Holy Crap! I Really Quit My Job!
Anytime you make a life change, you’ll find a number of different feelings surfacing. Opposite feelings tend to surface like a see-saw in your mind creating stress and confusion. I want this, no I don’t. I can do it. No I can’t. I have what it takes. No I don’t. I got this. I’m screwed. And so it goes.
The more I do this work with clients and the more I go through my own journey, I have come to find that it boils down to one simple word….
Acceptance.
I’m sure you’ve heard about acceptance before and how it is often considered the first step to change. I was skeptical, but I can tell you I wholeheartedly agree with this. Acceptance is a critical first step. Without it, there’s not much forward movement. I believe the reason for this is because you get frozen in an emotional state of being.
Think about it this way. Have you ever found that NOT accepting your feelings or a situation, EVER helps you move through it faster and really let it go? If you’re walking around not accepting your feelings what ends up happening is your negative self-talk will win. It will ultimately create self-sabotage and the end result of this is feeling stuck in the muck of your busy brain.
Another way to see this is like this:
Say you did something you regret. When you think about it, you get really down on yourself and even chastise yourself for what you did. You’re regret just builds because what you’re focusing on is the regret. What you focus on expands. Regret just creates more regret and thus more of a challenging and debilitating emotional charge.
When you have more of an emotional charge, you keep reliving the regret and this circles around in your mind getting larger than life. You try to push it out, but you can’t because now it’s taken on a life of it’s own. The more you regret, the more the feel bad about yourself, the more you feel bad about yourself, the more you regret and then back to feeling bad about yourself. It’s an internal tug of war that you will never win, unless you move to acceptance.
Now let’s try it this way… with acceptance:
You’ve done something that you regret and you own it and accept it. You take responsibility for your actions, but want to opt out of the internal tug of war that ensues. You realize that at the time you did this thing you regret, you were in a different place and a different frame of mind and given this, you accept the fact that you did something that if you could do it over, you’d do it differently. In other words, you let yourself off the hook. What a relief!!! The tug of war has ceased because you dropped your end of the struggle. Make any sense?
It’s counterintuitive. This is not what you’re typically taught. The martyr syndrome is more along the lines of the norm. If you think about it, it’s actually ludicrous to believe that somehow, if you can just regret something enough, or feel bad enough that it will makes things better.
Ask yourself this question and REALLY think about it. Has feeling really bad about something and hanging onto feeling bad, ever really promoted positive change. Now you might say yes, but if you’re really honest with yourself, and really look closer, you’ll notice that at the moment you started to change something for the better, it’s because you desired to feel better about yourself, so you took positive action which promoted positive feelings towards you and that, in its essence, is what promoted the positive change. It wasn’t hanging onto bad feelings. That would have kept you stuck. Really think about this.
So if you’re thinking that you really want to change your life and you really want to move into meaningful work that you love, then you will likely have to face a myriad of feelings that surface. If you do so with the positive expectation that you can face these feelings and use the tool of tapping to assist you. You can free yourself from the resistance these feelings that surfaces so you can move from potential self sabotage to ultimate success and Take Your Big Leap into the meaningful work you love.
Take the Leap!
Marti