get moving because alive things, they're moving. So if you want to be full of life, you need to do what alive things do. The next thing that I have noticed that gives me that full of life feeling is play.

And over the last three years, I have been playing more than I've ever played in my entire life. Even as a kid I've never played as hard as I'm playing right now. And of course play is different for everyone. But the aim, the intention is the same. It is that spontaneous, pleasurable and flexible activity that you do for your own self amusement. And the intention is always just to enjoy and to learn and to experience more of life. My play looks like dancing in the kitchen while I'm cooking dinner, it's playing cards and games. I love games. We play a lot of games. But it's also just being spontaneous. So for example, this past weekend we were sitting at home, we had planned to have a quiet night watching TV, and we get a text from a friend who just flew into town and he's like, "Hey. Get dressed, we're going out."

So it was like nine o'clock at night and there was a part of me that wanted say, no, let's do it later. But that's the part of me that used to talk me into doing things that made me feel dead, right? And I was like, no, let's go. So I jumped up. We got dressed. We ended up meeting him out at like 10 o'clock and stayed out until 2:00, 2:30. Met some really fun people, had some great conversations. It was such a fun night of play for me. When you think of kids who are full of life, what's the one thing that we noticed in them? They're always playing. And yet we get the story in our brains, and it's instilled in us by society, that as an adult, you need to be more serious. You shouldn't play as much. You can play after you get your work done.

And I think that's a very dangerous message. I want to make my work feel like play. I want life to feel like play. It's just this one big game that we're all figuring out, and we can have fun while doing it. It's all about attitude. You can dread it, you can fight it, you can resist it, or you can approach it with a sense of wonder and awe and playfulness. And I will tell you choosing the latter will, number one, allow you to have so much more fun in your life, but it also leads to better results because of how you're showing up. And everything is energy, my friends. When you start to show up in a more light, playful manner, you're going to start attracting things very differently than the heavy burdened version of you. So play more so that you can be more full of life.

The last thing that I have noticed that has led to this alive feeling that I have, bigger than I've ever had it before, is I'm thinking way more life giving thoughts. Thoughts that give me life, that give me energy versus drains my energy. So I want you all just to pay attention to what goes on in your brain every day. Do you wake up in the morning thinking, Ugh, I got to get through another day? Ugh, I wish my kids weren't being kids right now. I wish my husband would be different. I hate this job I have. Just notice what is playing in the background of your life all of the time that you probably don't even notice. Maybe all you notice is that you feel awful, you feel dead inside. Well, if you're feeling that way, it all comes down to your thinking. I wake up in the morning thinking I am so happy that I get another day.

One of my favorites is, look at the sun, it came up and I'd even have to make it happen. I just get to enjoy it. I just get to witness it. I just get to take it in. My kiddos tell me that I annoy them sometimes with how much I appreciate the day. We'll be in the car and I'm like, "Guys, just look out that window right now. Look how beautiful it is." Sometimes I start singing for no reason. I talk about life in such a way that it wants to hang out with me more. It wants to give me more of it because I do appreciate it. And let me tell you all, some of you may be thinking, well, Tonya, that's easy for you, look at your life now. I started this a long time ago and it's just increased over the years. But I didn't wait until my life was how I thought it should be, I started this process when I thought my life should be very different than the way it was.

And that has been exactly how I've been able to create the life I have now. And let me assure you all, my life is not rainbows and daisies all of the time. No one's life is. If anyone sells you that, then you need to run because that's not life. We all have problems. We all have experiences that are uncomfortable. Just like I was saying, this past week I've been nursing my daughter's heartbroken heart. It's part of life. And yet in all of it, we can choose to think in such a way that's not fighting it, but like, hey, I still appreciate you. Thank you for supporting me in this. Thank you for having my back Universe. We're going to get through this. And it's a beautiful day.

You cannot be full of life and attract more of what life has to offer you if you're hating your life. If you're complaining all of the time because you think life should be different than what it is right now. Being grateful for the life you have is the secret to creating the life you want. Celebrating your life is the secret to life giving you more to celebrate. And every moment you can focus on what you think is not going well, you can focus on what you don't like or what you don't have or you can choose to focus on what is going well, what you do have, what is abundant for you. Always choose the latter. And as you do, you will notice that you become more alive. And with that alive feeling, you start to show up differently. And then the world just rearranges itself to mirror that aliveness back to you.

Have a gorgeous week, my friends, and I cannot wait to see you in next week's episode. Cheers. Hey, before you go, I want to let you know that if you've loved this episode and you want more support in curating your self-image, I've created something just for you. It's a free podcast guide to help you find the episodes that meet you exactly where you are. Whether you're craving for elegant success, vibrant well-being, magnetic presence, or stylish living, or maybe you just want to deepen your understanding of the core concepts of self-image work. It's all in the guide. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/guide and grab your copy now. Your next breakthrough might just be one episode away.