S2.E13: The Eighty-Five Percent
As 2022 comes to a close, Kayla reflects on her theme work for the year and discusses her thoughts for 2023. What does the 85% Rule have to do with that? Listen and find out!
I am just the girl next door who believes that the purpose of life is to enjoy, create, and have fun. I believe that as humans, we can have anything we want and things are always working out for us. Experience has taught me that the path to getting everything you want begins with ease. If you believe in miracles and happily ever after, or even if you just want to, then this is the podcast for you.
Hi there, I'm your host, Kayla Rain, and welcome back to Attract It with Ease. I hope you had a great week. It's good to be back with you. As usual, I'd like to begin with my gratitude and this week I am especially grateful for holiday weekends. The Christmas weekend is coming up for those that celebrate Christmas, and that means for me a couple of days off of work. In fact, I get a three day weekend with my husband Dan, and my birthday is the day after Christmas.
So I'm really excited to be able to spend that time with him, both for the holiday and for my birthday. We are planning a little bit of a staycation, so we're staying local, but just kind of having a quiet little time, just the two of us. And I am so excited for the time off and the ability to do that. The second thing I'm grateful for today is a snowy winter. I live in an area that traditionally gets quite a bit of snow, and we did have a really big snowstorm a week or two ago.
It's all starting to melt now, but I have really appreciated it actually feeling like winter because we've had a few winters where we haven't had much snow. I grew up in Utah, and so I'm used to the greatest snow on earth. But that being said, I just have a love for snow and I love the way that it quiets the world. It just absorbs sound. It makes everything light and bright, especially in the evenings, and it's just so magical to me that really makes it feel like winter.
And the third thing that I'm grateful for today is something I think I've mentioned on a prior episode, but I'm truly grateful for clean water. That's something that I tend to take for granted. I drink a lot of water. In fact, water is my beverage of choice. I don't like soda, and I do have wine typically in the evenings, but during the day, my drink of choice is water. And it's so nice to have good clean water to drink, clean water, to bathe with.
There are so many people in the world that that is not a luxury that you know they get and they have to clean their own water or they have to work with dirty water. And I'm just so incredibly grateful that clean water is easily accessible and something that I can take advantage of in my life. So today I want to talk about my theme word for 2022. And if you have been a listener from the beginning, you know what that means because in season one, episode one, my sister Adria, who was my co-host in season one, she and I talked about theme words.
This is something that I have done for the last, I don't know, half dozen years or more. And it was something that one of my sisters brought up to me as an idea many years back. But the idea is that you choose a theme word, just one word, that you want to be your theme for the entire year. Now, it's hard to kind of narrow it down to one word. And if this is a new concept for you and you haven't listened to episode one from season one, I would recommend that you do that.
Go back and listen to it because we go into great detail and we give a lot of examples. But the idea is to kind of decide in advance what you want your year to look like and try and sum it up into one word and choose that as your theme for the year. And then focus on that throughout the year. And for the last several years when I've chosen a theme word, I've actually had it imprinted on a bracelet. It's been a different bracelet every year, but I wear it on a piece of jewelry so that I can see it every day and have a daily reminder so that I can focus on what I'm trying to bring into my life, what I'm trying to manifest.
And so I want to share with you, I think I did actually last year, but I wanna share with you, for those of you who have not been a listener for long or have, don't have a memory of what I chose for my word this year. My word for 2022 was evolve. And it's fun to get to the end of the year and really reflect back on what you set out to accomplish versus what you actually did accomplish. And sometimes, literally just writing something down or putting something out into the universe just puts things in motion.
It's magic. And sometimes you feel like, oh, I forgot about that. I, I, I didn't work on that. And then when you reflect on it in hindsight, you can see that it actually came about for you. Now, I'll be honest, one of the big reasons that I chose the word evolve for the year 2022 is that I was hoping that Dan and I would move out of our tiny house and purchase land and start building. And that did not happen.
When I thought of the word evolve, I thought, oh, I want to evolve, you know, my living situation, and I wanna get better at my job, and I want to get, I just wanna evolve and just be different, be more, be better than than I've been. And it's interesting because I put that word out into the universe as my theme for 2022. And although I did not get my dream home this year, I have evolved in so many ways.
