I Freaked Out, and not in a good way….
It was late in a week that seemed to have just slipped away and I was running down the stairs from my home office to grab something to eat before starting work.
I missed the last step and fell flat on my face at the bottom of the staircase. I wasn’t seriously hurt but still I burst out crying, sobbing my heart out in a heap on the floor. I cried like a baby. After a few minutes I realized, I didn’t know what I was crying about but it wasn’t the fall.
I stood up, wiped myself down, washed my face and trudged back up to my office to get down to work. Not long later, with the excuse of having to check my messages, I ended up on Facebook.
It was a video about a baby who had a hearing aid put in for the first time and how he reacted. I started sobbing again.
The final straw was a few hours later when my partner came home and we were chatting. I told him a story I had heard on a podcast the day before and half way through….yes that’s right, I was blubbering away again.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Why am I such a sensitive fool today?
Why can’t I cope?
Well, I took a deep breath, did some tapping and tried to calm the fraught, slippery slope of emotion that I had been battling all day. And that’s when I realized.
I was so exhausted, so worn out, so tired of being tired and incredibly stressed out.
I had been telling myself some powerful stories that were having a really negative affect on me. Strangely, these stories ranged right across my business and my life and though I was struggling to see it, they weren’t even true.
The story of lack (concern about finding new clients and funding new business investments that I had committed to)
The story of no self care (concern about my diet, exercise and sleep – yes, that same theme of never enough)
The story of negative impact (concern about my kids, partner and other family members – is there ever an end to these stories?)
You see, the stories sometimes don’t even reflect reality but given free range, they WILL create reality. It was time to start telling a better story.
You know what I did?
I got out, went for a walk, listened to some great music and observed the gorgeous surroundings that I walked through.
I made some decisions about the story I want to tell.
I got some sleep.
And pretty soon I began to tell this new simple story, ‘all is well.’
Reality is infinitely better than the stories we make up about it. Only 100% of the time (roughly the words of Byron Katie!).
What story are you telling today? Share it here.
