Sometimes Facebook’s location services wants to tag my farm as “Waycross Church” which is actually a few miles from here down a little country road. It always strikes me when it happens because my living room was used as a church for about 30 years, my office the former pastor’s sanctuary. Fitting that the room chose to be my office, given how much time I spend in there.
In the past two years since I moved here I have faced more resistance than I’ve faced in my entire 34 years on this planet. I have painstakingly torn up every inch of old carpet in this ancient house, and with every embedded carpet staple I pulled out with pliers, with every rusty 100 year old screw I broke off and dug out of the 200 year old wood floor, my inner resistance softened.
The change was so gradual I hardly noticed. I was busy hauling goats in a truck that broke on every route. I was busy placating my boss at my full time job with just enough work to pass muster, while fighting a futile war against dog fennel in my pastures and parasites in my goats. I’ll be the first to say it… I lost 8 goats out of my herd of 30 to parasites this year. Eight. Bad luck? Yes. Unfortunate? For sure. Preventable? Absolutely. But I didn’t realize that until a few weeks ago.
I was doing everything I had to do but I was fighting it every step of the way. I was living a dream passed down from my Dad and happily embraced by the hundreds of his friends and customers who took me in as their own… they looked at me and saw my Dad looking back at them in the set of chin, my dark hair, my tall capable frame and the ever present smile, and maybe even secretly hoped that someone would step in the way I did for my Dad should something happen to them unexpectedly. And I loved doing it. I loved meeting these people, hearing their stories about my Dad, driving the same highways and byways he did, feeling the same satisfaction in seeing the massive smiles as I deliver a gorgeous new animal to its new owner..
Meanwhile, at home my goats were struggling, my farm was being overrun by weeds, the soul-work of restoring the old farm house to its former glory becoming a scold from the dusty ladder in the corner, now a home for spiders and dead moths, covered in a layer of neglect and silent judgment, a reminder of a dream shelved away, put aside until I can make all these other things work.
Then one day, I read a Facebook post, almost exactly like this one, and something in me said, “send her a message.” My first coaching clarity call yielded several massive revelations and I suddenly I knew that before I did anything else in my life, I needed to do the work on me… and that’s when the breakthroughs started coming. Painful, sure. Scary, hell yeah. Genuine? Absolutely. Transformative? You wouldn’t believe it.
As I delved deeper into me, I started letting go of the fear, the constant sense of defeat, the self-judgement that spilled over to others, the procrastination that has cost me opportunity upon opportunity. I started trusting that God’s got this… I started trusting that I’ve got this… and I started trusting that other people can help where I don’t know enough or don’t have the time.
One of my favorite pastors, Pastor Steven Furtick, once said “Breakthrough doesn’t happen when God steps in to fix you, but rather when you step up to fix you.” One of my favorite coaches’ core principles of mindset, strategy and execution starts with mindset for a reason… you simply cannot achieve your business, or any, goals without getting in the weeds with your mindset work.
Have you ever noticed that you’re resisting even in the “having” of the thing you were so intent on having? How do you “step up to fix you” as Pastor Furtick says?