And so I do wanna share some of that with you because I think you'll find it interesting. And again, it's fun to reflect back and see how that word actually did represent so much of what happened for me this year. So some examples, as you know, in last week's episode, I shared that I now have a side gig, so to speak, and I started an online Etsy shop. So I have basically become an online seller, but with that, my love and my passion for crystals, I have turned into an actual small business that I call crystal art.
So that to me is a huge way that I have evolved, because coming into this year, making anything on my own, let alone trying to make something and sell it to the world and put myself out there in that fashion was not even on my radar. So the fact that I have become an online seller and I am now considered an artist, and you know, I'm doing something that's so obscure from anything that I would've imagined I would do, but also this is so different from truly much of what I see out there.
In fact, people tell me that all the time when they see my work, they say, how did you come up with that? You know, where do you get your ideas? I've never seen anything like this before. And to me, that in and of itself says that I have evolved, just the fact that I have kind of tapped into my creative resources and found a way to express myself in a way that not only pleases me, but obviously pleases others if people are buying my work, right?
So that's just one way that I've evolved. I have evolved in the fact that I got a whole tattoo sleeve this year. That was a huge project, and I've shared this on previous podcast episodes, but I have wanted a tattoo sleeve for, I don't know, probably 10 years or more. And it's something that I've just put off and put off both because of the expense, but mostly because I have worked for employers who did not allow me to have visible tattoos.
So now I finally feel like a, I work for an employer who allows me to have visible tattoos, but b, I really don't care anyway. I'm at a point in my life where I just wanna do what makes me happy. And I finally fulfilled that dream. And it was a seven month process with over 36 hours under the needle, multiple sessions for me to go in and get this tattoo sleeve done.
But to me, that's huge. I, it's completely transformed the way that I look, even just in my wedding photos. I don't have that sleeve last year. So I look at myself and I can physically see how I have evolved. You know, you're gonna think I'm crazy because I talk about money and manifesting money and so forth. But I've kind of had this hangup about 401ks for many years. And with the stock market the way that it's been, I've been reluctant to put money into a 401k because I felt like there's so many other ways to make money that maybe you could make more money.
But the irony in that is what I ended up doing by not putting money into a 401k is I really just ended up not really saving any money. And so this year I decided to start investing in my 401k. And I'm lucky enough to have an employer that matches 6%. So that money that's set aside for my retirement is quickly building because I have a decent match on top of my own investment.
And so to me, that's a form of evolving because I've gone from having literally almost no money saved from my retirement to feeling like I actually have a plan and I'm actually getting somewhere and I actually have a savings and, and it feels amazing. And that's just one other way that I've evolved along with that since Dan and I are working on trying to buy some property, buy a house, build a house, something in that realm, a place where we can park our tiny house Hank, but have something a little bit bigger, with a little bit more of the luxuries that the average person in the US experiences, like a dishwasher, like a microwave, like a washer and dryer and an indoor shower, those kinds of things.
I really have started trying to focus on a plan for that as well. So another way that I have evolved this year is I've improved my credit and I have also been able to put money into savings for a down payment on our home. So financially, it's been a very big year for us. And a lot of that is just in shifting my thoughts and my approach and, and just actually having a plan, a plan for my future.
That is a huge way that I have evolved this year. Another way that I've evolved is just my ease in life. And it's funny because I talk about ease all the time. I mean, it's one of the main words of the podcast. One of the main themes of the podcast is just be easy. Let things just come naturally to you. And I feel like I'm that way. But this year I've had multiple scenarios, some of which I'll talk maybe about on future episodes, but ways that I've recognized that when something goes wrong in my life, I kind of lose that ease.
And not only have I recognized that, but I've been able to work on that. I've been able to work on being more relaxed, being more okay with things, not always going the way that I had planned, not having control over everything. And the funny thing is, by being easy about my life, it has allowed more of my manifestations to come about. And I say this constantly, I'll say it a million more times, but so many times when the universe rings you what you've been asking for, it feels like it came outta nowhere.
