Reader, Hello April!

A situation comes up, and your immediate reaction is, “No, I can’t.”

How often does this happen to you?

I often see this when people take on new exercise programs or work to change their eating behaviors.

For me, this week it’s been about homeowner drama that needs to be dealt with.

My first reaction was, “Omg, wtf? I don’t know how to deal with this. Why is this happening to me? Why now? Who can I blame? How can I put this responsibility on someone else so I don’t have to take ownership of it? How can I get help? Can I just ignore it? I don’t want to!”

We are all still children in adult bodies. We don’t like change, we don’t like uncertainty, we don’t like not knowing how to do something. So when a situation comes up that is difficult, challenging, or different from the norm, we have a little hissy fit or meltdown.

The key to working through this is, you guessed it, Awareness. Knowing that these feelings of self-doubt, and inadequacy, childish “I can’t” are coming up because our body and mind are reacting to the possibility that this thing in front of us will be hard or cause discomfort.

Notice when these feelings come up. Let them. You don’t have to suppress them. But you can also practice what the spiritual and psychology world calls “reparenting.”

You acknowledge and validate your feelings.

It is okay to feel this way. It is expected.

Change brings with it all kinds of NO feelings.

Notice that the part of you that is feeling all this NO is your inner child.

They want to feel safe. They want to know that everything will be okay. They want to feel less alone. They want things to feel easy to do and understand. They don’t want to do things they didn’t choose to do.

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Practice telling yourself that you love yourself no matter the outcome. Feel it. “No matter what happens, I love you.” Life will be okay because you can handle it. You will find your way through even the hardest, most traumatic thing. You can feel all those NO feelings and still show up with courage, bravery, and confidence that you are capable and can figure it out.

The certainty that you can lean on is that you will do the best that you can with what you have. You are here for you.

You also have to recognize that no one is going to make you do it.

Even if you hire the world’s top Coach, they still can’t MAKE you do it.

You have to be the one that says hey, I CAN do this. I can figure it out. I can learn how. I can get uncomfortable and deal with this situation.

We are all just humans trying to figure it out. So you are not alone in these feelings. We all struggle this way at times.

You are more capable than you allow yourself to be.

Instead of saying “I can’t,” acknowledge that it will be hard, but like Glennon Doyle said in Untamed, “We can do HARD things.”
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Let it be uncomfortable, and do it anyway.

Every time you do something hard, it’s proving to yourself that you CAN, in fact, do hard things.

Morgan