Moxie Living: Courage and Confidence

Fear stops us. It’s the only thing that holds us back.

I’m sure, like me, you’ve felt fear in its physical form: anxiety, stress, sweat palms, dry mouth, butterflies in your stomach, heart pounding, anger. That fear is obvious in it’s sensational attire.

But it has other costumes. It owns a wardrobe of many outfits. The physical response to fear are easier to spot than its other disguises however they are just as powerful to stop you in your tracks, harder to spot because they pose around undercover. They aren’t as noticeable: apathy, boredom, comparison, perfectionism, cynicism, bitterness, judgement, blaming, insecurity, stalling, procrastination, indecision, jealousy, shame, guilt and so on.

The only way to remove the disguise is to start to undress it, or address it. So many of us have been trained to wear fear. Perhaps for own protection we were conditioned to behave in a certain way.

Fear will probably always be trying on it’s different disguises in your life, but you always get to decide if it stays wearing it or not. It’s okay to be frightened, but you still have to live your life.

You can make the transition from fear to love. No matter how educated you are in fear. The only thing that matters is what is happening now and whether or not you wish to choose to wear disguises, or do you choose to strip it bare stand in your truth, tell your story and aspire to create your own journey.

Try this:

• Answer: What do your fear disguises wear? Describe all the ones you are aware of. What would need to happen for you to start to undress them? 
• Thought: Look at one area of your life where fear is wearing a very specific disguise and you are aware of the impact it’s having on you. 
• Do: What would your first step in transitioning from fear to love look like? Take it. 

Imagine for a moment you’re a Neurosurgeon.

You’re scrubbed up and ready to perform an emergency life-saving operation. Everything is in place. In the theatre with you are a second surgeon, your surgical assistant, a couple of technicians, the Anesthesiologist, and their nursing assistant, the scrub nurse, and the Circulating nurse, the Holding room nurse,  and the Recovery nurse.

It’s a busy room. All of these people taking the lead from you. And the care of the patient is entirely in your hands.

You are in charge.

You then turn to them all and say, ‘Ever so sorry, it’s not quite right. I don’t like what I’m wearing today. Let’s do this next week. Wake them up. They’ll understand.’ 

That’s insane!

Yep. Ludicrous.

Wouldn’t happen!

Nope. Probably not.

But do you do it? Do you go so far with your own work, ideas, creative projects, plans and then cop out at the last minute with some ludicrous excuse or behaviour, unfathomable to everyone else except you? All the while you are falling for its not quite right reason.

Living on a diet of it’s not quite right will eventually starve you. Of your joy, your creativity, passion, happiness, well-being, confidence, self-esteem … to name a few. 

Stop stalling.

• If you want to launch your website but you aren’t 100% happy with the font because it’s not quite right, you’re stalling or perhaps scared of what others might think when you shove it out here, or both.

• If you’re waiting until your children are in school before you pick up the pen and start creative writing again, you’re stalling.

• If you’re always doing things for others because you can’t get started on your own stuff, you’re stalling and probably avoiding.

• If you want to change career from the one that sucks your soul to the one that makes sense and fits your core values, but you’ve never even asked yourself what your values are, you’re stalling and not taking accountability for your happiness.

• If you’re persistently looking about, seeing ideas that are successful for others, and change yours to look exactly like theirs because you aren’t confident in your own uniqueness or it’s not quite right, you’re stalling and also comparing your outer world to another’s outer show.

• If you constantly have repeating ideas you would like to start, and you are forever putting them on the back-burning, you’re stalling.

• If you’re always planning, analysing and never doing, you’re stalling.

• If you’re always looking outside for confirmation that you’re doing a good job, you’re stalling and need to work on your own self-worth.

• If you’re always talking about what you are going to do when … or one day maybe, you either don’t have strong goals or you’re stalling.

• If you’re persistently watching on the sidelines with something really valuable to say, but you never speak up, you’re stalling.

