I have just woken from a brilliant sleep. I don’t even think I got up to go to the loo once (usually, when you can’t remember, you can be pretty sure you haven’t!). Neither of the boys popped into our bed, and I didn’t toss and turn in the heat when settling last night.
There will be some of you reading this who want to thump me right now ! Sleep has eluded you for months, maybe years. I am amazed how many people are affected by this, and I agree that sleep deprivation is cruel.
Watch this Ted Talk called ‘How to Stop Screwing yourself Over’ by Mel Robbins where she talks about the F word.
This is a great watch. It’s not the word you think… it’s FINE. Everything’s fine!! We tend to say this time and time again, and so often, we say it when everything’s anything BUT fine!
“Everything’s fine…. (except I haven’t had a decent sleep for years)”.
“Everything’s fine…(except I feel so lonely having moved cities, and haven’t been invited to anyone’s place for six months)”.
“Everything’s fine…(but my wife and I never speak civilly to each other any more)".
Little caveat; I don’t want to push the drama card here! But how can you change around a situation when you won’t even acknowledge it and sometimes even to yourself?
I think as human beings, we risk going into ‘autopilot’ with our lives and simply tolerate stuff in it without getting really present to what it’s costing us. It’s easier to drink just a little bit too much, watch just a little bit more reality TV or distance ourselves from the ones around us, rather than face what is affecting us full on.
There are four primary areas of our life, where we seek fulfillment;
1. Wellness and Faith
2. Career and Purpose
3. Relationships and Community
4. Finance and abundance
You may have heard of these as the ‘four pillars of life’, where if one of these is ‘out’ you will be unable to deal with the inevitable change and adversity that we areinevitably faced with in life.
I have added a fifth category, which is support and structures, and kind of wraps itself around the other four.
Do a ‘tolerations audit’ of your life, and see if anything shows up!
I used to be very ‘appropriate’ with my one on one coaching. I was there to teach people about ‘lead generation’ or ‘thought leadership’. Quite frankly, it made me uncomfortable to go all ‘life coachy’ on it (actually I loved it when we did talk about ‘the stuff that really matters’, but I just didn’t feel brave enough to put myself out there like that). Time and time again, after weeks or even months of coaching, I would discover that my client hadn’t really slept in years. Or was in a destructive relationship. Or was feeling really anxious about something which impacted them daily. As coaches, it's up to us to ask the right questions so that our clients can achieve the breakthroughs and intentions that they have paid us to support them with. If I had asked the right questions earlier on in our partnership, not only would they have had a better chance of succeeding with those, but they would hav e been able to make some life changing decisions sooner rather than later.
Now it is standard practice for me to send new clients a tolerations matrix. It has been refined over time, and now asks some pretty straight questions. I have attached it below; please feel free to download it and complete it yourself. What you are looking for is outliers; areas of your life that you rate significantly lower than others. It's quite amazing; once those tolerations become visible in your line of sight, then it's very difficult to make them disappear again! For anything that is affecting your fulfillment, make a decision to get support and sort them out. Once you put it out there, providence kicks in. Of course you are also looking for the parts of your life where you rate highly, and want to celebrate those!
Have a think about how often you say ‘fine’ and about getting a little bit real with what might be really going on. Click here for a copy.
