Ready for Your Quantum Leap?!
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Ready for Your Quantum Leap?!
Is it fair to say your life is comprised of the decisions you’ve made? While life has all dealt us a different hand, the decisions we make matter.
Sometimes decisions appear inconsequential, like whether you chose to drink the full cup of coffee or left half of it. There are medium-sized decisions: do I choose a new exercise routine, not contact the summer fling back, or ask my manager for hours more conducive to my lifestyle? Sometimes the life-defining are obvious: do I stick out the marriage or end it? Do I stay in the same city or relocate?
Whether or not we realize it, we’re always making important decisions. 97% of these are from our pre-programmed brain. Each automated decision is setting our course of life, influencing our identity and the way others perceive us. Our resulting feelings, often frustration, numbness, fear, or sadness are also automated. We’re used to them. These feelings then inform us what actions to take.
Most of us live in a state of chronic anxiety, afraid of acknowledging and expressing our feelings and thoughts, as well as being more afraid of the people’s reactions around us—rightfully so. The environments we grew up in dictated whether it was safe to do so. Further, you may be 100% correct in your thinking: people around you likely will react if you’re not operating in the capacity they perceived you.
With that preamble out of the way, I’m going to state something a little woo-woo, so bear with me. What if the change you craved was not found in whether others received you, but was from the act of you authentically expressing yourself? Further, what if I told you the nectar of life is putting your true self out there (in whatever form that comes), and from that faith, you get to test and see what comes of it?? So maybe change doesn’t come in the exact moment you acted differently; it may not even come in the next week or month, but at some point your self-expression rippled a shift in reality that only could have come from your initial act of courage.
I’m bringing more awareness because we rarely stop to think that every meaningful part of our life has come from making a decision that’s out of the norm. That’s why it’s meaningful. The more abrasive the decision, the more meaningful the outcome.
Want to feel more alive? Want to feel fullness?
Ready for your quantum leap?
A typical timeline for a medium-sized life change is once every few months, and for a life-defining change, it’s usually six-to-twelve months. What if you shortened the time span of the medium-sized shift? Instead of waiting for a feeling to provoke you into action in a month or two, is there a shift on the table that you could do this week? What about today? Ask yourself, “Do I really need to wait on this?”
Do you need to wait on your friend’s birthday to reach out? Do you need to wait for yourself to be overworked to ask for a raise? Do you need to wait on the finances to get right before reaching out to contemplate starting a business? Do you need to get the degree before starting your passion project?
The most successful people—and I’m not just talking financially but those who have internal/external peace and congruence—have learned to shorten the span between their medium-sized shifts. So instead of waiting a month for a frustration to reveal itself, then taking another month to take action, they recognize a problem in a day and try to take action within twenty-four hours. I want to be clear though: taking action doesn’t mean they notice immediate shift.
If we’re honest with ourselves, if we look back on our lives, many of our life-defining actions could have been taken MUCH earlier. If you’re thinking you need to shift careers and have no idea where to start, have you bought a friend coffee to talk about their process of changing careers? If you’re wanting to get in shape, have you spoken to that in-shape friend about their diet? If you’re wanting peace in your life, have you reached out to that person on Instagram who, at least on the surface, seems to be filled with calm and positive energy?
I used examples of reaching out to people because it’s a little more invasive than doing a Google search. But also, you’d be surprised how the people before you have researched and struggles to find their own path. Usually they’re happy to freely share resources that have taken them hundreds of hours.
Now I want you to imagine something: let’s say you started the ball rolling on a half-dozen medium-sized shifts over the few weeks that otherwise could have taken six to twelve months, what effect would that have on your life? On the people around you? And I understand this evokes so many fears, but likely, the life-changing decisions will also speed up to every month or so. While this is a lot of change on your nervous system, you could create more life-defining shifts in one year than you could for a whole decade. This is a quantum leap!
With all this, I offer encouragement and an invitation: what is a decision, be it small, medium, or life-defining that you could make today? You’re capable of more than you realize. What change will kick off your quantum leap?