• If you arrive at a training course with the mindset you will never learn anything, you’re wasting your time and you’re stalling.

• If you read hundreds of blogs weekly and wish you could start one, you’re just wishing and stalling.

• If you’re constantly jumping on the next shiny new bandwagon for your business because you think you are missing out, you’re stalling.

• If you’re supposed to be marketing your business and you are watching cat videos on YouTube, you’re stalling.

• If you’re not happy in your significant relationship and you are scared to have difficult conversations that ultimately will help you grow (regardless of the outcome), you are stalling and probably building a bomb that will explode one day.

• If you’re sitting on a project that has your heart and soul behind it and will make a difference in lives of others and your worried about what those two people will say you met 10 years ago when they see you talk about on Facebook, you’re stalling and are bothered too much about what others think. (Hint: they don’t actually care! You probably aren’t that special to them.)

• If you’re meant to be writing an essay, article, piece of work and you’re putting in another load to the washing machine, you’re stalling.

• If you’re trying to cram one week of work into a day because you couldn’t be bothered the other 4 days, you’ve stalled.

It’s Not Quite Right

Yes, I know that stalling can have its roots based in fear. What am I saying? It’s usually always based in fear. It doesn’t matter what I say, if you’re stalling then you are the only person who can truthfully answer why you are doing it and for how long it will carry on.

I know that when we start new ideas, projects, creative endeavours and when we want to make transformations in our life we may stall because we look out into the world and because of our evaluation of ourselves we think that what we are doing isn’t as good as so and so, so what’s the point anyway? Then you have a self-esteem and confidence issue.

The one thing to know is your core values. Knowing who you are and what you stand for. Your values – personal, career and business – are the foundations of why you are doing what you doing. Feel right at home with those and everything will follow suit.

While you are stalling and flapping around with tiny details that aren’t quite right to you, to the rest of us they are fine. You are not only robbing yourself of your own sanity and confidence, you are also robbing the world of what you can create, do and be.

Stop stalling.

Do it or don’t.

Commitment is not the same as trying.

We are waiting on you.

Do the best you can with all that you have today. That’s all we want. And maybe that’s the perfect thing you can do for yourself? You can’t stall on that, can you?

If you have been living on the diet of ‘not quite right’ for a while ask yourself honestly, what have you lost and what have you gained?

Self-preservation: the protection of oneself from harm or death, especially regarded as a basic instinct in human beings and animals.

Sound familiar?

• You’re desperately unhappy with your current career/role, it no longer fits with your core values, and you know you have to shift but you’re uncertain of what your first move is. Instead of moving in any direction you cry, ‘But what if I get it wrong?’

• You’re realising that you have to make big changes in your business (or any area of your life) because what worked once is no longer relevant to who you are today and where you’re going next (or the market and customer needs). You need another strategy or model but haven’t got a clear vision or picture of what that would look like. You say, ‘I better leave things is they are, it might not work out’.

• You want to grow personally and professionally. You’ve known for a while that something is adrift, you’re excited about the thought of the reinvention and at the same time anxious and frustrated because you can’t get started. So you sit, and sit, and sit, and stall, you gather information, more information, then a little more, and some, then you sit again. You’ve done so much thinking, you are too exhausted to take action.

• You have a clearer picture of who you are, and what you really care about in life. In order to develop that further, you have to let go of what was and embrace more of what is coming. But you have a load of self-doubt swirling around your thinking.

I don’t have the definitive guide to relaunching or reinventing yourself, so why this post?

Well, I wanted to give you what I’ve learnt these past months as a human being. See, Living Moxie is in the midst of a mini-reinvention. I’ve not been in a major rush, I’ve been sitting with the questions. That sounds awfully navel-gazey. It’s not. Between you and me it’s been exhausting.

