Reading a friends ezine recently I was reminded of the (negative) power of limiting beliefs. She had set the mindset that she would not be able to have a 3rd child as travelling between the family home in California and relatives in Canada was hard enough with 2 kids, when her husband was working, to do so with 3 would be impossible, whilst thinking this recently at the airport she ran into a mom with 3 kids who's husband worked for the airline and her kids were used to flying and were perfectly fine.
It's amazing what we tell ourselves and therefore believe!
There are those who are given the diagnosis of something like Lou Gehrig's /
ALS Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and who refuse to accept it's fate and instead as with the very famous Stephen Hawking (who has lived with it for over 40 years) go on – believing that they can!
Whilst perhaps not everything is just as simple as mindset - it can play a massive part in it! People getting lost in the wilderness - some don't survive 24 hours others can be found weeks later... did mindset play a part, did the belief they would survive assist their survival - I say yes.
I will give a personal example of where I was a) able to overcome a hurdle with my mindset and b) where it didn't 'work'.
Firstly I had suffered with arthritic pains in my joints starting with my knees when I was 15 - reaching it's worst they day I tried on my wedding dress and my hip joint caused me such excruciating pain - I wanted to cry! Anyway I finally pushed my doctor and after some time ended up receiving the correct diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. There are those who don't believe in it and I understand that, I have every intention of writing a full article on this in the near future, however - in short, with some reiki some positive affirmations playing on my ipod every night and a general change in mindset (I believed I did not have to live with pain and well I didn't!)
So fast forward to when I fell pregnant - I was self employed and knew how important not suffering morning sickness would be to my ability to function and get my work done. I downloaded something to my ipod that was supposed to help overcome/ prevent suffering of morning sickness. Whilst I honestly think I believed it should work and maybe I picked the wrong thing, or maybe it was just my path - but boy was I sick, the WHOLE way through my pregnancy!!
I’d like to give just one more example, this is another positive outcome of really applying your thoughts and actions towards your positive desires. I had a great sales career - it was something I fell into and turned out to be good at and enjoy (although I was never keen on office politics and I could not suck up to the bosses to save my life!) anyway... I always wondered what I would be able to do after becoming a mom - for years this sat at the back of my mind. I'd want to work and well I like sales!
So when I met my now husband and was in a great job (again apart from the darn politics!) I wondered then what was possible. In the back of my mind I thought - what if you could be freelance - just like a freelance writer, but who has ever heard of a freelance sales person?! Right, me either!
I didn't even know it existed, but I wanted to do it, even just for a year - to see if it were possible and something I could do later in life when needed. Well a year later, right about when I was bored at work (12 months into any sales cycle, all targets exceeded, hmmmppff nothing's new!..) I was about to go away on holiday and was not looking forward to coming back to work afterwards and through a friend of a friend I'd heard about a Scottish magazine dying to get a decent sales person, so keen were they, they were considering someone who could work remotely, on a freelance basis. Ta dah! Now the down side of this opportunity was that it was to be commission only. I'd worked hard and saved well, so I knew I could cover the bills for nearly four months and so took the plunge!
Well fast forward (yes I am fast forwarding lots!) through some lean months - that magazine did not work out, but that's another story, also another client went belly up and owed me a months earnings, but anyway. I started making enough money to scrape by, then over time the quality of contracts that I got offered improved, word of mouth kicked in and then I found a client that I have now worked with for almost four years - just one day a week, working as his entire sales team! Now here I am working around my son, from home and still loving it, I get to work on new projects - which keeps things fresh and I can schedule my life around work.
But coming back to the objective - to overcome the beliefs that limit us, restrict our potential, make us fall short of living the life we want to live - I'd like to provide some help. Firstly please don't go quitting your jobs on a whim, research, plan, save and most of all HIT THE GROUND RUNNING, if you plan a career overhaul!
Having continued on from here and seen how lengthy what this short pep talk has become - I'm going to have to turn this into a ‘two parter’, can you bear with me? Come back in a day for part two? I hope so - it will be worth it.
Before I go here is a clip from a movie that I discovered when I made a very positive decision to work on my thoughts - The Secret. I frequently send this clip to anyone I think needs a cheer up!
I hope it's the best 20 minutes you've invested in your life, even if you've watched it before, go on do it again. It peps me up every time I watch it!
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