Falling forward

Fear can be a powerful force that keeps us stagnant, but what if we could transform that fear into a catalyst for change?  Explore how the struggles of taking action can be more fulfilling than those rooted in inaction.  Sometimes the wrong step provides the momentum we need because at least we are stepping.  Course correction can be easier than starting from scratch so just start taking action!

Failing forward is falling forward which is still forward momentum.  "The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried".  Stephen McCranie.  So this episode is our call to action, to keep plotting the course and taking one brave step at a time.  

Chapters

• 0:00 Moving Forward
• 9:31 Overcoming Fear and Moving Forward

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Rise and shine everybody. It's time to wake up with Susan. Spiritual awakening can be a beautiful, messy and sometimes lonely journey, so let's do it together. I'm your host, susan Sutherland. I'm an intuitive healer and spiritual mentor. We are all called to rise up above our conditioning and limiting beliefs and shine our light on ourselves and others. So let's get to it. All right, you guys? Today we are going to talk about going forward, about moving forward, about getting out of the standstill and getting past indecision. So that's come up a lot for me lately. So here we are.

Speaker 1: 0:45

About a month ago I had a friend check in with me. I am her energetic pulse. When things are feeling wild and a little crazy or tumultuous, she checks in because usually I can confirm yep, things are wild for me too. We just seem to be on a similar wave in that way. And she checked in with me because things are hard right now and she's having a lot of challenging conversations, a lot of difficult things she's having to navigate and it just feels hard. And I listened to her and my heart just wanted to just engulf her, because a year ago she was having struggles, but her struggles were because she was stuck, and so now she is experiencing going through challenges, including, you know, talking to her son about divorce, about her and her husband getting a divorce, about, you know, navigating, being independent and learning how to budget and manage her finances. And those are hard things. Those are really challenging, hard things to go through. But last year her hard thing was being stuck. It was being physically incapacitated because her nervous system was shut down. She had so much fear of moving forward and changing her life so dramatically that she was literally in shutdown mode. And so, one year out, the challenges that she's experiencing are challenges because she made a choice. She made a decision to move forward in a way that feels good to her. The thing is, we're still going to have the hurdles. We're still going to have the hurdles, we're still going to have to do the jumping, but now what she is struggling with is because she is moving forward and those are the good struggles to have.

Speaker 1: 2:56

It doesn't mean it's easy. It just means that struggling because you're moving is so much different than struggling because you're stuck. And so when we're in that stuck place and for me I guess stuck, stuck is like the embodiment of fear to move forward, or even complacency I don't know what I want to do. I don't want to even think about what I want to do. That is another stuckness. It's not the pause Like we were talking about, like flipping on your back to rest, to float when you're swimming, to take that breath and regroup. That's a pause. And that's not what I mean by stand still. Stand still is stuck. What is keeping you stuck? And that's very different than the challenges we have when we're taking action. So it's really important to evaluate where you feel like you are at a standstill and are you pausing or are you stuck?

Speaker 1: 3:59

Now, for me, if I am stuck, there are two reasons. One is I'm afraid and I need to to be real honest with what I am afraid of sometimes I am afraid of putting myself out there. I had a conversation with my daughter earlier this week and she's like why haven't you been posting TikTok? So I was like, look, I only just started posting reels again. I don't know what happened, but I just stopped altogether. And it is. It is like, oh my gosh, if you have ever run distance, the longest I've ever run is a half marathon. But you go from training and running like seven miles, eight miles, 10 miles, you run a half marathon, take a week off and you can't run a mile the following week. It's like you go from everything to nothing and that's how I feel, like like that venture was for me when I was being consistent and doing it, it was fine, and now it's really hard. I have to confront like what am I afraid of? What am I what? Where is my resistance coming from? So it's always fear-based for me, unless it is because there's something I gain from being stuck. Either I am getting attention that I would like. It is somehow calling in a relationship where they're checking on me because I need something. You know what I mean. Like sometimes being a victim does get you things and so if you're not moving, is it because you are, you know, calling in attention or compassion or friendships that are checking on you? Is there something being gained by being stuck? And this is where we have to be just brutally honest with ourselves and say what is the truth about this? What is the truth?

