Pruning the garden of your mind.

Hello, My Friends

Another week has slipped by, this week has been an interesting week with mixed emotions.

One of my clients had a major breakthrough, which has created a whole new range of emotions within me. I imagine it would be how a mother hen feels when her chicks mature and leave the nest. A bit of pride, and a tinge of sadness. I am so proud of the changes within this client.

Hubby decided that this weekend was the time to cut down the trees at the front of the property. The tree in question was pushing the fence over and trying to grab pedestrians on the footpath as they walked past. Also entwined in the tree was a wild Jasmine vine. This vine has no boundaries. It was all through the geraniums, up the totara tree, wrapped around the palm and entwined with the holly. This garden was a mess.

As I stood outside in my dress, (not really appropriate for gardening) grabbing the jasmine vine and yanking to disentangle it from the trees is was trying to strangle, It got me thinking about the thoughts that try to strangle the life out of us.

Mostly the strangling thoughts go unnoticed for the longest time, mainly because they are our normal thoughts. Then something happens around us that wakes us up a little to the idea that things could be different. We enjoy that thought, but don’t do anything about it. The vine continues to grow, wrapping itself around our lives ever tighter, stretching out into all the higher, deeper reaches of our being.

What I have found is it usually takes a major event or emotional upheaval for us to want to change, to want to make the necessary alterations to our lives, and even then we start on the outside with the things we can see, we strive to make our lives look like the idea that is taking place inside us. Not being aware that for the change to be permanent we must upgrade our thinking and our beliefs. So the action falls away and the default thoughts return.

For me this was the pattern of behaviour for years, until I got so sick and tired of always living the same way. As the chief gardener of my life, I revved up the chainsaw, I chopped all the big trees out that were pushing on my fences, that were annoying those around me. I cleared the garden, then stood back and admired the work that had been done and walked away. Months later the vine grew back, it was clinging onto anything it could to survive.

It was then that I knew if I wanted permanent change I would have to cut the vine out from the roots. In my life this looked like thinking new thoughts about my worthiness, about how I was enough, how I had enough and how I could be enough for anything that happened in my life. My affirmations were like the secateurs in the garden. Every day I would remind myself of the thoughts I wanted to think, everyday I would snip off the thoughts I didn’t want producing runners in my life anymore.

Learning new ways to think, produced new emotions which were in opposition to the emotions I was used to feeling, the war would rage until I discovered that the emotion I fed the most would win. I began to feed the emotion I wanted to feel and it would grow, the bigger it grew the better my results were. Which changed everything, the actions I were doing now became part of my self fulfilling prophecy, they backed up what was happening on the inside. I was able to breathe and become myself because I wasn’t being suffocated from past thoughts and actions.

So our garden getting a make over reminded me to take control over my thoughts, not by force but by one thought at a time. To think a better thought, to feel a better feeling in my body, and to do the action that supported both the better feeling and the better thought.

This process is not a once and done process, every time we move our lives forward into new and uncharted for us lands, we will bump into what I call glass beliefs. Glass beliefs are beliefs we have that we can’t see until we bump into them, and often we bump into them while trying to move onto the next thing in our lives.

This I believe is what setting goals is all about, every goal we set has the potential to show us a glass belief about ourselves, and in smashing this belief we grow into more maturity in that area.

Coaching is all about showing you where your glass belief sits, coaching is about empowering you to have the courage to face the belief and smash through it to see yourself from the other side.

Coaching is about enabling you to weed the garden, to support you in chopping out the vines that are strangling your life energy. Coaching is an outside perspective, it is having someone to bounce thoughts off and to see the reflection of them for yourself.

We all have the potential to be coaches, to ourselves and those around us.

Remember everything begins with a thought. Even a belief is just a thought that has been thought over and over with emotions mixed in to give the belief more power. Every thing you do is run thought the filter of your personal beliefs. Your personal beliefs about yourself affects your ability to act and maintain the life you want.

Action is an external behaviour that reflects an internal belief, when you fake it till you make it, you may feel like a fraud, the fraud feeling is your belief showing you what you really think about yourself. Change the belief by changing your thoughts and the fraud feeling will go away and you will step into who you see yourself being.

Until next time, Take the gardening secateurs to the vines of your life, the root thoughts of your life with affirmations, retrain your mind to think in a way that enhances your emotions and your well-being.

oxoxo Linda

As a certified Life Coach, I help you to help yourself, so you can create a well lived life your way. 

If what I am sharing resonates with you, follow me, reach out, share with a friend, like or leave a message below,

When you are ready to make a transformational difference in your life, contact me for a one on one coaching session.