Take A Transformational Anchored Adventure
Lately there haven’t been any adventures in my life. Between working from home all day and working on LemonadeMakers, I’ve been spending all of my time in front of the computer. I am starting to itch to just go for a drive, anything to get out of the house. So, I started thinking about adventures – what are they all about?
Surprisingly, I’ve been on adventures during the entire lockdown, I just didn’t know it. I’ve read books, listened to podcasts and Ted Talks. All ways to go on an adventure. Have you learned anything new in the past few months? That is going on an adventure. So come on an adventure with me now –
Catch the trade winds and set sail.
Explore.
Dream.
Discover.
“In order to realize the worth of the anchor, we need to feel the stress of the storm” – Corrie Ten Boom
Change is a scary word. It has a heavy weight to it, like an anchor. When your anchor is hooked in the rocks on the sea floor, it prevents the uncertainties of life from casting you adrift. When life’s chaos erupts in your life, change is the anchor that helps you cast off for a new adventure.
Change challenges you to look honestly at your life. You can’t spell challenge without change. To rise up to life’s challenges, you have to be prepared for change. Every challenge is an opportunity for self-transformation. The change in the challenge is what grows you. Change becomes something to look forward to, instead of something to resist.
“Don’t be afraid to take on big challenges. They give the best rewards” – Spencer Christensen
When the anchor is pitched into the sandy seashore unattached to the ship, it serves no purpose.
- The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast in the rocks of the sea bed, when the winds huff and puff to blow the ship into the raging seas.
- The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast in the rocks of the sea bed, when the tides pull the ship out to sea or push it against the shoals of the shoreline.
- The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast, no matter what the height or the depths of the waves.
The anchors in the photo below are not doing what they were designed to do, which is to hold you steady in life’s storms.
This year you have risen to a few challenges. You never know with supply chain shortages what you will find missing at the store; first you’re required to wear a face mask outside your home, then not – but maybe still depending on where you live or where you go; maybe you decided when schools began again to continue home schooling your children; and remote working from home or hybrid or fulltime back at the office; all have been challenges to both you and your household.
Failing to reach your goals, another year of watching your dreams slip through your hands, struggling to make ends meet—all that is far harder than rising to the challenge of going on a new adventure. This pandemic is a wake-up call to focus on your personal growth.
“Often what feels like the end of the world is really a pathway to a far better place” – Karen Salmansohn
What’s funny is realizing that every single challenge is an adventure. Adventure’s not only challenge you to change your normal routine, they teach you new things. For example working from home – now you know if you like working from home. You’ve got a whole new respect for the teachers that teach your children nine months of the year. Your company has discovered that they may not even need an office.
“Focus on what only you can do. Give the rest of it away.” —Elise Mitchell
You don’t have to be the bravest or smartest person. You don’t have to know how to do everything. You just have to be courageous enough to realize that every decision you make has some risk attached to it. You can’t face a challenge without change happening.
So go for the challenge that makes you smile instead of anchoring in around your limitations in life. Sitting in an empty field with your anchor raised up, is anchoring in to those limitations. You are not looking ahead. You are anchoring to your past.
If you think that you can’t sing, get singing lessons. It’s not the mountain you conquer when you take action. It is your past beliefs and limitations that are being conquered. It is you refusing to buy into “I can’t do that”.
Taking on challenges you’ll see that you are capable of doing more than you thought. You see that it wasn’t as hard as you thought. It will strengthen your mind, gaining self-confidence. How you handle what happens to you, determines how far you go. Challenges can take you apart, refine you, and change who you thought you were.
Create Your Growth Anchors
Hope is not a growth strategy. Action is the only answer to a challenge. You are in a time of disruption. Life is ripe for opportunity, as well as full of danger. Both action or inaction create risk, meaning it impossible to avoid risk. So take the risk of action – go on an adventure!
Learning is an adventure. Learning will challenge your habits, your beliefs and stretch your comfort zone. Travel the universe while sitting in your living room. It is the perfect time to challenge yourself to climb a new mountain.
- Cultivate a growth mindset – Spend 30-60 minutes a day reading a life-changing article or book
- Work with a life or business coach (we are here to help) – discover your purpose, highest values, deepest desires.
- Wake up to where your life is out of alignment – he who looks outside dreams, he who looks inside wakes up.
- Journaling daily about your goals without limits, celebrate your failures
- Reflect on your life to see reality clearly.
Every minute of attention that you focus on events outside of your influence, is a wasted minute. Focus on what you can control, ignore the rest. To thrive, you need to adapt yourself to a changing world. Focus on what you love doing. Choose a goal that you’ll enjoy chasing for the next five years, minimum, to ensure you’ll follow through.
“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. Strength comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t” – Unknown
Play to your strengths. A hedgehog is great at rolling up into a ball to protect itself. Decide on your hedgehog concept to be really good at ONE thing. Focus on what you can be the best in the world at.
The Anchor of Partnership
- Create a tribe to keep you accountable and energized,
- Create a tribe so that others are strong where you’re weak.
- Create a tribe to deliver results that are more than the sum of its parts.
The synergy that happens with a group that takes action is beyond amazing. Multiple solutions abound when you’re open to all suggestions from your tribe.
LemonadeMakers is a tribe of people who get together to talk, share, and help each other through life’s changes and transformations.
Finding a mentor doesn’t just mean finding a person who has done what you’re trying to do. It doesn’t have to be a real live person. There are great mentors from historical biographies. YouTube, Ted Talks, or watching a video by personal development experts, are all great examples of finding a mentor. There are great inspirational movies out there too.
From the movie Peaceful Warrior:
“Socrates: Everyone wants to tell you what to do and what’s good for you. They don’t want you to find your own answers, they want you to believe theirs.
Dan Millman: Let me guess, and you want me to believe yours.
Socrates: No, I want you to stop gathering information from the outside and start gathering it from the inside.”
The Anchor of Taking Action
What’s important in your life? Write down in your journal how you currently spend your day, minute by minute, then create your ideal daily schedule. As you work to close the gap between the two lifestyles, you’ll find time you didn’t know you had. You’ll discover you are more productive than you thought.
Do not schedule every minute of your day. Many of the activities and obligations that you thought were important, have turned out to not be necessary. Taking action requires blank spaces in your calendar—for solitude, room to breathe, creative space—so protect this freedom.
Personal growth means knowing there’s always more to learn. Start now by learning about ways to have a happier life:
- Visualization: Spend even two minutes each morning making mental movies of your best life—including how you want to feel most of the time, how you spend your day, where you’re living, who you’re with—and you’ll manifest these desires.
- Afformations: A term coined by Noah St. John. Instead of using traditional affirmations like, “I am so happy that I am earning $1M a year”, which your mind is going “liar liar?” He suggests using an affirmation which is asking questions instead like, “How could I earn $1M a year ?” Instead of your brain going down the “liar, liar” path, it begins searching for answers to your question.
- Great people: They say, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This is because of “mirror neurons” in our brains. These neurons will copy the beliefs and habits of others around us.
There’s at least one person in history, in your social circle, in a podcast, in a TedTalk – who has faced a situation almost exactly like yours and wrote about it. There are 1,000 of YouTube videos that can teach you how to do anything from applying makeup, to changing your cars oil, to building a shed, to programing a software program. Challenge yourself to learn something new.
