Help… I’m turning into Anthea Turner!
I was thinking today about the new website (this website, the one you’re on… yes, it’s quite new). I’ve created it to bring together all of my work under one brand as everything I did was operating quite separately,* there is nothing completely new here.
So, why has it taken me much longer than I planned to get everything completed, updated and out into the world?
The main answer I came up with, was procrastination, somehow I‘d become the master of it. I’d written and rewritten, read and reread and when I wasn’t writing or reading I cleaned and tidied my house, convincing myself that I have better thoughts when I’m tidying or cleaning. Even though I was experiencing the Zeigarnik Effect – that horrible feeling of discomfort you feel when you’ve started a task and not yet completed it, so you busy yourself doing mindless tasks – it wasn’t enough to override the procrastination. However, I took a step back and thought about what I would suggest to my clients, it would be to sit down and define what I was feeling, instead of mindlessly doing ‘stuff’. When I did this, one thing came into my head…
I’m nervous… what if it’s not enough?
Aha – there we have it… a limiting belief, those things that we work tirelessly to change in order to make progress. The top 3 limiting beliefs are usually about time, money and/or skills; I was having a skill based one. They hamper us, by changing reality as it enters our mind into our own work of fiction. We (human beings) have an amazing ability when faced with a challenge to visualise the most difficult parts and then make them seem even more difficult. We are prone to reminding ourselves of all the things that may have hampered us or others in the past and how the challenges could hamper us in the future. For example, I like to remember the time I let a typo slip through in one of my books… horror of horrors a typo!!! I was mortified, it took me so much longer to release the next book for publishing, agonising over every word and sentence. Yet, I read typo’s frequently in other people’s books and ignore them, because the information I’m getting from the book is far too interesting to care about a typo. For a short period (and thankfully it was only a brief period), I had let a belief limit my progress.
For those of you who have watched my about page video, you’ll notice I mention I had a whole heap of limiting beliefs developed in my childhood and early adulthood that I worked through to enable me to do the work I do today. We all have them, these amazing works of fiction that like to obstruct our progress. So, the truth is, I still have them, they still cause me to procrastinate, but the good news is I have learned the tools to stop these beliefs in their tracks and to eliminate them before they get out of hand. I could still be cleaning instead of writing this if I’d let that limiting belief stand in the way of my progress, especially as I’ve just looked up and noticed a cobweb in the corner of the room.
So, let’s look at the tools I used. The first thing, as I’ve mentioned, is to get in touch with the feeling that was stopping me from progressing. My feeling was nerves. Identifying this lead me to realise what I was nervous about. In this instance – that I wouldn’t have enough information for the new site or the information wouldn’t be enough to satisfy everyone.
Next we can have a poke around this belief; review it with realism, ask yourself some questions to test the belief as though you were asking a friend. For example I asked myself the following:
- Have other people found the information you’ve given useful? Yes
- Have you got more time to add new information to the site? Of course, I’ll be doing it at least twice a week.
- Can you ask your customers what additional information they would like to see? Well yes, of course.
- Can you publish the website with the information you have and people will still find it interesting? Well duh!!! :o)
Asking myself these questions, of course triggered the reality in my head and I was able to park my limiting belief and get on with the tasks at hand.
Please note that as I invested time previously and sought help to deal with my deep rooted limiting beliefs I only need to spend a small amount of time and a few questions to put an end to my bouts of nerves and procrastination. At the Free to Parent workshop we spend time to identify, establish the purpose of and eliminate your deep rooted limiting beliefs; I don’t expect to help you remove years of challenges by answering four questions!
So, the good news is that because you’re able to read this blog post on my live website, my little chat with myself did the trick. I was able to look at the evidence rather than be sucked into the story I’d created in my head.
We face challenges every day; the key is whether we’re letting these challenges impede our progress and that of our children. If so, we have a choice, we can continue to ‘cope’ with them and hope that they don’t hinder us too much (although we would probably have a spotless home) or we can choose to remove these limiting beliefs from our lives to give ourselves and the people around us (children/family/friends/clients) the best of us – the us without limits.
As always, I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about a limiting belief you’ve seen the back of, your best procrastination technique or simply share your cleaning tips with me. Either way, drop me a note at Debbie@emotions-im.co.uk
*I just wanted to add a note to anyone reading this who is juggling too many much in your business and you want tips on how to bring them all together and get your branding right. I highly recommend the ‘How to build a brand’ team (https://www.howtobuildabrand.org/) – Sammy and Miles are extremely brilliant, helpful, caring and very knowledgeable, they really helped me identify all the key components of my business and bring it together into a marketable product.
