Fear. Anxiety. Dry mouth. Reactive. Upset in the pit of your stomach. Worry. Heart racing. What if… Emotional. Exhausted. As I sit and reflect on the reactions of my mind and body during periods of personal growth they are all very uncomfortable states. I keep telling myself it’s where the magic happens. It is pushing through the discomfort. The growth is on the edges.
I have personally been in a zone of discomfort for some time now. And thinking, why do I continue to do this to myself?
Discomfort
My current story for context is I have recently packed up my entire life and moved interstate, leaving behind a well-established network, family and friends. Whilst I realise I am not the first person to do this I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult it would be.
Finding myself without a vet for my horses almost tipped me over the edge when Peggy got an abscess and was in extreme discomfort. I just wanted someone with a degree to look at my horse and tell me it was going to be ok. Instead, I sat sobbing in my paddock face buried in my hands sitting in the dirt beside my horse. After trying unsuccessfully to get three different vets out to look at my horse, I felt defeated and my head was filled with negative thoughts.
It wasn’t just that moment but lots of smaller hard moments too. There are many time-consuming tasks in finding a dentist, doctor, hairdresser, mechanic, and most importantly a good barrister. People that you need to trust to give you good advice and support. Your network and community. These take time to build and I am trying to do it all whilst taking on a new all consuming job.
These simple things are things we take for granted and don’t use our conscious thinking, they become our routine, like finding the best route to work in the morning. What I have realised that all these tasks become mentally exhausting until we build new mental pathways in our brains.
Now, as I sit facing another day with a daunting to-do list. I am reminding myself it’s in the discomfort that we experience growth. Our personal growth happens on the edges. I know this fact to be true.
It is going through and surviving some of the darkest moments in my life that I have realised what I am really capable of.
As I reflect on all those who I have helped going through extraordinary circumstances, this is the common thread. It’s about understanding that feeling of discomfort is ok. Sometimes it’s great!
Controlling our environment
I am not sure why we have been trained to believe that we think life should be easy and we should always be happy. It’s not real life. Our curated world on social media shows us the highlight reels of everyone else’s existence. The advertising and marketing messages we are served up are clear if you have “this product or service” you will be happy and all your problems will be solved. You should be comfortable. And what happens to all of us after hearing and believing these messages constantly is that we move away from any level of discomfort at any cost. We control our environment to the point that we don’t experience discomfort. We live in air conditioning, don’t get wet, don’t get dirty, and somehow everything around us need to be perfect and controlled. Why? And how did we get here?
Feeling positive emotions all the time. It’s simply not true, nor is it possible. It’s actually unhealthy.
So, my revolution and evolution came when I started changing how I thought about that anxious and fearful feeling. It matters. Because being scared and uncomfortable is where you learn and where the magic happens.
Personal growth happens on the edges, it often happens when we step outside of our comfort zones and face situations that make us uncomfortable. When we are uncomfortable, we are often forced to confront our fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs, which are the catalyst for personal growth.
Find ways to challenge yourself:
I have found when I step into the space to do things that I am not comfortable with, I find new experiences and learning opportunities. You learn new things about yourself.
Overcoming obstacles:
This is the best way to build resilience. No book or course is going to give you better skills than when you face obstacles and challenges that make you uncomfortable. Learning problem-solving skills and patience is developed through practice. So the best the best possible way to develop your problem-solving skills is through overcoming obstacles.
Learning from mistakes:
When you make mistakes or fail, it can be uncomfortable. Let’s be honest no one likes making mistakes but it can also provide invaluable learning experiences that help us grow and improve. The quickest way to learn and improve is through mistakes, embrace them.
Developing new perspectives:
Understanding others happens when you step out of your comfort zones. Have you ever gone to another country and experienced a different culture or a different lifestyle? It is where you can gain new perspectives and insights, compassion and understanding come through a new perspective. This helps us to grow and develop as individuals.
When we face our fears and overcome challenges, we can develop confidence in ourselves and our abilities, which can help us grow and achieve our goals.
It’s important to remember that personal growth can be uncomfortable at times, but it’s also a necessary part of life. By embracing discomfort and facing our fears, anything is possible.
Who do we trust? Where do we turn to for advice? What organisations can we look to in times of change?
I was doing some research and came across this article on the Australian Leadership Index. It provides a visual matrix of the social perception of intentions and competence. It started me thinking about the changes in how we seek information in times of crisis.
It was no surprise to me that our emergency services who continue to show up and save our lives are rated highly, and government institutions, are ranking low as they continue to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
When media is ranked so low for a social license, it starts to make sense to me why more people seek information from our social networks. With once trusted institutions like religious organisations ranked lower than state and local governments, mining and insurance it made me curious as to what other social institutions have had a shift in perception and trust.
According to the Australian Leadership Index, “The warmer and more competent a social institution is perceived, the more it is trusted, seen as having a social licence to operate, and showing leadership for the greater good. This should give Australia’s leaders, especially its political, business and trade union leaders, pause before asking the public to trust their deliberations and assurances of concern for the public interest.”
This article is a short easy read, it did pique my curiosity, and created some insights. The bigger question is, what needs to change for our Australian Leadership?
Here’s how to create positive affirmations that you can believe in and achieve all your life’s greatest desires. Whether you believe it or not, you can attract anything in your life that you give attention to, because like attracts like. Positive affirmations are a powerful tool that can make the opposite happen. By believing in a thought or sentence and repeating it to yourself regularly, you have the power to attract more positivity to your life.
Your words are incredibly powerful, and when done correctly, positive affirmations can be an impactful tool that will help you find the power to accomplish things that you didn’t think was possible. However, they only work if you believe them.
