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!
Sometimes it has to get really bad before we decide we’ve had enough. Sometimes it takes a life threatening illness, the death of a loved one or simply a misery that seems to seep into our very soul, for us to make the decision to live another way.
Whether it’s a vague discontent or the horror of discovering you’ve got breast cancer – whether it’s a whisper or a roar you’ve heard – you’ve had the wake –up call and you’re now on the brink of making some big changes.
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 three)
What is the thing you are most afraid to say out loud about your life?
What are you scared is happening to you?
If you were run over and killed by a bus tomorrow, what would be your greatest regret?
A wake-up call usually snaps us out of denial of the things we’ve been putting up with. We stop hiding from the truth about the situation and step out of denial. When we constantly hide from the truth about a situation – whether it be about our relationship (‘I don’t love you anymore’) or our career (‘I can’t do this anymore) or our weight (I’m 2 stone overweight and have been putting it on and off for the last 20 years) - we live with a hole at the bottom of our lives – one that drains every ounce of our energy, enthusiasm, and passion, no matter how much we eat the right foods or sleep the right amount of hours or drink our eight glasses of water.
Coming out of denial might sound scary but in fact it’s one of the most liberating things you can do – it takes you out of the fog, allows you to draw a line in the sand and start afresh. Your answers might shock you, might even depress you a little but they are in fact a wonderful call to action.
Answer one more question.
If we waved a magical Big Leap wand, and you woke up tomorrow morning with the life you really wanted – what would it look like?
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 really want?
Stay with the question. Don’t get into ‘that’s not possible’ or ‘don’t be silly, it can’t be done’. 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 really are a talented writer/artist/singer? What would you have to believe about yourself to create the life 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 to create a lovely life, that life’s a bitch and then you die, well you’re right. What you believe about the world is true. Your reality is what you think it is. So 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 start to create your new life – 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.
"Talking to Suzy was great. My life felt like a scrambled jigsaw but finally someone’s shown me how to put the pieces back together. I will be a different person by my 40th birthday. I have an interview at a careers centre and I plan to set up a help group for women coming out of long relationships. I saw my ex yesterday and for the first time, didn’t want to cry. I felt so proud of myself.”
Debbie Graham, 39, Big Leaping from a recent divorce to a new career and life.
