I can start in the middle.
The cool thing about doing stream of consciousness is that I don’t have to figure out how to start.
I can start where I start. The middle is the start.
Here’s a way that I’ve been thinking about my coaching.
I’m picturing that my client has all these – is all these - incredible ingredients.
Maybe they don’t realise how incredible these ingredients are… or maybe you know, on some level, you know that you have these insanely high-quality ingredients, and you just don’t have the recipe for how to put them together into an incredible dish.
The people I’m working with are such remarkable individuals (spoiler: everyone is).
But there’s some sense of not reaching their full potential.
My job isn’t to give you the ingredients (sometimes I will - sometimes I’ll have an ingredient that I can give you) - but oftentimes the ingredients are already there. I just help you to see what’s already there, and to unlock, unblock, what’s there that’s not serving.
I’m eating a delicious chicken bowl from Modern Market Eatery. Never eaten from there before. I’m a fan. Feels fresh. Tasty. I’m happy. I’ll be going there again.
It’s funny because since moving into this new place I haven’t done a proper grocery shop yet. I’m eating takeout or food from other places.
Which in one sense doesn’t feel optimal to me in terms of health. (The money thing doesn’t bother me. Money is infinitely abundant.)
From a health perspective, it doesn’t feel exactly how I want to be eating.
But these things are all a balance.
It’s very easy to beat myself up for not doing everything the optimal way.
But you actually can’t do everything the optimal way. There are always trade-offs.
And it feels really good and refreshing to say, “You know what, this is not the one I’m focusing on right now.”
To be able to do that without shame, it’s such a superpower. Because, apart from anything else, I feel like our system, our body, keeps these things in check. Shame stops us from feeling what’s actually serving us and not, so if I allow these things to happen without shame, without believing I should be doing it differently, then I’ll notice if it’s really not serving my body. It’ll stop feeling appealing, something else will start feeling more appealing.
And so then, rather than managing my life and how I’m showing up, I’m dancing with it, and to me that’s a much more powerful way to live life. And what I notice is it gets me towards more of what I actually want.
Which feels very counter-intuitive. And yet, in daring to lean into that over the last five or six years, that’s what I’m experiencing, over and over again.
The more I beat myself up to try and stop myself from doing something, the more that that behaviour stays in place. I see it in me, I see it in everyone around me.
We use shame to try and change what we’re doing, and actually it keeps it all held in place.
So, I’m bringing back these stream of consciousness writings.
I did it for a little while – I’ve done it a few times for a few days here and there. Sometimes published, sometimes not.
But today my friend Ashley helped me to reconnect with:
What do I actually want to be doing? What might move me towards what I want in a way that I enjoy doing? What’s the action that I could take that I would actually enjoy?
Rather than where I’d been coming at it from, which was more like: “what’s the action I can take that I think will have value for people?”
And one thing I’m learning is I have a really bad radar for what will land the best for someone else. In some sense, I have a very good radar for it; in another sense I don’t, because it’s heavily skewed towards I’m trying to find something that will be valuable for everyone, and that’s a losing goal.
Maybe it’s: my subconscious has a really good sense of what will land… but my conscious mind is trying to find a way to make things land, and that’s really hindering the process.
What immediately stood out to me was that doing these streams of consciousness feels very accessible and enjoyable, and the only reason it doesn’t seem like a good idea is because I worry it’s not valuable for anyone.
But since I know my radar for that is wonky, I’m letting go of that constraint. Instead of trying to make something good, what would I enjoy making? And that’s this.
So I’m bringing back stream of consciousness.
I haven’t decided what exactly I’ll do with it. I’ll definitely publish it on my website, but I haven’t decided how, if at all, I will publish or distribute or circulate it.
If you are reading this and you would like that I do more of them, I would really appreciate you communicating that to me. Because my habitual tendency is to assume that no one is getting value from what I have to say. Part of me knows that’s not true, but part of me is still imprisoned by that, so that would be cool if you can tell me.
The main reason, by the way, that I think that these don’t have value is because they don’t have a clear direction. A clear framing for what the value is.
That’s the place that feels stuck (not that is stuck, but that feels stuck) in my business right now generally, as I build up this new coaching/content/media business. I don’t have the clear articulation for what the value is.
But here’s what I realised today: if there is some action that I can take that feels accessible, and enjoyable, and exciting, that has the potential to move me closer to answering that open question, then that is a massive win-win.
And that’s what writing this stream of consciousness is. One step outside my comfort zone, in my nudge zone, and that is exactly where I want to be living.