The knowing that something isn’t right and not clear on how to rectify it, ugh, frustrating, yes? Loads of ideas, overwhelmed by them and doing none, annoying. Or tentatively starting on a couple without really having the good enough reason why. Not able to make decisive decisions. That sucks. And doubt. The big, ‘What if I’m wrong, what if I do this and it all goes haywire?’ Unbearable.

Even if you only read this far, take this. If you know you’re on course for a relaunch or reinvent and you’re doing nothing about it or avoiding it. Eventually, life will move you anyway.

Here we go:

Be all in (& make lots and lots of decisions)

Not just a little bit. Not three days at the turn of the new year. Not Sunday teatime when the black fog of Monday morning is looming. All in.

Make decisions and trust yourself that regardless of the outcomes you will not turn back. Look, we both know the phrases ‘don’t put all your eggs in the one basket’ or ‘better keep my options open’, as humans we prefer to have a get out clause in case the choices we make don’t work out.

Being all in is you committing to your decisions whether or not they work out the way you planned. 

But what if you make a mistake, get it wrong, fall, fail, trip or stumble.

You might. You might not.

Making no decisions is a decision.

Consistently putting your feet up on the Planets of Will I, Won’t I, Should I, Shouldn’t I, Maybe, Maybe Not is torturous. Think about the last time you visited there. What did it feel like? How did it work out for you?

Indecision is horrible, it’s worse than making a bad decision. Why? Because when you don’t decide you could end up having your decisions made for you, or nothing ever appears to change – tomorrow looks like today which was the same as yesterday. Where’s the living in that?

If you find decision-making a challenge you might start with the practice of making smaller scale decisions and sticking with your choice.

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” – Denis Waitley

Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a theory called the Paradox of Choice (watch his TED talk here), he claims that after a certain threshold is reached, an increased number of choices will cause major psychological distress. His theory was written for buyers and purchasers, but I have noticed the same distress in my own life when it comes to making decisions and being faced with so many choices. It causes more angst than peace. Tea-time in my house is a perfect example.

Schwartz’s advice for making good decisions:

1. Begin with the question, ‘What do I want?’ or figure out the goal or goals first.
2. Evaluate how important each goal really is. If it’s not important you won’t stick to the decision or goal.
3. Look at all the options available to meet the goal.
4. Evaluate the options available to help you meet the goal.
5. Pick the winning (most valuable, important, meaningful) course of action.
6. Modify the goal(s).

When I was all wibbly-wobbly about Living Moxie a friend asked me to do the following exercise over a cuppa in my kitchen. She’s a filmmaker, but really telling stories is her thing.

Before she films anyone she asks them to get a piece of A3 and write down all the words that are meaningful to them. Then she asks them to circle the five most important words/phrases.

She then asks them about this (you could write it out). She wants to know what is behind their meaning: what is their story, what is it they are really wanting to say, why those words/phrases? She says people talk about the reasons before completing the exercise, but it’s after this exercise she says people get to the honest reasons of what they want to convey.

What I learned from this exercise was the word ripples was very important to me. It had never been there before, but after going deeper I could see how I was dizzy with Living Moxie. Living Moxie is about helping the individual, but not solely for them, it’s also about what ripples out from helping one person.

Try the exercise, don’t stop until you have exhausted all ideas (words and phrases), circle the 5 most important words and ask yourself what you really mean, what is it that matters, what’s important, are you living those phrases/words now? After this exercise, you may have more clarity about the choices you have. If you have been humming and hawing with choices that don’t align with your core they can easily be put aside. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t need your attention. 

Embrace uncertainty

I know. I know. How many times have you heard that? If we could all just say and accept, ‘I have no idea what the hell is going to happen next! Forward!’ and be happy with that we would leave it there. But we don’t, so let’s talk about it.

We all want to have a little certainty that things are going to be okay before we embark on a relaunch or reinvent. We aren’t too keen to get our knees bruised or end up in a ditch along the way.