Speaker 1: 5:56

I have longed to write a book for a long time. It is in my heart, I know, I know the the content of it. I mean, I have to write the content of it, but I understand how it works and I haven't done it. I haven't done it and I'm working with a coach now who's like you write 30 minutes every day. That's what you have to do in order to get your goal. And it's like, why does somebody need to tell me that, when that is my goal and the truth of it is is because I'm afraid that I put something out there that nobody wants to read. I mean, that's being brutally honest with myself. Is writing a book that nobody wants to read? I mean, there's millions of those out there already, so still, would that be a big deal? And I have to. I have to be honest with myself about where those feelings are coming from, and I needed somebody to tell me hey, you're going to do this anyway, like we're going to go ahead and make this part of your homework, as this is what you're doing every day.

Speaker 1: 7:02

And what I have found is there is joy in the writing. It's like my daughter's crafts, where she's doing all of these crafts and because I just did a massive clean out of our playroom closet, which is the craft's closet, so much of it's like, oh, but she made this. Oh, but she made this. Well, she makes a lot of things, y'all, and the joy was in the making, and so I have to understand that part of the writing experience is that that this is also for me, that I enjoy writing, that it is a way I connect and connect with my higher self and allow this connection to grow by showing up for myself this way. But I have to say why am I stuck? What am I afraid of, and what is the action that I'm willing to take to get the ball rolling? Because it has to come from action.

Speaker 1: 7:59

I've told y'all that I am in the process right now of kind of just reworking my business, about going back and figuring out what it is for me, and that's because when I started setting it up, I was working with somebody at the time who was like do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this? We didn't do a lot of talking about why I'm doing this, and so I just kind of followed the script, going through the checklist, like, okay, I'll set this up, I'll set this up, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I have to go back and be like well, it's aligned for what I want to be doing, or how does this resonate for me? And I'm having to shift and part of me wants to beat myself up for that. However, if I would have waited for me to understand how, where, where this work is even taking me because I still do not know before I started a business or before I started working with clients, I still wouldn't be there, and so it was really. It's really important for me to understand, be happy that as I rework it, I'm not reworking it from ground zero, I am tweaking it because I already took a lot of action to get me where I am now, and now I can go back and kind of revamp things as I want to, but I did move forward. I did take that action.

Speaker 1: 9:31

This weekend I had a what I call a midterm rental that needed to be turned over. It is a small house that is furnished and I use it for like midterm contracts. If you're buying a house or having a renovation done or something, or a traveling nurse, and you need like a three-month lease, you have a furnished place to go to. Well, the people moved out and some other people wanted to come in on Sunday and so I didn't get to schedule a cleaner, which means my teenagers got that opportunity to go and work with me, which is a very good for them because they need to learn how to work and they're broke.

Speaker 1: 10:14

So we went to Rock Hill to work on this house and you know, all had our separate task and my daughter was putting queen sheets on a bed. And she's got these queen sheets up and and she's turning them around and around in her hands and she's like mom, I can't figure this out. I, I can't figure it out. I don't know which way it's supposed to go. And I walk in there and I'm like grab a corner and we go to put it on the bed and it doesn't fit and we rotate it one time. And then it's right because sometimes you have to try, you have to fail fast and then you're able to correct it and move forward. I think she'd still be there spinning the sheet around trying to figure out which way it goes If I wouldn't have said just try it, and if it doesn't work out, we'll adjust it.

Speaker 1: 11:10

There's a quote that I really like from Stephen McCranny and it says the master has failed more times than the beginner has tried, and I really like that. Sometimes we just have to start. We have to start so we can fail and see okay, that didn't work out, let me try again. And it's almost like, if you see it as not failing, but it was your first attempt to get it right, then we feel more comfortable with that. I think everybody is so afraid to not do something right that we're too afraid to try, and a lot of times you just got to get going. You just have to see how it's going to work out and then you can be like, yep, that wasn't it. But I'm closer. I'm one step closer to knowing what is going to work, because I know that didn't. I mean, a sheet only has four options and two of them are the same. So by the time you've tried one and it doesn't work out and you rotate it one time I mean you're done, it's got to work. And so we just have to not just fail fast and fail often, but really fail intelligently.

Speaker 1: 12:29

What did I do that worked? What did I do that didn't work and how do I want to tweak it? And that's kind of where I am with my business now is I realized there are people who are driven for different reasons and it is aligned and makes their business successful, but you successful. But you can't have a business be successful in my eyes if you don't understand what your values are, what is important to you? Because those need to be the drivers. And that's what I had not done.