Identify What You Want
To get started writing a positive affirmation for your life, you have to think about what you really want. Think about what would make your life happier and write those thoughts down. The essential part of creating positive affirmations is ensuring that you are completely clear about what you want without worrying about the when or the how.
List the Attributes You’ll Need
When you’ve identified what you want, the next step is determining the attributes that you’ll need to achieve your goal. You should list between four and six things. You attributes are the things that you need to be, rather than the things that you need to do. Once you’ve written these out, circle a few that you believe to be the most essential attributes that you will need to embody to reach your goal.
Write Your Affirmation
Once you have your desires and attributes written down, it’s time to create your affirmation. You want to create a statement that is between one and two sentences, and that states the goal and attributes in a positive and empowering way. This can be challenging, so you should write down some ideas as they come to you and repeat them out loud.
Practice Your New Affirmation
Now that you’ve created an affirmation, it’s time to practice it and repeat it often. You want to be sure to repeat your affirmations every day. To help you remember to say your statements you set a reminder on your phone, you can set your phone’s background to a picture of your affirmation, so you see it every time you use your phone, or you can put them on Post-Its and place them around your home or office. Do whatever works for you.
Affirmations are incredibly helpful in helping you achieve your desires as long as you do them correctly. You have the power to use your mind to create the future you desire.
Your Beliefs Shape Your Life So You Better Choose Them Wisely.
A lot of people think that their beliefs are like clothes. They really don’t have much choice in the matter. They just walk up to their closet, pick out what’s there, wear it, and move on to the next set of clothes the next day.
If that is you, your attitude towards your beliefs could be limiting your life. It would come as no surprise that you are not living your life to your fullest potential. Whether this means enjoying the best job, making the most money in your field, enjoying the best relationships, or looking physically fit, beliefs play a major role in your life. No matter how clueless you are about its role, beliefs will continue to remain important in your life.
Where Do Beliefs Draw Their Power?
Beliefs are like glasses. Depending on the grade of your glasses, the world may look crystal clear or it may look very fuzzy and you might even have a nasty headache when using glasses that have the wrong grade.
Beliefs work the same way. When you perceive reality, and I’m talking about the things that you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, they have to be filtered by something in your head. This is called your belief system. It’s your lens, through which you look at the world. So many things can change your lens, your past, trauma, culture all influence your beliefs.
When you filter this information, you give it meaning. You give it color. You give it a certain slant or angle. What do you think happens next? Your analysis of the things that you choose to perceive impacts the things you say, the things you do, and the things you feel about yourself and the rest of the world.
In other words, this is important stuff but the problem is a lot of people think that since they think a certain way that this is reality. They confuse objective reality, which everyone could agree with, with their own subjective take on the things that they perceive.
Also, other people excuse their own warped way of perceiving reality by saying that that’s just who they are or it’s part of their personality. How dare people question them!
Beliefs are chosen. Just as you can choose your clothes, you can choose your beliefs. I’m not saying that it’s easy. After all, beliefs do become habitual after a while. You don’t hang onto a belief system because it is just flat-out wrong and harms you. There’s something about the belief system that you have chosen that gives you enough benefits for it to be worth hanging onto.
Limiting Beliefs
It’s like wearing really raggedy shoes. You probably have really old shoes in your home. They look nasty and they could even smell like a rat died in them but, for whatever reason, you like wearing those shoes because they’re comfortable. You know that they don’t look the best; they don’t perform all that well but you prefer their comfort. They do well enough and serve you well enough so you keep them around and you use them day to day.
The same applies to your beliefs. There are many belief systems that have simply outlived their purpose or usefulness. It’s important for us to take a long, hard look at our beliefs and ask ourselves some hard questions. Otherwise, we will be living far below our potential. We would continue to look at reality with tools that really don’t serve us. That’s a tragedy.
When you become aware of your beliefs and are conscious of your lens you are looking at the world through you have a chance to change them. Emotional Intelligence could be a way to change your limiting beliefs that shape your life.
My experience growing up was children were “to been seen and not heard.” We were taught to respect our elders. Authority was something to be revered and definitely not questioned. When you are bought up in a house where parenting technics consisted of phrases like “because I said so” and “do as I say not as I do”. I understood the wooden spoon was a real threat. You genuinely believe that anyone who has authority is something or someone to fear. Principals and teachers were still allowed to give you the cane. In growing up in this era physical punishment is a legitimate tool and in some cases the only tool. You believe that hierarchical structures are the real authority. Teachers all had Mr or Mrs no one had a first name and friends of the family were Aunts and Uncles. Positions of power demanded respect regardless of their behaviours. So when my title stated that I was a manager I wholeheartedly believed that I needed to be respected because I had a position title. I thought management was something that should be feared. I reflect now on how much times have changed.
Respect for leadership is now earned
We now expect leaders to be questioned about their decisions. Leaders are held to a higher moral standard because they are a leader. Workplaces are now being asked to do more for staff than simply provide a paycheque. It is an environment where employees are asking more about leadership than ever before.
So it’s no wonder that “75% of careers are derailed for reasons related to emotional competencies, including the inability to handle interpersonal problems; unsatisfactory team leadership during times of difficulty or conflict; or inability to adapt to change or elicit trust”. -Center for Creative
As the world continues to go through yet another crisis we need to support people in leadership to develop their emotional competencies. Poor leadership can do more than increase staff turnover or poor productivity. You can have a lasting impact on someone’s life. So as we learn more and know better we need to do better. Invest in your leaders and emerging leaders to understand how to be effective people managers. As leaders develop their own authentic people skills their respect for leadership changes as well. The more you develop your skills in emotional intelligence, it can change your workplace, your culture, but also other important relationships around you.
