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In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about crafting personal rules for your life that empower you and avoiding the ones that disempower.

In this podcast you’ll find:

  • Personal Rules are rules that we create ourselves and inform how we believe reality should work.
  • Personal Rules are not real rules unless you discover that it does make you feel bad. You will identify whether it’s a personal rule based on its effect.
  • There are also personal rules that we are conscious of. You may not be aware of your personal rules until the emotion has brought it up to you.
  • All upsets are rules upsets. If we are feeling bad, it’s not because someone made us feel bad but because our personal rules are offended. If we’re aware of the rules inside us, we have the power and capability to change them.
  • A rule is what has to happen in order for us to feel good.
  • Rules are shortcuts for our brains to give a sense of certainty about consequences for actions to make lightning quick decisions. In order make quick decisions that will lead us to our desirable consequences, we start to create rules that will get us to that feeling.
  • When a rule comes in to your life, it’s a way for your make a decision which makes things faster so you can get through life.
  • We have more rules that can easily be offended than rules than are open frame. Most of us have a lot of rules that we don’t want. Be aware of your rules. Ask yourself whether it is a bad or an empowering rule.
  • Knowing what your rules are and crafting them in a way that makes you feel good, increases our happiness.
  • Be clear in communicating what your rules are.
  • 3 different components to a disempowering rule.
  1. A disempowering rule is impossible to meet and it’s going to make you feel bad all the time.
  2. What you can’t control determines whether the rule has been met – Outside circumstance have to fall into place in order your personal rule to be met. You don’t have control whether or not the rule happens.
  3. It gives only a few ways to feel good and lots of ways to feel bad. Things have to happen in an exact way in order for a rule to be honoured.
  • Hierarchy of rules.
  1. Threshold Rules – Rules that we will never break and define us.
  2. Personal Standards – Rules that we don’t like to break.
  • If your disempowering rules are populating your threshold rules, you feel unhappy because you are unable to meet to meet them.
  • Being right may seem like what makes us really happy but real happiness comes from being willing to re-evaluate.
  • Feel free to put much time and effort when designing your rules.
  • The most empowering rule is to enjoy yourself no matter what happens.
  • The person who is adaptable and flexible tend to gain the outcome they desire because they aren’t attached to specifics.
  • Let us know what some of your personal rules are and what it takes to have empowering happiness producing rules. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

Things we reference in this podcast about Empowering Personal Rules:

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4 comments

  • Megan Mills
    • Megan Mills
    • August 31, 2017 at 7:16 pm

    I’ve been realizing that I adopted so many of my personal rules from my parents, from smaller tangible things like how to fold the towels, what direction the toilet paper should turn, how to load the dishwasher (both of my parents are IJ’s who lead with Si… I think this may have something to do with it) to less concrete things like always being “productive” or eating out is ONLY for special occasions. It’s amazing how getting married really brings a lot of these personal rules to light.
    I really appreciated this podcast and the suggestions made. It was helpful to hear the differentiation between empowering versus disempowering and to be challenging with the rule of having a good time no matter what happens. Thanks for another great podcast!

  • Mon
    • Mon
    • October 22, 2015 at 6:55 am

    Just made mine :) Here’s some I wrote in mine:
    Explore methods to be more in power over my life. Be explorative and learn.
    Tell people when I don’t feel fine about something they say or do. This will take more effort to do than I am theoretically thinking. But if they don’t care about my state of mind, don’t care about their thoughts. It’s 99% more about what they think than what you really do yourself.
    Balance my neediness with getting a life (lol). Write, listen to piano/opera music to calm myself, read magazines, etc

  • Charis Branson
    • Charis Branson
    • September 22, 2015 at 2:46 pm

    Thanks for the comment Catlyn! I battle the same disempowering rules. I think the first step is acknowledging how those rules create fear and stagnation. The second step is constantly reminding ourselves that it is actually good to fail, learn and grow. Congratulations on realizing the importance of this journey!

  • Catlyn
    • Catlyn
    • September 14, 2015 at 11:17 pm

    During the course of this podcast, I came to the sudden realization that I have a pair of interrelated threshold rules that are very disempowering – anything less than perfect is failure; failure is absolutely unacceptable.

    Incredibly powerful a-ha moment. New Rule: I’m going to repeat one of Antonia’s favorites to “Fail Again. Fail Better.” Failure is part of the learning process and actually necessary for further development.

    Thank you so much for this podcast and the powerful realization!!

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