Here's the simple formula:
1. Decide on your plan
2. Clearly plan out your week: including what you'll do at the end of your day - how exactly you'll transition away from work, and what you'll tell yourself - on purpose - at the end of the day.
3. Follow your plan
4. Trust that your plan will work
5. Evaluate and adjust your plan, as needed, at regular intervals
Simple enough, right?
Here's where things go off the rails:
Self-trust.
Cultivating and developing self-trust is THE most important step. Trust in yourself. Trust in the process that you've decided on. All of the planning and follow through and evaluating in the world won't create self-trust. That's because self-trust is created ON PURPOSE. It is not a result of the things you did or didn't do.
Our brains are NOT naturally wired to trust in ourselves.
We are wired to doubt and find everything that's going wrong or that COULD go wrong and will go wrong in the future and to uncover every single possible reason as to why it won't work and focus on your past and how you've never done it before and how you can't do it.
On and on and on.
Unless you're thinking on purpose, your brain WILL offer up these thoughts. It's your job to notice them, and not believe them. And to know where it's coming from: your default brain trying to keep you safe. To keep you safe, your brain wants to find and anticipate alllll of the ways things could fall apart.
When you're focused on the ways it could fall apart, you'll be creating thing that fall apart.
Here's what that looks like:
- You'll spin out in, "I don't know what to do." And then you won't decide, on purpose, what to do.
- You'll obsess over finding "the right thing to do" and you'll buy programs, and read books, and buy courses. You'll amass dozens of options and opinions and then you won't know which one is right or which one to do.
- You'll do this by thinking you're not doing enough and adding more do your plan, which leads you to not following your plan, and then you'll make it mean you're someone who never follows through.
When you want to do something new that you've never done before, you have to develop self-trust. It is the foundation. It's not optional. Without it you will try to do new things and keep reverting back to your old ways to keep you safe.
Safe = creating more of the same. When you do things you've always done, you don't need self-trust. You have a history you can lean on of doing that thing.This is because you haven't learned how to create and use self-trust intentionally and unconditionally. If this is the piece you've been missing, schedule a consult, on the consult you will learn how to start creating self-trust.
P.S. If you want to start practicing self-trust right now, here are my favorite "DONE FOR THE DAY" thoughts that help me shut down the nagging voice that I haven't done enough:
This plan is amazing.
This is me creating the life I want.
This is it, it’s working.
I’m so proud of myself.