Did you know there are ROADBLOCKS to living your dreams?
Yea, who’d a thought?!
You wanna know the first 3, the “tricky triplets” I call them:
Avoidance.
Busy.
Comparison.
How many of you can relate to those tricky triplets?
Lemme put it this way: It’s nearly impossible to clarify, let alone manifest a life of your dreams if you’re too busy avoiding what you want.
Truth be told: We avoid things for all sorts of reasons and we are not only going to determine the who, what, where, when, why, and how we avoid but I’m also going to support you in strengthening your own levels of awareness.
“The key to growth is the introduction of higher consciousness and awareness” – Lao Tzu
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness” – James Thurber
So, today we’re first going to talk about avoidance, busy, AND comparison.
Lets start with…
Avoidance.
Avoidance, by definition, is the act of keeping away from or not doing something.
Wanna know what I call it?
I call it prolonging the pain.
As long as we are “keeping away from,” running from or “not doing something,” the more we are actually prolonging the inevitable, we are prolonging the pain. We think if we ignore it, it will go away… We think if we just don’t have that conversation and let it be “water under the bridge,” it will go away, but does it?
Nope.
Never.
And instead of addressing it head on, we shift into avoidance.
Cuz that’s really what it is, a shift into avoidance.
Something I want you to really be paying attention to in the weeks to come… the shift.
Imagine driving a manual car. You’ve got 5 gears and to really get up and go, you’ve got to shift in order to increase speed. When you shift gears what you’re doing is matching the engine speed to the speed you want to be traveling down the road.
That means, if I’m in 3rd gear, and I want to shift up to go faster but emotionally I am disconnecting because of avoidance, what I’m actually going to do is shift down into 2nd gear. I am going to shift myself into a lower pace, my output will feel like the same but all of a sudden, I’m getting somewhere slower.
Why do we do this? WHY DO WE AVOID?
We shift down (avoid) for a multitude of reasons. Consider which one it is to you…
- To protect ourselves…
- to be right…
- to avoid pain…
- to avoid judgment…
- to not have to face the truth…
- to not be wrong…
- to stay “comfortable,”
- to blame someone else or not take responsibility…
- to tap out of the “hard”…
- because we crave certainty…
But if you want to OVERCOME it, you can’t avoid it. You have to shift up.
So how does one OVERCOME it?? How do you shift up?
You overcome by focusing on Awareness.
You consciously choose Awareness OVER Avoidance.
You don’t get to do both.
So lets talk about awareness.
Awareness by definition is knowledge of a situation; fact; well informed interest…
It’s what I call: KNOWING.
It’s paying attention to your dreams, the mission, the thing God has designed you to do. Something I talked A LOT about in last week’s lesson, A Lesson in Dreaming.
Awareness is simply PAYING ATTENTION.
But if we aren’t paying attention, we start to avoid and the longer we avoid, the more we’ll start to become…
Busy!
The 2nd “tricky triplet…”
Bill Johnson says, “Busy is artificial significance.”
Darren Hardy says, “The illusion of being busy is an excuse to avoid doing what is hard and uncomfortable.”
Busy is a by-product of unprocessed avoidance!
We keep ourselves so busy that we are missing the possibilities of life!
“I don’t have time…” we say.
“I’m too busy…” we say.
And we’re addicted to feeling important, looking important, having a lot going on, but ultimately getting nowhere closer to where we actually wanna be. We’re moving a lot. We’re tired. But we’re not actually progressing. It’s like running hard on a treadmill only to get off and to realize you didn’t actually go anywhere.
It’s fine. Until it’s not.
It’s like being in gear 2 when we could be in gear 5.
The way to shift out of “busy” is by strengthening your belief.
Belief is trust at it’s finest and in fact, that’s actually what it means. By definition, belief means trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.
Far too many of us don’t trust enough or we just trust the wrong things. We put our trust in so many external, uncontrollable factors that we end up disappointed… rightfully so.
The Bible is super clear on this. It says, “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit” Jeremiah 17:7-8
We are to trust in the Lord.
We need to believe in God.
We need to trust in your dreams.
We need to believe in our dreams.
But if we’re too busy, how the heck are we ever able to believe?!
In my book, DREAM – I DARE YOU, I say: Dreaming is not about making a believer out of someone else. It’s about making a believer out of you.
Your dreams will cause you to strengthen your belief!
But if we’re too busy running around busy, we’ll miss it.
And the longer we practice being busy, the more we’ll stumble into the 3rd and final “tricky triplet:”
COMPARISON.
Too often we are too busy comparing what IS for what WAS, what IS for what “SHOULD BE”, what IS for what someone HAS, what IS for what we DON’T WANT and poof, just like that, our dreams evaporate.
When we begin to look at life as how it used to be, for what it “should be”, relating it to what it “could be”, looking at someone else’s IS and using it as a grading stick for our own life and what it ISN’T and just like that, we’re lost in translation.
Here’s what I know about comparison and if I could liken it to anything, it’d be an EXTERNAL SEEKING PROBLEM!
- That turns into an internally imbalanced issue.
- That wreaks havoc on potential and stops us from living our own life because we are precariously living through someone else’s which is why we feel the effects of a mid life crisis.
