The Creative Genius Corner
Lessons, musings and advice from the author of ‘The Life I Won’
How to identify personal growth and change.
I believe that we are learning every single day. What sets us apart as human beings is the ability to apply that knowledge and welcome change.
We are almost wired to fear change.
It makes us uncomfortable; we like life to fit inside the zone of familiarity and routine. Therefore, people stay in stagnant or abusive relationships that have become habits rather than things that serve our best interests. We stick with addiction because it is hard to give up. We avoid conflict for fear of backlash and accept the bad behaviour of other people, sometimes for a lifetime!
Over the last year and a half, I have experienced continuous growth that has completely changed my life. I wanted to share my experiences with you so that you don’t feel like it’s ‘just you’ and encourage you to embrace what may feel uncomfortable.
When I met my husband Gary, he told me that he had a life limiting condition. It was too late for me to change my mind because I was already head over heels in love. I had waited a lifetime for this man and experienced 3 failed marriages on the way. He finally showed up and our time was limited, so I learned very quickly to make the most of every single moment we were gifted. When he died in April 2020 I endured and learned about grief at a whole new level. I had experienced grief before and lost grandparents and even my dad, which was awful, but to find the love of your life and then watch them waste away and die, it was devastating. There is no time limit or ‘model’ for grief, it just IS. I have had my bad days (and still do) and I have experienced days filled with gratitude for the 7 years I spent with the most amazing man.
Gary was the reason I decided to follow my dreams, sell our home, and move to Scotland. He taught me how to live. But it was the latest launch in my coaching business that really highlighted to me just how much I have grown personally and how much change I have accepted into my life.
I moved to Scotland in June 2021 and had already started to build the infrastructure for a quiz and 5-Day challenge to launch my coaching business. I had created freebies and lead magnets before, but I was ready to scale my business and help more women. I had avoided it in 2020 because I knew how big a job it was to create the sales funnels, write the copy and create the e-mail campaigns, activities, and workbooks. I knew this would take me back to working long days and nights and I had become comfortable in my business at the level it was at.
As up-levelling presents itself to us we instinctively resist it for fear of failure, the workload, the change!
I had done my market research, weeks of it! I knew exactly what to do and I am lucky enough to have an excellent team to help me, but I still knew that it was a big task. So, how did I face this task, deliver it to the best of my capability and then learn from it? There’s no point doing things at 50% effort, you may as well give up now, you need to go all in to get the best results and lessons.
Here are my top 5 tips to help you face up to change and step into your personal growth.
Break down the task in front of you into bite size chunks.
You know you need to do it; you know it’s going to be hard, and you are feeling the resistance. Your first job is to break it down and understand each individual step and how it connects to the next one. As mine was a launch, I had a date to work back from so I could reverse engineer the steps to make sure that I was ready for the launch date. I joined several other people’s launches and diligently took notes about what they did each day. I noticed how they communicated, what had worked and what hadn’t worked. This was my market research. I could then work backwards and create a detailed plan of what steps I needed to take along a timeline.
Take this seriously, it’s your business.
Many of the women I work with struggle to take the online world seriously enough. Imagine you are working a full-time job (because you are!) and do what you would do if you were leaving your home for 40 hours a week. Set your working times and boundaries for those around you to respect your working time. When you get to grips with this you will begin to work more productively and constantly learn and grow.
Give yourself reflection time.
The habit of reflecting on your performance and personal growth daily, weekly, and monthly will enable you to acknowledge it and celebrate it. Just 15 minutes a day at the end of the day is enough for you to stop and reflect on what you have achieved. This will pay dividends in improving you and your business.
Plan your inny and outy time.
Inny time is where you learn and take information in and outy time is where you are creating and producing work. Both are equally important, and you must allow time for your self development. If you are doing some study, how many hours a week do you need? If you are reading a book, how many hours do you intend to invest in reading? This may sound excessive but believe me, what gets measured gets done.
Celebrate your wins and milestones.
It is incredibly important to acknowledge and celebrate your wins, we are too good at listening to our inner critic and not very good at praising ourselves for good work. Remember good work can be finishing your book and journaling on what your learned from it. It doesn’t all have to be work work!
Having successfully run my first launch and made good money I allowed myself to feel the personal growth and celebrate my success. This resulted in my symbolically removing my wedding rings as an acknowledgement that I was now stepping into the life of Mandy the single woman again. It was joyful and sad at the same time. But the act of doing it really allowed me to feel my personal growth, praise my team for their work and get straight into review and scale mode again. Allowing the growth in, encourages a growth mindset with no glass ceiling.
I have no limit to the revenue I can earn from my launches now because I did the first one properly and welcomed the change and growth. It is now a part of me, and I am ready for more. Now it’s your turn.
Good luck and go grow!