1% Action

Getting things done is 1% action, and 99% avoiding the temptation to do something else instead.

Mastering focus is the ultlimate work of productivity.

You've Got Everything You Need to Hit Your Goal

No matter how impossible your goal seems, you’ve already done all of the things before. 

You’ve talked to people.

You’ve asked for things.

You’ve come up with solutions.

You’ve made money.

You’ve spent money.

You’ve been uncomfortable.

You’ve written stuff.

You’ve learned new things.

You’ve overcome obstacles.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re applying for Harvard (you’ve filled out forms before), or learning to walk (you’ve moved your legs before) or building a rocket (you’ve stuck stuff together before).

Every goal you’ve ever achieved was built on a bunch of other actions you already knew how to do.

So telling yourself “I’ve never done it before” is only kind of true.

You’ve never done it THIS way before.

But you’ve already got all of the pieces.

They just need rearranging.

(You’ve rearranged stuff before.)

Show Up for the Superfans

Don't create for the person who might critique you. 

Create for the person who thinks you're a genius.

The people who don’t like what you’ve got aren’t your people. And that’s okay! 

Spend zero time thinking about them.

Just send them a big hug and let them unfollow, unsubscribe or walk away.

Because when you create from a place of “what will the neighbours think?” you curb your creativity.

Don’t create for them. Create for the superfan that loves ANYTHING you make.

Create for the people that NEED your brilliance.

Your work might not seem special to you. But to someone else, it’s life changing.

And every time you shy away out of fear of rejection, someone misses out on the magic you’ve got.

Your job is to show up for the people who adore you – even if you don’t know who or where they are.

I promise they’re here. Quietly watching.

They’re checking daily to see if you’ve put more of your goodness into the world.

They’re impacted by everything you do.

You’re the X to their “What would X do?”

YOU ARE IMPACTFUL.

Especially when you show up for the right person.

Showing Up Like The Future You

I’ve been considering the future me a lot recently.

What does she think about?

What does she believe?

How does she do things?

What does she wear?

How does she show up in the world?

Each time I ask myself these questions, they evolve and change.

But it’s my job to keep stepping into being that version of me, now.

Vacation Without Reception

This long weekend I went away with friends.

We stayed in a glamping hut on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

No cellphone reception.

No work.

Nothing to do except BE.

More of this, please.

What Would Make This More Effortless?

A question I’ve been asking myself recently is “What would make this more effortless?”

Some of the answers I’ve come up with:

• Doing the task from the comfort of my bed.

• Drinking a hot cup of tea while I do the task.

• Breaking it down into smaller more manageable steps.

• Eliminating unnecessary extra steps.

• Listening to music or a podcast at the same time.

• Asking myself if the task really needs to be done at all.

What do you do to create effortlessness in your life? Let me know in the comments!

Slowing Down

This weekend, I’m taking time to just be.

No work (I’m scheduling this post in advance), nothing to do.

Just listening, noticing what I might have missed while I’ve been in GO mode.

Watch this space.

Mini Temporary Thoughts

The thoughts that stop us from taking action are just mini, temporary thoughts.

They’re not our true thoughts. They’re not what we want the MOST.

They’re just temporary – and the more we remind ourselves of that, the less power they have.

How I Healed My Chronic Shoulder and Back Pain

For the last 18 months, I’ve been suffering from what I thought was a shoulder/neck/back injury.

It turns out, it was something entirely different.

In early 2020, I injured my shoulder doing my 100 push ups challenge.  Essentially, I just pushed myself too hard in one of my training sessions and spent a week in a lot of pain. I took time off my work to heal and thought it would be over after a couple of weeks of healing.

However, nearly every day since then, I’ve had pain in my shoulder. After about 6 months, it started spreading to my neck and back too.

I stopped doing anything that could aggravate it. Dancing, swimming, rock climbing, lifting things, using my laptop (switched to a desktop), sleeping on my side, even chopping up hard food with a knife.

I saw four different physiotherapists and two doctors. Everyone said it was my posture and work-from-home working conditions.

So I bought a fancy electric sitting/standing desk, and a specially-formulated chair. I had a physiotherapist come to my house to measure my body and create the perfect ergonomic working conditions.

One slightly uncomfortable movement could have me lying on my back in pain for hours, and there were certain activities (sitting, sleeping, and working on my computer) that tended to induce pain.

Fast forward to May 2021. I got an Xray (about 15 different photos) and a shoulder ultrasound, to check if there was anything going on.

Not only did the results come back normal – the physiotherapist told me they were some of the best scans she’d ever seen.

And yet I was in chronic pain that had me lying on the floor in between all of my coaching calls.