Speaker 1: 13:06

And so when, when things became about followers or metrics or whatever and not about impact, it got squirmy for me and I just have to fix that by kind of outlining. And it's a business of one. It's not like I have to communicate this to my, my powerful team. I just have to understand for me what are my primary values, how can I measure those? What kind of metric could I put behind that and build from there. And so it's just kind of repurposing myself in that way and that feels really good to me that way, and that feels really good to me. And so I'm, even though my action I'm taking right now feels backwards. I know it's like, oh my God.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Y'all know what I did one time. I was becoming the real estate mogul that I planned to be and I was reading everything and like buying properties really quickly and this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to do it. And I was listening to people who have teams, teams under them. You know they have their construction team and they have their this team and their sales team, whatever, and probably bit off more than I could chew, because good contractors that you can trust really are hard to find. If you don't have them in-house, good luck, but I had found a different contractor to work with and had him working on one house so I could have my other contractor working on another house. Because I'm like scaling, we're doing this right, and what I'm doing now, three years later, is my original guy, who I trust wholeheartedly to do a good job, is now redoing the work that the other team I brought in, like it was such a mess, and so now floor that is only three years old is being replaced because the subfloor was all screwed up and they didn't. They didn't fix that first, and so now the the vinyl plank flooring is coming up because I I tried to move too fast and so lesson learned there as well. So now I'm fixing the subfloor of this duplex and I'm fixing the subfloor of my business.

Speaker 1: 15:37

It's like steps back, because the foundation is not sturdy, it's not how I want it to be, and I have to understand that sometimes going forward is also going backwards that is part of my going forwards is saying, all right, let me get me on foundation that feels right, that feels sturdy, that's not making my tile floor pop up in 100 different places. So I do want to tell you another story. If you are kind of battling stuckness kind of battling stuckness, I do want you to look at your fear, maybe have conversations with somebody that you can really trust, because it's really important for someone to be able to speak truth to you and you be able to receive it. As you're trying to figure out what is keeping me there, to be able to face your fear and at least acknowledge. Maybe you choose to keep it. That's fine. There's no judgment there, but you need to at least be able to be honest about what the situation is. So I had a client here recently who is in a marriage with an abusive alcoholic and she is not happy, she is not in love and she is choosing to stay. And what Spirit said is no judgment here. You know, both are avenues for learning. You've got different paths, different courses, but your soul's growth can continue on either journey.

Speaker 1: 17:23

The issue is issue is choosing to stay while having one foot out the door, and so that's what we've really had to work through is you say you want to stay, and yet you are not. You know, constantly thinking about leaving or thinking life would be better, you know, not in this marriage. And so if you are committed to staying, then there have to be steps in order to make that a more healthy and better functioning relationship, and so that is the only path you can go. If you choose to stay is to really address things on that road. And so when we were talking about it, I was just curious you know, why do you want to stay? And she said that she could not afford to be on her own right now. She doesn't make enough money to live independently and then said but I'm just too old for a roommate. But she has a roommate, right, it's a roommate who is abusive to her, and, and so sometimes we have to look at things through somebody else's eyes to just to just kind of throw cold water on the situation and be like but but you do have a roommate who's disrespectful to you and that you are not in love with, and so a lot of times, why are we making compromises? And so this is the story I want to tell you is actually there was a real estate guy at some point and let me tell you this I can't remember who, I don't know if it was from a book or a podcast, I'm just I'm giving credit to the person I don't know who is just telling you this is not my this is not my work. I just think it's pretty profound because I still remember it.

Speaker 1: 19:16

But when talking to somebody about why they weren't willing to just go for it with their new dream, pursue this new career, pursue this new dream that they have, you know what is holding you back. And he said what would be your fallback plan if it doesn't work out, if you pursue something else? What is your fallback plan? Something else, what is your fallback plan? And she said well, I just come back to this job or I would find an equivalent job. This is what I would do, and that's where a lot of us are, is we're living our fallback plan. We're living the worst case scenario, and that's what stuck feels like. Stuck feels like if I could do something else and had to have a fallback, this is what I would do. So I challenge you to find out are you in whatever you're stuck, wherever you're stuck wherever you're stuck, are you living your worst case scenario and, if not, what are the aligned actions you can take just to start moving, just to start making progress towards the life that you want to live, that you deserve to live, that you are bold enough and brave enough to live, because we don't want to be living our fallback plan?

Speaker 1: 20:50

All right, everybody, it's a short one this week. I'm giving you some time back. You carved me out 35 minutes and I'm not taking that long, which gives you time to leave me a review. So if you're on apple podcast, you have to go, not in the episode, but go to show and then scroll all the way to the bottom below the list of episodes and leave me a review there. I hope you have a great week and I will see you again next week. Bye.