Warning: A Big Leap is a radical shift in thinking, which challenges one or more of the assumptions you have previously made about life. Once you’ve made a big leap, life will never be the same again.
Make Your First Baby Step to Creating The Life You Really Want in the next 3 Minutes!
You’ve had a baby and your life has changed beyond all recognition. In ways you never thought it would. Or you’ve got a growing family and your life is bulging at the seams. You’re working full time or part-time and you’re struggling with the juggling. You have worked hard to get the career that you want but you don’t want to spend all your time in the office, working late and never getting to see your family. But you don’t want to be a full time mum. Or you don’t think you do. You want to have best of both worlds. You’ve worked too hard in your career just to give it all up. Your company doesn’t do part-time. You’re worried if you go back and not work the long hours that the company expects that they’ll accuse you of being part-time anyway. You couldn’t afford to go part-time. You really can’t win. Is it really possible to have it all?
The following process will take 3 minutes. Get a piece of paper and scribble down the answers to the following:
Step 1: Ask a big question: (or two)
· What are the three big ‘shoulds’ in your life? E.g I should spend x amount of time with my baby/ I should be able to juggle a career and baby/I should work full time.
Now throw that list away and write yourself a list of wants. Get back to basics and ask yourself:
· What do you really, really WANT? Make it very specific and measurable – working 20 hours a week, doing x? Two days at home doing Y? Allow yourself to spell out what you REALLY want rather than what you think you can get. It might feel like you’re just dreaming but allow yourself to dream a little in step one. Keep focussed on what you really WANT.
Step 2: Ready to leap?
Making the big leap is fundamentally about changing the way we think as well as changing what we do. So answer the next big question:
What would you have to believe about yourself to create the life you have described in step one?
Stay with the question. Don’t get into ‘that’s not possible’ or ‘who will pay the mortgage or ‘my company wouldn’t allow me to do that.’ Just the answer the question. What would you have to believe? That you were clever enough? Brave enough? Talented enough? Savvy enough? Good enough? That you’re gorgeous? That you’re a quietly confident maverick or someone who has the brains, determination and flair to make a new business work? Or that you’re confident enough to get what you really want?
Step 3: Take a bootcamp baby step:
Our beliefs form and come true for us when we find evidence to back them up. What we focus on expands. If you believe that it will never be possible for you to create a life of balance, a life where you can ‘have it all’, well you’re right. What you believe about the world is true. Your reality is what you think it is. If you want to change your reality, change your beliefs. Change your belief by finding some new evidence to support the new belief you wrote down in step 2. If you have to believe you’re clever enough to ‘have it all’– what action can you take in the next 3 minutes to prove to yourself that this is true – from doing the crossword to doing an IQ test on the internet. It generally takes around 100 pieces of evidence before a new belief takes root and your focus begins to change effortlessly. Take a baby step and go and find your first piece of evidence NOW. Change your belief, change your reality, change your thinking, change your job, change your life.
Congratulations, you’ve just made a big leap in 3 minutes.
“My husband helps out a lot more. He used to say ‘how can I cope with three kids by myself’ but now he’ll bath the kids without being asked or make sure they don’t pester me if I want to take ten minutes out to read my book. I’m spending more time working on my novel and I’ll pitch it to publishers when it’s finished. I’ve also started looking for jobs in Florida. It looks like there’s a lot of work there and I quite fancy the neonatal unit at one of the Tampa hospitals. Rod, my husband, who’s a policeman, would get a job in security. We’d emigrate today if we could! I think the kids would love it!”
Annette, Macalister, 29, Big Leaping from staff nurse with three children under five to novelist and Florida resident!
