(In one of my blog posts, I talked about a simple word that changed my life: REBOOT. You can read that article here. It was the first step in radically changing my life.)
When Everything Changes
My life as I had known it had been rendered unrecognizable without my permission, and I was terrified, angry and hurt.
It took a long time to even start to pull myself together. When I finally started facing my reality, one of the first things that I did was ask for help. A LOT of help.
The first line of support were friends and family. My best friend from high school used tough love and made me think about what I needed to do to survive. My cousins showed up and kept me company and the house running. My sisters (all 5 of them) were in and out of my house, helping to distract me. The real MVP, though, was my mom, who basically moved in and managed the day-to-day responsibilities that I was struggling to perform.
Her presence gave me time for a lot of self-reflection. I reached out to friends who had been in my position, visited my doctor, purchased a bunch of books on how to repair and rebuild my life as well as sought out professional counselling.
One of the books I bought was “Boundaries” By Dr. Henry Cloud
In all this activity, what I found was that the first step was releasing what no longer served me. Part of what kept me stuck was hanging on to old patterns of thinking, behaving and believing.
It was time to let go.
A Clean Slate
Releasing things I had put my faith in and letting go of what had worked in the past was no easy feat. I’ve learned now that fighting change can hurt you or your business, even more than the event that’s changing it. The wise thing, the hard thing to do, is to pivot. I don’t offer this advice casually, as though it’s obvious and an easy process. It’s not. It’s really freaking hard and terrifying.
Because when you release your old ways of thinking and your old ways of behaving and your old ways of believing, you’re left with a lot of emptiness. There will be a lot of space to be filled up, and even if those old ways weren’t serving you, at least there was some familiarity. But, clearing the slate and peeling the fingers back from your clenched fist that is desperately trying to hang on to what once was, without a doubt is one of the bravest things you can do.
I once had a friend who was going through something similar, say to me, that he felt as though he was on one side of a fence, and on the other side, he knew there was freedom. The problem though, was that even though he knew it was so much nicer on the other side, he just couldn’t bring himself to hop the fence.
JUMP THAT FENCE!!!
I’m here to tell you to jump that fence. Let go of “what was” to move into “what is” and even more exciting what “could be.” If you need help doing it, there’s no shame in that.
If you’re struggling in your relationship, please get help. Go ahead and have a challenging conversation. Don’t just stick with how it’s always been.
If you’re struggling with your fitness and health, do the research, work towards letting go of any bad habits, get some help and make a change.
If you’re struggling in your business, be brave enough to do things differently. Be brave enough to recognize if the way you used to do something isn’t working. Release what was and embrace the new. Get help if you need to. There’s no shame in that at all. It’s ok not to know everything. It’s ok to shift gears.
There are tons of tutorials and advice on Youtube (one that helped me immensely was Dr. Caroline Leaf and her program 21 Day Brain Detox) and sites like Udemy to increase your skills and share new perspectives and strategies. Just like I needed to engage with different levels of help when my marriage broke, I’ve learned to apply that same strategy in all aspects of my life. I’ve learned that it’s important to allow myself to be uncomfortable with the unknown and keep faith that I’ll be ok.
Don’t Waste Another Minute
I’d love the opportunity to support your organization or business if you are struggling with the demands of content creation and cutting through the crowd online to be seen on Google.
If you’ve concluded that the old way of getting your message out isn’t working anymore and you’re ready to pivot, then drop me a line. I’d love to be a part of helping you build a new digital marketing strategy with content that gets you seen and heard.
