Why is abrasion a good thing?

Last month I put the spotlight on how to unlock the next level of growth as a leader and in your career. I ignited this conversation in my latest community luminous coaching conversation and boy did we get into a deep and interesting conversations.?

One of the key points that came up as a blocker to?getting to the next level of growth is feeling stuck or stagnant in our growth. When we are in this place it can feel impossible to jump-start our inspiration and we can often work ourselves further into the grind. Making changes or unlocking opportunities can then seem so impossible or overwhelming so we tend to stop trying.

Can you relate??

If you couldn’t make this session, then I’m here today to pop you out of the grind and spark your thinking. Here are a couple of proven and key ingredients that I use with my clients to get them empowered to act towards growing and creating opportunities again...?

Ingredient 1: Mindset – seeing abrasion as a good thing.?

If you are waking up in the morning with a heaviness about the day ahead or thinking ‘I’m not loving what I’m doing’ then I’m here to tell you that’s a good thing! Just before we are about to take action / change our behaviour we often need enough abrasion or discomfort to create the motivation for change.

Taking Action: we have a natural negative-default-mode network in our mind so it’s going to want to cling on to all the negative thoughts and emotions, so some energy is going to be required to train your mind to focus on the growth opportunities...

The first action I’d suggest is getting a piece of paper and putting a line down the middle. On one side write ‘loath’ on the other write ‘love’. Keep this at your desk over the next week and start to tune into the signs of tasks or people you are working with where you feel like you are growing and in flow and drop that under the ‘love’ column. Your mind will want to go to the negatives, so brain-dump down the things, tasks or types of people that don’t bring you energy or stop your flow in the ‘loath’ column. The next step is to start calibrating your week to increase your ‘loves’ and decrease your ‘loathes’.

Ingredient 2: Don’t let a lack of clarity on your purpose be a blocker ?

Our big, beautiful mind can at points be our undoing as we may have the desire to get to the next level in our careers but if we don't have a clear picture or absolute clarity on what this next phase of growth looks like or what our purpose is then often, we get stuck in the starting blocks.

Our mind likes to stick with what it knows because we are hard-wired for safety. Growth is an unknown and it requires us to get out of our comfort zone. Digging deeper into who we are and why we are here requires a certain level of quiet courage and often I hear people saying, ‘I know I’m supposed to have a purpose, but I don’t know what it is!’ They want that magic answer or pithy tagline and if it doesn’t come to mind then it can be a blocker to move forward.

I speak from experience here when I entered the stage of my career that was less about striving and climbing the career ladder and more about wanting to create a positive impact on those around me and give back, I wanted to head in that direction but didn’t know where to start. I had a few false starts where I thought it had to be radical change from where I was – ‘hello igniting a food and travel blog and traveling around Europe!’ Needless to say this was a lot of fun but didn’t hold the clues to the next level of my career growth!

Take action: So, my advice is to start small and take it day by day. Identify the nutrients and seeds that excite and energise you. Here are some thought-starter questions to get you started.

What do you love learning?

What are you passionate about in your day?

Who do you want to spend time with?

What kind of tasks or people light you up?

Leaning into these things as a starting point can then build and bring momentum. We start to develop the language around what brings us a sense of purpose. Which in turn this leads to clarity on your purpose and where to grow in your career starts to come from the inside out vs the ‘outside in’ expectations of what you should be doing in your career…

If you too are entering this phase of more purpose-led leadership then let, go of the ‘I must craft this into a beautiful purpose statement’ and just get started see what emerges...

Ingredient 3: Unlocking the power of the creative mind.?

When we are looking to create clarity on the next phase of our career, we need to create stimulus to unlock our creative mind. When we are stuck down in the weeds and endlessly riding the hamster wheel it can have us stuck on all the problems vs the possibilities….so we need to get back into our peripheral vision, our creative mind. There are a couple of ways we can do this;?

1. Attend inspiration sessions like my luminous coffee conversations to stimulate your thinking
2. Get outside and look up into the sky watch the clouds this can open our creative mind and start us dreaming ?
3. Focus the reticular activation system (RAS), which is the part of our brain that's responsible for filtering pieces of information, we get about 2 billion bytes of information a second, through all of our senses, we'd go crazy if we had to process all of that stuff. Our mind is great at deleting stuff that it doesn't think is relevant or distorting and generalizing things to make sense of it. So, the key is creating a clear picture of what we want to be different, then we can start hacking our mind to feel a bit more comfortable and confident moving into the unknown. ?

Take action: I really hope you have found these 3-key ingredients helpful today and should you want to go deeper then you can grab the full replay of the session, by commenting ‘replay’ and we’ll share this complimentary session with you.?

Here’s to lighting up the next level of your career growth in 2024!?