People often ask me, “But how? How do I maintain it?”
The ‘it’ they are referring to could be one of a number of things: self-confidence, loving and kind self-talk, self-care, forgiveness and self-love (for self and others), not reacting, fluid mindset, resilience, personal boundaries, aligning with their core values. And so on.
The answer is simple: live it.
If you’ve ever wanted to transform your thinking, question your beliefs, make changes and shifts in your life, you’ll know that reading a book, speaking to coach, attending a workshop is not enough.
At some point, the learning has to move into the living.
Often we refuse to live the learning.
When a brand new home is built, if anything goes wrong in the first few years the responsibility is that of the builders. Eventually, that accountability is passed to the owners.
If you were that owner you would maintain your home by noticing and attending to what is needing fixed.
You don’t need to rebuild the house when a light bulb blows, you simply replace the bulb.
You may find you have it one moment – the confidence, the courage, the mindset, loving self-talk – and then it can feel you are losing it again. You notice you aren’t sustaining your new learning. You can’t understand why. It’s in these moments we can fall into the trap of thinking we haven’t learned a darn thing. This isn’t true.
How do we maintain? We live it. We apply the learning. We notice and attend to the cracks. We maintain. We support the learning by continuing to apply. We take care of what is slipping back into the old ways by nurturing the new. We persevere (repeat) with the learning, we protect ourselves with love and quit of condemning ourselves when we didn’t notice the cracks. We simply attend to what needs our attention.
That’s the how.
Try this:
When you notice that you are slipping into old patterns, beliefs, habits, thoughts, first, remind yourself that there is another way. Sit down and write out your new learning. Then write out your maintenance plan.
For example: when you notice that you are not aligning with your core values (read: making decisions that you don’t actually care about or talking yourself into things without consulting them), write them out, list them, for each one ask yourself why the alignment isn’t working, what’s not right, where have you steered off, why?
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