The brain loves certainty so when it doesn’t know the outcome it goes on alert causing emotional and physical responses. At first, it may want to regulate you back to what it knows. You may find yourself unable to focus clearly and self-doubt starts to seep in because you feel a little out of control, or there’s a period of time when you feel you haven’t got a clue what’s happening.

Okay, how do you embrace uncertainty?

For me, it’s preparing for its arrival. Know it may happen. Before you begin any relaunch ask yourself, ‘When I feel uncertain, what will I do?’  We are very good at predicting our lives, but that’s all it is, just predictions. A forecast. Might rain, might not. Could be sunny, maybe not.

Does this negate goals then? Goals are still predictions, we have no idea if they are going to work out. Even with goals you still don’t have control over the how or the final outcome. That’s the uncertainty.

You’re always going to be somewhere, and if you’re making decisions that consistently align with who you are and you core values, wherever you’re at you will always be in the right place.

I’ve learnt recently that uncertainty stops me from moving in any direction. I’m static. Yes, and sometimes doubting. Nobody wants to deliberately screw up, but if I make did make a terrible choice there are no rules to say that I can’t go back a few steps and repair it, or start again. No. Rules.

I’ve also had times in my life where the decision I wanted to make wouldn’t just affect my life but it would have an impact on others (financial risk). Like you, I have responsibilities and commitments from choices and decisions I have made in the past. At these times, I have embraced the uncertainty, but I’ve also made a decision or accepted that the goal had to be amended to accommodate and fulfil those commitments. My decision.

Lead yourself

There are a few quotes along the lines of, ‘Before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself’ or ‘mastering yourself is your strongest leadership skill’.

The hardest, cantankerous, difficult, challenging, annoying person I have ever had the pleasure to lead is myself. I would not have me on my team at times. I can be too hard on myself, a recovering perfectionist, I’ve made terrible decisions that could’ve brought down Wall Street and at other times been so indecisive I drove myself potty. I go too easy on myself at times, too hard at other periods. I’ve made numerous mistakes, some I’ve even repeated. I’ve forgotten to praise good work, rehashed the awful. Given half the chance I would’ve fired me 100 times over in the past.

So, how do you lead yourself? Try answering these:

• What advice would you give to someone who is about to lead you? And take it.
• What skills, characteristics, gifts, talents, and strengths do you look for in a leader? And use them.
• What behaviours would you find most difficult to lead? And don’t do them.

As a child, I used to get myself in some scary situations because I followed all the death wish ideas of my peers. I was more a follower, but then I suppose it depended on the group dynamics of the day if that is actually true.

Most of us go through life being led by others (in the home, school, high school, university, workplace, social groups, the nursing home) we are well conditioned to assume there will ‘Always going to be an adult in the room!’, that one person who has more maturity, worldly knowledge, able to step in and take control of situations when they go horribly wrong.

We freak a little when we notice we have become the adult. That nobody else is coming in, we have the reigns. We have no idea when they were passed to us, but there we are, in control of our own galloping lives. Gulp!

Leading yourself is taking 100% responsibility for your actions, decisions, and choices. No blame. Its full accountability and ownership.

To lead yourself you have to become very intimate with the person staring back at you in the mirror. You need to have the courage to look at their strengths, weaknesses, and be capable of managing both.

You need, to be honest with them, show compassion, to be directive at times and give them freedom during other moments. You need to be able to have ‘support and supervision’ with them, sit them down and ask candidly how things are going, how things can be better, how they are getting on, what they need help with. It’s about backing them up. Not being too hard on them when they make mistakes and screw.

It’s about backing them up. Not being too hard on them when they make mistakes. Encouraging and empowering them to make decisions and choices. Offering advice and solutions. Accepting they aren’t perfect. Not letting them off the hook when they try and get out of their responsibilities and commitments.

Try this: write 5 pages of A4 on the topic, ‘A practical guide to understanding and leading [insert your name]’. That’s a lot of writing! Yep, get to it. You will probably get to the good stuff on page 5! Do it in one sitting, no distractions.