It feels so unexpected, it feels effortless. It feels like it fell out of the sky. And when I am easy about my life, my manifestations come easily too. And it's been so fun to see that happen, but also to reflect back on just the momentum that I'm, I feel like I'm getting right now, especially towards the end of this year, I, I really feel like I'm gaining some of that momentum and things are starting to happen for me and things are happening effortlessly, and it's just, it, I can't even tell you.
It's such an incredible feeling. And to me that is a way that I have evolved. You know, a really fun, exciting surprise that just came in the last few days is that we found out we, meaning my husband and I found out that our brother-in-law is gifting us solar panels for our tiny house now, our tiny house, Hank, he's lovingly named Hank.
He is wired for solar and we have AC and DC power in our home, but we've never had solar panels. So even though we've had the capability to be off grid, we've never been able to be off grid. And we've always been required to be connected to shore power, meaning like plugged into an actual RV outlet, so to speak, in order to be able to live in Hank.
And it is so, so exciting and been a dream of ours to add solar. It just hasn't been at the top of our priority list. So we haven't budgeted for it yet. And to me, that's a way that we're evolving, we're evolving our lifestyle. And that was just something again, that fell out of the sky for us, where our brother-in-law essentially reached out and said, Hey, I have this gift for you. I'm gifting you these panels. And that is such a blessing and something I am incredibly grateful for.
But again, a way that my life has evolved this year. And the last thing that I wanna share about the way that my life has evolved is what I opened last week's podcast with, and that's that I am so, so honored and excited to have been selected as a finalist for the Signal Awards. Now the Signal Awards are in their inaugural year, so this is the first year that they're giving them. But it is the first award out there that is only for podcasting, and it is a worldwide award.
And I am one of four finalists in the religion and spirituality category. And I cannot tell you how amazed and honored and humbled I am just to be a finalist. It is incredible. As you know, if you listen to last week's podcast, there is a voting for listener's choice for each category. That voting ends on Thursday. So it's coming up in just a couple of days. Thursday, December 22nd is the end of voting.
But if you hear this and you love this podcast and the voting is still open, I would love for you to support me in place a vote for me. And you can do that by going to vote dot signal award.com. That's www.vote v O t e dot signal, S I G N A l award, A w A r d.com.
When you go there, select the general section. The general section will break down all of the voting by different categories. It's alphabetical, and you will find my podcast attracted with ease listed under religion and spirituality, and you can cast your vote there again, though, that is just another way that I just feel that my life has evolved. It's, it's incredible that the podcast has received that level of recognition and it just really reaffirms that what I'm doing is, is helping people.
And that honestly has been my intention. F all along, I just want to as inspire and uplift and help improve other people's lives. So that's how my theme word for 2022 turned out. Did you have one? And if you did, I encourage you to take some time to reflect back on how your year looked, whether you kept it top of mind, whether you focused on it, what did the year 2022 look like for you?
So now is the time to start thinking about your theme word for 2023. We're running outta time folks, and you wanna select that word before the year begins. Not to say you can't select it at any time, but wouldn't it be awesome to just start out January one right off on the right foot with an intention that you choose? So I've really spent, I don't know, several different days thinking about what I want next year to look like for me.
And obviously I would love to get our home next year, but I also want the way that that comes about for us to feel easy and I want it to be right, and I want it to work out with all the other things that I'm working on in my personal and professional life. And so if that takes some more time, that's completely okay. But as I've really focused on what I want 2023 to look like for me, I've thought about how I personally want to grow. I've thought about how I want to improve myself mentally, meaning how I wanna learn, how I want to do more things, how I wanna pick up new skills.
I've thought about how I want to get better at the things that I'm already doing. And then I've thought about the areas of my life that I've been slacking. And one of those areas is my personal appearance. And what I mean by that is I've been carrying around some extra weight that I haven't been happy about since basically the pandemic. And I've fluctuated a few pounds here and a few pounds there. I've been up and I've been down, but I haven't been at a place that I've been comfortable since pre covid.