Then someone mentioned the words “Dr. Sarno and the mind-body connection.”

I listened to the audiobook version of his book Healing Back Pain, and watched his documentary, All The Rage.

Within days, without doing anything other than consuming knowledge, my pain was reduced to about 20% of what it was before.

Just from learning.

And now I have barely any shoulder, neck or back pain at all.

The book and documentary explain the theory that the mind instructs the brain to create real physical pain in order to distract the person from facing the emotional pain they are truly facing.

At first, I thought “but I’m not in any emotional pain.” Well, yes, that’s the point. Because my brain had been using physical pain to cover up my emotional pain.

It turns out, that at the beginning of 2020 when I injured myself doing push ups, the actual injury healed quickly. What remained, was a conditioned pathway of pain, a convenient place for my brain to target as a distraction from my emotional pain.

When I started doing physiotherapy and my shoulder started feeling better, my back and neck started to cause me incredible pain, for seemingly no reason.

Because the pain wasn’t related to something physical. It was my brain finding places to create pain, in order to avoid dealing with the true emotional pain I was feeling.

“Patients often report pain in a new location as the old one gets better. It is as though the brain is unwilling to give up this convenient strategy for diverting attention away from the realm of the emotions.”
― John E. Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

Just to be clear, the pain I was experiencing was totally real. It wasn’t “in my head”. The only thing that is different about TMS is that the pain wasn’t being triggered by something physical like an injury, it was being triggered by my mental/emotional experience.

“Chronic physical pain can sometimes be the result of emotional tension. We can feel measurable, quantifiable pain throughout our bodies, he writes, in response not to injury but to emotional distress. And our minds create this pain (often by depriving certain body parts of oxygen) in order to distract ourselves from these “unacceptable” emotions, such as anxiety, anger, and fear. When unaddressed or repressed, he says, these emotions can essentially be churned subconsciously through the body to emerge elsewhere as physical pain. Unaddressed rage, for instance, can become back pain (or neck pain, or pain anywhere). “Unconsciously,” he writes, “we would rather have a physical pain than acknowledge any kind of emotional turmoil.”

One of the clearest examples I have is my friend Emily’s birthday. We all met at a nature reserve, walked around, sat in the cafe, and I had no pain at all the entire day. The moment I got home and turned on my computer, I remembered I had a task to do that was going to be incredibly emotionally uncomfortable to deal with.

BAM. Instant tension headache and back pain.

I had to spend the next hour in bed with a hot water bottle and painkillers. It came on so suddenly, and because I had just read Dr. Sarno’s book, it was abundantly clear what had happened: my brain created physical pain to avoid dealing with the emotional pain.

And it worked.

So you might be wondering, were the unconscious emotions I was repressing?

Anxiety, stress, and grief.

While I won’t go into too much detail, currently (and for the past few years) I have a loved one who is very unwell and is getting progressively sicker. I have also been working non-stop without a vacation or holiday for almost two years (I LOVE my work as a coach and that’s why it never even really realized I wasn’t taking breaks. Plus, as we all know, the pandemic kind of put a stop to vacations). I also had a terrifying experience with an earthquake a few years ago, that gets reignited every time I feel another small quake.

My mind has been holding onto a LOT of emotion, and clearly didn’t feel it was safe for me to process it.

So instead, it induced chronic pain.

That’s TMS.

The beautiful thing about TMS, is that once you diagnose it, it’s a quick path to recovery.

I AM SO GRATEFUL!

A Simple Tool To Overcome Procrastination

You know that thing on your to-do list you’ve been meaning to do for ages, but you just keep putting it off?

99% of the time, it’s because of this one thing:

The items on your to-do list aren’t actually actions – they’re end results.

TO DO:

Generate leads

Write book

Do livestream

Your brain is confused. “What does that even mean bro?”

Right now, as you’re sitting on the couch scrolling through Tiger King memes, “Generate leads” sounds about as doable as “Fly rocket to Mars.”

Your brain needs you to translate “Generate leads” or “Write book” or “Do livestream” into something it can actually DO.

• Instead of “Generate leads”
  > “Write “lawn mowing services” on a Word doc, print it off, walk to supermarket, pin up on bulletin board with my phone number attached.”

• Instead of “Write book”

  > “Open notes app on phone. Write a bullet point list of the main sequence of events.”

• Instead of “Do livestream”
  > “Brush hair, choose a quote I like, log onto Facebook, press “go live”, add a puppy dog filter, and talk about what the quote means to me – just for 30 seconds.”

Give your brain something it already knows how to do.

Tiny, bite-sized, could-do-it-in-your-sleep, action steps.

Make it doable