7 Rules You Must Follow When Building New Habits

Dear reader,

My business coach often says that entrepreneurship is the graduate school of personal growth. Building a business tends to bring you face to face with some of your deepest fears, insecurities, and limitations. Looking them in the face can be overwhelming at best, and debilitating at its worst. For my sweet mamas, add the fact that motherhood is a catalyst that brings out any and all flaws and fears that you might be able to avoid in business growth and you have a recipe for potential disaster. Yet, momprenuers seem to be on the rise because moms (and women in general) are amazing creatures of strength, fortitude, grace and magic. If you’re on this path let me start by telling you that you have my utmost respect and admiration. I know from personal experience how grueling this journey is and anyone who even attempts it deserves a giant, shining, gold star.
Now, dear one, I want to warn you of one of the biggest pitfalls you might face on this path and I’m going to do it through a story about gardening.

Imagine for a minute that you have inherited a beautiful country cottage that sits on sprawling gardens. Gardening is a passion of yours and you can’t wait to get in there and cultivate the grounds to bring out the best in nature’s beauty. As you drive along the winding country road you’re already thinking through what kinds of plants you want to buy as you wonder what kind of soil you’ll see. You get excited imagining what kinds of plants are already there waiting for you. You round the corner and your heart sinks and a sense of shock stops your thoughts with the screech of a halted record. The grounds have apparently been abandoned and neglected for what looks like decades. Everything is completely overgrown with vines, weeds and grass. You’re not even sure where the gardens end the yard begins.

You take a deep breath, approach a section of garden and gingerly start poking through the thick overgrowth. You feel a thrill of excitement as you notice some beautiful roses and irises still growing strong despite the suffocating weeds. You also groan as you look through the many vines growing over the garden; you know from experience how pernicious some of these species are and they’ve had ages to establish deep roots. Clearing them out is not going to be easy. The reality of the work ahead of you sinks in; this is going to take a long time.

This is a perfect analogy for what happens again and again as people begin a personal growth journey. You have limiting beliefs, traumas, fears and insecurities that have been silently growing and suffocating your dreams and strengths for years, maybe even decades. Then you started a business, or had children, or sought help changing some unhealthy habits and were brought face to face with those weeds. That moment of realization is often earth shattering. “You mean I have all this muck just sitting inside me holding me back and making me miserable!?!? Oh hell no, that’s going away right now!” So you start furiously tearing at weeds only to exhaust yourself after making a small amount of progress, which leaves you feeling discouraged and hopeless.

But there is a better solution. When you come face to face with a giant mess and are tempted to go to war against it, stop, take a deep breath, and follow these rules.

1. Realize this is not a new mess

This mess has been here for a long time. It didn’t suddenly show up right when you saw it. When you first glimpse your mess a part of you will think “Eww, gross!! Get it out now!!!” But calm down, it’s been there a while and it hasn’t killed you yet. Yes it’s gross, of course you want it to go away, but you can’t clear it all right this second and trying will only hurt you more.

2. This mess took time to make and it will take time to clean up

This ties in with rule #1 and serves as another reminder that you can’t clear all of this out right away. The longer those vines have been growing, the longer they will take to clear out. The sooner you can be okay with allowing part of the mess to still be there as you clear other parts of it out, the less stressful this process will be.

3. You have to get to the roots, but not right away

I know, I know, you’re thinking I’m crazy because everyone knows that you should go straight for the roots of a problem right? Well, not always. Take our weeds and vines for example. When you have a thick overgrowth of vines you often can’t even get to the roots; you’ll have to do some trimming back first. Sometimes when you’re doing personal growth and emotional healing you first have to chip away at the surface symptoms and heal those before you can even see the root issues. So if you’ve been working on it for a couple of years and it still hasn’t healed, don’t be discouraged. You are still doing good work, and you’ll get to the root when you’re ready. However, if you stop after trimming back the surface symptoms, those problems will keep growing back again and again. So, be okay with trimming back the surface issues at first, but don’t give up until you’ve gotten those roots out.

4. Make a plan

You can’t just tear out weeds at random and hope to have any lasting effect. Figure out what the most critical place to start is. What issue is choking the most life out of you right now? What is having the biggest negative impact on your life? Write down the top two that come to mind and start working on those.

You can also find areas that are simple fixes and clear them out to give yourself some breathing room. Are there items on your to-do list that you can accomplish in 10-30min and they would be done for good? Make a list of those things and start crossing them off. It will give you some emotional breathing room so you can have more energy to focus on the big issues.

As other issues come to mind write them down and then leave them. Tell yourself that those items will be addressed after you have handled what’s on your list right now. You’re not ignoring them, you are simply choosing where to focus your energy. I like to keep post-it note pads around the house and when something comes to mind to distract me I write it down and stick it to the wall. At the end of the day I collect all my post-it notes and transfer them onto my master list. Knowing that things aren’t slipping through the cracks is a huge relief for my overthinking brain.

Follow the plan. Don’t give up. It can be tempting to start a task, then tell yourself you should pick a different one instead because that one will work faster. This is not a fast process. The best way trough this process is to make a plan and stick to that plan.

5. Sometimes clearing one issue causes others to clear up as well

Be encouraged by the fact that clearing up one issue often has a positive impact on other areas of your life. Don’t be surprised to find that working on one or two issues actually resolves a set of minor issues that you never even realized were related to it.

6. Remember the roses inside the weeds

As you free them from the tangle of vines you’ll be able to start cultivating them so they can grow and shine as they were intended. Your strengths have been suffocated by fears and limiting beliefs, and as you free them you’ll be given the chance to grow and improve those strengths so you can bring your gifts into the world.

7. Get help

I can’t stress this enough. You don’t want to go through this process alone. You want an expert who has walked this path and understand the struggles that you are going to face. You want someone who knows the obstacles and knows how to overcome them so you can decrease how long this process takes. Helping people like you navigate your tangled mess is a passion of mine. I love watching the tangled darkness clear away as you begin to shine a light on your strengths and breathe new life into your dreams.

Let me walk this path with you, contact me at Melissa@loveessentialskincare.com to set up an appointment today.