To Change your Story
The life you live is your choice, Always!
If your life is not the way you like it you can change it, there are always options and the only reason you may feel trapped at times is because you won’t allow yourself to see those options. There are always obstacles in life to overcome to reach the desired destination but it is your choice as to whether you are going to let those options stand in your way or if you are going to find an alternate route around them. If you give up and quit, that is because you have made the conscious decision that you are not going to succeed but it isn’t the obstacles that prevented you from moving forward it was you!
Obstacles are on your path to challenge and teach you that anything worth having is worth fighting for and to help build who you are to become. Stepping outside your comfort zone is where your biggest opportunities lie and it’s not that you are going to be successful with everything you try but taking a chance will build your self-worth and not taking the chance will lower it. I have personally found that even if the road I’ve travelled doesn’t pan out I feel pride because at least I tried it. Regret, in my opinion, sucks the life out of your self-worth, self-pride and self-respect and will continue to drain that part of your psyche until you let go and resolve to move forward with a life plan that better builds you.
I’ve taken chances and risks to walk on many different paths in the effort to find the one that is truly my own and I don’t believe I’m done yet. There always seems to be another level even higher than the last that I need to reach for next and every step I take leads me to new discoveries, sometimes daily. Discoveries that tantalize and inspire my inner creativity with insight into new and exciting prospects, prospects I hadn’t even considered. Letting go of fear is your only option for moving forward, fear can be paralyzing and it lives only in your mind, it’s not an actual circumstance. Danger and extreme peril, both are actual circumstances that can evolve to exist but fear is a component of the mind, created by the mind.
When you become stuck it is because there is something in your emotion (usually fear) that is continuing to cycle and reminding you that you can’t get there from here but really you can, you just have to find another route.
Just because you’ve fallen down doesn’t mean you stay there, the only reason you are unable to see a way out or up is because your vision is clouded but it can and will clear if you want and allow it to. Letting go of the fear to take a chance is the single most important step you need to take to move in the direction you seek, if you don’t know the direction look within, all the answers you will ever need are in there.
If your story is not going the way you want you may have quieted your instincts so much that they are barely an audible whisper but the more you allow them to have a voice the louder they will get. Your instincts, intuition, inner voice, however you want to refer to it will never guide you to a place that isn’t necessary for your personal growth but you are not meant to get stuck there.
I absolutely love Jane Fonda’s analogy of this kind of emotional challenge, I can’t quote it verbatim but it is somewhere along these lines; every time you exercise you create little miniscule tears in the muscle (that sore, tired feeling after exercise, like you really worked out), these tears heal quite quickly and become stronger and so muscle grows. This is like the emotional challenges, they make little tears in our emotion and we heal and become stronger because of the experience, it’s not that we are broken but rather broken open and the opportunity for positive change and new beginnings can be the result of that experience if you don’t allow it to define you.
We all deserve to live the life we hope for and envision and there is no such thing as too late or too old. You know your heart and inner spirit better than anyone and you know when you are going against it because inner war is the result, that conflict creates negativity that can spiral into dark areas that can damage you significantly, sometimes altering you into an entirely different person. I do believe that everything happens for a reason and even though negative experiences are needed for growth, as are positive, they can sometimes create a tornado effect within you and the only way to stop it is to take away its wind.
Take back your power, surround yourself with people that build and inspire you, live and breathe positive thinking and change your story!
Shelley Hallmark 