Understand there may be risks

Sorry, there will probably be risks. Accept that, and then do what you can do to minimise the impact.

Nothing in life is without its risk (except perhaps doing Paint by Numbers). Everything else, riskeeeee. Can we not focus on the risk part, but the understanding? You know you best, you may be someone who likes to risk, or you may be someone who avoids it at all costs. You know your value and meaning of risk. To me, it’s part and parcel of living.

In a previous role carrying out Risk Assessments was a daily task for me. You take the big idea/goal/relaunch/plan and basically identify what could happen (or more honestly what could go wrong), score each on a scale of 1 – 10 of the likelihood of it happening (10 will happen, 0 very unlikely), and then, the best part ‘how can the risk be minimised’? How can something that is scored an 8 be managed, what would the new score be after the management of the risk?

There’s no way you identify all the risks, but just getting what you do know today out on paper does help.

Understand the risks is not the same as planning for all risks, sometimes it’s as simple as the acknowledgement that risk is present and you have thought about all the different ways that can be minimised.

To Do: Take what you want to reinvent or relaunch and write down all the risks. Score them on the likelihood of it happening (how I mentioned above). Beside each, ask yourself how the risk be minimised. What number does the risk become after the minimalising? Is the risk worth it then?

Know yourself

I’ll make this one quick. If what you do isn’t aligned with your core, what the hell are you doing it for? And if you have no idea what’s important to you and why it matters, then start here.

Most of us worry about screwing up and stumbling, not noticing that by doing nothing we are fumbling along anyway.

Here’s the big news: you are who you are. Whoever that is, you’ve decided based on your beliefs you have about you. I’ll bet that most days you’re more filled with questions than answers.

Who you are has nothing to do with labels, postcode areas, job title, what you own or earn. Most of us come to reinventing or relaunching because we are so detached and distant from our core (read: we haven’t got a bloody clue who we are anymore). Things just don’t make sense. We can’t understand when we have made choices and decisions that we thought were right, have actually taken us further away.

I’m not being helpful, am I? It’s because I believe knowing yourself has to be a lifelong exploration. It’s never ending. The person sitting here writing this (me) will not be the same person tomorrow. So, my advice, know who you are today and make your decisions based on that knowledge. Amend as you go.

Emotional strength

I believe we are a lot more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Go ahead and Google Emotional Strength, you will read plenty posts and information on the ‘Characteristics of Emotional Strong People’ or ‘100 Things Emotional Strong People Know That You Don’t!’ Scary title, huh?

Why not write your own list?

I mean, there have been times in your life where you had to dig deeper than you thought was possible and you coped, yes? What did you do? What strengths and characteristics did you call upon that perhaps you didn’t know where there before?

Have you ever heard someone say about someone else ‘their emotions were all over the place’ or ‘they were too emotional.’

Emotions are your reactions.

You don’t just start crying for no reason, you don’t get angry unless you feel there is something to be angry about. They are signs on how you feel at the moment. Tears aren’t a sign of defeat, they are usually born out of frustration.

I remember when I was in the hospital with my friend. One of the nurses said to the visitor of another patient, ‘Today, can you try not be so loud and over emotional. We have other patients and visitors on the ward and you upset them yesterday’. I was there the day before. I remember her emotions. I thought they were valid given the situation, her mum was dying.

The nurse – in my opinion – made the girls emotional reaction a sign of weakness, and although she didn’t perhaps say it, the girl was told to not feel what she was actually feeling, to pull herself together for the sake of others opinions and comments (who were in the same position as her anyway). Very strange.

It’s all about context.

So,

Say you did go down the path of reinvention and relaunch and it didn’t work out the way you planned, that you were faced with setback and disappointments, hurdles, made mistakes and people criticised you at every turn, that you were to find yourself more stressed and experienced a lot of rejection. How are you going to handle it?

Emotional strength is about being able to cope with life’s challenges, to not become overwhelmed by what’s happening.