And so for me, that is something that I would like to work on this year. And that's not my whole focus for the year, but I wanna make sure that when I select a theme word that I'm thinking about that as a piece of it. So as I started thinking about words that sum up what I'm trying to manifest this coming year, there were two words that came to my mind. And they're similar, but they're not the same. And the first word was maximize.
And I thought, you know, I don't necessarily wanna work any harder, I just want to maximize what I'm already doing to get the most out of what I'm already doing. You know, I want things to just really start paying me back. I want my efforts that I'm putting in to to pay off, so to speak. And I want to find ways to not work harder, but work smarter. And so maximize was one of the two words that I had originally kind of narrowed my theme word down to.
The other word that I was thinking of was the word optimize. And optimize is similar to maximize, but it's basically getting the most out of everything, getting the most out of yourself, getting the most out of your work, getting the most out of anything you put your hands on. And you know, I went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth about those two words and which one meant the most to me, and which one really kind of identified or defined what I really am wanting out of the year 2023.
And I couldn't settle on a word. And I finally decided it's not either of those words, it's gotta be something else. So funny enough, the way that the universe always works and just kind of brings things into my awareness at times when I'm not even asking or looking for it, I was on social media and I saw a post. And that post mentioned the 85% rule. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the 85% rule, I'm now seeing it everywhere.
So you're probably familiar with it, but I was not familiar with it when I saw this post, which was not too long ago, a week or so ago. So the 85% rule is this. The 85% rule says that an athlete will not perform best when they are giving a hundred percent. They will actually perform better when they are giving 85%. And so as I've looked this up, there's a lot of research on it.
And apparently world winning, Olympic winning record holding runners run at 85%, not a hundred percent. And the whole concept or thought process behind it is if you are not giving everything, if you're not pushing yourself to the your maximum, you're not using all of your energy, you're not getting this burst where then you are dying out before you finish. You're not overextending yourself, you're also not injuring yourself, but you're working at top performance where you can keep a steady pace.
And they say that runners who in their mind are running at 85% of their ability are actually faster than runners who run at a hundred percent of their ability. And I found that concept fascinating. And so as I've started doing more research about the 85% rule, I've realized that although it's was kind of developed in the world of athletics, it can apply to so many other aspects of life.
But as we're talking about physical fitness, if you think about working out at a gym or even weightlifting, if you've ever been through that experience, you know what it's like to do max reps. And for many years I was trained to do max reps, meaning when you are lifting weights, you max yourself out, you go and tell you cannot go anymore. And even if you're counting your reps, if you're doing say five sets of 10 reps on, I don't know any particular exercise, you get to that five sets of 10 and you finish.
If you feel like you can do more, give it one more, push it further and tell you max out. Well, that was how I was trained to work out. And there's definitely ways that you can see some good results from that, but there's a disadvantage to it. And this is what I've always run into every time that I've approached working out that way. And let me tell you folks, I am a give it my all kind of person. Meaning I've said on previous podcasts, when I commit to something I commit a hundred percent, I try and give a hundred percent.
But the problem in that is that you can't give a hundred percent all the time. You will eventually break down, you will eventually wear out, you will eventually fail, you'll exhaust and you won't be able to continue. And that's what happens to me when I'm weightlifting and I'm doing max reps, is sometimes I can't finish my workout because I exhaust myself so early in on one exercise that I have nothing left in the gas tank to complete other exercises. Additionally, the other negative benefit from that is that if you finish the exercise, and even if you don't, when you go max, when you give a hundred percent, you are so gassed that A, you can injure yourself because you can lose your form.
But B, after the exercise, you are more tired. And I don't mean just physically tired. I mean your body is going to hurt, it is going to be sore. And they say no pain, no gain, right? They say that you're supposed to be sore and it just takes time for your body to get used to that. Yes, that's correct. But you shouldn't get to a point where every day when you work out, you cannot move for the next two days. That's not what your body was designed to do.
And yet that was how I have been trained to lift weights. And there's probably people listening to me going, Kayla, that's crazy, and whoever trained you like, that's just ridiculous. And maybe that's the case. But I'm trying to explain to you that I had this epiphany with the 85% rule because I realize if I'm giving 85%, I'm stopping before I max, I'm leaving some in the gas tank and I can continue with my workout and I have enough energy to move through to the next exercise, and I'm still performing at a very high rate, I'm still giving so much because I'm not performing at 10% and I'm not performing at 50%.
