20 | April | 2012 | SpilledCookies

I have had so many major life changes these last few years if I were to list them I would need an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, I did list them out for a counselor about two years ago and she just read it then looked at me and asked if I thought I needed medication. Ha! No.

Change has been such a part of my life for so many years; I have truly come to think of myself like a surfer on life’s ocean. It’s a visual I have come to hold on too when things get rough or I get in over my head. Like a surfer, I have learned to float, to ride the waves, watch for the storms, get knocked off my board and go under swallowing water, climb back up, and now and then I get to ride the tide in and walk on the beach.

This year I decided to take more chances on ME. For too many years I have been a caregiver, a people pleaser, a taxi, giving to the point of exhaustion, then giving more without taking enough time to develop my interests, follow my dreams, or having enough courage to try just for me.

Taking more chances on me sounds great, but it’s hard work. Even while unpacking and sorting through remnants of my parents’ lives, I have been pushing my limits in different ways, continually doing things that are outside of my comfort zone. Oddly enough, this has sometimes caused a chain reaction of weird fears and anxiety over strange things.

I will be having a good day with everything going along fine and some odd senseless fear will crop up and I wonder “what the heck?” and “where’d that come from?” The other day a friend of mine asked me to get on Skype. I hadn’t been on Skype before and out of the blue this stupid fear of the unknown hit me, so I pushed it aside and took the plunge trying out something new. I am still here.

I have had a lot of creeping fear and anxiety following me around like shadows lurking, but I have been teaching myself not to give in, not to dwell on it, just see the fears for what they are – more obstacles trying to keep me from moving forward. I put them in their place and find ways to work past them.

The hardest part of facing fear is the actual facing part. Once you stare fear in the face and denounce it, it tends to shy away or disappear. I pick up my copy of “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway,” by Susan Jeffers Phd. and remind myself now and then that life is about making choices and taking chances and our greatest underlying fear is that we won’t be able to handle things. I love her perspective on how to balance the different areas in life and how to face fears.

Then there are my journals. I don’t know what I would do without the journals, or how I made it without them before. My journals are a place where I brain dump everything that is bothering me, jot down potential solutions, work out ideas, and keep track of my progress in different areas. Journals are a valuable resource.

Comfort zones are nice, but I am in the process of changing, adapting and moving forward in a new direction. I will take the fear and do my best to identify it, then channel it and use it to learn from and grow. Life is a journey and I’m thankful I am still here to experience it.

Cherry Coley (c)

Courage (iseeiwriteiam.wordpress.com)
20 Truths About Fear … (aliveatwork.wordpress.com)
The Risk of Living Fully (joyofspa.com)

I have read many books in the past about living with a purpose, finding your purpose, discovering your purpose, and on and on.

They are the soul-searching books that suggest you do steps much like these:

Identify what you want
Identify what you’re willing to do to get there
Figure out the obstacles in your way and how to deal with them.
Set definite goals.
Set forth a plan of action to get you where you want to be.
Achieve success

It all sounds like good solid advice and it obviously works because people buy and read the books, right?

It’s just not all so cut and dry like that. It’s easy to type out what you “should” do, but the actual getting down to the nitty-gritty and “doing” these things is not so easy.

I used to get really frustrated with the self-help type books because they would make lists like the one above and being a somewhat literal person, I would stop in my tracks right there, especially if the book had assignments or exercises you were supposed to do in each chapter.

I would stop reading the book until I had time to really devote myself to doing what was suggested in the chapter. Usually I would make it through about three chapters then get distracted or my time would be required to work on some other project and it could be days, weeks, months, even years before I’d make it back to the book again. By that time I’d have to start over because things change over time.

One of my problems has always been that being a really creative person and one that is interested in, well, everything, I get distracted easily and try to do too many things all at once. When I was a teenager my grandmother used to shake her head and say, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” It took me a long time to really grasp what she meant.

After making some disastrous and not so pretty decisions with my life, not really concentrating on any one single thing long enough to “master” it and just bumping along life’s road trying this, working with that, and falling down enough times, I can say that there are three skills I have found that I needed above all others.

The skills I needed to fine tune, had I worked on them sooner in my life, would have allowed me to be in a far different place than I am now after learning 20 years later.

Self-Discipline
Focus
The art of meditation

These skills go hand in hand, and though I THOUGHT I was utilizing them throughout my life, I really wasn’t. I was giving half-hearted efforts as needed along the way instead of really applying these skills and making them a part of my daily life.

If you truly want to live a life with purpose, then while you are doing your soul-searching, finding out who you are, your limits, your needs and what you really want to do; take the time to develop self-discipline, focus and learn a meditation technique that will work for you. Fine tuning these things as you go will make a world of difference and when you finally do discover your focus you will be in an excellent position to focus your attention, have the self-discipline to go after what you want, and know when things get stressful you can seek meditation to clear your mind and gain perspective, then you will find you know how to deal with the obstacles and keep going.

Cherry Coley ©