This was a big topic recently with one of my RTT/coaching clients.
Over the past 6 weeks she had had an RTT session with me, a Mindscape session and we were on our coaching call and this came up.
You see, these powerful modalities bring changes into your life – really quickly!
The speed can sometimes take clients by surprise. Of course they want change, that’s exactly why they have come to me, but it can still feel scary when it comes.
Now as I’ve said before, I love living by the water, living next to the river, it brings me so much calmness and joy, so I love to use the river as an analogy.
The way I see it is that we are standing on one side of the river bank, this is our comfort zone – a place we LIKE to be, hence the name. However, it is also a place where we get stuck, where we can become stagnant, like still water, like a river that doesn’t flow. Although our comfort zone feels safe (it is), we can feel frustrated – deep down we are aware that we are not being the best we can be, that we do need to push outside our comfort zone to move forwards, otherwise we are not just staying stuck, we are drifting back.
So here we are on our comfort zone river bank and where we really desire to be is on the other side, that’s where our heart’s desire lies. The river is far too wide to jump across, so you can look for a bridge, a boat or, failing that, we can swim if it’s deep or walk if it’s shallow to get to the other side.
This is what I call the River of Change – this is where it is scary: we have left our comfortable river bank and plunged into a river that is flowing, sometimes very fast, and that may have a strong current we can’t see.
When this happens, we feel scared….and we should and always will. That’s because our brain loves everything to remain the same – remember it is a pattern recognition machine and you are changing the pattern – scary! You go into ‘threat’, basically you are on high alert and it feels uncomfortable. That is normal and how it should be.
However, this is when lots of us turn around and head back as fast as we can to our comfort riverbank.
But this is exactly when you need to continue to push forward, to continue to take another step or another stroke, or paddle your boat harder and continue towards your riverbank of desire.
You WILL get there, it might not be in quite the way you hoped, maybe not straight across, you might get dragged down the river a bit, but you will get across and when you do the rewards will be massive and you will look back at what seemed like a huge river flowing so fast and realise that it wasn’t so big after all.
If you don’t take that action, that step, you will stay where you are, and if that is where you want to be, that is fine, but if you are wanting to change then you must cross that river.