I'm giving most of what I have without giving all of what I have. And that concept really resonates with me. And as I've thought about it, I've thought about how the 85% rule can apply to so many other areas of our lives. Mine in particular. So I mentioned I'd love to lose some weight. Well, I also mentioned that I'm an all or nothing kind of girl. So when I commit to losing weight and I say, okay, I'm really gonna do it. I'll go on this crazy strict diet, I'll cut out my carbs and I'll be perfect.
But you know what happens? Like I said, when you give a hundred percent, eventually you break down, eventually you gas out, eventually you can't give a hundred percent anymore. So what ends up happening is I either get sick and so then I have to get off my diet to try and get some nutrition and get back on whatever to feel better, or I end up binging and cheating and who knows what. And then I feel so guilty I just fall off the train and I just give up completely because I just can't get over the fact that I screwed up.
I wasn't perfect. And that's some of the, you know, my own issues of expecting perfection in myself. But I'm recognizing that if I can accept the 85% rule, I then am only expecting myself to be perfect, so to speak 85% of the time. Wow, there's so much grace in that. Can you imagine if you only had to be your best 85% of the time, how much room for failure and mistakes you're allowing?
And I don't mean like set yourself up for the mistakes, but what I mean is forgive yourself when you make a mistake. It's still okay if you're talking 85% and there's seven days in a week. I mean, I'm not doing actual math right here, but I imagine that's about five days out of seven. You should work out and eat well, that means two days a week you can screw up and you're still on the 85% rule. Like that's amazing to me. And that doesn't mean select two days of a week necessarily.
If you can do a little bit more, do a little bit more, but it's not expecting perfection, it's not expecting a hundred percent out of yourself, it's not gassing yourself, it's not finishing before you're done. It's, it's just giving yourself grace and space to not be perfect. And when I think about areas of my life that I can use this, I really feel like this will be a life changer for me if I focus on the 85% rule for 2023 to be able to be okay with having a bad day, be okay with making mistakes, be okay with not being perfect with my diet, or missing a day or two at the gym, or you know, just being able to not reach exhaustion, you know, to be able to work longer, to be able to finish stronger, to be more relaxed, to live with less tension, to have more capacity to focus and relax.
You know, I just feel like I can use this in my work. I can use this in my art, I can use this in my diet, I can use this in my sleep, I can use this in every aspect of my life. And I wanted to share it with you, not because I think 85% it should be your theme for 2023, it should be whatever resonates with you. But I wanted to share it with you because when you choose a theme word, you should feel as passionate about that word as I am as passionate about the 85% rule right now.
Now, obviously, 85% rule is not one word. So how am I turning this into my theme for 2023? Well, I'm choosing the word 85 and 85 is hyphenated. So someone could say, well, that doesn't count, but guess what? It's my word I get to say. So 85 is my word for 2023, and I've already ordered a custom bracelet. I'm excited about it. I'm excited to see what the year has in store for me.
And I'm excited for you to choose a theme for 2023 and see what the year has in store for you. So that leads me to our action item for this week. It's time for you to select your theme word for 2023. Take some time, think about what you want the year to look like and sum it up into one word that will be your theme word for 2023. I would love to hear from you.
Feel free to reach out to me, share your theme word. And I want to remind you that I do have an ongoing giveaway for a manifestation journal. If you got anything out of this episode or if you just love the podcast, and even if you don't, if you have some feedback you wanna give me, that's not positive, that's okay too. But the way you can win a manifestation journal is by leaving me a written review of the podcast on any of the podcast platforms that allows you to leave a written review, not just a star review.
So weekly I check for my updated reviews, and anyone that has left a review is entered into a drawing for one of my custom made limited edition. You can't get them anywhere else, manifestation journals. And I have pictures of the journals on my website, attract it with ease.com if you wanna check it out. But leave me a review, let me know what your theme word is for the year. Let me know what you think of the podcast, and I look forward to talking with you soon.
Have a great week.
