Why you shoudn't be afraid to 'do the work'.

Many times, people fall into the trap of wanting things outside of them to change, and feeling that everything will be better for them as a result. I say this with great compassion, because many times… I’ve been ‘people’. Yet, as I’ve engaged in change work for the last three and a half years, I’ve discovered that it is not so much what’s going on around you, as the way you relate to it. That has stood the test of time, and even event that I would *seriously* rather hadn’t happened. Maintaining your personal sense of power will help with how you relate to the people, places and situations around you. The great thing is, if you instigate change at the level of YOU, you don’t have to scrabble to see each and every situation in more empowering ways, it becomes more like a way of being. From this ‘being’, you will find yourself doing different things than before, and when you do different things, you tend to get different outcomes.
Another way in which I see people trip up, is that they expect specific outcomes from their new way of being and doing. In fact, many times, people have asked me what specifically I hope for when I try out a new mode of operating, and in truth… often the answer is just ‘a different result’. I trust that because I’ve ‘done the work’ on me, that I’ll adapt with or be able to further influence the outcome, should it not be to my liking. But I can’t know until I try. That’s why I don’t put too much emphasis on confidence these days. Am I confident that what I’m going to do will have a good outcome? Not really. Do I hope so? Yes. Does the action come from a positive intention? Yes. Is it aligned with my values? Usually, yes. If not, I might re-adjust. This is what really gives me a groudedness in my decision making process that goes beyond confidence… Because I know that each action, each choice, each decision, can be adjusted and tweaked if it doesn’t bring about the results I would like. I’m still getting over a sneaky perfectionism that was covert in as much as it manifested mostly in inaction, rather than the perhaps more classic presentation of trying to make things perfect, I just wouldn’t even attempt it.
So sometimes I adopt a ‘fail fast, fail forward’ approach. At other times, I lean in to the developmental ‘edge’ that feels like it will get me the most gains. Sometimes I’m focussing more on building relationship and other times its more introspective work (to be tested later in relation to others!).
I used to be a big believer in the saying (in fact, I even have it on my wall) ‘if a flower doesn’t flower, you change the environment in which it grows, not the flower’. These days, I believe that yes, we do have a way that’s more natural for us to be, but also that fairly huge components of what you might have thought of as ‘personality’ can in fact shift and change when we engage with personal change work, and start to experiment with engaging with the world differently. I’m not saying ‘don’t be yourself’, but rather that social conditioning and repression may mean that what you think is yourself, is actually a somewhat watered down version. The courageous work of digging in will have many people come back to a truer version, and THAT feels great!.
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