Take your medicine

I find life is littered with many powerful analogies that apply to numerous aspects of our personal and professional lives and success. They can beautifully and powerfully draw our attention to obstacles and how to tackle them. These parallels can also enable us to reframe, rethink, assess and evaluate our lives to get more of what we want and remove what we don’t.

We all know the saying “Can’t see the wood for the trees” and as a coach I often hear clients say after a session that they feel like they’ve “brain dumped” everything and suddenly it all becomes clear, because we can all become entrenched in our lives and struggle to see what we really want or what really needs to happen and thus struggle to get it.

This was beautifully if a little scarily highlighted to me in my own life the other day. I’ve been injecting a chemotherapeutic medicine for 12 months to help treat my Lupus and other autoimmune diseases and the dose has slowly been increased. The great news is that as time has progressed I’ve had many benefits and it’s really helped me lead a better quality of life that I’m loving, the downside of this is that there are a few side effects that are becoming, let’s just say “less fun” and while I can put up with the severe insomnia, weight gain and other “fun” stuff I noticed last Saturday night that as I went to inject myself I felt a massive sense of loathing.

I am someone that truly appreciates the power of what we think in all aspects of our life and how it can impact on our success and so whenever I’m confronted with a negative emotion or thought, I process to understand it;

Why am I thinking this?

Is this impacting on my actions?

How is this making me react?

Etc, etc.

And I became aware that I was starting to resent the very substance that had given me so much life back. By processing this thought I was able to see that I was filling that 3 minute injection once a week with negative emotions and thoughts. Why is this relevant to you and your success?

Because not everything we want to achieve in life is accessible through passion, dedication and thought alone, it will require hard work. (Everyone knows that right?)

However, we often put off the things we don’t’ want to do, that are the very powerful game changers in our lives. We resist the needed action and this creates negative emotions that impact on our actions and thus our results.

For me I had to restructure my thoughts. Take the negative association of my needle and swap it for a positive. For me it was this thought “How amazing that 12.5ml of a liquid can give me so much life, I’m so grateful for this.” This thought then led me to remember that 5 years ago when my illnesses were a “mystery” I had a specialist tell me that I had to accept my life was over and I’d never work again. How wrong was that specialist! And it was just 12.5ml of a golden liquid that had done that! (Well maybe not just 12.5ml of liquid, it also took fighting a lot of specialists and determination!) See how powerfully I’d changed my view on an essential task in my existence?

And I’m reminded of an intriguing experiment that I read about years ago. Masaru Emoto, a Japanese Professor of Alternative Studies was said to be able to manipulate rice in a jar depending on whether negative or positive statements were told to it. It’s since been proved and disproved by many people and official bodies with some stating that the experiment never had the right controls to be “science”. Regardless of your viewpoint, many of us have heard of soul food or food made with love. My own Nan used to stir cakes or the Christmas puddings and tell us to make a wish, and I’ve never tasted finer cakes. So whether it’s true or hocum, the point is that our intentions can impact on our results, because our thoughts are powerful. There are stories of soldiers in the first world war believing they’ve been operated on under the safety of Morphine only to later have learnt that the poor doctors had run out of Morphine weeks ago and they’d undergone what should have been excruciatingly painful procedures with nothing more than a saline solution!

So what in life are you seeing as disastrous or out of your control?

What activities do you loath, put off or groan at just the thought of?

Process the emotions and the beliefs you hold to these activities and allow them to play out in full force. What results are you likely to get? How is this likely to further impact on your success?

You see life has a habit of giving us clues it’s just up to us whether we wish to see them or look the other way. Our mind is the most wonderful computer that will ever exist and we have to learn how to look after it, nurture it, and program it to get what we want.

The next time you find yourself in a fug or procrastinating ask yourself what the underlining feelings are.

And if you can’t find the wood for the trees, I’m always happy to have a chat and often share inciteful Facebook live webinars for you to benefit from for free. Sometimes it is scary to appreciate that the one person in control of our future is us, it is also something that you can restructure to think “Wow, I’m in control of the future I get!” Powerful stuff, right?