Ok so this week I promised to expand on HOW you can start tackling any struggles or challenges you may be experiencing in your life right now in a more proactive, less reactive way.
I touched on the secret to this in my last email as well when I said that everything you need to navigate your way to something better is already within you.
It’s time to stop looking externally the whole time for the answers
We do this all the time, especially when you’ve specifically been trained to know exactly where to go to find the data-and-evidence-based information that tells you the ‘correct’ thing to be doing.
We don’t feel valid until we’ve taken the certificate, read the book, had external validation from our peers, from our husband/wife/partner, or from our boss etc.
We look to recruit a coach or mentor hoping that THEY will then be able to tell us what and how we should be doing things.
We HAVE some thoughts and ideas perhaps, but then we constantly question them, or we endlessly poll other people for their opinions and this keeps changing whether we think our idea is a good one or not.
Ringing any bells?
We also put ourselves under pressure often to grow in an upwards and linear direction. So feeling we should have more certification, be earning more money, not reducing our hours etc.etc. otherwise we feel we’re not progressing and other people will pass us by.
Because we haven’t defined what success looks like for us personally on our terms.
We’re engaging in comparisonitis and allowing society or professional cultural ‘norms’ to dictate this for us, even if it’s not what we truly want for ourselves.
Often we’ve created our whole careers to date based on external expectations.
We had the initial internally generated idea of becoming a vet. However, in order to then achieve that, we had to play by all the externally driven rules, grades, universities and pathways dictated for us.
Then we hit a point where perhaps it’s no longer feeling like the right thing. But we’re so used to looking externally for guidance that we don’t have a clue how to start to move through this!
The solution?
Come back home to yourself.
Learn how to tap back into the guidance that is constantly talking to you from within and had all the answers that are right for you and you only.
Start to design your life and career from the inside out from now on, driven by your values, what you care about, what you’re NOW interested in – rather than what you might have been interested in 5 or 10 years ago.
Work towards achieving the lifestyle that you want, rather than what you feel you’ve been given because of how the profession currently works or what ‘everyone else’ is doing.
This is a lot of what I do with people.
Flash!
I had a flash of insight in the shower the other day (why do ideas seem to come when you’re in the shower? Does anyone else do this or is it just me…. 😂).
The work I do best with people falls into three distinct categories:
1. EVOLVE. I like the word ‘evolution’ rather than ‘growth’ because there’s more freedom in it. Growth tends to imply upwards and more, whereas you can evolve into whatever you would like to in this next phase of your life and that evolution can be in any direction – upwards, sideways or down – all of which are 100% valid and valuable. Renaming it tends to remove much of the ‘I should be doing x,y,z…’ aspect and we get more honest about what we really want.
2. ALIGN. Instead of being pushed along by what your profession or other people expect from you, this is about learning how to pause and tap back into yourself again. Learning how to understand the value you provide and the unique strengths and gifts you have. My course participants really struggled with this initially as we’ve been taught it’s not nice to brag etc. but that’s not what this is about. More on that next week!! This is also about deciding what you want your life to be like in all areas, not just your income-generating role.
3. DESIGN. Once you’ve decided you want to make changes, and you’ve worked out who you are and what you want and why, then it’s time to get off your backside, kick the self-doubt and confidence gremlins into the passenger seat and start driving the car of your life in the direction you want proactively. This means learning how to break down scary things into tiny, manageable actions, then taking those actions, and supporting yourself through the inevitable mindset gremlins that will pop up when you stretch yourself outside your comfort zone.
Each of these three areas comes ultimately from within the client themselves. As a coach, I can never know what’s right for someone and I can’t paint their picture for them. What I can do is arm them with the right canvas, paintbrushes and paints and then support them as they learn how to create their own picture from within.
Journaling exercise
If you want a quick journaling exercise from the above, grab a pen and take ten minutes to answer the following questions – and again, don’t read these and try and cognitively ‘think’ about what you would write, something genuinely amazing happens when you just grab a pen and actually free-write.
- If I removed the pressure of having to earn money, and if I knew I couldn’t fail, what would I like to evolve into in this next phase of my life and career?
- What is feeling out of alignment for me in my life currently? Where do I feel like I am doing something because I have to, when it doesn’t feel good or I don’t really want to be doing it?
- List out three actions you could take in the next 7 days to start proactively taking control of making some changes around these ideas even if they are teeny-tiny baby steps.
I’ll be back next week with some musings on how to know when the time is right to make changes, or when should you hunker down and stay as you are.
In the meantime, catch me on my Facebook Page for the final couple of days of my campervan adventures and top-tips series of short live videos.
N.B. I’m repeating my ‘How to Master your #vetpassport’ free webinar again next month so if you’d like to register for that you can do so here.
If you’ve seen the webinar before but would like to be kept up to date with information about my group coaching program re-launching at the end of next month, sign up here.