This is the fifth step of a five-part series where I’m walking you through the five steps of transformation and why each step is essential when you’re ready to make a huge shift and uplevel your business and/or life.
Step 1 is to pause. Step 2 is to make a decision. Step 3 is to take action — the opposite action you normally would take. Step 4 is to feel all the emotions that come up when you’re doing the opposite action.
So, what’s the final step? Give yourself time.
After going through a ton of transformation and shifts since 2012 when my mother was first diagnosed with cancer and continuing through her death, I’ve come to this very important conclusion:
Transformation only happens as fast as you can handle it.
Look, I get it. We all want it to happen yesterday. And, this can be particularly difficult and stressful if we’re feeling urgency around our transformation. For instance, we need our business to start making more money (like yesterday) because we have bills to pay.
But, as impatient as you feel right now and as much as you may want to hurry the process along, you just can’t force it.
It’s going to happen in its own sweet time. And the best thing YOU can do is surrender to process, remember to breathe, and trust you will be supported and taken care of throughout the journey.
So, why can’t you hurry things along?
Well, I think there are a few reasons. Our nervous system can only handle so much change at any one time. Especially if we have a lot of feelings such as fear, anger, resentment, old grief, shame and guilt that have been building up because we’ve been refusing to feel them … there’s only so much we can take at any one time.
Our bodies are wise. We’ll only go as fast as our bodies can process those feelings and move them out of our body. But, if we have a lot of triggers stored up and a lot of feelings that are blocking us from taking action, it’s just going to take time to let them move through us.
In addition, sometimes things must happen in the right order. For instance, in order to actually sell a book, we need to not only complete the book but also publish it. We’ll never experience book sales unless we have a book to sell.
Now, I know that sounds simplistic, but think about it. Things need to happen in the right order. And when we try and push and force, we may be trying to make something happen that actually CAN’T happen because we haven’t put the foundation in place.
Let me illustrate with my blog. So, two things happened that helped make my blog far more popular and sticky after I had been blogging for over a year. Both things couldn’t have happened any sooner than when they did.
The first I started to feel far more confident creating longer blog posts, like between 1000 and 2000 words. I found I was able to take a stand on what I believed, where I was more wishy washy about doing this before.
Part of why I was able to feel that confidence is because I had allowed myself to feel all those feelings that wanted to stop me from consistently showing up. Those feelings were stopping me from fully stepping into my next level. So, the only way I was able to access this confidence was by feeling the feelings and taking action.
The second was more practical. I switched my theme to more of an online magazine theme. But, that theme only made sense after I had over a year of content on it. If I had set up the blog with that theme since the beginning, it would have been silly. It was only after more than a year of consistently creating content did I have enough on there to make that theme make sense.
That’s what I mean about things needing to happen in a certain order. Sometimes you need more practical steps to happen, and sometimes YOU have to be a different person because you’re not letting your fear-based emotions stop you from taking action toward your dreams.
