Is Perfection Getting in Your Way?
At the recent Innate Health Conference I attended, I bumped into someone I had only really connected with on Facebook. It was lovely to meet her in person and she shared with me a big insight she’d had during the conference.
She didn’t know whether she could be a Three Principles Practitioner or not. (That’s not the insight!) She felt she really wanted to, but she just wasn’t sure about it. Then she spoke to one of the presenters who pointed out that all she was dealing with or all that was in the way was the thought. The thought that she believed to be real – i.e. “I’m not sure if I want to be a Practitioner or not”.
Here comes the insight
Once she saw it as one random thought creating her experience in the moment and it could have been any other thought, it fell away and she could see clearly that she wanted to create a business and BE a Practitioner.
Bingo!
She saw THAT she was THINKING.
Sydney Banks, theosopher, speaker and author, uncovered the Three Principles which explain just how life works. His sharing’s point to the fact THAT we think and just how important it is to see this. Once a person insightfully realizes that they are creating their experience of life via thought in the moment 100% of the time it has a profound impact on their life.
Now that might sound really simple, and the good news is that it is! We are like fish swimming around in water and not knowing that we are swimming in water. So we are human beings that think, but because that has always been the case for as long as we can remember, we don’t notice it. That is until someone points it out.
So when we are running our businesses and we get stuck, we can be sure it is just the fact THAT we think that is in the way. Of course, just as in the example above, it’s not so easy to recognize this fact all the time.
Take one of my clients, let’s call her Julie. She was totally caught up in the fact that she needed to have her website completely up and running before she could speak to anyone about working with her. In fact, she refused to speak to anyone about her business until it was (in her eyes) perfect and she had spent months trying to get it that way.
I pointed out (in a very gentle way) that she was not taking into account that her experience was coming to her via thought in the moment and there was no “truth” to it per say. Her immediate reaction upon seeing this was “So what can I do about it?”
Great question.
Simple answer…nothing!
You see the nature of thought is that it comes and it goes. Fresh new thoughts appear out of nowhere all the time. Just like the weather happens without us having to do anything about it. It’s a beautiful simple system: thoughts come and thoughts go. When left alone they move on. Maybe not as quickly as we would like them to. Again like the weather. It may rain for longer than we would like it to, but it always stops.
We don’t go out and try and make the rain stop. We understand that it will, it’s nature’s way. It’s just the same with the nature of thought. There will always be new thinking and in my experience, the less I “try” and change my thinking, the quicker it passes.
So bottom line here is not to look at the content of our thinking, but where it is coming from. So in my example of Julie it wasn’t about her trying to change her mindset or her belief. Once she insightfully understood that she was experiencing thought in the moment and she had no power over what was coming next, she relaxed and the next new thought popped in and she laughed hysterically!
“You mean my website doesn’t have to be perfect?”
“No it doesn’t or yes it does” I said.
We make all the rules up and then forget we have!
Life is much simpler when we understand how it works and so is business. And isn’t that good to know?
If you are ready to get some support in growing your heart based service business, please contact me at sheela@sheelamasand.com or check out my one to one coaching programme.