The Rebel Philosopher's Blog

Spirituality encourages us to spend time with ourselves daily. It encourages a daily practice of meditation, journaling, yoga, or going for a walk as a means of clearing our minds, connecting with ourselves and feeling better. I don’t meditate or do yoga. I’m not committed to journaling as a daily practice, but the writing I do daily for public consumption definitely serves as a means of understanding myself and my experience better.

The daily practice that I have is one of self-awareness and holding my own feet to the fire. How did I act today? How did I feel today? How did I think today? I look for the places where I offered myself pain through my thoughts, feelings, and behavior; then I fix that. If I need to that includes going back to people and having conversations again or apologizing. It includes understanding the pain I created for myself and then how to manage that. I take the expression I created to heart and live by it – manage yourself in the experience without trying to control, change, or manipulate the experience. To say that this process has been life-changing for me is an understatement.

Over the years I’ve created a multitude of different coaching programs but they were all missing the key ingredient to my own success which was the daily self check-in practice. I’ve had some amazing clients over the years, but without the daily check-in practice, I found the weekly calls were not as effective as they could have been. Things were left out, forgotten about, or skipped that could have been helpful. My coaching programs left me feeling like something was missing and I wasn’t the one doing the work. The weekly calls relied heavily on my clients to provide the content and if they don’t already have a high level of self-awareness or become afraid of sharing things with me, the calls fall short. What was missing was the daily check-in practice.

My new coaching program, Radical Self-Mastery, uses the daily check-in practice as a foundational tool to guide the weekly calls. Every single day there is a form to fill out that asks people to reflect on their day by understanding their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. If you’re curious you can check out the form here. The form will take about 10 to 15 minutes a day to fill out. It’s not a crazy time commitment. To be honest with you, when I first started my self-awareness journey, it was a full time job, spending hours every single day trying to understand myself in the experience. I don’t expect that level of commitment from you, however 15 minutes a day is a very reasonable time commitment if you’re truly dedicated to the process.

The coaching program has an application process that includes 30 days of mandatory daily check-ins prior to our first call. I don’t even require payment until after this process is done. Why am I asking for so much before we even really get started? Because I want you to be comfortable. I want it to be a habit. I want you to start recognizing your own patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. I will reply to each of your check-ins which allows me to show you that I’m not judging you on your ability to handle or not handle any given experience. I want to begin laying a foundation of trust so that you don’t feel the need to hide from me. Ultimately these check-ins allow us to jump right in on our first call and start working through those patterns that you’re probably already seeing for yourself.

The more awareness of yourself you bring to our calls, the more I can guide you to shift the pattern. I can make the shifting of the patterns easier. I have learned all kinds of ways to handle pattern shifting that don’t create more pain. By shifting one pattern, it opens you up to be able to see another. Together we can start peeling back the layers of that proverbial onion more quickly. You don’t have to get stuck anymore because I have the tools to make sure that doesn’t happen. As long as you’re honest with me and you’re willing to do the work, I can guide you through anything you run into.

What I’m really showing you is how to see experience in a way that doesn’t create more pain. I’m shifting you away from focusing on the pain of the experience to focusing on what you do within yourself. I’m offering you different ways to see it that aren’t painful.

Blame, shame, guilt, and victimization are the 4 most told stories that people have whether they internalize them or project them outward. What I’m doing and encouraging you to do is to drop those stories. It will leave you to take responsibility for yourself. Here’s what that looks like.

Feelings are felt, understood and released. “It’s not your fault I feel this way. It’s not my fault I feel this way. I just feel this way.” That’s simple acceptance – it is what it is. Through the daily check-ins you examine why you feel that way. Where’d the feeling come from? What thought was behind the feeling? What old experience was triggered? Where’d I learn that from? Is it true? By understanding and fully accepting the feeling, the feeling goes away by itself.

Thoughts are managed and challenged. We question the story we tell ourselves about the experience. We look for stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization and drop those stories so that we can tell a different story that doesn’t have a painful foundation. By challenging our thinking we offer ourselves the ability to interpret experience differently. We no longer have to have painful thoughts.

Behavior is changed by questioning thoughts and feelings. We begin to understand the story we tell ourselves. We’re no longer emotionally attached because we’ve released that. Now all we’re doing is changing the behavior to something that no longer reflects the pain. We actually spend time understanding what types of experience trigger certain behaviors and we come up with new behaviors before the experience ever happens. Then we rely on our own self-awareness to recognize when that experience is happening and change the behavior to the new one we’ve already decided on. We don’t beat ourselves up for missing those opportunities. We just keep working at it until we get it.

Over time, if you do this enough you will change and so will your life. Changing how you show up changes everything else. But you can’t change how you show up until you deal with the thoughts and feelings that are currently controlling your behavior. Why? Because the fear of changing it will stop you. This is why you don’t need a goal to be able to work with me. It doesn’t matter if you know what you want your life to look like or not because your life will naturally change as a result of you changing yourself. The only change you’re really making is dropping the pain in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors – but that changes everything!

The key to all of this is the daily check-ins that encourage a habit of self-awareness. If you’re ready to commit to healing yourself and you’d like to get started on your first 30-days of check-ins, you can find all the information and the application form here. The application form includes the first check in. If you’re sending your check-ins during the day you’ll reflect on the previous day. If you’re sending your check-ins at night you’ll reflect on the same day. If you have shift your work and your schedule is messy, please let me know that in your application, particularly if it means you’ll be alternating between daytime and evening check-ins. I’ll reply to your application and include a link to the standard daily check-in form you’ll use over the next 30-days and throughout the 3-month program.

2025 can be the year you change your life. Are you ready to get started? Click the link above and complete your first check-in today.

Love to all.

Della

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