Episode 001: Three Tips to Live with Intention

In this episode, I’m sharing the three pillars I’ve learned when I started my own wellness journey and three tips for you to start living your own life with intention.

Here’s a few things you’ll hear

• You’ll hear my story and my journey towards wellness
• My three pillars of health that I’ve learned that I needed in order to live a healthy lifestyle
• Three quick tips you can implement today for you to live a more intentional life

Let me know what you thought!

Thanks for listening to the first episode of Imperfection with Intention! Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Imperfection with Intention! I’m your host, Monica Frederick from MindfullyMonica.com and I’m here to share with you tips with you to start living a happy and healthy life and remind you that none of us are perfect and to give you inspiration to get up and try again.

You’re listening to Imperfection with Intention, Episode 1!

Hello and welcome everyone to the very first episode of Imperfection with Intention. I’m so honored and grateful that you’re here to explore and to listen to this journey along with me.

I’ve been so excited to get on this platform. I’ve been looking for a new platform to be able to connect with other like-minded people on a little bit more of a deeper level than my website.

So at this point you may be wondering who I am and what this show has to offer for you. 

Well, like I said earlier, my name is Monica and I run the mindful living lifestyle blog, MindfullyMonica.com

Since I’ve launched my website I’ve been able to connect with so many different types of women out there and I’ve been able to connect with so many different types of people that I’ve had such an honor and privilege to work with.

I love being able to not only share my story with people and hopefully in turn help them with their own lives, but I’ve been able to hear stories about other people’s lives and have learned some more along the way.

So before we get to far into my story and how we got to this point, I wanted to go over a little bit of what this episode is going to look like.

So in this episode, I’m going to share with you three tips that you can start with now to live more intentionally. But before we dive into those tips, I’m going to share a little bit with you who I am and my story and why I love sharing these types of tips.

So the story starts with here I was a few years ago. I was the type of person where I was working all the time, I always had to have a career path and anything I did, I always made sure that it was ok with work and any decision that I made in my life would benefit my future with a company. Or I was always working way more than I ever should have and because of that, I was living in a way where I felt really unhealthy. And I knew I was, too, but I didn’t know where to start and I had a lot of stress in my life.

I let that really affect my relationship with my husband and my friends and even myself For a while. So at a certain point I knew that I needed to start on a new path and I needed to learn how to live a little bit more of a healthy lifestyle.

At the time, I was gaining weight pretty rapidly I felt really stressed all the time. My thoughts were running really wild and I felt very lethargic, I really didn’t have a lot of energy and I didn’t want to continue to live like that, so at first I thought all I needed to do was workout a little bit.

So I researched different companies that would help you learn how to workout essentially and I started exercising at home then I started branching out to check out studios start taking workout classes and that was very helpful, but I noticed that I didn’t get a lot of the results that I wanted and then I found out that was because my nutrition wasn’t on point.

I was never really a great cook and I didn’t really know how to make any recipes or anything like that so learning nutrition was definitely a learning curve and it was a hurdle for me and I know I’m not the only one that feel that way about trying to learn how to cook or learning what to eat or when to eat it.

So at that point I was working out regularly, I was cooking better food, I was eating things that were actually green. I was still feeling really stressed and my thoughts were racing and I just really felt like I couldn’t get control over my emotions.

That’s when I was learning and trying to research different ways to manage stress and manage my emotions and I came across meditation. For my whole adult life I really thought meditation was just sitting cross-legged and just saying “ommm” over and over again. Or I thought it was just trying to completely get rid of your thoughts and I learned that was not quite the case. Starting mediation and actually implementing mindfulness into my life is definitely an everyday practice. 

So after I implemented the three pillars of fitness, nutrition and mindfulness, my life changed dramatically. I started seeing things clearly more about myself than I ever thought I would and I started to really realize what was important in my life and what I wanted to one day look back on and know that what I was doing was important.

The main reason I started my website MindfullyMonica.com was because when I was researching all of these three types of areas to make my life better there was so much information out there that I felt really overwhelmed and I wished that there was just one place where I could get all of this information kind of neatly bundled up into a perfect little package and that’s where the idea for my website was born.

Like I said earlier in the show, I’ve already connected with so many different types of people and I love doing that so much so that I really wanted to create another platform where I could connect on a deeper level and that’s where this podcast, Imperfection with Intention was born. So you may be wondering why the name Imperfection with Intention. As I was going through and I was thinking about what to name this podcast I really wanted to make sure that I got across being intentional with your thoughts and being intentional with your food and being intentional with the exercises that you do that help make sure you stay on track with your health.

But as I was going through and I was learning all these things about health and how to live a better lifestyle, I didn’t give myself permission to grow and I didn’t give myself permission to make mistakes and that’s where Imperfection with Intention comes in. So Imperfection with Intention is all about intentionally trying to make your life better but realizing that you are imperfect, like we ALL are and that’s OK!

And now that we’ve spent all this time talking about me, let’s spend a little bit of time talking about you! Maybe you stumbled upon this show by accident or maybe you’ve been reading my blog for a while now. Either way, I hope you get as much out of this podcast as I do.

So now let’s get into the three tips to start living with more intention. And it probably won’t come as a surprise that these three tips are based off my three wellness pillars: Fitness, Nutrition and Mindfulness.

So tip number 1 is to list out one thing you’re grateful for in the morning. Now you may be thinking, “that’s pretty easy, I can definitely do more than one at a time!” And you may be able to do more than one at a time, however, I really want you to make sure that this stays as a habit. Because the more and more that you write down what you’re grateful for each day, the more and more you’re going to be able to see more things throughout your day that makes you grateful. So if you’re able to just only do one thing that you’re grateful for in day more likely than not you’ll actually stick with this habit of doing this and instead of treating this like another “to-do” that’s on your list, it’ll start just turning into a habit.

My second tip to living with more intention in your life is to drink a glass of water right when you wake up. There are so many people that I’ve talked to where they come home and can’t even remember the last time that they had a drink of water. So I talked about this a lot in my post “Simple Tips to Drink More Water” (and I’ll link that in the show notes below) but keeping hydrated is so important for you health, not to mention that it helps you stay focused and helps you not have headaches. If you make yourself drink a glass of water the first thing in the morning this is going to help you create a really healthy hydration habit.

My last tip for you today is to get some stretches in right when you wake up. This is going to help you start your day on a physical note. Adding a little bit of fitness into your morning is going to help you stay mindful of how your body acts. So many of us stay hunched over a computer all day, or maybe we’re hunched over our phone. That’s starting out with stretching in your day is going to help you remain physical all day.

So there you have it, my three tips to start living with more intention that you can start doing to day.

I hope you like this episode of this podcast. Looking forward to the next few episodes that we have coming up, I’m so excited for the guests we have coming on. They’re from all sorts of walks of life and health and I think you guys are going to get a lot of enjoyment and I hope you learn a lot from it.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Imperfection with Intention! If you liked what you heard today, screenshot this episode and share what you learned with #ImperfectionWithIntention and tag me on Instagram or Facebook @MindfullyMonica so I can share you pics on my stories as well! And if you’ve been listening for a while, please leave a review! I want know what you like or even dislike. Leave a review where ever you listen to podcasts so other people like yourself can find this show! For show notes, downloads and more information on today’s episode go to MindfullyMonica.com/podcast.