- That is not friendly competition, it’s aim is to wipe someone else out and that “someone” is normally YOU. (NOTE: creation is not about you competing with someone else, its you competing with you)
- That shuts us down.
- That robs joy and creates feelings such as inefficiency, fear, worry and doubt because it fuels striving. It leaves one feeling like they’re never enough, it’s never enough, I can’t keep up, I can’t measure up, I’ll never be like her/him, I can’t have what he/she has, I’m not what I once was and those thoughts ultimately keep us striving, spinning, reaching, obtaining, accomplishing for all the wrong reasons.
- That squeezes one’s ability to take risks because its acting from deficiency. It’s safety, security, stability. It’s a stagnant mindset.
- That leaves a trail of unfulfillment and resentment that spills over onto everyone in its vicinity.
COMPARISON SUCKS THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF YOU!!
It sucks the life out of you!
We become so tuned into what everyone else is doing, that we can’t hear our own voice.
We’re trying so hard to be like the people around us that we forget about who we are.
SOOOOOOO, that begs the question:
HOW DOES SOMEONE OVERCOME COMPARISON?
We do what we can ONLY do and that is CREATE.
When we stop sucking the life out of us by comparing, then we actually turn those daylights back on and we recognize that the greatest gift that we’ve been given as a human being is the ability to create!
Because here’s the beauty of creation… NO ONE and NOTHING can take that away from you.
Creation is not built upon external circumstances and situations, nor is it dependent upon opinion or reality, it’s built from within.
Create by definition means: bring into existence, to cause something to happen as a result of one’s actions.
We don’t view ourselves as creators. We actually don’t see ourselves as creators. We have jobs, we are employees, mothers, friends, sisters and brothers, business owners, but creators?! Never imagined such a thing. “How others see you is not nearly as important as how you see you”. Many don’t see themselves as a creator or even creative. They’ve got an unconscious identity and that’s not it.
Plus, somehow, somewhere along the line, many of us have learned and even trained ourselves to live on autopilot. We are reacting to life, responding to things as they come, unaware of what’s going on within us, stuck in habits and routines, and likely to do as we’re told or at least doing things the way we’ve always done them without giving any real thought as to why. We go to school, graduate, go to college, get a degree, fall into our job and stay for no other reason than “making money,” get married, buy the house, have the kids, and continue to live much of our lives with unchecked and even unprocessed pain, thought processes and emotions, and then we wonder why we wake up in our 30’s, 40’s and 50’s asking, “Is there something more?”. We started following the rules and doing as we were told without giving any thought to the fact that maybe, just maybe, there was a different way and without understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing, which means we’re definitely not tapping into an enlightened state.
However, you will find, especially as you lean in to this work, you were born to create, not just follow the rules.
Our creator was a creator and in His image, we too were created. You were not just born to respond and react, or work at a job to simply pay bills or to go along with societal norms just because that’s how things are done or what’s expected of you, but to really enter this life as a creator and contributor.
This is why we are too often functioning mildly depressed, bored, anxious, depleted, and/or lacking motivation, because we aren’t creating and anytime anything isn’t being utilized for its core, fundamental purpose, it lacks fulfillment and satisfaction.
Creation changes everything.
That means, that at any point in time, if something isn’t serving you or you don’t like how things are playing out or when life feels like it’s happening to you, you’ve lost your job, lost revenue, see a problem, or have any sort of misalignment in this life, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS CREATE.
Take out the paintbrush of life,
Take out the white board,
Whatever your tool of choice is and “let it rain”!
As I said before, the beauty of creation is that NO ONE and NOTHING can take that away from you. Mark my word on this, and if you find this to be untrue in any way, shape or form, especially as you try this on for size in the month to come, you come find me and you lay it on me.
Bottom line, creation is not built upon external circumstances and situations, nor is it dependent upon opinion or reality, it’s built from within.
Comparison keeps us stuck. It keeps us where we are.
Creation takes us to where we’ve never been.
God saw NOTHING when he started creating, “A formless world” the Bible says but that didn’t stop him from having at it!!
Let me say that again, creation is not dependent upon reality. Sure, reality is what it is but it doesn’t have to stay that way!
What this tells me is that the very act of creating is bringing something into existence that implies it didn’t exist before AND it’s a happening caused by – not fate, chance, the government, your past, or any other silly excuse – YOU. It’s the results of one’s action, YOU being that one!!
Sure, someone else also has the power to create something and whether you like or hate that something has no bearing on your ability to create something alongside of it or instead of it. GOOD TO KNOW IN TIMES LIKES THESE!
I know you don’t like what the Corona Virus is doing.
I know you don’t like losing your job.
I know you don’t like being quarantined.
I know you don’t like lost revenue.
I KNOW.
Believe me, I know.
AND. AND. You still hold the paintbrush to your life my friend! You still have the power to create and no one and nothing, not even Corona Virus, can take that away from you!!!
Creating is the very essence of dreaming!!!
So I encourage you this week to be super mindful of the tricky triplets:
- Avoidance
- Busy
- Comparison
And instead shift UP into:
- Awareness
- Belief
- Creation!
Your dreams are dependent upon it!
