What if… I stopped waiting today?!

Over the last few weeks my pessimistic view of myself has been challenged, poked, prodded and challenged again! The well ingrained habit of pessimism is fighting hard! It’s feeling very uncomfortable with this rising wave of change… it’s like my pessimistic side knows change is coming, it knows it’s inevitable, but at the same time it’s fighting for its life! What if… for the first time in my life, I truly backed the rising wave of change???

I have my finger in a few pies, but no matter what I’m involved in my m.o. is the same – I participate in planning and training with gusto and then my momentum fizzles out. Take for instance, my Direct Selling endeavors (Nature Direct) – I’ve done a lot of training, been to conferences, networked… but when it comes to numbers of Show ‘n’ Go’s under my belt – well, safe to say it’s too embarrassing to quantify it here! It’s so typical of me! I get fantastic ideas! I get super excited! I start something new… I do the planning, training, goal setting… I even review my goals in the cold hard light of day and revise them to be more realistic! To the untrained eye it would seem that I’m doing all the right things to lay down a solid foundation for success… and then life happens, I have a bad night’s sleep, I wake up feeling down, something doesn’t go my way, I feel like I’m not achieving what I set out to achieve… pretty quickly I get so despondent that my Nature Direct aspirations are only a memory! It’s not that I don’t believe in the product, that’s for sure! Nature Direct is a natural range of cleaning products that genuinely work! Contrary to popular belief, it’s not purely about selling the Nature Direct products! My role is to raise people’s awareness about chemicals in the home, so they can make conscious and informed choices that are right for them! It’s a privilege to share with people how simple it is to improve the health and well-being of their families by reducing the amount of chemicals they use in their homes! Despite believing wholeheartedly in the products (and having used nothing else in our home for almost 3 years now) – I’m still sitting here having not got my Nature Direct business off the ground. What if… I wasn’t afraid to succeed? What if… I wasn’t afraid to make those phone calls? What if… I didn’t fear being rejected? What if… I actually backed myself in business?

Many of these revelations came to me during the recent Nature Direct training given by Lindsey Baigent from Direct Sales Success on getting out of the “Party Pooper” mentality and becoming the “Party Queen”. Just quietly, she’s brilliant! She speaks to the heart of the problem and is willing to tell you exactly how things are… the things you’re doing that are amounting to self-sabotage and the things you need to do to pull yourself out of that! If you’re in Direct Selling and need a good kick up the pants to take your business to the next level… go no further! Ask Lindsay about the ’21 Day Challenge’!

Of course another of my endeavors is right here, in the blogosphere. Which has led me to read many other blogs that reside out here in the ether… somehow I found my way to Lisa Robins Young who recently wrote an extremely challenging post, ‘What if?’. In her post, Lisa shares some of the hurt she’s experienced recently and the damage she was self-perpetuating with her negative ‘What if?’ questions, “the kind that roil our mindset and throw us completely off our track. Questions that don’t serve us, aren’t life giving, and, quite frankly, do more harm than good.” Wait a minute… don’t just rush on through the rest of this post… take time to write yourself into this post – have you examined your mindset lately? Is your internal monologue doing your more harm than good???

If I’m honest, this is my problem in life to a tee! Both Lindsey and Lisa hit the nail on the head! Sure, I’ve had a lot of very tough experiences in my life… I have a lot of ‘valid‘ reasons to just curl up in the corner and cry and continue to ‘justify‘: why I don’t cope well with life; why my inability to cope isn’t my fault; why I deserve a break from the hard things in life. But when the rubber hits the road… I’ve got a choice! Am I going to be defined by the negative things other people have done to me/ spoken into my life? Or, am I going to pull myself up by my boot straps and do a thorough, long-over-due mental clean out?! Am I going to allow myself to discard ALL the negative words and beliefs I have accumulated from ‘well-meaning’ people over the years in tomorrows trash?

But not only that… it isn’t enough to simply rid yourself of the negative! Whenever you do a clean out, space appears… and what you do with that space is as important, if not more so, than creating that space in the first place! As Lisa’s post challenged me, what if I choose to ask better questions in life? What if… I choose to start focusing on the good things I’ve done, rather than on the bad things or the things I haven’t done? What if… I went ALL IN and followed Lindsey’s ’21 Day Challenge’ to completion? What if… I dared to put aside the time to make the projects I have been thinking about a reality? What if… I actually dedicated myself to running the marathon that will make my dreams come true rather than getting despondent that I didn’t win the 100 meters? What if… I put my fear of failure and the pessimistic questioning of others aside and didn’t allow it to stop me dead in my tracks? What if… I dared to jump into this adventure called life with everything I’ve been given by God and fulfill the purpose God made me for?

What if… I too stopped waiting today?!