I had to wrap my head around what the heck was going on when I heard the words “pandemic” and “quarantine”. A lot of feelings came up for me over the next couple of weeks, I was tired, I was exhausted and I just wanted my blanket and netflix and I didn’t want to show my face. If you felt that way at all in the past few weeks, you’re not alone.
Probably, for a lot of you, things have been overwhelming lately. So many feelings, so much stuff going on and your mind is trying to wrap itself around everything that’s happening right now. Most of us have not been through anything like this pandemic. We’ve been through some tragedies, we’ve been through things that we had to overcome, but this is big right? There is no right or wrong emotions right now. There is how you feel and how you move through those feelings at your own pace. If you don’t want to work on your business today or you want to sleep, that’s ok. If you’re forging full steam ahead, that’s ok too. Just try to think about how you’re feeling and don’t ignore what’s going on because that’s not going to serve you later on.
What will your new normal look like?
We’re all in this together, we’re all here for each other, but what will this new normal like for you and what are some ways you can navigate through your feelings in your mind?
Personally, I feel like we’re being upgraded right now. This slow down time has really put things into perspective. We’re gaining new perspectives and we’re also creating new priorities and maybe realizing the priorities we had before were not what our priorities should be. Just remember when you’re moving through all of these feelings coming up in your business and in your personal life, that even if you have been on the personal development path for a while and you thought you worked through a lot of old beliefs, feelings and ways of thinking, some of those things may come up now because everything has slowed down and your mind has time to move around and think. So whatever work you did on them before, let’s do a little bit more because whatever it is, it didn’t negate that.
The biggest thing now when those feelings do come up is what are you going to do with them?
Will you keep believing them, or will you do more personal development and work through them and heal them? Because part of you stuffed these feelings and limiting beliefs down before if they’re still coming up now. So now in this new normal, where a new version of you is required, and you have the chance to step up in a bigger way, that old stuff is not going to serve you anymore.
What is this time telling you right now? What were you prioritizing before, that wasn’t really important? For me, it was staying busy. And what happens when we focus on something, it grows. What we focus on grows. If we’re focusing on staying busy because we feel like if we’re not busy or we’re not being productive, then it turns into this cycle where you think you always have to stay busy to be productive. The busier you get, the more work you gotta get done and it’s not fun anymore. That’s not why you started your business, that’s not why you’re here on earth, to be busy. At least I know for me, I don’t want to be busy all the time. I want to go do stuff, I want to feel freedom, I want to do all kinds of things and I can’t do any of those things if I’m busy and neither can you. Regardless, if being busy was your priority before, let’s think about what it was and the circle you were in that wasn’t serving you then and will not serve you now. It starts with effectively creating our story from the inside out.
Here’s a little exercise I want you to do.
Imagine there are two canvases in your mind. One is a completely blank canvas and the paint brush for that canvas is your thoughts and it paints your emotions and together with your imagination and attention, you could paint whatever you want on that canvas. So let everything else go in your mind and think about what you would paint on that canvas for this next level of “you” that is going to show up now after this upgrade, during this upgrade, or right this second.
The other canvas is already full of paint. It’s full of paint from your past, it has your fears painted on it and your predictions. When I say predictions I mean the misbeliefs we have like, if I do this then this will happen or if I had done this so many times, it will happen again. All those thoughts and beliefs are not going to move you forward. We normally would try to paint over that second canvas with our new story and our new beliefs even if it’s already been painted on. Why do we do that? Because we don’t realize that we have a blank canvas already. In our mind, it’s in the closet collecting cobwebs and we don’t even realize we can pull it out and use it. Another reason might be creating a brand new painting scares the sh*t out of us. What do I paint, what colors do I use, what paintbrush do I use? We’re asking ourselves a bazillion questions that don’t matter. It doesn’t matter what color paint we use or what kind of paintbrush we use, what matters is what we want on that canvas.
A whole new painting probably feels like a lot work, but we need a whole new painting. When we paint over our old canvas, eventually what’s underneath the paint will come through. The paint is not going to stick to the other paint like it would a canvas and it’s going to crumble off and so all of those things that we painted over are going to come back to the surface. So while we were trying to cover it all up, it didn’t work because we still have all that stuff stuck in the canvas under all the other paint. In reality though, you really only have one canvas and it’s blank all the time because our future is uncertain and everything is possible 100% of the time. It just really depends on what you paint on the blank canvas at any given moment.
Every single second we’re painting our picture on a blank canvas and ditching the old canvas and taking a new canvas. There’s going to be some work you need to do. You can’t just picture a canvas in your head and it’s done. It doesn’t happen that way. Most of our limiting beliefs we’ve carried for years so to dig into those beliefs is scary. But if you’re going to move forward with a blank canvas you need to know what those beliefs are. It will improve your life tremendously to just get to the bottom of the things holding you back that aren’t serving you anymore. Digging a little deeper does take some work and you have to be open and ready to get there. As we all upgrade and as we all take this time to go through the feelings we’re having, there are no wrong feelings. I just want everyone to know this will end. We will all be okay. We’ll all get through this. It’s not the optimal situation right now, but what we do with the time that we have right now and how we choose to come out on the other side will be our game changer.
If you need help with the feelings that you’re feeling now, please reach out and know you’re going to be okay. You’re going to show up in a bigger way, you’re going to step into a version of yourself you didn’t realize you had.