Have you ever exerienced a time in your life where you started to feel lost, or unsure of where to go next? Perhaps you were feeling like you were without purpose, and just going through the motions of every day life. Or maybe you had an inkling of what you wanted to do, but were afraid to take the leap. Afraid that your loved ones wouldn’t understand, or that you would be judged for following your dreams. Maybe you just couldn’t possibly see how following your dream would be possible. It seemed so far out of the realm of possibility that you just gave up without even trying.
I get it. I’ve been there before. Hell, I’m there now too, still working through my self limiting beliefs and trying to push myself into having faith in my abilities.
Last week I spent my 36th birthday in sunny Fort Myers, FL attending a womens personal development conference. This conference, titled Rise, was hosted by Rachel Hollis- author of the New York Times Bestselling books Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Appologizing. Though this post is not meant to be an add, if you are female and have not yet heard of Ms. Hollis- I highly recommend you go grab her books and check her out on social media. This woman will change your life.
During the three day conference, I not only learned a lot about myself and how to work through a lot of my personal tendancies that hold me back from following my dreams and goals for my life, I also learned that I am not alone in my faults and failures. I learned that as a self proclaimed people pleaser, I am not alone in my desire to put everyone else’s needs before my own. I learned that there were at least several hundred other women in the arena with me that get anxiety just at the thought of someone else being mad at them, even if they have absolutely no reason to be mad at all. Not only did I come to acknowledge these tendancies of mine, but I learned some valuable tools on how to move forward with dealing with them.
For example, if you are a people pleaser like me and have anxiety that gets triggered when you think someone is mad at you, did you know that the majority of the time this is all in our head? I honestly had no idea! It’s all about our perceptions of reality. I realized that my anxiety would be triggered anytime I thought someone was mad at me, and this would send me into a spiral that would take over my entire day. I would worry and make up stories in my head about what I could have done wrong. I would obsess over the situation until I had confirmation that the person was not actually mad at me. I always just assumed that anytime someone looked angry or unhappy, it was because of me. Even just reading that sentance makes me feel egotistical, but my mind wasn’t working that logically. Once I was forced to step back and look at it from another perspective, I realized that people are not thinking about me. People are thinking about themselves.
It is amazing the clarity you can gain from taking a step back and looking at life from another perspective.
Once I was able to move past this self limiting tendancy, it was amazing the clarity I felt within each day. My anxiety was so much less when I began to worry less about what other people were thinking about me. When we stop focusing our lives on other people, and really look within ourselves on what we want for our own lives, the options for our dreams and goals for our future become much less scary. Things become more clear, and the future appears closer to our fingertips than ever before.
Our dreams should never be limited by fear. Most especially, fear of what others will think. Your dreams are yours alone, and no one gets to tell you how big your dreams can be or how you make them happen for your life. If there is one thing I learned, if you have a dream that you want for your future, you are the only one that will care enough about them to make it happen. You are the one that needs to stop letting the fear of other peoples opinions, or the fear of failure, get in the way of those dreams coming to fruition.
Some of my other takeaways from the conference:
▪️Always stand up for your fellow sisters. No matter what you have gone through in life, or what pain you have experienced, there is someone out there that has gone through it too. Remember that you are not alone, and use what you have learned through your journey to help your sisters get to the other side of their pain.
▪️Without failure, there is no success. If you don’t make mistakes, fail, and fall down, you will never be able to learn and experience the growth from getting back up and trying again. So get out of your comfort zone, and try again!
▪️Stop the voice in your head from holding you back. What are you afraid of? What are the limiting beliefs you have told yourself for so long that you now hold them as truth? Write them down, then throw that crap away. You can do this! Your creator made you for a purpose, and you can do whatever you have the determination to work hard for!
▪️Find the beauty in every day. If you take 5 minutes of every day to be grateful for the blessings in your life, you will find more to be grateful for in every day.
▪️Do something good every day. If you do good things, good things come back to you.
▪️Drink the water! And when you think you’ve had enough- drink some more!
▪️And last but certainly not least…. 5-4-3-2-1! MOVE YOUR BODY EVERY SINGLE DAY! Do what you can, with what you have, for 30 minutes.
My hope for everyone is that you find some motivation to reach for that one dream that is in your heart to pursue. That you know your purpose, and go for it. That you don’t allow fear to hold you back. I hope that you ask for help when you need it, and that you help someone else when you see them struggling with something that you have made it through before. I hope that you have the support of family and friends to reach for your dreams. If you don’t have a supportive community behind you, I hope you keep going and prove them all wrong.
Today, I hope you dream big, and take the first step out of your comfort zone to make that dream a reality.
It’s About Time 