Blue Tree Tip of the Week

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing a very cool guest for my podcast and she dropped this bit of wisdom right at the end of our conversation: Face Everything And Rise, aka FEAR. (Her name is Dawn and her episode will be dropping mid-August). I love this so much, as it encapsulates both fear and its complementary opposite, courage.

I recently participated in a 2-week courage challenge with a group of growth-oriented ambassadors for the Scare Your Soul organization. Every day for two weeks, we posted things both small and large that we did to “scare our soul.” They ranged from difficult conversations to physical challenges to career-shifting decisions, to name just a few.

One of the things I loved most about the challenge was that it had me looking for opportunities to flex my courage muscle. It’s a fact of neuroscience that when brains are primed to look for certain things, they will find them. It’s like when you decide you want a white RAV4 (I think I leased 4 of them in a row), you see them on the road everywhere you look. So with the courage challenge, I saw courage-inducing moments all around me.

It’s also a fact of neuroscience that what we practice gets stronger. Practice courage and you’ll become more courageous.  Practice more compassion and you’ll be more compassionate. Practice more presence and you’ll be – you guessed it – more present.

Pick a quality you want more of this week. Look for opportunities to practice it. And hit reply to tell me what you’re working on growing!

Real Coaching Results

One of my newer clients is working on growing her coaching business. In a recent session we uncovered that she was constantly looking for evidence to see if it was “working,” and then when she didn’t see any, she created a story that it wasn’t. The story, of course, started to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy, as when she thought “it’s not working,” she felt fear and doubt, which prevented her from moving forward in a way to actually spur her business growth.

Of course this makes sense, and relates to the white RAV 4 analogy above – when our brains are primed to look for something – whether a car or a courage opportunity or evidence that our business isn’t growing – they almost always find it.

So my client came up with a brilliant idea to shift the narrative. She decided to partake in a two-week experiment where she simply did the things she wanted to do to grow her business, without any regard at all for whether it was “working” or not. In other words, she committed to consistent action without judgment. And guess what – as soon as she made this commitment to herself, someone reached out to hire her. Funny how that works.

Look, doubt and fear are normal and even inevitable for us all. And, we can create ways to keep moving forward without letting them stymie our growth.

Podcast Recommendation

The Fiber Fueled Cookbook by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz.  I’ve been on a bit of a gut health journey for the last year and a half. And despite receiving some really poor advice and being led down multiple wrong paths, I recently found an integrative doctor I’m really excited to work with. She has steered me back to a fiber rich plant-based diet, which had been my mainstay for many years. I’m really excited about this new cookbook and my family is already loving the recipes.