Some news:

You are already emotional strong because you are expressing your own needs to change, you’re welcoming it, you’re going for it, considering it. That takes a certain amount of emotional strength.

Emotional strength is about being adaptable, not collapsible. 

Support

Get it. Ask people for help. It’s perfectly okay to say out loud, ‘I seriously haven’t got a clue what I’m doing!’ or ‘My brain is mashed, there is so much in there and I need someone to help me go in an extract what’s important and what isn’t.

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It’s a smart move. But we aren’t great at asking for it. Why? Well, it’s the uncertainty. We may get a no, a yes, or somewhere in-between. When you offer support, do you mean it? When you say to people, ‘What can I do to help?’, do you mean it? How many people actually take you up on your offer?

I think there has to be authenticity and sincerity when asking for support. And making sure there is clarity of the request. Pure reasons why. People always have the right to say no to any request made of them, but they don’t know if you need help if you don’t tell them.

The easiest way to see if someone is able to support and help you is this: ask.

Do it for a good reason (the honest one)

• Stated reason, ‘I tried to relaunch my career before and it didn’t work’, the real reason, ‘I read a bit of a career book’.
• Stated reason, ‘I would like to relaunch my business, but it’s not the right time’, the real reason, ‘I am terrified to lose what money I do have coming in’.
• Stated reason, ‘I would love to ditch this project and start this instead’, the real reason, ‘I’ve worked so darned hard on this, and if I stop now I will look like a failure’.

I’m not saying the above are you. All I am saying is whatever you are changing or relaunching make sure you are doing it for the real reason. The honest one. There’s usually the reason we give others, and then the real reason is the one we keep to ourselves. Embrace the real reason.

Over to you:

I’d love to hear what you’ve learned during a reinvention or relaunch. Do you have a story? A piece of learning or insight you would like to share. Leave it in the comments. 

I’ve just watched an advert with a 52-year-old old ballet dancer. I’ve actually no idea what the advert was for, but the fact she was 52 was what I was to pay attention to, I think.

At 45, a 52-year-old ballet dancer doesn’t make me think, ‘Wow, she’s 52!’

If I was 25 years younger I’m pretty sure my first thought would have been, ‘That’s amazing, for her age!’ Ageist? Yes, I was 25 years ago. Aged 10, like most children, I thought 35 was ancient. As we both know the older we get, when we have more time behind us than in front, we stop seeing the future out there, we notice it hurtling towards us.

As I watched the video a thought popped up, ‘Dawn, take up ballet again, you can do that’, I don’t think so was the second.

Sure I could do ballet but unlike said woman in the video I know I haven’t practiced and committed to that art in 30 years. She obviously hasn’t let anything slide, stayed focused and used her body for what she loves to do that it’s still doing it now. Not that I actually want to do ballet. And it’s not about age. But it is about noticing that where once I thought time was infinite, and it’s not.

‘Live each day to the fullest as if it’s your last day,’ they say.

Yeah, we know. But we get lost in the empty, or just trying – at times – to keep a little in reserve to make it through until an episode of Game of Thrones comes on, We say, ‘I’ll start tomorrow, tomorrow is a new day’, we put plans, ideas, passions, loves aside until the non-existent tomorrow never arrives. We actually think that we are able to reclaim time. Or make it timely for us. As if it’s going to unwind and come back to us.

At the time of the death of my friend a couple of years ago, I sat beside her bed for 5 days. She never woke up. 5 days is a long time to sit in a situation where you feel helpless and all hope is slowly leaving. You think a lot. You become very aware of the state of your own life, and you pay attention to the moment, you come to realise that most of what you are doing day in and day out is just filling up time.

I made promises that week. To her and to my life. Here we are nearly 700 days later and it takes a video of a woman I’ve never met before doing ballet for me to learn what I thought I got back then at my friends’ untimely death.

