The Ultimate Guide To Showing Up To Yourself in Life & Business: Don’t wait to feel like it and use fear as a compass

This Women's Month, 1st for Women has teamed up with speaker, trainer and author, Lori Milner, to bring you The Ultimate Guide To Showing Up To Yourself in Life & Business.  Want to build new habits and actually sustain them?  Want to manage your inner critic, free of anxiety and fear?  Lori has the answers.

Last week we discussed celebrating your win and aiming for progress.  If you haven’t read this blog post, you can do so here.  Today, we’ll list some more tools needed to show up to yourself in life and business. 

Starting with:  Don’t wait to feel like it

When it comes to a new goal/habit/hobby, there is a story you have told yourself that you need to feel like doing it to take action. Here’s the truth – you will never feel like doing it. You cannot wait for this magic burst of inspiration and motivation to do the activity you scheduled for yourself.

Have you ever heard of having ‘Runners Block’? There’s a reason for that. They get onto the road whether they feel like it or not and just run. How do you move through this barrier?

Make the decision the night before and allow no room for debate. In this way, you will not need to rely on willpower or motivation.

Benjamin Hardy, author of Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success says:  ‘To be frank, willpower is for people who haven’t decided what they actually want in their lives. If you’re required to exert willpower to do something, there is an obvious internal conflict. You want to eat the cookie, but you also want be healthy. You want to focus at work, but you also want to watch that YouTube video. You want to be present with your kids, but you can’t stop looking at your phone. You don’t know what you want and are thus internally conflicted. Your desire (your why) for your goals isn’t strong enough. You aren’t invested in yourself and your dreams.’

Marketing Guru, Joe Polish, says he does 50 burpees a day. He claims that he hates doing them, but he loves the feeling of having done 50 burpees a day. How about reframing your mindset to how you will feel after having achieved the micro win?

The problem with waiting to feel like it is that ultimately you will land up avoiding the task and breaking the agreement with yourself because you weren’t ‘feeling inspired or creative or energised’ that day. This causes havoc on your confidence and self-esteem and catapults you into a downward spiral for the day resulting in procrastination and choices that are not in your own best interest.

2. USE FEAR AS A COMPASS

A huge barrier to taking action and showing up to ourselves is fear. It could be the fear of failure, fear of not being good enough or the fear of not being perfect that prevents us from taking action on what matters most to us.

Your brain is hard-wired for protection, but there aren’t any Sabretooth tigers anymore – it’s protecting you from the feeling of discomfort that comes with doing something new and moving out of your comfort zone.

You like the known even if it’s not always best for you. This is the reason why you may be holding onto old habits, thoughts and patterns that no longer serve you.

When you are forming these new neural pathways, the new way of doing things, there will inevitably be feelings of anxiety and uneasiness.

Have you ever used Waze or Google Maps to take you somewhere new, and there’s this reflex not to want to trust the technology? Like you know better? But you have no choice other than to trust this different route than you would usually take, and you land up discovering a better route, which ultimately becomes your new normal.

 Similarly, you need to trust yourself to discover the new route – this new way of being - until it becomes your new normal.

 For example, suppose you are training yourself to wake up 30 minutes earlier. In that case, it’s going to be uncomfortable at first but eventually, when you do it for long enough, your body adjusts, and it becomes the new body clock.

 Fear is a compass, and you need to run towards it. If you think about something you did for the first time like presenting to your team, it was daunting, but you did it. I’m sure you had the same initial feelings of angst, but in time you mastered it. When it comes to creating new actions, remind yourself that it’s another one of those.

Next week, we’ll discuss more ways in which you can show up to yourself in life & business. Until then remember, of you genuinely want to let go of the old version of yourself, you need to ask yourself some tough questions:

 Am I willing to go through the discomfort of doing things differently?

Am I willing to let go of old destructive or out of date habits and thoughts that no longer serve me?