I’m in the midst of changing my business model, which necessitates lots of internal work. Identifying, facing, and releasing the demons and self-limiting beliefs that we all manage to accrue is hard but necessary work in order to muster the courage to show up authentically. There’s also the work involved in identifying what is authentic for you, after decades of being socialised to fit in.
Along the way, I started noticing some of my self-sabotaging behaviours and digging down to find their roots. We all have these, of course; they’re there to keep us safe. Whenever we try to play bigger, dare to grow, work to be different than we’ve ever been before, self-sabotaging behaviours are what we end up doing automatically without thought as our mind’s way of keeping us small and unchanged, which keeps us safe.
Today I was pondering a particular set of dysfunctional behaviours that I witnessed and absorbed during childhood (like all the best dysfunction), which was reinforced during my young adulthood. I’m incredibly lucky and grateful to no longer have this particular knife dangling above my head, but I’ve still worried about it, quite viscerally at times, regardless. Sometimes I feel a bit like “Life’s good now, but just wait until something happens and the other shoe drops. It will happen. It’s only a matter of time.”
It hit me today: The root of some of my self-sabotaging behaviour is my reptilian brain’s idea that by doing these things, that other shoe will drop, the pain and suffering will come, and I can go back to the world I know so well instead of this kinder, gentler world I find myself in now, which seems so alien. It’s a nice world, to be clear, but still strange and unsettling.
I’m grateful to have had this realisation the easy way and not the hard way. Now the quest shifts to working this kinder, gentler world into my reptilian brain’s model of reality, so that I can accept it and just enjoy it.
Hello again! How was your summer? I hope you spent some time with your loved ones.
It’s been full-on here, as ever. I’m doing multiple courses right now and still building my business. The work never ends, but it is work on my terms that I enjoy, so it’s worth it.
At the beginning of August, my Uncle Eric passed away. I wasn’t close to him, so the amount of processing I needed to do really threw me for a loop. There were many aspects to that processing, but the biggest was realizing just how different my family is now from the one I came of age with.
There were 13 of us who lived within a mile of each other and gathered frequently all through my high school years: my grandmother, my parents, two pairs of aunts and uncles, one brother, four cousins, and me. We had family birthday dinners together regularly in those days, and got together randomly at other times, as well. We were fairly close-knit in those years, but we cousins have scattered to the four winds now and grown apart. I guess it’s a natural part of life.
Hello again! Happy June! It started off so warm and sunny, but has now gone quite cold and dreary. But on Tuesday, it was sunny, so we meandered around Burbage Edge, here in the Peak District. I’d never been before, so it was nice to walk somewhere new. Also somewhere quite peaceful, with very few people. Quite chilly, though – we both wore our fleeces on this walk, zipped up, until the very end. Craziness.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of soul searching this month on where I want my business to go and how to best get there. I’ve added a member to the team, and I’ve signed up for another training course (which will be on top of the main one I’m doing still). I have an idea, and hopefully the new course will help me flesh out a proper plan in its first few weeks. It begins on the 7th of July.
It’s been quite some time since I kept a blog, and now I’m starting two. We’ll see how this goes!
I aim to blog about all things business over at my business blog, and I realise that once I turn on the tap of writing again, I will also have non-business things I’ll want to share, so I’m setting up this space for those.
A few random factoids about me:
I live near the Peak District, England, UK, with my husband Chris.
That’s a photo of us at Lizard Point, Cornwall (the most southerly point on this island). We both really love Cornwall.
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