We happen in time. We are running through it. We think years, months, weeks, days and live by the hands on a clock, but clocks stop for you when you’re gone. Death is never untimely, but we sure as hell lead untimely lives.

We’ve all got stuff we need to take care of, we all have responsibilities from previous choices we made earlier in time. Maybe the person who made them is not the same person sitting here reading this and wishes they had chosen differently.

Yeah, well, we didn’t, did we? We’ve all made choices we wish we hadn’t. But, if you have time, which you do, you can choose again.

Change isn’t always easy.

I get that. I do. It’s uncomfortable. We are surrounded by fear, scare messages and doubt, outside and in our own thinking. But still. Time doesn’t stop. We do. We have to move. It’s not enough to say you want to climb a mountain, you have to take a step towards it, anything else is just words and good intentions.

Living and transformation take energy.

Some days I haven’t got any either. Yes, I would rather have a glass of red, watch Downton Abbey and lick the chilli flavour from tortillas. Time doesn’t stop as we lie on the sofas we’ve placed about our lives. We do. If something is important to your own happiness, well-being and quality of life then you have to take the hurdle over the sofa, the tiredness, the apathy, the doubt, the fears, the ‘what if’s’ and ‘maybe some days’. Learn to hurdle if hurdles are in your way. Remove barriers, and quit putting more down in your path.

You have to find the reason to do, feel it, and it will outweigh all the excuses not to. To take steps. Start. Walk forward.

Pay attention to the choices you’re going to make today because the consequences and fall out of them you’re going to be reaping the benefits of – or not – one day soon.

Take accountability for those that you’ve already made, don’t get mad you didn’t stick at the ballet barre or honed a pax de Deux, start from where you are today, not yesterday.

And where no choice has been made yet, make it one that you are happy to carry with you through your time and in time, so that when you get to horizon of your future, you might be honest and admit you maybe didn’t live each day to the fullest, but you did make sure you were full of life.

For pondering:

1. Think of something you loved to do but you no longer pursue because you feel you don’t have enough time, secretly you would love to take it up again.
2. Write down all the ways you don’t have the time:  ‘I no longer [insert thing] because [insert excuse/reason/fear].
3. Consider that life is untimely. What time are you waiting on?
4. What if you made your time your own? What no longer needs so much of your attention?

I’d been avoiding the greenhouse. Partly because I couldn’t get in for all the junk that’s been collected since last summer.

Greenhouses aren’t on this earth to be clean. As well as – in mine – old pots, snail nibbled paper, cobwebs, spiders, no longer shiny new gardening tools, they also have bugs, slugs and other Jurassic looking tiny creatures stomping about willy-nilly.

Today a friend came over and with the delight and squeals as a kid on Christmas morning she declared, ‘Let’s Do It! Then we can have a grow-off’! A grow-off is similar to a bake-off but with vegetable seeds, not cake. Yes, we made it up.

6 hours later we were done. I have a greenhouse which is still dirty, but it’s tidy and fit for purpose for another year. Rubbish is gone. Everything in a handy place. Seeds are planted.

In life, especially in periods of growth and change, we tend to think that we have to have a massive mental clear out in order to find some peace and calm.

I don’t think that’s true.

We have to begin somewhere. Anywhere. But start we must. We may want to focus first at unpicking the limiting beliefs that are causing us the biggest hurdles. Once we start to change one area, everything else changes around it.

And hey, guess what, at times we do need and welcome the help of others.

Feck, we all need support. I would hate to think we are so wrapped up in ourselves we can’t ask for it, or worse, think we don’t need it.

Yes, the common wisdom is that the ‘best motivation is self-motivation’ – has that always worked for you? When some tasks seem so large and daunting I think it’s incredible loving to have someone to say or behave in a way that says, ‘Come on, let’s do it, I believe in you, let’s give it a go, shall we?’  

• Who can you call today to ask for help?
• Who can you offer your help to tomorrow?
• What start are you stalling on? Begin.