Start Designing Your Life With The Teacher In Your Soul

Listening to internal guidance can be very hard to do when life is stressing you out.  The noise of the chaos around you drowns out that inner voice.  Everyone will have an opinion on what needs to be done.  People will freely tell you how to live your life, what choices you should be making.  They will show up, try to convince you, dazzle you, and intimidate you.

The first thing to do is to drop resistance to what is happening.  “It is what it is”.  When you stop fighting against it, you find the ability to cope with what is.  You lose a loved one, it can’t be changed.  Your employer lets you go, it is what it is.  Coping can only begin after acceptance of what is.  Since you can’t change it, stop pushing back.

Glennon Doyle  in her book Love Warrior said: “I have met myself, and I am going to care for her fiercely.”  She outlines phases that we go through in life.  The typical hero journey where life is good, then tragedy happens, and then we find our way out.  In the process we make discoveries about who we are, and we make changes in how we show up in life.

At this moment in time the whole world is in a unique place.  The whole world has been going through a massive hero’s journey.  It began at the beginning of 2020.

STAGE ONE: LATE STATUS QUO (pre Covid)

You are living in your comfort zone and life is rolling along.  You might be hitting a few speed bumps once in awhile, but on the whole, life is good.

STAGE TWO: FOREIGN ELEMENT (Covid)

…Bam! An unexpected event occurs.  The foreign element of Covid instantly and urgently, changes everything.  Your entire life is turned upside down.  And it’s not just you.  It is happening to everyone around you too.  From normal minor things such as getting groceries, to something more major such as the kids being home-schooled.  If you’re lucky you’re working from home, if not you may have been furloughed or laid off from work.  You’re required to wear a mask everywhere.  You’re told to shelter at home.

STAGE THREE: CHAOS

You may have thought at first that this would be a very temporary situation.  Maybe a couple of months.  But instead those couple of months go past a year, and you find yourself entering into a weird “new normal”.    Then just when you have adjusted to this new normal, it happens again.  Your kids are going back to school – but what does that look like?  Is it safe?  Your job is calling you back to fulltime in the office, but you like working from home fulltime.  You feel like you get a lot more done each day, and who needs that commute?  Plus now you can be home when the kids get home from school.  Just the thought of going back to that old daily commute puts your stomach in a meat grinder.  Or maybe you want to have the ability to do both, having one or two days in the office and 3 or 4 days at home.

The world has changed and what you thought you knew cries out for reexamination. What you’d hoped for, planned for, or predicted before Covid has changed.  It may no longer be possible or even desired. You need to figure out what really matters to you.  This is not a pleasant process because it is filled with so much uncertainty, both for you, your family, and your employer.  But if you just take the time to do the work, it will get you somewhere important. The feeling of being in this chaos phase can be likened to taking a car engine apart – there can be confusion as to what is wrong, what needs to be replaced.  But if you work through the process of clearing up the confusion, you can make some really important and life changing discoveries.

STAGE FOUR: TRANSFORMING IDEA

STAGE FIVE: INTEGRATION AND PRACTICE

This is the stage where you try out those new ideas from your epiphany.  Your employer insists on everyone coming back to the office fulltime.  You suggest a hybrid workplace.  You have done the research and have the data to support your idea.  Maybe it just starts out with coming back to work in the office every other day; two days a week or three days a week.  Suggest that in 30 or 60 days you both reexamine how it is working out.  You follow other companies and what they are doing.  You discover some best practices to implement.  You generate and discard several ways of transforming the workplace until you find the one that fits your workplace culture.

This same concept works for any new ideas you want to implement in your life.

STAGE SIX: NEW STATUS QUO

This happens when your breaking outside of the comfort zone shifts into the new comfort zone, the “new normal”.

STAGE SEVEN: START DESIGNING YOUR LIFE

Pick a regular time several times a year, in which you can take out those kaleidoscope “eyes” and start to DESIGN and prepare for A NEW ADVENTURE.

You can be pro-active.  You can choose how the stage resets.  Your washing machine has more than just one cycle.  Instead of waiting for the foreign elements to bring in chaos, you can choose to start the process of enlarging your comfort zone now.  Be pro-active.  Instead of just imagining what you want to do someday, “I’ll finally write that book” or “I’ll finally travel to a foreign land” or whatever you always say your going to do someday.  You still won’t have the time, the money, or whatever you think that you are lacking in this moment when someday comes.  You just have to go within and shift to stage four and start transforming your idea to make it happen today.

While it is always good to know your limits – it is never good to accept them at face value.

Your current limit is just that – a current limit.  There are so many ways to exceed those limits.  It may mean leaning a new skill.  It may mean using leverage to get around it. When the Apollo mission had to figure out a way back home, the scientists took an inventory of everything they had and figured out a way to make something they didn’t have.

Water is another great analogy.  In order to get around obstacles, it can use the power of a rushing flood to break apart an obstacle.  It can freeze up and expand thereby crushing an obstacle.  It can flow deep within the surrounding area to get under an obstacle.  It can be fog, rain, hail, sleet and snow.  It can work with the wind in a hurricane.  Knowing your limits means thinking outside of the box to discover a way around or through the limitation and still be able to achieve the desired results.

Be like water.  Be magical.  Design something new and wonderful.

“You can’t tame the spirit of someone who has magic in their veins.” – SageGoddess.com