Want to design the life you desire? Here's a question to start with: do you make life happen or is life happening to you? There's a significant difference.



My mission is to help you instill habits practiced by the longest-lived people on earth. Why? So you can extend your healthspan and have the most heartbeats available to spend!



Stacey Aaron Domanico, author of "Where Do You Spend Your Heartbeats?" issues a gentle wake-up call in this episode to spend our time wisely and purposefully.



After two bouts with cancer, Stacey realized healing is hard when you're not being authentic. During her second cancer diagnosis, she found herself caught up in pretending to be happily married and doing the same thing she'd done during the first battle against cancer.



I continued the same way of eating, worrying about what others thought, living in an unhealthy relationship, and treating myself like a foe and not a friend.Stacey Aaron Domanico in "Where Do You Spend Your Heartbeats"



Signs You're Just Surviving



Does any of this sound familiar?



You are tired and life is tiringLife feels painful most of the timeYou believe you have no powerYou're keeping your head downTelevision is an escapeYou numb yourself with emotional eatingYou feel like a victim of life's crueltiesWalls are your friend, a prison of your own creationYou've learned when it comes to life, it's best to grin and bear itYou feel stuck



If you're struggling to make a decision, you're not alone. Mental and emotional strain can lead to very real decision fatigue. In her book, Stacey has a five-step "stethescope gut check" that I found to be incredibly useful.



Ready to Design the Life You Desire?



What kind of life do you want to live? Are you living it? What legacy do you want to leave? Do you take steps that lead in the direction of your dreams?



Stacey is available for coaching, read her story here: coachingwithstacey.com.







The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time. While running from one event to the next, we wonder in our innermost selves if anything is really happening.Henri Nouwen



Getting Started



Reading Stacey's book was empowering. She asks questions that made me think. At the end of every chapter, she lists key reminders. I've gone back to them frequently over the past few weeks. As I mentioned in the podcast episode, I highlighted a significant portion of her book.



Below are some key points to focus on:



Create a timeline of the milestones and experiences you want out of life (a bucket list of sorts)Find people who embrace life and seek their advice.Stop comparing your life to others - focus on your gifts, talents and abilities.Life has a way of filling our days, be proactive and fill your days in a way that gets you closer to your dreams.Understand that you can change your current circumstances but often there is a price to pay. As Stacey mentions, "The fear of change overpowered the pain and that's really what the scale is. Once the pain became more than the fear (...) The ability to take care of [yourself] grows stronger.""For just one week, visualize your dream life in as much detail as you can. You have nothing to lose but a life of joy." page 153 Chapter 8 Key Reminders from "Where Do You Spend Your Heartbeats?"



Meet Author Stacey Aaron Domanico











Website: coachingwithstacey.com



Following a dynamic career of over 25 years at the executive level leading teams and coaching women in a Fortune 50 company, Stacey Aaron Domanico became a certified life and empowerment coach so she could focus on her first love of mentoring women: a role she began to enjoy while still in her corporate life. Today, as a two-time cancer and toxic relationship survivor, it is Aaron Domanico’s purpose and passion to help other women by sharing the lessons she has learned and tools she has developed throughout her own journey.





Against the backdrop of the fact that we all have a finite number of heartbeats in this lifetime, Aaron Domanico shares the message that our biggest decision each day is where and how we wish to spend them, and that we have the power to create the life we desire, one heartbeat at a time. She specializes in relationships, career change and advancement, as well as overcoming fear, stress, and anxiety. When not mentoring or coaching women, she loves to travel, entertain friends, ride her Peloton (especially after indulging in a seriously good thin-crust pizza), and spending time with her husband, their four children, and fur baby, Bella.





Rebecca: I wanted to talk about, how to decide what you really want to do with your life and how.



Rebecca: to make those decisions, even though sometimes we get stuck in a place where it feels like the decision you have to make might be between a rock and a hard place. And just how to be more present in where you are right now. A lot of people of all ages really struggle with always looking.



Rebecca: Towards the next stage you know, just anticipation of the next phase and the next phase.



Rebecca: Stacy, can you just tell me a little bit about why you decided to share your story with others? 



Stacey: I have been in corporate America for over 25 years and I have had a career in corporate America, and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. During that time, I had Gone through breast cancer twice, and as a result, I've really looked at life differently.



Stacey: In addition to that, throughout my career, I really loved mentoring and coaching women. It was like the highlight of my career that I just love to do. And as a result, I started thinking about, you know, I have a message that I wanna share and how can my experience, because what I would love to see people not go through trauma to learn the lessons that I've l that I've learned.



Stacey: And people kept saying, You know, you really should tell your story. Tell your story. And you know, you hear things and you're like, Yeah, that's nice, but what's my next meeting that I need to go to? But I sat down and I said, You know what? If this can help, if my experience can help others, why would I not tell the story?



Stacey: And of course, while I'm writing the story, fear came in because I'm being very vulnerable. I am sharing such personal, aspects of my journey. But you know what, at the end of the day, We are here to help each other, and if we can't do that, then you know, it's really a gift for me to share with other people my story, if it even helps one or two or three or a hundred other people.



Rebecca: Oh, that's beautiful. And you mentioned fear, and that was one of the first sections that I highlighted In your book, you're talking about rewinding and recalibrating, and you ask, What is your worst fear? How much time do you spend thinking about it? Be honest with yourself. Do you really want to continue feeding it with your energy?



Rebecca: That was really powerful to me. We do spend a lot of time thinking about our fears or the things that are negative in our life. How did you come to this realization? What part of your story brought about these questions? 



Stacey: Thank you for asking that. while I was going through my second bout of breast cancer and going through, and at that point it was almost stage four, so I really statistically did not know how many, how much time I had on this.



Stacey: Beautiful Earth. And I said to myself, You know, you start thinking about the time that you spent, and I realized two words that kept coming up that I equate now to almost a curse word is "what if?" And I realized that I had spent so much of my precious time and my precious heartbeats with the. What if, and most of the time, the what ifs don't come to fruition.



Stacey: So what happens if you spending all of this magical time that you have here on this earth, thinking about what ifs while missing what's happening in front of you at the moment? So I really started thinking about that, and if we think about our worst fear and we lean into it, and then we switch the narrative, It frees up the energy around it and it, it, it weakens the intensity that we feel.



Rebecca: Wow. And so when it comes to like negative thoughts, and I know you, I don't wanna give away too much of your book, but I know you had a lot of, I guess, negative thoughts and fears around cancer. I think a lot of times when people think about, how your thought life affects your reality, It can get into a little gray area.



Rebecca: Can you explain to me how you feel like your thought life may or may not have contributed to some of the realities that you were facing during this time? 



Stacey: Yes, and this is my personal belief. I, for whatever reason, had an obsession with getting cancer. It wasn't a, Hey, what if it wasn't a, you know, it, it was really consumed almost all of my thoughts, and you would say, But you don't have cancer in your family, and I really don't.



Stacey: But I kept thinking about it now. I also believe that our thoughts affect our bodies. So the, the stress, when you have peaceful, loving thoughts, your body's at ease, your body, we are meant to heal. That is how we are built to always heal ourselves, are ready to heal. And when we're, we're thinking about thoughts that may make us upset or stressed, our healing may stop.



Stacey: So that's one, one piece of it. The other piece of it is I do believe that what we think we're, we're more powerful than we believe. And when we think things, I believe that we send them out to the universe and they may manifest. So whether that's true or not, why take that chance either to affect how it affects your body, or how it affects your future and your existence and your, you know, your reality.



Stacey: It's, we have so much control and power over that. Why not reverse it and make it really special and happy. 



Rebecca: So true. And like you said,