Three Keys to Turbo-charge your Progress Toward any Goal.
Many unique and talented people among us are making a real effort to revolutionise our lives and realise incredible goals. The challenge comes when our energy gets split and instead of being used to develop what we want, we get bogged down in day to day stress. Fortunately there are methods to overcome this and turbo-charge your growth:
1. Overcome your fears,
2. Live a life you’re passionate about.
3. Adapt to thrive in stressful scenarios.
There is a very real and biological reason why we are wired to succeed this way. To understand why, firstly, we are going to need to understand a bit about how the intelligent design of your body works.
Imagine that you have a finite amount of energy to be used wisely. An an energy budget, if you will. There are only 2 things which your body can spend it on.
1. Growth
2. Protection
Your body is very clever and if you see something in your environment which you believe is a danger, your body will focus all of its energy on the life-threatening imminent danger as a means of protection. This activates what is called the Sympathetic Nervous System, responsible for “fight or flight.” Whilst this is useful in life or death situations and helps to alert us to possible problems it can actively prevent us from growing both in a figurative sense as well as a literal physical sense. Every moment our body is casting of decayed and dead cells and we need an astounding amount of energy to rebuild ourselves from the inside out, this is the domain of the Para Sympathetic Nervous System, responsible for the “rest and digest” functions of our bodies. It’s our vital organs. When we are under stress the “fight or flight” response literally switches off the “rest and digest” function and all of your precious energy gets channelled into protection and you hamstring your own growth and decay your body.
Another way to say that is that you can choose to spend your energy budget on love or fear. One is productive, one destructive
As is evident in the doctrine of signatures we are a reflection of the cosmos and what’s going on on a cellular level has an interesting way of playing out in the whole macrocosm. When in fear and protection mode, what is going to happen in our lives? We erect barriers in relationships, cause fights, play it “safe,’ stop investing in our professional development, are too exhausted to take beneficial actions etc. and we decay in the larger context of our lives.
The important thing to remember is that the part of your being which determined whether you we going to reside in growth or protection was not the environment itself, but your unique perception- your belief filters, and it is these which we will need to adapt to serve our higher goals. We need to clear the mental filters causing you to respond with fear and not come out of it in a timely manner.
The stress response is a universal experience and we all have four general options on how we cope with the stress:
Fight: May include trying to improve the environment, argue or trying to change somebody's behavior. These are slightly haphazard. Ultimately we cannot control our environment 100%. It’s like trying to heat up the ocean before we go for a swim, it probably won’t last and takes a lot of energy. Flight: May include changing jobs or leaving relationships. Freeze: May include avoiding confrontation, putting off decisions. Adapt: This is monitoring your response to your environment and choosing to adopt a specialised approach to coexist and even thrive with adversity. It is the foundation of evolution and a common trademark of successful and popular individuals.
Having better access to a range of adaptive responses can dramatically improve your growth result, so how do you do it?
Three Keys to Maximise your growth.
Key 1. Get a handle on your Stress
a. Healing past and current concerns Stress decays and kills our physical body and allows us to actually become prone to opportunistic organisms and illness. Address your current stressors as well as doing some work on the past traumatic events which have shaped your outlook. You cannot look objectively at life with unresolved trauma clouding your present and future outlook, mongering anxiety and fear while draining and decaying your body. Resolve your stressors both with action and counselling. Kinesiology is my preferred therapy because it not only identifies the exact stress which is the number one priority issue to kick-start your growth, but also clears the stress up using a holistic array of alternative medicine including Traditional Chinese Medicine and NLP. I recommend working with a Kinesiolgist.
b. Think Positive. Identify and drop fictional concerns and over-thinking, as your body has no idea if your imagining the stressful scenario or living it.
c. Address your stress with exercise. Accumulated stress hormones must be released, blast off adrenaline with boxing or running and bust cortisol and restore with a yoga class.
Key 2: Become more Adaptable
This is about finding a way to express the person you want to be even when faced with adversity. It’s about committing yourself to some temporary discomfort, like being incompetent in a new position or recruiting new resources and skills that maximise your potential for growth as well as letting go of the parts of your identity or lifestyle which are ultimately holding you back. Being adaptable means living with the fact that everything isn’t perfect, perhaps even hard-work, but being humble and happy anyway. There’s a certain level of being appreciative with what you have and optimistic that you can rely on your own inner resources to carry you through hardship.
To develop a strategy to adapt to any stress, ask these questions:
In relation to this situation, who do I really want to be?
How do I want to be remembered?
What sorts of actions lead me closer to being that version of myself?
What detracts from it?
What new skills will I need to develop?
Key 3. Do What you Love!
Love is the ultimate opposite to fear and the catalyst for growth. When you love what you do you’re happy to make any sacrifices required to adapt a new behavior. You easily spend time doing those things you love, mastery actually relies on repetition, which is no problem if you love it! Also you and are willing to sacrifice some comfort for the larger reward of doing the thing you love. Time stands still, you forget to eat, you’d get up at 5am. Love and passion are the ultimate antidote to stress and really resets the nervous system to “rest and digest.” Dedicate time to pat your cat, get sweaty, paint, swim, dance, laugh, explore, anything you love. If you can incorporate what you love into your career or daily life you kick-start your personal growth and effectively improve your longevity and wellness.
I hope you enjoy incorporating these keys into your daily life and begin to see tremendous acceleration in your personal growth.
xx - Erin Ricketts