STEP 1
RECOGNISE CHANGE
IS NEEDED
Do you often find yourself daydreaming
about escaping your current reality and
living a better life? Often, that’s a very
strong sign we’re disenchanted. “At a
gut level, intuitively, you’re unsettled
and know there’s more you could be
doing and you know you’re not living
up to your potential,” says Annika Rose,
founder of The Wellbeing Collective
(thewellbeingcollective.com). “[If ] you
feel stuck and you’re hitting the snooze
button a lot, [then] those are signs
there’s something there to address.”
According to Emma Maidment,
a mindful marketing expert, yoga
teacher and writer (emmamaidment.
com), another way to sense that
change is needed is to tune in with
your body. Our feelings manifest
themselves physically, so unconscious
beliefs always have a physical
symptom. Maidment points to the
chakras – or the seven spinning
wheels of energy in the spiritual body
- and says that discomfort can be
felt in the throat chakra. “We store
our emotions physically in our body
and when you’re not speaking your
truth, you’ll have this sensation of
tightness or like there’s something in
your throat and you just can’t clear
it,” she says.
The throat chakra is the epicentre of
our communication, and to be aligned,
we need to speak, listen and express
ourselves with clarity and honesty. That
said, there’s a fine balance between
speaking our truth while maintaining a
sense of diplomacy and delivering our
messages with love.
STEP 2
ADOPT A GROWTH MINDSET
“Our brains are wired to keep us safe
and sometimes that means staying in
our comfort zone, but we’re not going
to thrive there and reach our goals,” says
Rose. “Our minds are designed to keep
us safe from an evolutionary perspective
and sometimes we make barriers and
hurdles for ourselves as sabotage for
hitting our goals or even creating
our goals.”
The fixed mindset comes hand-in-
hand with the inner critic, which keeps
us in a repetitive, unconscious pattern
of conditioned actions. The inner critic
comes up with great lines such as telling
you somebody else has it easy, which
is why someone else can live a certain
lifestyle, or that someone else is capable of
geting a certain job and you can’t.
We need to buddy up with a growth
mindset, which sees challenges as
opportunities for expansion. “The
growth mindset tells us we can learn
something new from an experience and
if I fail, then that’s one step closer to
me learning how to succeed,” says Rose.
“Embrace failure as a lesson and a gift
moving you closer to success through
hard work, effort and persistence –
which is a totally different mindset and
a much healthier one. A fixed mindset is
either ‘I can do it’ or ‘I can’t do it’, which
stops you before you even start.”
If you notice that a fixed mindset is
your modus operandi, Rose says one tinyadjustment to each thought can steer
you in the right direction.
“The first step is awareness: notice that
fixed mindset and when it’s happening
add the word ‘yet’ to the end of your
sentence,” she explains. “I can’t do such
and such...yet. Those three little letters
give you this expansiveness of ‘I can’t do it
yet’ but in the future it’s possible!”STEP 3
GIVE YOURSELF SPACE
TO CREATE
Although you might have identified
that you’re ready for change, you might
not know which direction you want
to go in. If that’s the case, don’t fret;
it can be a great opportunity for self-
exploration.
“So many people are intimidated by
[the question] ‘What’s my purpose?’
and the comparison to other people
who have their purpose figured out,”
says Rose. “Accept that it’s a journey and
there isn’t one pathway to discovering
your purpose.”
Rose says one of the best ways to get
going is to understand your strengths“Embrace failure as
a lesson and a gift
moving you closer
to success through
hard work, effort
and persistence.”THE PROCESS
32 | AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HEALTH naturalhealthmag.com.au