YOU JUST GET TO MAKE IT UP
When I was about 22, my life coach said something to me that was an absolute game-changer, and, once I got my head around it, completely, well, changed the game for me. It’s a shame that it took me something like 10-15 years afterwards to fully GET my head around it, but eventually it clicked in.
Which is to say – eventually I backed myself enough to actually CHOOSE for it to click in.
I would go and see this woman every 2 months or so for a 2 hour session, which I paid $350 an hour for. This is 19 years ago!! Her actual rate at the time was $750, and largely she mentored CEOs of major corporations. She was a life coach but also a psychologist, best-selling and well-famed author, you name it. Probably still is.
I wonder what she thought of me, so different from her normal clients, coming in in my personal trainer’s uniform and gym branded bumbag (fanny pack), and with no real definite clue or intent as to why I was there except that – I wanted to be.
I always understood, just naturally, about the power of just putting myself in the SPACE of upleveling, even if I wasn’t quite or at all sure what I would do in that space, or why I was there!
I never asked for the discount though. I guess it was just what felt aligned to her. But either way, $350 / hour was an INSANE stretch for me to pay, especially when there was no real reason for me to be there, except for –
I knew I must be.
My whole life I’ve been really really good at doing what I know I must, based on the flimsiest little feeling or internal whisper, and I would say it’s been one of my greatest ‘secrets’ of how I’ve created so much success.
Your soul always knows, if only you’d listen …
Anyway, I would go to her office, which was a super stylish and with AMAZING views 2-bedroom apartment in the Melbourne CBD, and I would think –
This is what I will do one day.
Sit in my stunning stylish ‘office apartment’, surrounded by books I wrote and a coffee machine and great couches and just – help people, somehow. Kick their ass, more likely.
Back to soul, and flow, and yes!
And then I would sit there, and just talk, I guess. About what was going on in my business at the time. About my dreams, and wishes, and wants, often to do with writing, and speaking, but no real specificity around it.
And, one memorable time, because it led to the huge ‘aha’ I’m writing about today, about how overwhelmed I felt by how much life was coming at me.
I had 9 apprentice personal trainers working for me at the time, 7 of whom were male, and honestly, it felt like I had 9 overgrown teenagers to look after, a lot of the time. lol. That’s not quite fair, they definitely were not all teenage vibes haha. In fact none of them were ACTUAL teenagers, and in fact all of them were INCREDIBLE trainers, and learners, who I taught so much cool shit to about messaging, and serving, and sales, and who each crushed in their different ways. But by definition my job was to coach and guide and support them out of THEIR overwhelm and self-doubt in business, and some of the boys in particular were, well, particularly boy-ish about it. Rolling up hours late ’cause they slept in, and looking like they were still wearing what they slept in. It was a fun time.
I was explaining to my coach how I just had SO much to do, and it was kind of drowning me. In between every client I had a list of a million things coming at me, to take care of for my business, and then, as part of that, for my apprentices. It was too much! I wanted some sort of help with being better organised, on top of things.
And she said the simple thing which changed my life, which was something like this –
“What if you just deleted the list though Katrina? Are you willing to trust that if you had no list, ever, you would always know what matters and what to do, and that you would be the kind of person to do it?”
I knew instantly what a POWER move that would be. YES, I knew I had that level of faith … somewhere! And I could fully see and feel the logic and also the freedom of it.
But, for whatever reason, I guess I just still needed to learn a little more about faith, and being all in on me, I didn’t actually follow through with it at the time.
On a side note, and just coming back to the point I made earlier about simply putting myself in the ENERGY of upleveling, what WAS interesting was that every single time I would go back for another session with this coach, we’d both notice with amazement how, I’d naturally just achieved nearly EVERYTHING that had been a ‘I wish but don’t know how’ sort of dream the last time.
This was one of the first times I really fully understood the power of putting yourself in the right room,
and of claiming things.
Fast forward about 5 years, I was around 27, and I went out to dinner with Charles Poliquin (a long-time mentor and eventually friend of mine from around that age, for about 8 years), and a group of other students of his.
We were eating Thai food, I was nervously noticing every move I made because I was sitting next to him and was in a state of deep respect, awe, admiration and slight intimidation, and we got to talking. He had only met me that week, it was my first week working with him.
And he said something like this –
“You’re the kind of person who needs to live without a list. You need to just designate Monday’s (for example) as your ‘do everything’ day, and then the whole rest of the week you just get to make it up. This is ESSENTIAL for someone like you, to let your best work out and also be happiest”.
Charles sadly and suddenly passed away a couple of years ago, and I think about him so often to this day. He remains one of the people who most powerfully impacted me in my life, in SO many ways. Also one of the funniest 🙂
I listened to what he said at that dinner, and I fully GOT it, you know? I felt it in my core. I knew it was true.
But did I live into it? Nope!
I said or thought that I would. I agreed it made sense, more than! And then I did that thing that most people ending up giving their life for, of not doing what you damn well know you must.
Of not CHOOSING into faith.
Maybe I didn’t yet understand that faith was a choice.
Fast forward.
Maybe it was last year, maybe it was 5 years ago, maybe it was actually bit by bit the whole time, perhaps it all started when time began, or maybe it was just yesterday, but at SOME point –
(probably the tipping point was around 5 years ago)
– it clicked in.
I can still remember the first time I just went into my list,
and also in to my email and messaging inboxes at the time,
and with my eyes clenched tightly shut (but squinting enough to see what I was doing haha),
I deleted the entire.fucking.thing.
BLANK.
SLATE.
It was scary it was exhilarating it was free-falling it was TIME.
I was sick of being bound to the idea that I always had things I had to DO,
so that one day, when I’d done ’em all, I could be!
“You will DIE, and your list will still not be finished, so get over it NOW!”, is something I’ve often said to clients since.
But it wasn’t just about the ‘list’.
Maybe you have one, maybe you don’t, but it’s more about what living in ‘should’ represents.
The routines, rituals, disciplines, shoulds you are bound to every day, whereby you do the certain things you do,
(or, worse, DON’T do them, and just have them hanging over you all the time!)
because you are terrified that if you don’t it will all fall apart,
or you’ll never get there in the first place.
And maybe you are great at not feeling TERROR around it, maybe it feels like ‘being organised’, prepared, having a plan, making sure you don’t miss anything along the journey to creating your dreams, and maybe that is all a GOOD thing, or even great!
But maybe,
just maybe,
the real you
the soul you
the you who is already THERE and is doing the damn thing and IS the damn thing,
maybe she doesn’t live like that.
You know?
And in the end, that’s all that matters, and how you decide.
If you were already who you’re working so damn hard to KEEP keepin’ at arms length (own it!) and one day be,
THEN how would you do life?
It’s simple:
Every day would be a completely blank slate.
Every day would be a brand new dance with God and life, which I cannot possibly know until it unfolds and I am IN it.
Every day I would just make it up, and trust, and know, when I laid my head on the pillow at night, that baby –
I did good.
In the end, it’s VERY black and white and very very simple:
Either you trust yourself to be free,
That’s not how it works child.
You don’t have to earn your life.
And you can already be trusted to walk it right.
So,
plant your eyes and heart and soul where it matters,
in God and truth and you,
AND DELETE THE WHOLE MOFO EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD TO DO FIRST.
You can be trusted.
You MUST live from that trust, if you’re to be who you came here to be.
And,
it’s time.
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